Eschatological Being

Eschatological Being
Vertical Particularity meets Horizontal Universalities

Tuesday, June 8, 2010


 
Fyodor Dostoevsky, on the eve of modernity’s pinnacle, lamented that Russians had “seized hold of civilization and at once, blindly and devotedly, adopted the creed that it was precisely in civilization that we could find the ‘universality’ destined to unite humanity.”[1]  He was speaking of modernity’s creed, embedded in the rationalism of science and math that had taken Europe and America by storm and was quickly spreading east to Russia.  Dostoevsky, the prophet, realized the fallacy inherent in the modern creed of progress that created a Euclidean problem of asserting universal scientific reality over and against spiritual particularity.  This artificial separation of the natural and the unnatural, duped humans into believing that a public universal ideal could be achieved here on earth, separate from the private (as modernists claimed) values of God. 
As science encountered the intricacies of the created order, not to mention human existence, categories and specialties were generated to explain and rationalize the chaotic.  Libraries flourished in modern times as more and more paper was used to document, categorize and enlighten our existence on earth.  Burgeoning universities demoted Christianity and religious study to an optional curriculum that dealt with a private sphere of values.  Philosophy became more ‘scientific’ with the introduction of psychology.  Recently rationalists created Cultural Studies theory, as another specialty to help interpret and categorize data of human existence.   While much of Cultural Studies operates on a rational Euclidean plane, it contains within it, a potential to critique the claims of its source, modern rationalism.  This critique provides the possibility for collaboration between Cultural Studies and Christianity that breaks down modernity’s Euclidean structures and re-introduces a cosmic multidimensional view of God’s created order.
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Christianity asserts another dimension into the particular/universal human reality.  Christianity breaks down the Euclidean fallacy and replaces it with a multidimensional view of history.  Particulars are events that cannot always be neatly fashioned into the horizontal universal sweep of history.  The event, in fact, may be vertically aligned to the point that it resists horizontal integration.  In this case, the particularity may only fit into a vertical universality.  When this happens, pre-modern cultures say a miracle happens; modernists on the other hand often will adjust their universal constructs to explain away the unnatural as just another natural event.  In most cases, however, particularities can be best integrated into a universal when that universality is understood in both vertical and horizontal terms.  Cultural Studies oriented toward the horizontal, needs a vertical universal in order to avoid the modern trap of hegemony. 
Christianity, with its foundation in the incarnation and its orientation towards the eschatological, supplies the universal vertical dimension needed to counter rational modernity’s hegemony.  The incarnation of Jesus Christ is the particular revelation of Jesus Christ within historical time of God’s universal purposes.  The universal is not presented as abstract ideas or values, but in the particular life of Jesus Christ.  The vertical orientation is always grounded in the particular as it looks upward towards the universal.  “Jesus’ meaning is contained in the telos built into his biography; his life is lived toward resurrection, back toward his extra human, supra-individualistic state.”[2]
The eschatological vertical dimension embraces the fluidity of particular contracts because of the yet, but not yet aspect of human history, while still holding to the telos of God’s universal purposes.  This eschatological promise reveals that any universal interpretations and classifications are only temporary, and at best only partially reveal actualities contained in particular contracts.  As such universalities that are not fluid themselves are ideologies that seek to replace the ultimate truth revealed in God.  Even religious universalities such as doctrines and creeds are particularities that have been improperly universalized.  They have been created by a structure and are meant to reify particularities and maintain boundaries between the structure’s insider faithful and the outsider heretics.  Does this mean that all Christianity then is relative?  On the contrary, the universal is the particular fact of Jesus Christ that reveals vertically the universal purposes of God.  This vertical revelation replaces any horizontal universality.  
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Chakrabarty identifies modern Europecentrism as a dominant force that shapes historical discourse and Cultural Studies.  I would add that it does so through its assertion of factual cause and effect, which elevates the written word over oral communication.  The written word reifies individual and group contracts through its ability to chronicle events into a historical whole.  When this is done, the particular event becomes universalized into factual history.  Written history has been in place well before modern times, but the peculiar ‘contribution’ of modernity is the belief that all events and contracts are natural and “everything can be historicized.  So while the nonnaturalness of history, the discipline is granted, the assumed universal applicability of its method entails a further assumption: that it is always possible to assign, people, places, and objects to a naturally existing, continuous flow of historical time.”[3]   The logical conclusion is that particular events and contracts narrate themselves into a universal history; therefore they are not in need of a universalizing telos.
Within modernity’s written history, particular attempts to re-narrate events or to shift history are judged against a norm that is assumed to be inherent in the event itself.  This modern understanding ignores political power differentials and other variables such as group membership requirements and status, levels of mobility, valuations of communication types, typologies and level of enforcement.  The historian is the person responsible for laying out the facts into their natural and prescriptive universal whole.   Attempts to rewrite history by the marginalized often generate Euclidean claims.  In other words, histories run side by side concurrently.  For example in the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission process, there are two histories, one for the predominately black participants and one for the culturally dominant white surrounding community.  The Commission attempts to bring the black history into the white history; the problem is, however, that white history has already narrated and reified the events in written form; therefore within a modern construct of history, any black rewriting of the event will continue to run parallel to the white history, as an undercurrent representative of an alternative view.
Christianity, which comes to us in written form, is particularly susceptible to modern Euclidean history.  The Christ event, as recorded in the New Testament is an event that can be reified into a modern historical fact separated from its divine telos; modernity separates the incarnation from its divine source and purpose into a Gnostic parallelism of natural human Jesus and unnatural divine Christ.  The natural human Jesus becomes the possession of humanity under modernity as a material process to protect, interpret and control.   The incarnation of Jesus Christ is intended less to inspire eschatological imagination and is destined to be a controlled cultural artifact used in the production of meaning.  This meaning runs within human history while the divine Christ runs in the modern parallel Euclidean dimension just above human history. (See figure 1).  Its parallelism prevents the divine Christ from ever intersecting and disturbing human history. 
The Euclidean dilemma of modernity is broken through in the apocalyptic vision of God’s in-breaking eschatological Kingdom as witnessed in the particular life incarnation of Jesus Christ.  Is the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ a fact?  Yes, but it is a fact that is both natural and unnatural, human and divine.  It is the vertical and horizontal intersection of God’s purposes with human history.  At this intersection, the two dimensional plane is exploded into an endless multi-dimensional possibilities.  (See figure 2).
“…Paul Minear makes the point that John’s cosmology in the book of Revelation is not dominated by the (Euclidean) categories of time and space but rather by heaven and earth, with primacy accorded to the heavenly realm.  Furthermore, there is not merely a ‘first’ heaven and earth (ta prota, 21:4, which ultimately passes away), but also a ‘new’ heaven and earth, which constitute the decisive frontier of the old – not in terms of temporal succession (though the new heaven and earth do not pass away) but as an alternative cosmic order and community in which God dwells and is worshipped as Sovereign.[4] 

