Political theology beyond interruption: (re)discovering the ambiguity of the practice of theology

Introduction

It is no secret that the field of theology has shifted in recent decades as feminist, postcolonial and queer scholars bring out elements of the tradition that have previously been overlooked. Recent work in the field of political theology has especially sought to uncover contextual experiences at the margins of society – those that serve to unsettle and ‘interrupt’ the study of theology. One such example is Mark Lewis Taylor’s book The Theological and the Political, in which those who ‘bear the weight of the world’ – an aspect of the ‘agonistic political’ – make up the ‘theological’ – a discourse positioned to interrupt ‘guild Theology’. While his work offers a beneficial lens from which to do political theology today, I argue that to speak of interruption in theology and to treat it as distinct from the political is to depict theology as a stagnant, fixed tradition on stable ground, able to speak to the surrounding culture or be spoken into, but always with a boundary around the discipline itself. Using research in the field of psychology on narrative theory and Thomas Bauer’s recently translated work A Culture of Ambiguity, ¹ I seek here to reframe theology as being in a state of becoming through its entanglement with its socio-historical context, growing and changing in light of new circumstances and information because of the inherently ambiguous nature of the field. ² More specifically, I seek to reframe the contemporary task of political theology not in terms of interruption, but rather as a narrative centred on the ambiguity of the tradition, one that serves to highlight the constructed nature of the practice of theology and its sources.

The interrupting theological

In his book The Theological and the Political, Taylor explores the tensive relationship between the theological and political, making use of what he terms ‘guild Theology’, but also stepping outside the field he has labelled and exploring dimensions of agonism wherever they may appear. Bringing together the disciplines of political philosophy, theology, poststructuralist thought, sociology and anthropology, and merging these with artistic expressions, Taylor blurs disciplinary lines to construct his notion of ‘the theological’, which he distinguishes from guild Theology by using a lower-case ‘t’. The theological as a discourse is a space of trans-immanent agonism – a practice of critically reflecting on inequality and power dimensions, ‘trac[ing] and theoriz[ing] ways that persons and groups who are traditionally rendered subordinate under the concentrated weight of the world are able, nevertheless, to haunt, unsettle, and perhaps dissolve the structures of those systems of knowledge and power’. ³ In other words, for Taylor, guild Theology – the academic, institutional study of theology – is unsettled and challenged by the theological, which emerges from subordinate experiences.

This haunting and unsettling presence of the theological not only challenges social systems in general, but also holds the specific benefit of upending the ways in which guild Theology itself ‘participate[s] in the world’s weight as concentrated’. ⁴ Specifically, Taylor seeks to challenge aspects of ‘guild Theology’, such as its ‘resistance to contextualizing Theology’s language’ and its role in ‘maintaining the subject-position and subjectivities of Euro-American, predominantly white and male, discourse and thinking’, and he critiques the political consequences that follow. ⁵ While these critiques of guild Theology are not altogether novel, the theological goes a step further by offering itself as a transdisciplinary, unsettling presence that challenges the doctrines and creeds of guild Theology. ⁶

Within his discussion of the theological, Taylor uses the phrase ‘agonistic political’ to describe the interlocking of relationships and power between individuals and groups: a delicate balance of power in our world that is ‘always vulnerable to the outbreak of acute struggle … along various lines of antagonism and opposition’. ⁷ Taylor describes the agonistic political with the example of how wealth allows and denies certain opportunities and access: there is a specific way in which our world is structured that allows and disallows certain opportunities. This structuring is not limited to money; it can also be seen in the ways we internalize stereotypes related to things such as our race and sex, especially in how these weigh on us and place us in constructed frameworks of how we should act, and what our place is in the world. ⁸ These frameworks weigh especially on the most vulnerable, who have little to no say in how our world is organized, a weight that then leads to ‘agonistic strife and tension’ – a resistance to the oppressive, defining narratives placed on the world. ⁹ It is from within the spaces of agonism – the concentrated weight of misrecognition and oppression – that art emerges with force as a resistance to the circumstances weighing on bodies – a resistance to the marking of certain bodies as ‘killable’ by those with the power and resources to depict them as such. ¹⁰

While Taylor’s work offers beneficial additions to the field of political theology (although he would hesitate to name his own work as such), it also attempts to trace and delineate guild Theology from the theological, depicting the theological as something that comes to unsettle and upend Theology in a way that continues to overlook the constructed nature of the field of theology itself. Additionally, his work distinguishes theology from the political in a way in which they can ‘interrupt’ one another but always maintain a boundary between themselves. I argue that to present a binary of Theology and the theological, and theology versus the political, is to fossilize the study of theology as it is today and protects the Western, white, male voices in the field while marginalizing alternative voices as deviations. It also fails to address the fluctuations of theology as it developed within its social and historical context, and as it continues to do so today. ¹¹ In the rest of this article, I use research in narrative theory and Thomas Bauer’s work A Culture of Ambiguity to (re)conceptualize the theological tradition as narrative, arguing against depictions of its boundedness and highlighting the ambiguous nature of the practice of theology and its sources.

