Book Review: Overcoming Onto-Theology
What could Christians possibly learn from postmodernism? As it turns out, some powerful biblical themes.
In Overcoming Onto-Theology, Christian philosopher Merold Westphal offers a sustained critique of “onto-theology.”¹ Onto-theology, according to Westphal, is a way of doing theology that has bought into the Enlightenment project of modernity. Modernity sees everything as masterable by human reason — including God. For the modernist, understanding reality is humanity’s chief end. It is Westphal’s contention that insofar as theology embraces modernity and uses God as a mere means to this end, it becomes onto-theology.
This is deeply problematic, for modernity turns the text into “an object to be mastered by the interpreter for the advantage of the interpreter, a source of theoretical treasure to be accumulated and owned” (p. 1). Thus, theologians operating within the modernist paradigm permit God “to enter the scene only in the service of their project, human mastery of the real” (p. 4). In onto-theology, “God’s raison d’être [reason for existing] has become to make it possible for human reason to give ultimate explanations” (p. 11). We cannot sing praises to the God of onto-theology. Instead, he “is at the beck and call of human understanding, a means to its end of making the whole of being intelligible” (p. 12). In essence, onto-theology only cares about God insofar as he is useful to us: the most important thing about God is that he serves as an Ultimate Explanation or a First Cause.
The book consists of a series of essays by Westphal offering a postmodern critique of the modernist onto-theological project. Westphal does this from a variety of angles, interacting with postmodern philosophers such as Heidegger, Derrida, and Nietzsche. Throughout the book, one of his key contentions is that Christians should not be afraid of postmodernism. On the contrary, Westphal finds that certain postmodern insights, such as an emphasis on our human fallibility and the finitude of human reason, resonate strikingly with biblical Christian themes. In what follows, I want to narrow my attention to just one of these themes from one essay of the book.
In the first essay, “Overcoming Onto-Theology,” Westphal lays the foundations for much of the book. He argues that the modernist obsession with understanding is dangerously idolatrous when applied in the realm of theology. The most persuasive part of this chapter is not its logical airtightness per se but its powerful emotional appeal. In one particularly poignant passage, Westphal compares onto-theology, which “imprison[s] theological discourse within a primacy of theoretical reason” (p. 23), to Richard Wagner’s 19th century opera Lohengrin. In that opera, the mysterious hero Lohengrin magically arrives one day to save the beautiful Elsa. However, he saves her only on the condition that she cannot know his name. She agrees, and the two soon fall in love. Eventually, wedding plans are made. Yet, as the wedding approaches, Elsa is persuaded that she cannot really trust Lohengrin unless she knows his name — even though he has always been trustworthy. Lohengrin warns her not to insist on this or risk ruining everything. Nevertheless, Elsa demands to know his name: “it was so wonderful to hear him say her name and she wants to return the favor” (p. 26).
Despite her stated intentions, it is only later that we find out what really motivates Elsa’s desire to know: “She is afraid that someday Lohengrin will tire of her and leave her. He came by magic and she seeks some magic to bind him to her” (p. 26). We learn that Elsa’s desire to know “is not born of self-giving love but of the desire to be in control, to have Lohengrin at her disposal” (p. 26). With Lohengrin’s name now revealed, he must depart: “The magic that brought him to her would have left them together forever if she had trusted him. But it requires all knights to return to the temple of the Grail once their identity is known” (p. 26).
Westphal observes a tragic parallel to Lohengrin in the realm of theology. Elsa “insists on Enlightenment, on dissipating the darkness of mystery with the light of human knowledge, on walking by sight and not by faith” (p. 27). By analogy, Westphal suggests that despite the best of intentions, onto-theology is ultimately self-motivated. In drawing upon this and other stories in this chapter, Westphal offers a devastating narrative critique of the onto-theological desire to know. The desire to know is often merely the desire to rule.
However, we must be fastidiously careful not to take Westphal’s critique too far. Crucially, Westphal himself insists that we should not simply “abolish theology” (p. 27). Theology itself — the “what” of theology — should still be done. Rather, Westphal is concerned with the “how” of theology. He is criticizing the kind of overly cerebral and rationalistic theology that insists it is loving God with all its mind but really does not care about God at all. Westphal wants to instead point us to genuine faith, “the site at which alone is possible a loving, trusting relation with a God before whom one might sing and dance (or at least clap)” (p. 27).
This brings Westphal to a key theme that will resurface over the next several essays and which has echoes throughout the book, namely, what the twentieth century German philosopher Martin Heidegger calls denying theory. It is captured well in a Heidegger quote that Westphal returns to often: “I have found it necessary to deny theory in order to make room for practice” (p. 24). Something is wrong when we can no longer sing to the God of our theology. To quote Heidegger once more, “[we] can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god [of philosophy]. Before the causa sui [The Self-Caused Being], man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god” (p. 2). But singing and dancing is precisely what Israel did. The overemphasis on theory must therefore be corrected — indeed, overcome.
Westphal insists that Heidegger’s denial of theory is not something Christians should shy away from: “There is a religious background to Heidegger’s protest against the primacy of the theoretical” (p. 54). It was the Greek Platonic tradition that was focused on the abstract theoretical Forms and disembodied souls. By contrast, “Heidegger’s theological analogue is the Jewish or Christian affirmation that embodiment, and thus embeddedness, is good because it is part of God’s creation” (p. 55). If Christians have ears to hear, Heidegger’s insights can be appropriated: echoing Jesus and the prophets, they offer “a sustained argument that the life of faith is not primarily a concern over the correctness of assertions” (p. 54).
But is the correctness of assertions of no importance at all? This is where those trained in an analytic philosophical tradition might understandably push back. Granted, Westphal’s concern is with the “how” and not the “what” of theology. Still, the line between these is often fuzzy; how do we choose which theological hills to die on? Even Jesus often seemed concerned with theological details we might not categorize as primary, and he used grammatical arguments that might seem rather abstract or hair-splitting to someone like Heidegger (Mark 12:26-27).
But it is here where a critic of Westphal should be careful. Since much of Westphal’s argumentation is couched in Heidegger’s words and works, it is not always clear whether a claim made by Heidegger is fully accepted by Westphal. It is possible that Westphal would even heartily agree with this pushback. Nevertheless, it still bears mention: even granted our human embeddedness, fallibility, and cognitive limitations; even granted that the how is more important than the what; and even granted that God refuses to be limited by our logical constructs — the fact remains that God has gifted us with reason. And as Augustine once wrote to his friend Consentius, “God forbid that He should hate in us that faculty by which He made us superior to all other [animals].”²
As for me, I remain optimistic that a chastened rationalist, one who has learned from Westphal and the postmodern philosophers, can nevertheless truly worship God with his mind. I see a healthy concern with correct assertions as flowing from a desire to care even more, to try and do our very best thinking, not only for awe-inspiringly complex engineering projects, but also when it comes to the small, damaged fragment of truth that God has allowed us to receive about himself. He certainly deserves no less.
And that is something about which I hope Westphal — and perhaps also Heidegger — would heartily agree.
[1] “Onto” comes from the Greek word ontos, a participle of the verb eimi (“to be”), meaning “being” or “existing.”
[2] Augustine, Letters, Volume 2 (83–130), trans. Wilfrid Parsons, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 302.
