Virtual reality Christianity

Theology Today, Jul 1995 by Thistlethwaite, Susan Brooks

I understand why deconstruction's specific self-appointed task is to expose the play of difference in these things [the goods of liberation: courage, vitality, wonder, compassion, obligation]. But if it contends for a freedom that opposes or displaces them, it is only one more sign and instrument of the oppressive dehumanizations of advanced industrial society.(22)

Womanists knew that they cannot afford the extreme relativism of deconstruction, which would reduce what is valuable in human society to mere clusters of culturally conditioned assumptions. Such cultural relativism eviscerates the capacity of those rendered marginal to state, "This way of doing things is wrong; it is wrong now and it was wrong an eon ago."

The ability of human beings to be moral agents in the world and to transform the world toward a greater good is the bedrock on which the womanist stands. Consider Emilie Townes' reflections on the dominant culture's understanding of power and the womanist understanding.

The traditional concept of power is a natural consequence of an authoritarian model of obedience based on submission. The world is separated into entities with little or no interrelationship. Power becomes the property of these separated entities and is identified with domination. This notion of power involves the notion of invulnerability.

The concept of power that comes from decision and responsibility is one that entails the ability to effect change and to work with others. This power requires openness, vulnerability, and readiness to change. It is dynamic and concerned with the responsibility we have as moral agents for personal and social transformation.(23)

Womanists have not been taken in by the rhetorical dance of postmodernism and they see its often convoluted prosing for what it is--an intellectual flirting with danger by the economically secure. Those who are pushed to the margins by dominator forms of power know that beyond the prose is a mailed fist. Power is not just discourse; it is the aggregation of property and opportunity and its inequitable distribution. Only if you can presume that the distribution will continue to include you, can you afford to flirt with relativistic understandings of power.

THE EMBODIMENT OF GOOD AND EVIL

Another area of convergence in the approach to theodicy in these two different volumes is that themes of theodicy cannot be played out from the eyebrows up. Both volumes insist that it is through the living, human body that evil comes and is or is not transformed. Yet, contrary to those who would reduce evil to "man's (sic) innate aggression," Farley argues that while, in considering theodicy,

what is central and primary is what the human being needs in the struggle for life and well-being...[N]o inexorable causality marks the journey from the hypothalamus and the hormones to human evil. Abstracted into itself, the human biological condition is neither good nor evil but a set of capacities and tendencies which are the root of but also gathered up into the distinctive experiencing life of human beings, thus into language, embodiment, and ways of being spatial, social, and temporal.(24)