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There is always a message behind any sign, indicator, or icon. There is always content. And that is why the how must be considered the source of ultimate meaning because it is the origin of the message that is received and heard and ultimately shapes our pretheoretical expectations for daily life. There is always content, but the how must be the interpretive and authorizing source of the what.
My argument here is that even the icon can be betrayed when the direction it points is co- opted or subverted. The Bible, perhaps the most mainstream icon in the West, can be subverted to point to racial, cultural, and economic imperialism rather than gracious redemption. Jürgen Moltmann had previously made the point that the cross itself has been idolized across Christian and Western history.143 Icons are not impervious to idolatry no matter how sacred they may be.
This fact reiterates that what is at stake is the how rather than the what. And while Smith may focus on the young Heidegger, Heidegger’s concern for the how above the what was a consistent theme across his lengthy career.
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attempt to overcome Kant. Smith uses the language of embodied particularity in order to
‘redeem’ the phenomena, as it were.145 Presumably that redemption would be ontological such that the phenomena would no longer be lacking anything found in the noumena. To that end, he returns to the incarnation. As the title suggests, Smith wants to claim that the great councils
“[affirmed] that humanity and divinity are not mutually exclusive.”146 In some sense, that is precisely what the creeds say, but they also recognize the logical and existential contradictions that this claim makes. The creeds recognize the mystery of incarnation in the juxtaposition to exclusive ontological language.147 Importantly, Smith’s work in NO shows that his later writings remain consistent with his early works in regard to his views on Gnosticism and incarnational logic.
Smith’s project is important, but his primary turn towards a philosophical and theological model based in a participatory ontology causes him to fall short of his goal. His rejection of sources that might move beyond a participatory ontology cause him to fall short of his goal, sources such as Levinas and Marion. The complexity of his project, working with so many moving parts, raising and addressing so many different questions, and his inability to keep them all clear in his writing creates great difficulty for him and his reader. It is this set of commitments
145 “For those with any theological sensibility, this move by Derrida to eschew particularity and embodiment and point to a ‘pure’ ideal has the feel of a Gnostic aspiration . . . The pattern that emerges is what I call [Derrida’s]
‘logic of determination’ that sees particularly and embodiment as inherently violent, faulting creatures for being finite.” James K. A. Smith, The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2021): 4.
146 Ibid., 6.
147 It is one thing to assert that “the divinity of the Son was not ‘violated’ or ‘contaminated’ by becoming flesh,” and another thing to say that the creeds affirm “the goodness of finitude and particularity,” as if what was assumed did not need to be saved (Ibid.).
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and complexity that seems to drive his strange rejection of Levinas. Had he read Levinas (or Marion) more charitably, perhaps he would find therein other options – more gracious options.
Smith deals with modernity by trying to retreat from it, but he continues to leave the (modern) human subject at the center of the drama of communication and knowledge. What would happen, instead, if the self was not empowered to choose but instead was put under an obligation so that our only alternative to responsibility is to kill the Other; to kill God, perhaps by placing our own liberty of choice at the heart of salvation because our own epistemic labor is at the heart of revelation and communication. What if knowledge is by grace through faithfulness and not by works? What would that look like?
The entire Christian doctrine of the incarnation insists that in the person of Jesus, the Word of God, we find the fullness of God and the fullness of the human being. God is conveyed in the Christ. Or is this interpretation of the incarnation too simplistic? In relation to Levinas’s claim that things/referents cannot clothe themselves in the totality, how should we consider Paul’s claim that the Son became sin for us, rejecting the form of God to take on the form of the slave? Paul’s claim is that in doing so, the Son inverted the signs of the world (see Paul’s deployment of cross language in 1 Cor. 1:4-3:9).148 The Son does not communicate himself through the totality, but instead overcomes the totality in his excess. It turns out that Smith’s logic of incarnation is too simplistic and cross-sectional. It takes a formal structure at a moment of time and ignores the surrounding narrative and power dynamics.
148 “What is of greatest interest at this point is that Paul can characterize his message in a way that seems similar to the description of ‘deconstruction’ (in which weakness and strength change places) and to justice.” Theodore Jennings Jr., Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006): 70. See also, Theodore Jennings Jr., Transforming Atonement: A Political Theology of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009): 150-158.
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What if, instead, of trying to understand or to grasp or to know, we ourselves were understood, grasped, and known? What if this were the direction of theological, graced knowledge? What if this were the direction of revelation, and, consequently, of salvation?
Smith has passed off the violence of finitude onto the inadequacy of the sign. For Smith, it is not finitude that is found wanting, but the sign itself.149 The sign needs the referent to complete it, perhaps much as nature needs grace? This is one of the areas where Smith seems either inconsistent or undisciplined. In what sense would it be problematic to suggest that finitude is incomplete without the eternal, much as the sign is incomplete without the referent?
Why not turn all of finite being into a sign that indicates beyond itself?
And, what if the ‘concept’ did not try to clothe the thing itself but merely pointed to it?
This indicative view of the ‘concept’ is more in line what Smith wants us to consider. The sign indicates. Could it be that is all the sign did? The sign is just an arrow pointing towards the thing, which could never be housed within language? That is certainly not reflective of the incarnation.
It is not that Jesus just points us to God, but that Jesus is fully the Second Person of the Trinity.
So how does the logic of incarnation inform Smith’s utilization of Augustine and Heidegger? At this point, Smith takes an odd route. He says this:
Hence, at times I must believe where I cannot know; where the sign fails, I learn the thing by faith. The result is not a comprehending knowledge, but belief, the non-knowing of faith: sans savoir, sans avoir, sans voir. Here we are taught by the inner Teacher – Christ.150
The final part of that quotation regarding the inner Teacher is a reference to Augustine, but it is the fullness of the quote in conjunction with the incapacity of the sign to do more than point to
149 Smith, Speech, 120.
150 Ibid.,
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the thing beyond that is odd. Certainly, there appears to be a danger of anti-intellectualism and fideism here: a replacement of reason and knowledge with mere belief. Or is Smith doing something more interesting? I would like to believe that, but he simply gives no indication, no sign, of anything other than the sentiment of anti-intellectualism. When faith is a substitute for reason or for knowledge, then it is no longer about faithfulness or loyalty but rather propositions void of evidence.
Augustine says that the self finds its enjoyment in God.151 Notice that creation is a mode of the Creator, for Augustine. This is structurally not unlike Levinas’s notion that the face of the Other is a mode of the infinite. We love the creation, says John Wesley, as it leads to the
Creator.152 Through the Other, says Levinas, we are called to holiness. Yet, Augustine, the compatibilist, and Wesley, the Arminian, still embrace self-agency, properly understood. In contrast, Levinas renders the self passive. Herein is a major difference, and perhaps this self- passivity, this divestment of the self, is what makes Smith so uncomfortable with Levinas
If my above criticisms are correct, then what does Smith’s new ‘concept’ get us? What is its value-proposition? My conclusion in this section is that Smith has solved a problem that did not require a solution. Additionally, his proposed solution does not actually provide the benefit that he claims.
151 “You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Augustine, Confessions, 3).
152 John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1966): 13.
59 CHAPTER 2
Evolutionary Metaphysics: Hierarchy, Liberty, and Eschatology
Philosophy has its own mythic assumptions.1
As Christ “died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”
– Julia Ward, “Battle Hymn of the Republic”