THE PROCESS OF RECOGNITION
A Review of Divine Self-Investment: An Open and Relational Constructive Christology by Tripp Fuller
“We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence,” Annie Dillard says in the opening of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. That is, long before we consciously have the means to question it, we are thrown into a form of life, and, even after we have developed enough to begin to wonder about this strange situation in which we find ourselves, for long stretches of time, whole lifetimes even, we still do not put these forms to the question. We have inherited the whole world – or what we take to be the whole world, anyway – and we make our way through it as casually and naturally as a fish in water. For a great many of us, however, certain events break into our comfortable horizon, events of wonder and awe, but also of horror and evil, and we suddenly wake to the utter strangeness of our situation. “Seems like we’re just set down here,” Annie Dillard reports her neighbor saying, “and don’t nobody know why.”
Despite this upset, or, more probably, precisely because of it, some of us set ourselves to the task of giving an account of the world we have inherited. It is good and necessary work. But the only tools we have ready to hand to make sense of this situation are the competing and contradictory notions that we have received out this same maelstrom of culture that threw us head over heels in the first place. Once upon a time, we may not have realized that there were differing accounts of our relationship to the things of ultimate concern because everyone we had ever known understood them through the same symbols of what sociologist Peter Berger calls the “sacred canopy” of shared social meaning. But now, in our contemporary context of an interconnected globe, it has become abundantly clear we can no longer creditably claim everyone, everywhere, in every time has told the story of the sacred in the same way. Moreover, if we are being honest, our new modern horizon shows us there is no theoretical foundation which is not historically situated, and, even if there were such a firm foundation, there would still be no access to it which was not already affected by our own consciousness, a consciousness which is itself brought about by and through the effects of history. Or, as Josh Ritter sings it in one his love songs, “every heart is a package tangled up in knots someone else tied.” It is a peculiar conundrum. And yet, all these philosophical caveats and quibbles notwithstanding, for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, love continues to call us to the things of this world.
In Divine Self-Investment, Tripp Fuller offers an explication of this love. Perhaps best-known as the founder and host of Homebrewed Christianity where he has been interviewing academic theologians and scholars since 2008 in his engaging and convivial style, in this new book Fuller offers his own constructive Christology. Fuller speaks deeply and compellingly of the God who is love as he is revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but he also understands that this traditional confession takes on a new resonance in our contemporary context. “We are at a moment,” he states, “in which the Christian community is struggling anew to articulate the ongoing encounter with the God that Jesus mediates.” For the Christian who recognizes the problems of existential thrownness and historical contingency, the triumphalist apologetics of previous eras are no longer adequate. But on the other hand, for those who come to live in faith as a form of life, neither can Jesus simply be reduced to just another mystic or sage. As Fuller notes, for the one who lives in faith “to call Jesus the Christ is an enactment of the entire person in a particular community. Reflection upon this confession is not something one can do from a distance, because the confession itself entails an existential response that requires much more than the affirmation of beliefs. Christology is a disciple’s discipline.” For Fuller, articulating a faithful response to this relational understanding of Jesus is the central task of theology.
Nevertheless, from this relational vantage point, Fuller also insists that a proper engagement with Jesus of Nazareth cannot simply rest in the existential. It must also address the metaphysical dimensions of faith. As he says, “both registers are important and necessary given the Christian confession is not simply about Jesus or even God’s presence in Jesus, but about the reality and identity of God.” Although he affirms the modern critique of religion and its traditional sources that emerges out of the liberal theological tradition “is necessary for engaging the contemporary constructive theological setting,” here Fuller offers a more robust corrective to the often muted and reductive accounts of Christology that have appeared after Schleiermacher. As he says, one of the primary aims of his book is “to demonstrate the Christological possibilities that remain largely unacknowledged and undeveloped in liberal theology.” Readers who maintain a commitment to a traditional understanding of doctrine from classical theology will disagree with Fuller from the outset, and Fuller does not necessarily spend much time seeking to persuade them. But for those sympathetic to how an existentially engaged open and relational framework informed by the metaphysical process thought of Alfred North Whitehead might work, this book is quite a gift.
