Public Theology and ‘The Fragment’: Duncan Forrester, David Tracy, and Walter Benjamin
In: International Journal of Public TheologySearch for other papers by William Myatt in
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Abstract
Public theologians as diverse as Duncan Forrester and David Tracy have pointed to ‘the fragment’ as a useful and timely form of theological reflection. This article considers the possibility of the fragmentary form for public theology by complementing the suggestions of Forrester and Tracy with Walter Benjamin’s critical philosophy of history. Benjamin’s use of the fragment as a genre of expression reflects a desire to retrieve history without perpetuating history’s oppressive tendencies. Public theologians suspicious of these tendencies would do well not only to emulate Benjamin’s fragmentary style but to understand and embrace the philosophical reflections driving it. After summarizing the turn to the fragment in Forrester and Tracy, this article continues with a consideration of Benjamin, highlighting the possibilities for liberation and critique in a public theology dependent on his philosophy.
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1
Duncan B. Forrester, Theological Fragments: Essays in Unsystematic Theology (New York: T. & T. Clark, 2005), p. ix.
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2
Ibid., pp. 1–24. The remainder of the book consists of various reflections culled from Forrester’s long and illustrious career; the subject matter of these chapters is not ‘the fragment’ per se but, as Forrester explains in his Preface, examples of ‘doing’ theology (p. ix).
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3
Ibid., p. 1; Forrester gleans this phrase from Stephen Hawking.
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4
Ibid., pp. 3–4.
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5
Ibid., p. 4.
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7
Duncan B. Forrester, Apocalypse Now? Reflections on Faith in a Time of Terror (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), p. 30. Forrester’s comment here comes at the conclusion of an extended reflection on Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1993). Forrester ultimately disputes Fukuyama’s ‘unambiguously secular’ approach (see Forrester, Apocalypse Now?, p. 29).
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9
Forrester, Apocalypse Now?, p. 67, commenting on Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981).
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11
Duncan B. Forrester, The True Church and Morality: Reflections on Ecclesiology and Ethics (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1997), p. 1.
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14
Ibid., p. 7.
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15
Ibid., p. 8.
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16
Ibid., pp. 10–11.
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17
Ibid., p. 8.
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18
Ibid., p. 16.
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19
Ibid., p. 17.
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23
Duncan B. Forrester, On Human Worth: A Christian Vindication of Equality (London: SCM Press, 2001), esp. pp. 1–19.
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24
Ibid., p. 1.
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26
See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).
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27
Ibid., p. 287.
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29
Ibid., p. 13.
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30
Ibid., p. 14.
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31
David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 114.
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32
Ibid., p. 19. Tracy states that these rules ‘are merely variations of the transcendental imperatives articulated by Bernard Lonergan: “Be attentive, be intelligent, be responsible, be loving, and, if necessary, change” ’ (ibid.; cf. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), p. 231).
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33
Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, p. 17. To be exact, Tracy uses the first person plural pronoun here: ‘But if we allow some claim upon our attention from any game . . . then we can free ourselves from ourselves’. See also David Tracy, Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 99–101, where Tracy uses the first person pronoun as a form of phenomenological argument, moving from personal experience to shared experience.
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36
Ibid., p. 20. To be clear, ‘truth’ here is understood ‘in its primordial sense’, as manifestation (ibid., p. 29). Cf. Martin Heidegger, ‘On the Essence of Truth’, in Martin Heidegger, Selected Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), pp. 111–38 and Martin Heidegger, ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, trans. Thomas Sheehan in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 155–82.
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38
Ibid., p. 32.
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39
Ibid., p. 36.
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41
Ibid., pp. 36–37.
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42
Ibid., p. 85.
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43
Ibid., p. 86.
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50
Ibid., p. 88.
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53
Tracy, ‘Fragments: The Spiritual Situation of Our Times’, p. 170.
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59
Tracy, ‘African American Thought’, p. 30. We may interpret the notion of disclosing ‘infinity’ as an allusion to Emmanuel Levinas. Tracy states: ‘The real face of our period, as Emmanuel Levinas saw with such clarity, is the face of the other: the face that commands “Do not kill me” ’ (David Tracy, ‘Fragments and Forms: Universality and Particularity Today’ in Giuseppe Ruggieri and Miklos Tomka, ed., The Church in Fragments: Towards What Kind of Unity? (Concilium, London: SCM Press, 1997/3), pp. 122–9 at p. 124).
