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Beyond Consolation

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Beyond Consolation 142 143 Beyond Consolation: The Anton Boisen wrote, people are “living human documents” which we can engage and exegete, or interpret, just as we do written texts.4 Significance of Failure for Faith As a scholar, I integrate my work with people into my theoretical knowl- edge as a Christian theologian working in depth theology and dogmatics. Depth Heather Wise theology is an emerging discipline that reflects theologically on the insights of depth psychology, the study of the depths of the psyche, or “soul” in Greek.5 Post- Enlightenment, what was once called the “care of souls” in the Christian tradition largely fell out of theology.6 Depth psychology, or psychoanalysis, in the discovery Christopher Morse, the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor Emeritus of Theology of the unconscious, provided a new healing modality and what founder Sigmund and Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, teaches how to “test the spirits,” not Freud called “a cure through love.”7 Some people of faith, whose traditions no only of the tradition, but also of we ourselves, as theology witnesses our transfor- longer worked for them, found help in this therapeutic method. Depth theology mation into who God made us to be.1 The following presentation, which I gave takes up a psychoanalytic critique within theology toward the healing transforma- on April 25, 2013 at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College for non-theologians tion of the person and community in society.8 engaged in an interdisciplinary seminar series, shows how Morse’s work influences Within systematic theology, dogmatics is a discipline that adjudicates the theology and theology’s engagement with other disciplines, so we can best find testimony of the church, or the witness of those who speak in the name of Jesus what it means to be human, or, as Bonhoeffer emphasized, following the apostle Christ. Dogmatics, as theologian Christopher Morse writes, is simply the “test- Paul, that “God is for us.”2 In gratitude for all Morse has taught me about doing ing” of dogma, or “decreed (authoritative) teaching,” and, as such, is “the antidote dogmatics as a “theology of freedom”—each one of us invited to test the evidence to dogmatism.”9 The difference between dogmatics and dogmatism is that the presented because God, as “the One who loves in freedom,” can be trusted to con- former is a radically critical discipline and the latter demands allegiance to one’s firm or convict what we conclude—I write as a witness to what God is doing and own beliefs as if they cannot be critiqued. Christian dogmatics tests what people the difference it makes in our lives and communities as my mentor has so faith- are saying and doing in light of what they are called to say and do in the Gospel of fully done for decades.3 Jesus Christ. However, other faith traditions or ideologies can test what is faithful to their own teachings from within using dogmatics, which originated in Greek traditions of both theology, or theologia, logic or sayings about the gods, and dog- Introduction mata, sets of teachings deemed authoritative.10 Following theologian and Christian martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer who Before turning to the theme of the day, I want to introduce my disciplines wanted social reality taken up “into the service of dogmatics,” and Morse, who and method for this diverse group gathered for the interdisciplinary seminar. has taken this work of Bonhoeffer forward, my work in dogmatics seeks to deepen While not an ethnographer like many of my colleagues in the seminar series on social reality to include psychic reality, to consider not only the conscious and “Religion and Failure” in the Anthropology of Religion at Teacher’s College, I am communal aspects of our lives and communities, but also the unconscious and a clinically trained chaplain and scholar in the fields of Psychiatry & Religion and Systematic Theology. As a chaplain, my method for reporting clinical experience follows the standards of the Association of Clinical Pastoral Education, which 4 Anton T. Boisen, “The Period of Beginnings,” Journal of Pastoral Care, 5, no. 1, (Spring 1951), 13–19. includes verbatim material (that maintains confidentiality), self-and-other reflec- 5 See Ann Belford Ulanov, The Unshuttered Heart: Opening to Aliveness and Deadness in the tion and theological interpretation. As the founder of Clinical Pastoral Education, Self (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007), 18. See also Amy Bentley Lamborn, “”Figuring” the Self, “Figuring” the Sacred” (PhD diss., Union Theological Seminary, 2009), 214–216. 6 Ulanov, The Unshuttered Heart, 64. When a pastor in Barcelona, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1 1 John 4.1–2. For more on “testing the spirits” and theological method, see Christopher wrote, “It sometimes seems to me like all our work comes to grief on the care of souls.” Dietrich Morse, Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief, 2nd Edition. (New York: Continuum, 2009). Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom, 406. 2 Romans 8.31b. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” For instance, see Dietrich 7 Sigmund Freud wrote this phrase in a letter to C. G. Jung. See Bruno Bettelheim, Freud Bonhoeffer, “Christ the Center (Christologie) Summer, 1933” in A Testament to Freedom: The Essential and Man’s Soul (New York: Knopf, 1983). For the history of the unconscious, see Henri F. Ellenberg- Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson (San Francisco: Harper er, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Collins, 1990), 127. Books, 1970). 3 Karl Barth said someone in the United States of America should do a “theology of free- 8 See Heather Wise, “Depth Psychology and Dogmatics: Testing the Spirits in the Soul and dom,” which would mean a “freedom for humanity.” Final words of a panel discussion in Chicago, in the Tradition” (working paper, Union Theological Seminary, 2012). April 26, 1962. http://kbarth.org/audio. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1. Edited by Geoffrey 9 Morse, Not Every Spirit, xviii and, 14–31. William Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrence (New York: T & T Clark, 2004), 257–321. 10 Ibid., 14–20. 142 143 personal dimensions, for understanding the whole human person in relationship.11 creating a bridge between them as church father Irenaeus said the glory of God is Important to note, work with the psyche refers to its wider frame of reference in the living person.15 the term psyche-soma, as soul and body are inseparably connected and the psyche is not a discrete individualistic entity, but relational.12 For Christians, theology must attend to psychosocial reality because God acts through Jesus Christ apoca- Faith and Failure lypsed (Gk “revealed”) in the flesh and blood realities of this world. As psychoana- lyst and theologian Ann Belford Ulanov writes, God also comes to us in the flesh This essay offers a philosophical, psychoanalytic and theological assessment of the human psyche.13 of what happens when faith fails. Contrary to what many people realize, faith, To “serve dogmatics” means to critically reflect upon related disciplines, as a human mode of trusting in God, is meant to fail. Like all idols we make of such as history, ethics, philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis, in light of what the things we love, faith fails because it does not transmit the ultimate, but merely God is doing and the difference it makes. Herein lies the difference between points to it. So what do people of faith do in the face of failure when even faith anthropology of religion and theological anthropology. Anthropology of religion itself no longer obtains? studies humans and their communities of faith on their own terms, while theo- Following philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s seminal essay “On Consolation” in logical anthropology studies humans from the standpoint of God’s action and its The Religious Significance of Atheism in which he argues that God is beyond our import in the world today. Christian theology says we are created human, but, consolation, and his explication of the function of symbols in Freud and Philoso- under the influence of evil in this world, we fall away from our true humanity. phy, I consider what we do when faith fails, our symbols break, and we still long We are called, as the apostle Paul writes in Romans and 2 Corinthians in the for consolation. I also adjudicate group psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s theory of O New Testament, to no longer live kata sarka (Gk, “according to the flesh”), but (ultimate reality), K (finite reality; knowledge), and –K (the loss of both O & K) through Jesus Christ en sarki (Gk, “in the flesh”), which restores us to our true, for what it offers to both science and religion for how we understand failure and embodied humanity.14 possible responses to it. Relatedly, I investigate Bion’s column 2, which on his For a dialogue between religious studies and theology, the crucial question number and letter grid perhaps represents the place of necessary failure, and its then is how to understand and test experience for what it actually means to be connection with John Keats’ negative capability. human. Both fields and their subfields have much to say on this which I cannot I relate the work of Ricoeur and Bion theologically to faith stories including go into now, but I hope this paper will open up the conversation and be part of the Judeo-Christian story of Moses not being consumed by the burning bush and the Christian story of what happens in the life span of Jesus Christ which includes incarnation, death on the cross, and resurrection. I remember Rachel’s refusal 11 Christopher Morse, The Difference Heaven Makes(New York: Continuum, 2010), 87.
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