Virtual reality Christianity

Theology Today, Jul 1995 by Thistlethwaite, Susan Brooks

Liberation theologians have often made this response to the traditional Euroatlantic proposition that one must sacrifice either God's omnipotence or God's goodness on the horns of theodicy. Rosemary Radford Ruether makes this point.

When we model our God after emperors and despots who reduce others to dependency, then we have a problem of theodicy. But the cross of Jesus reveals a deeper mystery. The God revealed in Jesus has identified with the victims of history and has abandoned the thrones of the mighty.(13)

While God is not the problem of theodicy for Farley either, he does not take the christological route. His effort to map the human condition in order to describe how evil functions in relationship to good is more phenomenology than anything else. He argues, "If there is no way whatsoever that human evil shapes human agency and its historicity, face-to-face relation, or dynamics of social institutions, then we suspect that there is no such thing as human evil. It is merely a vacuous symbol." But if human evil is real, then it can be described and this description could be used to interpret Dostoyevsky or Jesus of Nazareth. "What are identified for reflection are not so much unhistorical essences as features of a life-form that perdure over a very long biohistorical period. This, in fact, is the sort of ontology one finds in the prophets of the eighth century B.C.E. or in the Gospel of Mark."(14)

It should be clearer by now that these two works are on very different--one could even begin to suspect opposing--methodological trajectories. Farley tries to map the broad contours of the human condition to see what the enduring structures of evil and good are like and how they are related. Townes and her co-authors describe in vivid detail the specific historical conditions that have given rise to womanist ethical and theological reflection on the shape of evil.

THEODICY AT ODDS WITH POSTMODERNISM

But their methods converge at a couple of significant points, the first being that apparently both reflective ontologists and womanists believe that there is something called "the real" and that it can be described. That is, they set themselves at odds with what has been called postmodernism or deconstructionism. Farley separates out what he considers the mild form of these critical schools, a form that is really closer to hermeneutics and the sociology of knowledge. He agrees with most of this critique. "It rightly contends that God, self, philosophy, knowledge, and history itself are thematics (meaning-clusters) of history. They arise with the experience and discourse of specific culture that engendered them."(15) These meaning clusters do not mirror the mind of God, they are not eternal, and, in fact, "they can be part of an epoch's or people's oppressive social structures."(16) Of course, as Michel Foucault has so well pointed out, these schemes try to disguise their oppressive roles and hide their oppressive character. Breaking the "tyranny of fixed contents and symbols" is why postmodernist criticism can be helpful to oppressed groups.