Incarnational Humanism by Zimmermann Jens;

Author:Zimmermann, Jens; [Zimmermann, Jens]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2012-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

Gianni Vattimo: Incarnation Without Transcendence

Without a proper understanding of the incarnation, postmodern theologies overemphasize either transcendence or immanence. So far we have discussed postmodern theologians whose preoccupation with God’s transcendence lets them neglect his presence. We now turn to a philosopher who succumbs to the opposite extreme of losing God’s transcendence by focussing too much on God’s presence in the world. The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has tried to articulate a postmodern, post-Christian Christianity on the basis of the incarnation. Vattimo’s conflation of Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology with the central Christian doctrine of the incarnation justifies and requires a deeply theological response to his basic question: “Can we really argue, as I believe we must, that postmodern nihilism constitutes the actual truth of Christianity?” Assuming “we” refers to Christians, the short answer to this question is no, we cannot and must not.

Such a negative response to Vattimo’s question still concedes that his general project of an incarnational ontology is philosophically bold—perhaps reminiscent more of Hegel than of Joachim de Fiore—a move that offers important insights for thinking through the West’s current cultural crisis.[181] Our cultural situation, as I have argued, seems characterized by the exhaustion of secular reason on the one hand and the return of religion, accompanied by the fear of fundamentalism and religiously motivated violence, on the other. Vattimo tries to articulate Christianity within this context and rightly stresses the interpretive nature of the Christian faith to forestall dogmatism, escapism and the church’s segregation from the world.[182] To this end, Vattimo tirelessly points out the need for hermeneutic reflection not only within Christian belief but in all areas of political and civic life.

In equating weak thought with the essence of Christianity, Vattimo, much like his main sources Nietzsche and Heidegger, reacts against stifling cultural examples of Christianity, but fails to preserve the gift introduced into Western thinking by the Christian concept of the incarnation. This gift is the balanced correlation of transcendence with immanence, the alliance of divine otherness with human finitude, of radical difference with identity, and this gift has acted as a potent relativizer of absolute categories in Western thinking. Yet this relativizing—or as Vattimo might say “weakening” effect—depends on maintaining a careful balance of transcendence and immanence. Vattimo loses this balance because, as so often happens in postmodern theologizing, he twists the biblical mystery to suit a prior, postmodern framework. Of course, as we have learned from hermeneutic philosophy, any truth requires mediation through a particular language and its concepts, and neither Christianity nor the biblical text is an exception to this rule. There is no “pure” biblical message, free from particular historical context. Christianity has the essentially incarnational character of “a spiritual Reality becoming incarnate in the realm of sense” that matures in history.[183] The hermeneutic character of the Christian faith does, however, have a guiding measure for interpreting Christianity through particular language and concepts. This normative measure is Christ’s claims about himself, his self-interpretation in light of the Jewish history his teachings passed on

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