Fuller makes his argument in six modestly sized chapters. First, he traces recent developments in the quest for the historical Jesus. Next, he explicates the Spirit Christologies of Roger Haight and Joseph Bracken, which he then compares to the Logos Christologies of Kathryn Tanner and John Cobb. He then turns to the accounts of salvation in Douglas Ottati and Andrew Sung Park. Taken together, these chapters form a kind of Venn diagram with Fuller’s thesis at the center. However, in each chapter, before he makes his own argument for his vision of an open and relational Christology, Fuller takes care to clearly articulate the positions of the theologians he engages, and this is one of the strongest achievements of the book. This structural choice to summarize and contextualize these recent threads in academic theology not only clearly situates Fuller’s own response for those already familiar with these trajectories, but it also serves as a solid introduction to these thinkers for the enterprising student or the enthusiastic layperson unacquainted with these developments. These chapters are rather technical, however, and the prose is sometimes choppy as Fuller attempts to condense and then compare these complex arguments. Lay readers will likely want to keep a theological dictionary handy.
This brings me to Fuller’s final chapter where, having laid out his groundwork, he makes his final appeal for the open and relational framework. “In the revelation of Jesus as the Christ,” he states, “we can see that the pathos of the covenanting God is not only moved by the tumult of history, but also that this God has sought to know it and share it completely.” Moreover, “in each moment, God gives the Word to the world and then receives back into God all the world becomes.” Seen through the lens of process thought, this statement accomplishes the existential and metaphysical weight Fuller hopes to achieve. Thus, for Fuller, “when you understand the Word of God as always calling Creation into existence, cosmological history is also the history of God’s Word in the world. The emergence of mind, complexity, community, depth of rationality, and moral responsiveness are all in part the result of God’s cosmic self-investment in Creation.” It is a beautiful vision.
I have been sitting with it for some weeks now, and I am still not quite certain if I am fully persuaded. Having grown up inside the Church of Christ, a rich congregationalist community with roots in the American Restoration Movement, I inherited a relentless emphasis on Scripture that has remained with me even after I moved to the Episcopal Church in my early adulthood. Initially, moving away from that sola scriptura mindset and coming to rest in the long theological tradition of the Church was a deep and abiding comfort that helped me keep the faith. Still, as a longtime student of literature, I will also admit I am not compelled to the life of faith primarily by the logic of theology, but by the story of God as it unfolds among God’s people. As I read it, Scripture constantly testifies to the ways in which the great God of Israel again and again confounds our expectations and understanding as God continually puts Godself into relationship with us. As Walter Brueggemann says, “poetry breaks the syllogism.” So, in spite my temperament of deference to Church tradition, I still find myself quite sympathetic to the relational dimension of Fuller’s argument. For the argument to also have an account of metaphysics that breaks free of Enlightenment notions of materiality, well, from where I sit, that is something worth contemplating.
However, in the end, to focus primarily on whether I finally come to agree with every jot and tittle of Fuller’s version of process theology is somewhat beside what I find to be his largest and most compelling point: Christology, at heart, is a disciple’s discipline. As I read chapter by chapter, I immediately recognize I am in community with him. The Jesus he testifies to is the same Jesus I know. In this way, the book stands within Fuller’s larger project of bringing curious laypeople into closer contact with the rigorous work of the academy in a way that does not deflate the life of faith but serves it and calls it into newness of life through a richer understanding of God. It seems to me his point is also well taken by academics who, in offering caveat after caveat in order to please a secular understating of rationality, end up robbing their work of the very spirit that is meant to animate it in the first place. Surely any theology worth its salt will wake us to the wonder and majesty of the world and to the One Great God of Creation who continually breathes it and us into being. As Fuller says, “the Christological confession is the beginning of Christology and not its conclusion.” Fuller knows this good news that is in Christ Jesus, and his constructive theology is a welcome invitation to recognize our place in great adventure of being in the world. I am grateful to find in Fuller a companion along the way.
