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INTRODUCING THE CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA OF RUSSIA
For as long as I can remember being in academia, I have gotten accused of being an anti-intellectual simply because I could not would not submit my mind to the Euro-centric canon. Parties from both sides, mainline and evangelical would question my intellectual rigor; that is, what happens after all, when you present a challenge to the canon. My refusal to believe that there are no innocent truth claims, and that with every philosophy, no matter how abstract it is, there is a politics behind it.
At the center of the post-modern western canonical apparatus are three men who no one really questions their presence as “must reads.” In Christian theological folklore, there is a mystique behind each of these men, and anyone who dares critique their work is written off as a marginal crackpot (if they are white), but if they are a person of color or a woman, well, they are just labelled as bitter. So today, I would like to give a very warm and heart felt POLITICAL JESUS welcome to Russian Christian existentialist thinker Nicolas Berdyaev. I see a lot of parallels between Berdyaev and Clement. Both men were exiled from their beloved countries; Berdyaev was actually deemed a heretic by the Russian Orthodox synod even though he never went to trial for it. With all the references to the Trinity, creation ex nihilo, and the importance of the indwelling of the Spirit in his text, The Destiny of Man, you could have fooled me that he was guilty of any heresy.
Berdyaev was not a systematic thinker; that is obvious, but at least in the Destiny of Man, he relies on Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, along with the Greek Orthodox tradition, to lay down a challenge to the naturalism presupposed by Barthians and Marxists alike. At times it seems as if he borders on individualism, but as he argues, the rugged individualism in modern sociology is a product of naturalist philosophy. And I believe he is correct. His arguments such as (and I am paraphrasing here) that communities (states/families/etc.) cannot hold a total claim on the human person because humanity is made in the image of God, and that image within humanity belongs to eternity. This was possibly the part of the foundation of his protest against oppressive church hierarchies and political structures such as dictatorships & communism, for institutions live on not because of clergy or politicians or professors, but because of heroes (saints) who embody the values that these institutions once stood for.
One would be hard pressed to consider Nicolas Berdyaev an “anti-intellectual”; like J. Kameron Carter, he offers the church a scathing critique of Kantian metaphysics and ethics. One of the few African American Christian theologians who utilized Berdyaev’s work was Major J. Jones in his book, The Color of God: The Concept of God in Afro-American thought (1987). I see the potential for a distinctly liberating metaphysic, that wrestles with the daemons of Platonism, Thomism, and Barthianism, and offers an alternative.
For more information, please visit this site (which has also been linked to our RESOURCES section):
The Philosophy of Nikolai Berdyaev.
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This dude sounds pretty awesome.
But why must we slag old Karl? I certainly wouldn’t be where I am now if it weren’t for his crazy dialectic capers!
LOLS!
Berdyaev is quite the dialectical thinker. NB was not a fan of Barth’s view of divine transcendence and ethics, which I fully heartily support NB.
I’m not as well read on Barth as I’d like to be, but didn’t Barth temper his earlier “fully other” God with God’s immanence? Or is that also tied up in the issue?
By most accounts, Barth took a God as a more Human approach, but the critique from Berdyaev still stands I believe. A Christian really should not have to do ethics with the division of G*d and humanity, but their reconciliation because of the Incarnation. It is a matter of starting points that’s the difference.
Interesting. I get that the reconciliation begins in the incarnation, but does that preclude the continuing distance between God and humanity that Barth talks about?
I think it does precludes Barth’s thesis, though in his Letter to the Romans, by starting with the Resurrected Christ as the departure for theology, a barthian could agree with Berdyaev.
But because I tend to lean towards the Free will tradition/Wesleyan and Eastern Orthodoxy, I side with NB’s starting point of Incarnation.
But can Berdyaev do this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msLK1NfpEQQ
I’ve never read Plato, Barth, or Aquinas — though of course I’ve come in contact with many thinkers who were influenced by them (or pretended to be). Maybe I’m an anti-intellectual. You say,
My refusal to believe that there are no innocent truth claims, and that with every philosophy, no matter how abstract it is, there is a politics behind it.
That sounds like Van Til.
Really,
Van Til comes to mind when you read that statement? I must be doing something wrong.
Is there something wrong with Van Til? I’ve only read him a little, and every time I have the basic jist of what he’s saying is that there’s always more underlying truth claims that the truth claims themselves.
I have personally never read Van Til, just excerpts, etc. I am not too crazy about his followers. Apparently, like the one commenter Jared said in the Safe Theology comments, I have an allergic reaction to Reformed theology, even though my 2 co-bloggers lean that way.
I hear you. Rushdoony, North, Bahnsen, and others can be a bit scary sometimes. I’ve been randomly cornered by Calvinists from time to time and grilled on my views in a most hostile. It turns out that I’m not considered orthodox by a fair number of Christians (because ‘open theism’ makes the most sense to me). Perhaps the fact that Calvin had his own daughter put to death for adultery is a hint that there might be something deeply wrong with his theological process . . .
But Til articulated some things really, really well.
“Perhaps the fact that Calvin had his own daughter put to death for adultery is a hint that there might be something deeply wrong with his theological process . . . ”
LOLS!
And yes, i think all 3 of the writers on this blog lean open theist more than anything. I know i do!
@Ryan,
Lols.