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61
Tracy, ‘African American Thought’, p. 30. Tracy is, of course, borrowing from Jean-Luc Marion the notion of a ‘saturated phenomenon’. See, David Tracy, ‘Foreword’, in Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, trans. Thomas Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. xi–xviii.
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62
Tracy, ‘African American Thought’, p. 30. We may again posit Marion in the background here.
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71
Tracy, ‘African American Thought’, p. 31. Tracy has in mind here Dwight Hopkins, Shoes that Fit Our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993). Hopkins mines ‘folk religious experiences’ to construct theologies of the Trinity (pp. 22–46), connectedness and embodiment (pp. 60–81) and ‘Democratized Political Power’ (pp. 134–166, drawing from W. E. B. Du Bois). For a more recent construction, see Dwight N. Hopkins, Heart and Head: Black Theology—Past, Present, and Future (New York: Palgrave, 2002), where Hopkins covers liberationist, womanist, heterosexuality, interfaith dialogue in the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT), and globalization.
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73
Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980), p. 129. Marcus Bullock likewise highlights Benjamin’s attentiveness, stating that for Benjamin, ‘it takes greater intellectual discipline to wander at a loss in the streets of a city than to find one’s way in it’ (Marcus Bullock, review of Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition by John McCole (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), Monatshefte, 87.2 (1995), 264–6 at 264).
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75
Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1:356. See also Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’, trans. Stanley Corngold, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1:299–300. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) first published Die Wahlverwandtschaften in 1809; for a recent English translation, see Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. David Constantine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
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83
Ibid., 4.390.
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84
Ibid., 4.396, cf. Gessamelte Schriften, 1.2.702.
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91
Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4.390, cf. Gessamelte Schriften, 1.2.697.
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93
Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4:392; cf. Gessamelte Schriften, 1.2:697–698 (original italics).
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97
Benjamin, Gessamelte Schriften, 1.2.702: ‘Der Historismus stellt das >ewige< Bild der Vergangenheit, der historische Materialist eine Erfahurng mit ihr, die einzig dasteht’. Harry Zohn notes that the final word of this sentence ‘chimes’ with einsteht (‘takes a stand’) in the first sentence of section XVI (see Zohn’s comments in Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1.400, fn. 26).
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101
Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4.390 (original italics); cf. Benjamin, Gessamelte Schriften, 1.2:695: ‘Das wahre Bild der Vergangenheit huscht vorbei’.
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105
Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 462, N2a.3; see also p. 463, N3.1.
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110
Benjamin, Gessamelte Schriften, 1.3.1237; cf. 1.2.695: ‘Only as an image, that flashes up in the moment of its recognizability—never to be seen again—is the past seized’ (‘Nur als Bild, das auf Nimmerwiedersehen im Augenblick seiner Erkennbarkeit eben aufblitzt, ist die Vergangenheit festzuhalten’). Also, ‘each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability. In it truth is charged to the bursting point with time’ (Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 463; N3.1).
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112
Ibid., p. 458; N1, 9.
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114
Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 4. György Márkus calls this phenomenon a ‘utopian potential . . . dominant even in the most depraved forms of experience as collective, unconscious, meaning-creating activity’ (György Márkus, ‘Walter Benjamin or the Commodity as Phantasmagoria’, New German Critique, 83, Special issue on Walter Benjamin (Spring-Summer, 2001), 3–42 at 10).
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115
Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 10. In the original, the first sentence of this quote is: ‘Zweideutigkeit ist die bildliche Erscheinung der Dialektik, das Gesetz der Dialektik im Stillstand’ (Benjamin, Gessmaelte Schriften, p. 5.1:55).
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122
James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2011), p. xiv.
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Public Theology and ‘The Fragment’: Duncan Forrester, David Tracy, and Walter Benjamin
In: International Journal of Public TheologySearch for other papers by William Myatt in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
Public theologians as diverse as Duncan Forrester and David Tracy have pointed to ‘the fragment’ as a useful and timely form of theological reflection. This article considers the possibility of the fragmentary form for public theology by complementing the suggestions of Forrester and Tracy with Walter Benjamin’s critical philosophy of history. Benjamin’s use of the fragment as a genre of expression reflects a desire to retrieve history without perpetuating history’s oppressive tendencies. Public theologians suspicious of these tendencies would do well not only to emulate Benjamin’s fragmentary style but to understand and embrace the philosophical reflections driving it. After summarizing the turn to the fragment in Forrester and Tracy, this article continues with a consideration of Benjamin, highlighting the possibilities for liberation and critique in a public theology dependent on his philosophy.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 728 | 59 | 3 |
| Full Text Views | 249 | 8 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 105 | 16 | 0 |