Episode 142: Dr. Ruben Rosario Rodriguez

Dr. Ruben Rosario Rodriguez gives his case for a new way of thinking about theology in his book Theological Fragments (Westminster John Knox Press, 2023). We talk about our experience teaching undergrads at a Jesuit university and how that has shaped Dr. Rosario’s approach to teaching and doing theology.

Timestamps:

1:57- How Teaching Theology Has Changed

18:11- The Transfer of Culture

33:37- Liberation Theology and Poverty

1:03:38- Human Theology

Charles Kim 0:01

Hello, and welcome to a history of Christian theology. My name is Chad Kim with me this week will be Dr. Rubin, Rosario Rodriguez, who has written theological fragments confessing what we know and cannot know about an infinite God with Westminster John Knox press. In this converse, he is professor of Systematic Theology at St. Louis University. And this book actually comes out of conversations that he has had with his students over the last several years teaching intro to theology and other theological studies classes at St. Louis University. And it's also part of, I think, his heart and desire to connect with a generation of students who don't seem to have the same concerns that maybe previous generations did. And so it was a pleasure to get to talk with him to hear a little bit more about stuff that he thinks is going to be very helpful and beneficial, maybe even to some of those nuns as they're sometimes called, those who profess no religious commitments, but still feel some spirituality. And so this book is, in a way kind of addressed to them. So we talked a little bit about that. We talked a little bit about audience.

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 3:07

You know, when I started here, most of our my students and theological foundations had had, at the very least, done Catholic schools through eighth grade. Many of them came from Catholic prep schools. You know, 19 years later, St. Louis University is only 50% Catholic, and of those very few are coming from Catholic prep schools. So it's a different world. Yeah, and not not saying that.

Charles Kim 1:12

And, yeah, it was just a very fruitful conversation. appreciate Dr. Rosario coming on to talk with me. We have a few other conversations coming up one with KJ Drake, one with Emily doubler Winkler, and we'll have a few more things throughout the summer. So thank you so much for listening. Here's my conversation with Dr. Rosario. I'm Chad Kim host to history of Christian theology. Today we have Dr. Rubin, Rosario Rodriguez. And he has just written another work it was this year, fourth or fifth? Book fifth. Yeah. So I think I did an index on one as a grad student. And that was like the dogmatics. After Babel,

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 1:57

I think it was the kind of, there you go. This is kind of in many ways a sequel to this. Yeah.

Charles Kim 2:06

Yeah, yeah. And then But then you've done other works on, you just sort of a comparative theology of martyrdom, which I remember reading through as well, way back when maybe also, when I was a grad student, or maybe TA or something I can't remember for you. So you've done a lot of work. But this one, as you were saying, is sort of trying to come to terms with your long career of teaching theology. And, and I guess, like one one way that you were kind of framing that, you know, I tried to tell my students, and I'm just sort of learning how to teach theology. But I, you know, I tried to talk about theology is dialogue. And so I guess some of this book arises out of that, that kind of dialogue, the feedback that you were getting from your students.

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 2:50

Exactly. And I think what, what changed for me as the teacher is that I could no longer assume either a base of the most simple knowledge of the Bible.

That's the only way people have the kind of base knowledge to engage theology. But what has become more and more obvious, is that many of them have made a judgement about Christianity, with very little experience or knowledge of Christianity. So then it's a doubly difficult task. Not only am I having to introduce materials they've never studied and have no interest in, but then I have to overcome certain prejudices and judgments they've made about the Christian religion with without having all the facts. Yeah. Yeah.

Charles Kim 4:14

Yeah. Well, and one thing I as I was reading, I was thinking of some of my experience teaching. And, uh, surprisingly, when you get to sort of, I taught I talk about theology, you know, as sort of the contemplative and active life sometimes I use that framing. And, you know, it used to be that I feel like, you know, students understood that, like, used to think of theology just as contemplative, and they didn't really want to think about the active part, but I feel like our students or the students that I've encountered, they're like, when I tell them that, you know, Christianity is concerned about ecology or Christianity is concerned, you know, the about the environment, or Christianity is concerned about, like how women have suffered and these sorts of questions or, or racial issues. When I say that theology is concerned about that, you know, they take that they're like, Yeah, well, for sure. And I used to think that would be the hardest sell. Think about the ethics or something. Yeah,

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 5:09

exactly. Because I think definitely my generation, I'm not sure about yours. But But we, we were formed, especially as Protestants in a kind of a window that looked at the world and Christianity within that world, as transcendent, as something given from from from up above to be blunt about it. And and that, because it wholly dependent on grace, we didn't want to insert ourselves in it and our moral contribution to that faith. Right. Yeah. And so what I think it will, in many ways, that's the struggle Bart is dealing with, you know, for BART, you know, theology is ethics, ultimately, that, you know, he structured his dogmatics that, that there is a big, so what and then a consequence. And I think, even though he cites Luther a lot, in the end, he's closer to Calvin and Calvin's, third use of the law, then then he is Luthers more? Well, it's a passive spirituality, it's a spirituality, but it's one that that the believer is always that kind of the receptor. And I think, Bart, while while always emphasizing God is wholly other, in the end, also wants to make a claim about that, that it's in this context, we call church that God is manifest in the world. Yeah. And God is real. And there's something objective there.

