Abstract
At various points in this study, I have drawn upon the language of networks, webs, and systems to understand Schleiermacher’s theology, and in particular the vision of global space that emerges from his texts. As we saw in chapter 2, it is that intuition of an interconnected network throughout the universe, composed of an infinite variety of nodes that drives so many of Schleiermacher’s spatial metaphors in the Speeches. Similarly, it is a motif that can be found throughout The Christian Faith, as I argued in chapter 3 when analyzing Schleiermacher’s treatment of the other religions. There, I observed that Schleiermacher’s understanding of systems was used to refer to the workings of nature, doctrines, and even the text itself, which becomes a performance of the systematic interconnections of the world that it describes. Further, I suggested that the discussion about other religious expressions was an example of the interdependence that Schleiermacher sought to describe, and/or create. The understanding of systematic interdependence allowed us to see that in Schleiermacher’s thought, Christianity actually depends upon other religions for its very identity. Indeed, it provided an opening less to pluralism (a game rigged in favor of Christianity) than to polytheism, a vision in which numerous gods interact and depend upon one another for their mutual existence.
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Notes
Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (London: Continuum Press, 1999), p. 532.
Schleiermacher’s reluctance to use the term “system” is worth mentioning again in this context, for he often substitutes other words or phrases that will convey his point about organic interconnections and the mutual interdependence of parts and whole. By avoiding the term “system” (in most cases) Schleiermacher sought to avoid mechanistic assumptions about the operations of the parts and whole on one another. Thus, when I employ the terms “systems,” “systems thinking,” etc. I have Schleiermacher’s organic processes in mind.
CF, p. 534.
Ibid., p. 173.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol. 2, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 3–25.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), p. 100.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, ed. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1987), p. 253.
Ibid., pp. 249–250.
Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 274. As cited in Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 88.
Taylor, p. 88–90.
CF, p. 139.
See Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, “Translator’s Foreword,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. xii.
Deleuze and Guattari, p. 15.
Ibid., p. 21.
Ibid., p. 9.
CF, p. 560.
Ibid., p. 427.
Ibid., p. 560.
Ibid., p. 561.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 562.
For example, see James Kennedy and Russell Eberhart with Yuhai Shi, Swarm Intelligence (San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2001), or David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 199–212.
There are, of course, limits to this analogy. The bee hive does have a queen, and the ecclesial community is animated by the Spirit. Forms of leadership and direction continue to exist, such that for Schleiermacher, the Spirit is never simply dissolved into the community. As Schleiermacher notes when elucidating the relationship between natural causality and divine causality, the two are coextensive, but not coequal (See CF, p. 211). The divine pervades creation, but it cannot be reduced to it. So too, with ecclesiology and pneumatology, that allows us to say that while the Spirit is immanent to the community, and while that does create the conditions for the community to become complex and self-generating, the Spirit cannot be wholly reduced to the community any more than the divine causality can be reduced to natural causality. Even so, just as the nature system continues to function within the divine causality, the decentralized ecclesial swarm continues to operate within the life of the Spirit.
CF, p. 563.
Ibid., p. 564.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 567.
Ibid., p. 566.
Ibid., p. 575, italics mine.
Ibid., p. 564.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 565.
The book itself closes with an appendix on the Trinity, though Schleiermacher takes pains to point out that considerations of the Trinity do not belong within the system proper, since it does not qualify as an immediate utterance of the Christian consciousness.
CF, p. 735.
B. A. Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 214.
CF, p. 736.
Ibid., pp. 736–737.
Ibid, p. 737.
Deleuze and Guattari, p. 11.
Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 443.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 480.
Given the outcome of Marx and Engels’ redirection of social organization, i.e. the creation of various totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century, it may be necessary to flip their insight yet again. Indeed, Jacques Derrida does precisely that in his book Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge Press, 1994), discussed in the epilogue of this project.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 166.
Ibid., p. xv.
Multitude, p. 217.
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), p. 201.
Multitude, pp. 213–214.
Empire, p. 213.
CF, p. 27, italics mine.
Ibid., p. 564.
Of course, to be effective that rhetoric must be joined to a host of other skills, disciplines, and operations in a manner akin to David Harvey’s long frontier of insurgent architecture. Neither Schleiermacher nor Hardt and Negri would argue that persuasive rhetoric alone can alter a social reality. They do, however, affirm the importance of rhetoric, and thus imagination, as an indispensable piece of that project, an insight that I too wish to affirm.
Multitude, pp. 351–352.
Ibid., p. 736.
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© 2012 Steven R. Jungkeit
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Jungkeit, S.R. (2012). Spaces, Specters, and Global Systems. In: Spaces of Modern Theology. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269027_5
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