Virtual reality Christianity

Theology Today, Jul 1995 by Thistlethwaite, Susan Brooks

It is my thesis that the virtual reality craze with which we live in the late twentieth-century United States, with its extreme polarization of good and evil, is on a trajectory with some of the body-cheapening theodicies of Christianity. There are other, more promising directions resident within Christian theology as well, articulating that the relationship of good and evil, hence the struggles we face, is far more complex than often has been dreamt in the Christian West. Both the Farley and Townes volumes express these complexities from very different premises and in very different voices. It is both the differences and the often remarkable similarities in these volumes that makes, I hope, a strong argument that the problem of theodicy needs immediate and creative address.

CONTEMPORARY THEODICIES

Both the Farley and the Townes volumes consider the question of theodicy, posed classically as the conundrum: "If God is omnipotent and all good, why is there evil? If God cannot prevent evil, then God is not all powerful; if God can prevent evil and does not, God is not all good." They have each chosen to come at this question from the specifics of the human condition.

Farley, from a philosophical perspective, sees the human condition, mapped with these analytical tools, as a specific context. "Reflective ontology," the name he has given to the method he pursues in this volume, is defined as "commonsense discourse oriented to world continuities" as opposed to traditional ontologies that "translate recurring features and continuities into world-transcending universals."(7) Farley knows full well the range of critics he would have to face (liberation theologians, post-structuralists, and the like) should he attempt to assert traditional universalizing categories. But "reflective ontology" is not merely a side-step into redefinition in order to accomplish the same old ends; commonsense is the key word in this definition. The senses, the sensual, these are things human beings have in common, and they exhibit recurring patterns and continuities through history and culture that can be described. That work, to describe the commonalities of the human condition and then to frame the discussion of theodicy within those parameters, is his whole agenda.

What contextual theologians such as the womanists who contribute to the Townes volume are saying is that what has passed for the universal is really only the experience of one race, one gender, one class, one culture, abstracted and projected onto the screen of the cosmos as the eternal. Doing theology in this way is simply not possible. "Much of what womanist thought seeks to debunk is the notion of universals and absolutes. Womanist thought is intentionally and unapologetically biased. Its bias is for a diverse and faithful community of witnesses. These witnesses are an active force for love and justice in the midst of oppression and fallenness."(8) Womanists are singularly uninterested in abstractions because they do not help the community get through the day and do what needs to be done. In fact, we may note that it is the purpose of abstractions precisely to take social struggle and reduce it to what has been called the paralysis of analysis; that is, traditional ontological treatments of theodicy do have a very specific historical agenda, they are in the service of the status quo. The question, which I want to leave open for now, is whether what Farley is attempting, that is, to posit that "intensified awareness of the general dynamics of human evil is helpful...in the struggle for social good" makes enough of a substantive distinction between the general and the universal to matter in the struggle for a more just and equitable United States.(9)