between the “home” and “other” tradition constitutes a possible locus of habitation. What pluralistic theology seeks to create is not just more knowledge or wisdom but a new, attractive, form of religious life. Its ultimate value will be found in the kinds of experience of being it makes possible. Just as the constant action of currents and waves builds sand bars in between opposite shores, the interstitial space between religious traditions is filled by a mobile region of intersection, sustained by the ongoing recombinant conversation between its parent religions. This shared locus of meaning is intended to be a potentially new way of being religious for adherents of its source traditions, as well as a new option for living for those outside of these religions. Importantly, this recombinant religious tradition will naturally reflect the implicit and explicit commitments, biases, and presuppositions of its poet, the pluralistic theologian. His/her responsibility in its creation will be to both create as beautiful, elegant, and useful a hybrid as they can, while allowing it to reshape themselves in its creation.24 The production of pluralistic theology – as is true for all theology, I would argue – thus becomes an expression of autopoesis as well. With this in mind the pluralistic poet-theologian must expand their minds in order to create something truly lovely. In so doing they autopoeticize in order to create, and create to autopoeticize. This formula aptly describes the experience of the dialectic at the heart of pluralistic theology.
Radical Risk: The Principle of Irony
We finally arrive at the quality of radical risk, characterized by irony. Irony is, I suggest, characteristic of all theology. It is present in the very attempt to speak about something over our heads, in the sense that we cannot hope to refer to a transcendent realm with immanent ideas and terms, yet this is exactly what we do. I have already alluded to the problems of religious language, fallibilism, and truth, and won’t rehearse these points here. But irony cuts deeper into the body of theology by revealing the absurdity with which we must all struggle. Perhaps no other philosopher has wrestled more profoundly with the idea of absurdity than Søren Kierkegaard, who bound irony and absurdity together at the heart of religious life.
Kierkegaard considered the basic facts of a religious life to be absurd. Christians are supposed to believe in an eternal, simple, infinite, transcendent God who simultaneously became incarnate as a temporal, composite, finite, human being. There are two possible responses to this paradox: to have faith or to take offense. What we cannot do, according to Kierkegaard, is to believe by virtue of reason. If one chooses reason, the absurdity of the choice causes offense and dismissal. If one chooses faith, one must suspend reason in order to believe in something which is higher than reason. Belief then can only be had by virtue of the absurd.25
What this means is that one must decide to believe, as an act of will, in something one knows to be unreasonable, illogical, preposterous, inappropriate, and incongruous: that is, the absurd. To do this one is required to regularly and constantly renew one’s commitment to God, repeating the decision to believe and form one’s life according to the teachings of Jesus. The act of belief is a continual, repeated, decision to follow Christ. Repetition is the substance of faith, for Kierkegaard, and the only way to become one’s true self. But in the face of absurdity these decisions cease to be decisions at all, for deciding in itself requires the existence of decidables, that is, options which express sensible propositions. The absurdity of the options amounts to either believing in something which is paradoxical, or taking offense at an irrelevant paradox. The former is clearly nonsensical, the latter utterly foolish. In either case these are not “live options,” as William James puts it.26 Absurdity evacuates the decision of its weight; it ceases to be a decision at all. The only way out of this conundrum is to embrace, as a knight of faith, irony.
A dictionary definition of irony describes it as the expression of meaning, in language which normally signifies the opposite. This is not simply to experience a bit of bad luck like “rain on your wedding day” or a “free ride when you’re already there,”27 but rather a conscious act of saying while at the same time unsaying, a position which undermines itself in the process of its expression. It is to deliberately steer a path between two contrary positions: affirmation and negation – but irony is much closer to negation since in saying anything at all we implicitly affirm the existence and significance of what we are talking about. To speak ironically, then, is to layer the unsaying part on to what we are saying, to add simultaneous negation to our positive affirmation.
Kierkegaard spent quite a lot of time considering irony and the absurd. In Repetition he shows that Job gets everything back by virtue of the absurd, and in Fear and Trembling he argues that Abraham’s reprieve from having to sacrifice Isaac is also due to the absurd. Faced with a religion such as this, what attitude could we take other than irony? Indeed Kierkegaard goes further and argues that all human life must be understood through the ironic. He claimed that:
Just as scientists maintain that there is no true science without doubt, so it may be maintained with the same right that no genuinely human life is possible without irony28
More importantly Kierkegaard sees irony as a way of liberating us and in this freedom giving us a permission to play in the infinite possibilities of being human:
Irony is a qualification of subjectivity. In irony, the subject is negatively free, since the actuality that is supposed to give the subject content is not there. He is free from the constraint in which the given actuality holds the subject, but he is negatively free and as such is suspended, because there is nothing that holds him. But this very freedom, this suspension, gives the ironist a certain enthusiasm, because he becomes intoxicated, so to speak, in the infinity of possibilities.29
This infinity of possibilities is just what intoxicates the pluralistic theologian. By drawing into sharp relief the porous boundaries of our traditions, their hybrid constitutions, their freedom from constraint, the dynamic dialectic of expansion and precipitation at their heart, and the beauty of its bricolage, pluralistic theology responds to the facts of religious plurality in a more authentic and fruitful way than traditional theological forms. The irony at the heart of both theologizing and indeed religious life is revealed to a greater extent when Christian theology borrows heavily from non-Christian traditions and is open to being transformed by these traditions. Moreover, pluralistic theology can set free prophetic voices calling attention to the papered-over fissures of injustice revealed by pluralistic theology itself. What results is a panoply of possible hyphenated, hybrid traditions: Hindu-Christian, Buddhist-Christian, Christian-Jewish, Buddhist-Jewish, Muslim-Hindu, and so on. Of course all of these possible combinations will be unique to their particular sources and poets, and shaped by their contexts, aims, communities, and times. Not all of them will be beautiful and good. Not all of them will “catch on” as inhabitable for those who have been alienated by religion. It is impossible to decide a priori which hybrids will survive and which will perish. But, crucially, those which do flourish, attracting others through their inherent beauty and the elegance by which they reveal new, inhabitable forms of religious life, will form the basis of new traditions of religion more adequate to the needs of their communities. Some will last, some will not, but all will have at least been more aware of and responsive to the facts of religious plurality, and thus be truer to our current awareness and experience. Theology conducted through religious pluralism will then rise to the needs of the day, making religious traditions more relevant and bringing life to people in new ways. Surely this is the goal of creative theology (see Box 1.8).
Box 1.8
The author is alert to the controversial nature of his argument. So he introduces a delightful device. He has an “objections and responses” section. He is well aware that plenty of theologians would not be sympathetic to his approach. So he wants to articulate the objection and offer a response. In so doing, he is making it harder to simply dismiss his argument. He is alert to why someone may find the argument problematic and wants to explain how the problems can be overcome.
Objections and Responses
In