3 Key Ideas from "Overcoming Onto-Theology"

Ever since I was introduced to Peter Rollins' How (Not) to Speak of God a couple of years ago, I have found great freedom and joy in postmodernism's reflection and critique of (modernist) Christianity. It has been suggested that, as I read various books on this theme, I post a few simplified summary points.

Merold Westphal's Overcoming Onto-Theology is not for the faint-hearted. I have no significant philosophical training, so I had to have an enormous amount of determination to wade through this. I read the entire book with 3 tabs open on my web browser: Google translator for the German, Wikipedia for the Latin and philosophy jargon, and dictionary.com for the "normal" words that exceeded my vocabulary. The book is brilliant, but I would recommend that you start with Peter Rollins and several books from the Church and Postmodern Culture series. Below are 3 key ideas I gleaned from this particular book. Only the portion in quotes is directly from the book; the rest is my ruminations and formulations.

*Religious folks are usually “idolatrous, worshipping a god created in their own image and in conformity with their own interests.” Idolatry does not occur when we have false understandings of God (all of our ideas are limited, inaccurate, and incomplete), but when we insist that our understandings of God are the Truth. Idolatry is finding God exactly as we expect him to be.

*As humans, we are limited in our attainment of Truth (notice the capital T) because of our ‘createdness’ and ‘sinfulness’. We cannot know the Truth (fully, completely, with certainty) because we cannot transcend our interpretations that are tied to our human experience. This is called the “hermeneutics of finitude” (createdness). And even if we could surpass this first limit and get to the Truth, in our selfishness, we would revise and edit it so that it suits our purposes. This is called the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (sinfulness). There may very well be Truth (with a capital T), but none of us possesses it.

*We come to each event in life with prior experience, knowledge, and assumptions. These guide our interpretation (understanding) of the new event. But the new event may also cause us to revise and adjust our previous assumptions and beliefs. There is a cycle of assumption, interpretation, and revision that never ends and never reaches a final absolute certainty (‘totality’). We are always in process in the pursuit of Truth. This is called the “hermeneutical circle”.

Overcoming Onto-Theology by Merold Westphal (at Amazon)