How then does this new understanding of Christianity shape the prophetic role of Cultural Studies within this new understanding of Christian theology?  It is one that is clearly apophatic, rather than universalizing.  Its purpose is to expose and rid narratives that are universalizing and hegemonic.  It is not to interpret or reify, but to point to intersections where the vertical universal purposes of God intersect with the horizontal particularities of human reality.  When this happens, the Euclidean planes that separate narratives merge, not into a modern rational universal, but into a narrative that provides a telos that breaks any human attempt to claim universal meaning and purpose.  It is a telos that is particularly witnessed from a slave’s point of view. 
“…the slave’s perspective require a discreet view not just of the dynamics of power and domination in plantation societies dedicated to the pursuit of commercial profit but of such central categories of the Enlightenment project as the idea of universality, the fixity of meaning, the coherence of subject, and, of course, the foundational ethnocentrism in which these have all tended to be anchored.”[5]

 "The Slave Ship" by J M W
Christian apocalypticism exposes the lies of modernity and the chaos it has created, as represented in Turner’s “Slave Ship.”  In the midst of the chaos of death and despair, there is a vertical ray of light that represents God’s eschatological light that illuminates the evil of modernity, stripping it of its power and revealing the true telos of all created beings.  Far from creating meaning through material processes that reify particular contracts into archaic cultural artifacts, Christianity transcends modernity and celebrates where the horizontal particular meets the vertical universal of God. 
In this multidimensionality, the prophetic purpose of Theological Cultural Studies is to follow Chakrabarty’s lead and begin to challenge modern assumptions and universalizing narratives without specifically knowing what the new narrative will look like.  The task is particularly at this moment a prophetic call to repentance.  Modernity has been a force that particularly lined up well with Christianity.  It will take a lot of deconstruction to untangle their closely-knit narrative ties.  Once deconstruction is completed, I cannot predict whether Theological Cultural Studies will survive, after all it is a modern construct itself.  Perhaps culture, and the individual will remain distinctive, but with new ways of relating to each other; perhaps they will disappear.  Whatever the future holds, God’s narrative of what it is to creatively live into God’s eschatological and multidimensional historical intersection has always been in conflict with earthly narratives; therefore, God has always been in need of particular prophets to remind creation of its universal telos.   


[4] P. Travis Kroeker and Bruce K. Ward, Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity (USA: Westview Press, 2001), 100.
 [5] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 55.
[3] Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Time of History and the Times of Gods” Lisa Lowe, ed. The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham: Duke University Press: 1997), 36.
[2] Michael Holquist, Dostoevsky & the Novel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1977), 111.
[1] Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s DiaryVol.2, Translated and Annotated by Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 831
Photo Credits: 
JMW Turner Slave Ship:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship