I came across a statement in Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution (highly recommended!) that rang true to my experience here at Union Theological Seminary: “Some postmodernists suspect that all certainty is authoritarian. They are nervous of people who sound passionately committed to what they say.” (p. 136)
What Eagleton is saying applies, I think, to a lot of liberals. And we have a lot of liberals here at Union. (I’m one of them.) We seem to have a bit of an allergy to people who speak passionately. So often in class discussions, when someone waxes passionate about what they are proposing, warning signs start to flash on faces around the circle. Is it because passion sounds like proselytizing? Like someone is imposing their views on us as the only really true view? This is especially the case when passion is about religion. It’s one thing to be passionate about the Yankees. Quite another to be passionate about Christianity.
But being passionate is not necessarily the same thing as being authoritarian or exclusive or narrow-minded. When you’re passionate about something it’s because you think it is true and valuable. That doesn’t mean you necessarily think it’s the only thing that is true and valuable. (Okay, Yankee fans might.) If I really believe that something is true and good, I’d better be passionate about it. I’d better want to tell others about it. Otherwise, I don’t really believe it’s true and good. We need more passion.
But it has to be passion that respects and is open to the passion of others. And that means, I think, that if we need to speak with passion, it should be passion-plus-humility. We’re convinced about what we believe and we want to tell others why. But if we’re humble as well as passionate, we will recognize that the truth that we hold, as sound and beautiful as it is, can never be the whole truth. There’s always more. And that leaves room for other truths and other people who are passionate about their truth.
If we can be passionate and at the same time humble, we won’t scare people with our passion. On the contrary, our passion will be a dialogical passion — one that calls out the passion in others.
Nicely said, Paul.
I think philosophy and theology as disciplines have encouraged a healthy “hermeneutic of suspicion” over the past half century, and we’re all products of such to some degree. As I’ve had to turn that hermeneutic on myself and my own beliefs and passions time and again, I want to know that others have done the same. That they’ve questioned and examined everything well enough to have that humility you speak of.
The danger of suspicion as an all encompassing hermeneutic, however, is never being passionate about anything again, that suspicion becomes as unquestioned a doctrine as anything it questions. Being 20 years out on my own theological education, I find my suspicion hermeneutic still in tact, but tempered. A kinder, gentler hermeneutic, if you will. Certain life occurrences have a way of tempering it: falling in love, having children, the death of a parent. These challenge all hermeneutics, all PC definitions, all theories, all suspicion, because these life events, and the passions inherent to them, have a way of breaking down all intellectualizing, and make us stand humbly before a universe that is much larger than any thing we’ve preached with certainty.