Faith's Sublime Traversal: Rhetorical and Dialectical Approaches to Preserving Christianity as Existential Movement

Abstract

This thesis weighs the merits of "rhetorical" and "dialectical" theological responses to the history of western thought as a history of objectification. Objectification is theologically relevant insofar as it can be shown to be the root of modern and postmodern "suspicion" of religion. In modernity's predictable temporal economy, the human being is not a true "agent" in history, but the object of a spatialized logic of determining causes. And postmodernism's acute sensitivity to temporality as unpredictable "flux" nonetheless implies that the human being as agent is "sacrificed" at each successive moment to an arbitrary measure of difference. What is ruled out in both cases is the Christian supposition that the true form of creation is not a "thing" but a "way," a way whose temporal articulation may be analogous to the eternal "differentiation" of the Trinitarian God. This diagnosis is derived from the theology of John Milbank and "Radical Orthodoxy," which suggests in addition that only a theological "rhetoric" can safeguard the human being from objectification, in that rhetoric does not tempt the subject to define himself or herself as a "thing," but "persuades" that subject into becoming a self only by living the mysterious movement of caritas. This thesis first of all clarifies the little noticed Kierkegaardian heritage implicit in Radical Orthodoxy's "existential" imperative to rhetoric. But ultimately it argues that Kierkegaard's account of love, which refuses to appeal to a "hope" that is authenticated by any rhetorical exemplars, more adequately captures the Radical Orthodox imperative to Christianity as an existential way than does any rhetorical appeal. On my reading, Kierkegaard offers an account of love as giving rise to a unique mode of expectancy- a comportment to the future as the possibility of the good-which keeps the subject eternally in motion through faith's inexplicable resolve.