Weak Thought

I'm usually late to the game when it comes to philosophy - and I'm sure this is no exception.  I just finished reading Vattimo's After Christianity and Caputo's The Weakness of God.  I can't say the ideas they expressed were entirely new to me - it seems, after reading them, that I've been moving toward a "weak theology" my entire teaching career.  I'm thankful for both Vattimo and Caputo's work as they provide a way of organizing what I've been trying to articulate for a while.  Not that I buy everything they say - I definitely have some questions and push back - but overall they were a joy to read.

The problem is that I'm immersed in a tradition that wants so badly to erect "strong theology."  The world needs to be organized, categorized, and everything needs to be in its proper order.  The sovereignty of God, natural law, and double predestination become conceptual tools that not only provide a means for domesticating God, but they become the means for determining who is and who is not a part of the Kingdom of God.  Social and economic institutions become the means for ensuring the kingdom comes efficiently and with gusto.

So what of weakness?  What of kenosis?  What about, as Vattimo emphasizes, charity?  This past year I spent my Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons at a new high school in south Minneapolis - Cristo Rey Jesuit High School.  I spent my time with young people like Juan, and Hugo, and Jesstine.  These are young people who have been through quite a bit already - more than some of us will see in a lifetime.  What I sensed from them, despite their difficulties and through their triumphs, was an undercurrent of charity.  Its almost as if they had no choice but to be charitable -  there seemed no other way to navigate the messiness of life.

My experience at Cristo Rey has forced me to wrestle with the tendency within the Calvinist tradition to construct "strong theology."  At Cristo Rey I was invited into the lives of young people - into a realm where gang violence, homelessness, domestic abuse, and teenage pregnancy were a part of the everyday lives of students.  "Strong theology" leaves no space in which to encounter the lived experience of others.  "Strong theology" always has a plan... a strategy... the answers.  What I learned at Cristo Rey was an important lesson in "weak theology" - a theology that is grounded in charitable love and the embrace of differences.  I still hold to my tradition... I still call myself a Calvinist... because I believe in the end that Calvinism and what Caputo calls "weak theology" are not antithetical as so many seem to presuppose.  This will be, I think, the theological task I take from my experience at Cristo Rey - to explore the common ground between the "weak theology" necessary for the Christian community to live out the gospel in the world of differences and the biblical and theological insight provided by the Calvinist tradition.  Don't ask me how... I'm not quite there yet.