Is "Radical Theology" Radical?
by Shaul Magid
Ever since Spinoza, many modern Jews and Christians have struggled to offer an alternative to Spinoza's atheism or, more accurately, his a-theism (a dis-belief in the personal transcendent biblical God who commands), while essentially agreeing in principle with his deconstruction of the personal God of the Bible. Spinoza, of course, was not an atheist like Richard Dawkins. He was simultaneously a "God-intoxicated man" and banished from the Jewish community because of his blasphemy. This model of God intoxication and institutional religious rebellion is a central theme of modern religion in the West. And it surely doesn't begin with Spinoza. We can find resonances of this perspective in the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, the Sufi poet Rumi, the Zohar, the Protestant mystic Jakob Boehme, and modern Hasidism. In America, Ralph Waldo Emerson and David Thoreau, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William James, Canadian Richard Maurice Bucke (Cosmic Consciousness), Krishnamurti, Allen Ginsburg, and New Age religion have all been traveling more or less in the same Spinozistic trajectory: they have replaced biblical theism with an alternative notion of a God who is ever-present, a sense of ineffable wonder, or a theology that is nondualistic (God and world) -- anything but a radically transcendent God who commands and who enacts eternal retribution for eating a crumb of leaven on Passover.
Arthur Green has been at the forefront of constructing an a-theistic, or a-cosmic, Jewish theology for a new generation of religious seekers, especially those raised in the continuity-obsessed and uninspired world of post-war American Judaism. Yet I ask myself what is so radical about a God-idea that Jews, Christians, and Muslims have struggled with for centuries? Non-duality? Radical immanence? Pantheism (or its problematic cousin, panentheism)? A-cosmism? Are these radical in the twenty-first century? I would like to see a sharper definition of "radicalism" in Green's new project. While the periodic re-tuning of these ideas for a new generation is a necessary exercise, and Green is a master at doing so, my fear is that his work also perpetuates what we do not want to face: the fact that we are essentially already a-theists. Gershom Scholem struggled with this mightily, defining himself alternatively as a "believing" secularist and a religious anarchist. As a-theists, or religious anarchists, we may believe in something (or not), we may experience something (or not), out there, in here, but we need not make it appear seamless with a tradition that rests, at its best, on paradox and the very negation of Aristotle's law of the excluded middle (that a proposition must be either true or not true).
Many theologians in all three monotheistic religions lived in that very dark tension, and many offered daring appraisals of a (non-)God on the very precipice of monotheism. Few overtly took the leap. And those that did were truly "radical." But many of us are already post-monotheists, religious anarchists, non-believers, or secular believers. This is normative. This is where many of us begin. In an unpublished manuscript version of "God Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown," Zalman Schachter-Shalomi wrote, "If pantheism is a given, what is already there as a minimum, then what else can we say about God?" In my mind, this "what else," gnawing at the very margins of classical monotheism, is one next step.
My belief these days is closer to Ezekiel's vision of razo ve shov (fleeting), of a God I do and do not believe in, a God who is totally present one day and totally absent the next. And both are true, not because of any notion of divine concealment (hester panim), non-dualism, or the limitations of the human perspective, but because the God I do and do not believe in is generated and maintained through my living in the world. And life is messy. And the God that enters, or does not enter, my life has nothing to teach anyone except me. Regarding many of these "new" theologies, with all due respect to Green and the monumental contribution he has made to spiritual life in America, we know most of them already and have known them for centuries, and yet we still dwell in the ruins of human weakness and suffering.
My God is simple, albeit dark. It is perhaps best captured in the penultimate scene in the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man when Marshak tells his newly minted bar mitzvah boy, "‘When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies'... be a good boy." Marshak then gives him back his transistor radio with a twenty-dollar bill hidden in its case so that he can finally pay back his bully neighbor for a bag of weed. Just moments later they are all consumed by Job's whirlwind. Life and God are equally precious in their precariousness, razo ve shov. While surely not radical, that may be worth pondering. Be a good boy.
Shaul Magid teaches Jewish Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. His latest book, From Metaphysics to Midrash, was awarded the 2009 American Academy of Religion Best Book in Religion in the textual studies category.
Magid, Shaul. 2010. Is "Radical Theology" Radical? Tikkun 25(2):52 http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010magid
