10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How to speak about God, May 30, 2004
This review is from: Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation (Routledge Radical Orthodoxy) (Paperback)
In this book, Smith grapples with how one ought to (or can) speak about God. The problem he deals with is one from phenomenology. If something is transcendent (as is God), then it cannot be conceptualized or spoken of without doing violence to its transcendence. Essentially, we cannot speak of something that is wholly other without making it immanent, even if only in our speech. Yet this speech does not do justice to God. The other option is not to speak, but this does not seem like such a good option either. Following the young Heidigger and Augustine, Smith develops an incarnational model of speech. Such speech does not violate transcendence, but points beyond itself to the greater reality (God). Further, it does not do violence because the transcendent One (God) initiated the speech. This is a difficult read if you are not familiar with French Deconstructionist philosophers like Derrida, Marion, and Levinas, but it is well worth the effort.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fresh Air..., August 1, 2006
This review is from: Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation (Routledge Radical Orthodoxy) (Paperback)
Mark my words: in time JKA Smith's work will reverberate throughout the barren wasteland otherwise known as the Evangelical `academy'. He is one of the few out there in Evangelicaland who is doing stimulating, innovative work (perhaps along with Vanhoozer, McGrath, Wright, etc.). I begin with this affirmation because 1) I believe it, and 2) I love this book in spite of the critical remarks that follow. While I emphatically sympathize with his general strategy, his argument rests on an aporetic knot that he does not quite traverse without slipping:
His appeal to Levinas and Marion in support of his thesis is severely problematic, even after he critiques their notion of revelation. Those critiques somewhat miss the point, in that it amounts to positing the need for `conditions of reception' for revelation. Smith writes after quoting Levinas: *But still we must ask: in what way can the Wholly Other be revealed? Must not every revelation be received? (159)* In this whole paragraph, Smith confuses the event of the other in Levinas as an `appearance', delivering a content that requires conditions of reception, intelligibility, and so forth. For Levinas, the other precisely does not appear: the other appears as non-appearing, as enigma, as trace. The event of the face does not *reveal* information, or content to be assimilated within a structure of comprehension. (Levinas does not in fact regress to pre-critical metaphysics.) The relation is one of non relation: the other resists determination in that its content overflows its concept: this overflowing, taken with the trace, inscribes, elects, and constitutes ethical subjectivity; it signals an absolute passivity prior to even the minimal spontaneity, or merely relative passivity, implied by `conditions of reception'.
Smith forgets or ignores Levinas's theme of the TRACE. This is why Levinas is not a good resource for Smith's project. The alterity that irrupts in the face (in TI) and in Saying (OB) appears as trace of a past that was never present, i.e. a trace that (in principle) cannot be INCARNATED. The ethical trauma Levinas thematizes does not require a structure of reception beyond the jouissance of the existent, its affective being in its self-sameness. The relation to the other is traumatic precisely in that it `elects', it opens the same to responsibility precisely against its own inclinations. It constitutes the self's very singularity! The height and destitution of the other are the tropes for the passing of the trace. I am not as familiar with Marion, the description of the *religious phenomenon* as displacing and overwhelming the conditions of appearance bears the Levinasian influence. We should ask: do we really want God to `appear' in the specific phenomenological sense? Smith's appeal to Kierkegaard's paradox is a bit problematic too. The incarnation, for Kierk, does not appear in the phenomenological sense, but precisely burst the bounds of appearing and comprehension, it defies assimilation into Hegelian (or Husserlian) intelligibility. It would seem to me that the Incarnation must remain an offense, Christ must remain `incognito' to the lights of Reason or a (putatively) neutral epistemology. Or else faith would not be needed.
Of course: Smith's point is that in the Incarnation, God *condescends* to man in Christ. But this condescension will only ever appear as idolatrous and mythic to the neutral philosophical eye; which is why to that eye, God will only ever `appear' as an opening or irruption, as a whisper or shudder. Any more, and we're in the region of faith and the undecidability it presupposes. The theological opposition he seeks to mediate - immanence/transcendence - is aporetic and should remain so.
This touches on another confusion I had: Smith makes the claim that Christian theology needs Christian philosophy, i.e. reflection on method that exceed the regional specificity of theology. If this philosophy is indeed `Christian', i.e. post-faith philosophy, what need does it have of phenomenology? Why critique Marion and Levinas if one is already out over the abyss, and when this is precisely what the seek to effect (rather than regress to onto-theology)? Indeed, the critique seems to beg the question, in that Lev and Marion are operating on the terrain of the phenomenological tradition that brackets the position Smith assumes.
All in all, in spite (or perhaps because) of my critical questions, I love this book. This is a book that's worth reading, worth arguing with, and worth critiquing; a book that demonstrates that broadly orthodox theology can do more than incessantly recite the same slogans and oppositions. Smith is asking the right questions, pointing us in essential trajectories, and opening a site for theological reflection that moves beyond the Biblicism and positivism of so much Evangelical theology. From *Fall of Interpretation* to this book, Smith is trailblazing a new mood of inquiry and questioning. We hope that his work gains a wide reading!!! God knows, Evangelicalism is in need of legible, creative, effective, insightful thinking. Thanks Jamie!
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