Narrative theory

Research has shown that we understand our lives, our relationships, and our social and cultural context in terms of narratives. Recently, narrative hermeneutics has become a popular topic of study in fields including political theory, psychology and marketing, allowing scholars, therapists and marketers to use the framework of narrative to conceptualize their work. In a broad sense, narratives allow us to categorize and organize our experiences. In this sense, the past is always already influencing our current interpretation as we sort current experiences into a narrative framework that has been developed in our minds in the past. This is often an unconscious occurrence, but it becomes more conscious as someone retells the story of what happened to them, with their story reflecting their interpretation. When these stories are made explicit as narratives, they can then be opened up for reflection and, often, reinterpretation, which allows us to see that our original interpretation is constructed without acknowledging all of the information. As such, researchers are especially interested in how reframing our narratives can lead to different actions. ¹² However, in order to allow space for analysis and reflection, there needs first to be a recognition of the constructedness and contingency of narratives.

Hanna Meretoja’s work The Ethics of Storytelling seeks to develop a ‘hermeneutic narrative ethics’ that works to draw out this constructed nature of narratives, showing not only how narratives are influenced by the past, but also how they are culturally mediated and can inform future decision making. ¹³ Here Meretoja highlights both how individual memory is influenced by its social context and how, as our interpretations of the past are told and retold, they create a specific way of understanding the world – one that not only influences immediate choices but also can orient us in a specific way in the future, especially if we are not critical of the process of narrating itself. ¹⁴ Her work seeks to draw out these layers of narratives and highlight the complex strands that come together to make up the stories we tell, arguing that by doing so we can ‘expand our sense of the possible’, ¹⁵ while also seeking to unearth that which has been left out of dominant narratives.

To frame her approach to narratives, which recognizes their selective and incomplete nature, Meretoja distinguishes between subsumptive and non-subsumptive approaches, with the subsumptive serving to shield the constructedness of narratives and present them as normative claims, and the non-subsumptive working to destabilize narratives, unmasking their constructed nature. A non-subsumptive approach ‘problematizes simplistic categorization’, blurring the boundaries between what we would otherwise separate, and ‘fosters an ethos of openness to the unknown’. ¹⁶ Instead of ignoring counternarratives, a non-subsumptive approach recognizes that narrating does not encapsulate the whole of reality, and, as such, welcomes counternarratives with curiosity and uses them as an opportunity for dialogue. It is in this dialogue – a continual uncovering, questioning and (re)making – that narratives are in a state of becoming, growing and changing as new information comes forward, and as they themselves are continually deconstructed and reconstructed anew. ¹⁷ Here, Meretoja’s work seeks to resist binary constructions and polarized thinking, and instead allows for the ambiguous reality of the narrative. ¹⁸ Said another way, to uncover the layers and strands of narratives that have been overlooked is not only to open up new ways forward; it is also to embrace a space of ambiguity – one that recognizes the constructedness of our history, categorizations and narrations of our world.

A culture of ambiguity

Thomas Bauer’s recent research on the history of Islam offers a study of precisely what Meretoja’s research suggests, uncovering the ambiguity of a tradition made up of layers of meanings and storylines. In his book A Culture of Ambiguity, Bauer seeks to draw out strands of Islam’s history that have been overlooked in favour of simplification, especially as Islam interacted with the West’s quest for certainty. His work highlights centuries of Islamic history that exhibit a high tolerance for ambiguity – one in which competing viewpoints were allowed to coexist and converse without demanding one ‘right’ answer. ¹⁹ In many ways, Bauer’s work is an example of (re)framing a religious tradition through narrative theory, although he does not explicitly name it as such. Not only does he highlight the history of ambiguity that made up the Islamic tradition, showing the wide variety of readings of the Qur’an that were allowed to coexist; he also shows that this ambiguity and variety were actually seen as a blessing from God – something to be celebrated rather than ‘domesticated’. ²⁰

