Today I have the honour of reviewing the recently published Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Metaphysics of René Girard by Anthony Bartlett.
British-born but a longtime resident of Syracuse, New York, Bartlett is a former priest and theologian whose thinking has been radically influenced by the work of the late French cultural anthropologist René Girard. He is a prolific author whose previous work includes Cross Purposes, in which he sought to dismantle prevalent theories of the atonement rooted in violence; Virtually Christian, wherein he explored the ways in which the Gospel has infiltrated human meaning; Pascale’s Wager, a novel that is at once dystopian and utopian in which he creatively explores key Girardian themes, their effects in human relationships and culture, and what they might mean for the future of humanity; and Seven Stories: How to Study and Teach the Nonviolent Bible, a personal and group study guide offering a thoughtful re-reading of seven key biblical themes from the perspective of non-violent theology.
So much for the background. Now, on to the book in hand.
We might perhaps begin by consider its title. If one stops to consider what it might mean to talk about Theology Beyond Metaphysics, one will quickly realise that the vast bulk of Christian theology categorically has not been and cannot be said to be “beyond metaphysics”: that is to say, philosophical abstractions have been and continue to be deeply embedded in most Christian theologies and the worldviews they inform and support. Indeed, one might even say that when it comes to theology, many people are utterly dependent on philosophical abstractions to answer questions (or metaphysically defer answering them) and fill in gaps that would otherwise remain unresolved and open. It may be no exaggeration to suggest that metaphysics is the most frequently played theological “get out of jail free” card.
What this often looks like in practice is that a theology asserts that God does a, b and c, but when one asks precisely how God does a, b and c, the answer is couched in abstract metaphysical terms. The landscape of atonement theories in particular is littered with such abstractions. Bartlett’s daring task in this book is to attempt to sketch out and marshal credible evidence for an understanding of the Gospel and its influence on human culture that is not rooted in or dependent on abstract metaphysics. This makes Theology Beyond Metaphysics somewhat unique: while there is no shortage of books that seek to use rationality and empiricism to explain away Christianity’s central claims, few indeed are those that explicitly use rationality and empiricism not only to support but also to explain those claims.
How does the author go about this task? In his earlier work Virtually Christian, Bartlett explored how the Gospel has infiltrated culture in such a way as to influence and subvert human meaning, much as yeast spreads through a batch of dough and ends up decisively influencing the final form of the loaf. In this latest work, he follows the river of meaning upstream to its source and draws from a range of seminal thinkers to make a reasoned – and, crucially, non-metaphysical – case for precisely how the Gospel has achieved this feat of influencing and subverting meaning to radically reshape what it is to be a human being. If in Virtually Christian Bartlett took the finished loaf and broke it open to observe and describe how it had been affected by the yeast, in Theology Beyond Metaphysics he wants to go back to first principles and try to account for how the leaven of the Gospel got into the dough of human culture in the first place and by what mechanisms and processes it did – and continues to do – its subversive and formative work.
Building a case like this requires some theological and philosophical heavy lifting. Starting from the Girardian idea that not only human culture but language itself is rooted in primordial violence, Bartlett takes up the theme of semiotics – how signs and symbols represent and convey meaning – and tracks its development from the ancient Greeks through to giants of Christian thought like Augustine and Aquinas, and finally down to a number of thinkers who have shaped the landscape of modernity and postmodernity, particularly Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and the lesser known but no less interesting John Deely and Charles Sanders Pierce. While setting out an extensive overview of key insights from each of these thinkers, the author is not afraid to challenge them and highlight their shortcomings, and is thus able to sketch out his own framework to account for how a culture born and steeped in violence is subverted and realigned by a Gospel rooted in love and forgiveness – and, indeed, how only a radically non-violent Gospel could have refounded the world of human meaning and culture in this way.
Once the hard philosophical work has been done, the reader is rewarded with a final chapter titled “The Semiotic Gospel”, which offers a refreshing and inspiring reading of the Gospel of John, highlighting and explaining how its author makes ingenious and creative use of signs to reveal, transform and reshape human meaning. The good news is that this invigorating re-reading of John is but a foretaste of Bartlett’s next book – current working title Signs That Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence (expected later this year) – in which he will trace the Christ-infused evolution of human meaning through the entire sweep of the biblical narrative.
Having already made mention of heavy lifting, it would be remiss of me not to explicitly point out that Theology Beyond Metaphysics is by no means a light bedtime read. To fully appreciate and evaluate the arguments set forth in it would require a familiarity with classical and modern philosophy that I for one do not have. It also, in my opinion, requires some prior grounding in the work of René Girard: Girard’s thinking runs wide and deep, and while the author does his best to concisely lay out the basic prerequisites, one really needs a decent grasp of things Girardian in order to properly appreciate what is being offered here. (That said, I should perhaps also add that Bartlett draws out fresh implications from Girard’s thinking, so that Girard virgins and seasoned old-timers alike should find something derived from Girard that they likely would not find elsewhere and/or had not previously considered.) The flip side of all this is that, for the intellectually curious reader who is not deterred by their own shortcomings, Theology Beyond Metaphysics, well referenced as it is, can serve as an excellent jumping-off point to identify and explore multiple related lines of enquiry.
In summary, Theology Beyond Metaphysics is a challenging read in at least two senses: it challenges the knowledge and intellect of the reader, and it challenges the sometimes lazy and often inadequate metaphysical scaffolding in which the Gospel is so often encapsulated. Bartlett is one of those rare thinkers who is deeply rooted in and committed to the Christian story as a transformative force but who also has the creativity, imagination and audacity to be willing to break new ground and pursue a new direction for Christian theology in the twenty-first century. Buried treasure takes some effort to unearth; for the diligent and committed reader, there is gold here.
[Theology Beyond Metaphysics is published by Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock. I was kindly provided with a review copy by the author. I was not required to write a positive review.]
