Haunted by the Ghost of God—Reading Theologically

Abstract

The notion of living in a secular age, as Charles Taylor has termed it, at least within the academic humanities, is crucial to the literary scholar’s understanding of herself as reader. Academic theologians have long recognised the value of literary texts to their task, but to the meta-modern secular literary scholar there seems to be a discomfort in the prospect of using theology as a hermeneutic tool. To read theologically, it is supposed, must be to commit to the univocity of a Christian Truth, with a capital T, which sits uneasily in an academic sphere that, as Charles Taylor would describe it, is ‘emptied of God, or of any reference to an ultimate reality’.¹ Within these pages, I hope to describe (and perform) a form of theological reading in which the secular literary scholar can participate, which nonetheless refuses to reduce theological hermeneutics to a set of ‘literary tools’. To identify a ‘theological’ and a ‘secular’ reader is, of course, to create a false dichotomy, and such a dichotomy as is suggested here is based very much on an understanding of theology and literature as fields defined by academia. Of course a readership is instead something of a spectrum. Perhaps, then, it would be better to identify a ‘non-theological’ reader. Such a description refers not to a reader who identifies as secular and frames their reading as such, but one for whom theology is not the starting point of their reading journey.² Such participation means inhabiting a hermeneutic space which is hospitable to both theological and secular ontological commitments, but which is also confrontational in that it demands a repositioning of the reader. Moreover, participation in the privileged space of the supernatural tale effects such a repositioning. I will try to map this hermeneutic space in this chapter.