Bauer argues that, by viewing ambiguity as an ‘evil that must be avoided’, ²¹ rigid categorizations have been reinforced and, as Meretoja highlights in her work, this subsumptive narration holds ethical implications. One of the primary implications is that it separates norm from deviation, presenting the ‘norm’ as a delimited ideology that is separate from ‘deviations’, which are then presented as something that either needs to be altered and subsumed under the norm, or, more likely, to be cast out and labelled as deviant. Bauer argues that one of the primary ethical implications of the fossilization of the Islamic narrative was that it reinforced the West’s justification for colonizing areas that were predominantly Muslim, for example the USA’s invasion of Iraq. ²² To look at these cultures through the West’s understanding of Islam – one that has become a narrative that Islam is ‘chaotic’, ‘dangerous’ and in need of some sort of redemption – is to further reinforce the colonization and inaccurate depictions of the rich, complex history that made up Islam. ²³ Additionally, it frames the West as the more ‘civilized’ and ‘enlightened’ norm, and ambiguity as the deviation that results in the need to conquer. With this categorization of norm and deviation in mind, we can now turn back to Taylor’s presentation of Theology and the theological.

The theological implications of the stories we tell

While Bauer’s work is not directly translatable to doing Christian theology today, it does offer an example of rethinking political theology as a constantly developing, complex narrative due to the ambiguity of its history and sources. Research in narrative theory and Thomas Bauer’s analysis of a history of ambiguity in Islam come together to offer a way of rethinking theological presentations, like Mark Lewis Taylor’s, that depict theology as a bounded field, and instead present it as a changing, growing narrative with ambiguity at its centre. To approach the theological task in this way is to explicitly recognize that the sources and task of theology are full of ambiguity – an ambiguity, for example, that allows the same verses to be used in conflicting ways by presidential candidates, church leaders and theologians. It is also an ambiguity that gives theologians the task of analysing their socio-historical context with fresh eyes, revisiting their theological beliefs in light of new information, willing to continually revisit past interpretations and question the alternative narrative storylines that have been silenced. It is an approach that embraces this complexity even amidst discomfort. It problematizes normative claims and categorizations, and is especially mindful of the ethical implications of binding theology as a stagnant tradition. In other words, I argue that theology does not stand apart from and speak into culture, nor does an ‘outside’ traverse its boundaries to unsettle it; rather, it is a much more fluid interaction that goes beyond the names we give fields and experiences. We are pushed to recognize the influence of our context, and, more importantly, the context of the sources we use in the practice of theology – sources that are themselves constructed, translated and ambiguous.

To move from a language of interruption towards a non-subsumptive narrative also holds ethical implications for how we practise theology moving forward, aiding in confronting theology’s colonizing capabilities – ones that use specific verses or theological frames as the groundwork for labelling and categorizing norm from deviation. To move beyond the language of interruption is to question the ways in which ‘unsettling’ voices are seen as deviations, something outside the ‘norm’ of theological practice. To separate Theology from the theological is to overlook the coexisting norms and storylines that have made up its practice – a history that serves to give space to the very voices Mark Lewis Taylor seeks to draw out of agonistic spaces. Said another way, to sort the more ‘academic’ practice of Theology from the agonistic voices of the theological is to further reinforce Theology as the norm and the theological as the deviation. Instead, narrative theory seeks to problematize categorizations and boundaries, allowing for the ambiguous reality that has been mistakenly sorted into binary representations in the very work that wants to give space to silenced voices.

Conclusion

There is much work to be done to further cultivate theologians’ comfort with ambiguity, especially in the West. As Bauer’s work shows, our quest for certainty has conditioned us to search for the one ‘right’ answer and to pursue theological endeavours in a way that overlooks the ambiguity of our resources and practices. In this article, I have sought to point towards the benefits of approaching theology from a space that rethinks the language of interruption used in work such as Mark Lewis Taylor’s, which, while seeking to challenge harmful ideologies, serves to further reinforce theology as being a binary between norm and deviation, with deviating voices challenging the delineated ‘academic’ field. Instead, I have argued for a narrative approach that blurs these artificial boundaries, and instead recognizes the complexity of the practice of theology and its sources. With the work of Bauer in mind, we can label this complexity of our history not as a challenge to be overcome – and a quest for the one ‘right’ answer – but rather as a gift from God that should be embraced and preserved.