Charles Kim 6:55

Yeah. Yeah. So it is funny. So I think, you know, one kind of thing I was thinking through with this book, and again, just kind of thinking about teaching theology is how to get that word transcendent. It's almost a word without meaning. For a lot of students like it's something that like when I try to, you know, talk about, you know, God's actions, we go through Exodus, and we were talking about Absalom, Jones, Thanksgiving sermon, or something, or, you know, try to show how early African American Christians saw the, the movement of God, and the, it's part of that sort of God, it you know, being transcendent over the eminent domain and being, you know, not just what the here and now, but God being, you know, trying to reach up and understand God as beyond us. And that was like that, sometimes that's hard for them to even, like wrap their minds around, they don't even want to think in those kinds of categories.

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 7:51

And that's one of the reasons that I engage the natural sciences in this book. You know, we teach at an institution where 75% of our students are majoring in some aspect of the life sciences or the medical profession. And with it comes a certain worldview, a certain Reliance right on, on empirical verification, and really a certain reduction of that which we can speak about, as knowledge and certainty. Right? But but if you push back, and students don't like it sometimes when you push back, but But if, you know, do they really view the world as deterministic and reductionist as their commitment to this scientific method, and you find that in the things they care about most and are most passionate about? Most of them? Don't? Yeah, that suddenly the the laws of science don't apply when it comes to romantic love. When it comes to aesthetic values, you know, what music I like, what clothes I wear, what you know. And so, so to me, that then becomes an opening for a conversation into transcendence, into recognizing that, in the modern world, science has been a very effective and practical approach to understanding the cosmos. But by its very nature, its reductionist and, and it is successful in telling us how things happen, but not very useful as to why that's right. Right. And so the question becomes, you know, we as human beings, we develop science, it didn't fall. No, it is a human rationality. And so, we need to to start with certain facts and one of the facts is from an evolutionary cognitive and neurological perspective. Stone Age, human from the Neolithic era, and a modern day human are the same. You have the same capacity for knowledge for intelligence, right, and it's Some could argue, before we have this vast mass of culture learning in history, right? You know, it took real genius to, you know, observe something in nature, lightning hits, that suddenly there's fire, you know, and put these things together. And then, you know, so so we need to get over ourselves on this idea that somehow we as modern people are more intelligent, no more, etc. And once we overcome some of those obstacles, then then we can tap into the fact that theology and the natural sciences are all dealing with the same phenomena. And the same sense of awe and wonder, and just coming at it from different directions. Yeah,

Charles Kim 10:47

yeah, there's a kind of humility about our own place in this world. Yeah,

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 10:53

exactly. And so I often bring in short readings from from people who are, you know, physicist or, or chemists who, who have in studying the complexity of the cosmos, returned to faith. And rather than spending their whole time, which is what many fundamentalists try to do, in bringing this biblical narrative into complete agreement with this scientific narrative, you live with that discomfort because you don't read the Bible to figure out, you know, the Krebs cycle in brain synthesis, right. You know, I used to teach eighth grade catechism class many years ago, and I, you know, you want to bake a cake, you read a cookbook, you want to tear apart, carburetor, and I'm dating myself, cars don't have carburetors anymore. And put it back together, you get the technical manual from the car manufacturer. When you read the Bible, you're not reading it for the kinds of answers that an evolutionary biologist wants about the origin of human life. Yep. When you read the Bible, though, what you're getting is a claim that that the universe in its vast complexity is created. And it is ultimately good. Yeah. And then you start from there. Yeah.

Charles Kim 12:24

Yeah. And it's, uh, you know, that's a great, that's a great thing to fit to think about is, you know, all these things, like, sometimes it can feel as a fee is, you know, as a theology professor and things, you know, I think, Well, why would students want to come to me, you know, they can get all this specialist knowledge, they can get all of these jobs. But then when I, you know, we begin, I often use confessions because I love Augustine. One, and I tell them that, you know, the most important thing that Agustin realizes is that life is a gift, and that creation is good. And, you know,

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 12:57

you find the same parallel, and Vidkun Stein's Tractatus, which ends with this kind of mystic language, what you cannot speak about, you must pass over in silence. But you read a few paragraphs earlier. And what he's telling us is not that there's something wrong with this mystical approach to the world. But that very life itself is mystical. The very fact that there is something instead of nothing. Yeah, isn't rational. It doesn't make sense. Yeah. But it just is coming to terms with that. It takes a certain outlook. Otherwise, you become a nihilist. And nothing has meaning. It's just random chance and so, so for Vidkun Stein, who was a closet mystic, just the very fact that there is something is is is a mystical claim.

Charles Kim 13:46

Yeah. Well, and he begins the philosophical investigations with a quote from Augustine on on language. And so we Yeah, I mean, you know, he even he loved reading Agustin at least and he thought he was wrong about his, about how he understood language, but he, but he was wrong. In a I was just listening to, or reading through a little bit of Rowan Williams, his Gifford lectures, and it's about language. But this idea that language doesn't end the conversation. But any statement that we make is essentially like drawing people into further conversation. So I think Vic and Stein sort of, you know, he doesn't think that Augustine gets the full picture, but it's not because he thinks Augustine stupid. Yeah, it's because he thinks that the conversation needs to keep going. He's just got started.

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 14:34

And Augustine is just this font of knowledge. You could find Descartes Kognito in Augustine, and one of his dialogues you know, this this sense of we can't be certain about much of what we know, but we can be certain that that we're the ones thinking yeah, and that's a starting point of sorts. So yeah,

Charles Kim 14:57

yeah, well in the city of God, he also uses the phrase of unless I am deceived I am or because or because I'm deceived. Really, I am. So so he recognizes, and you know this, that this idea that, yeah, we know that we're existing, and that others are existing simultaneously. Because, you know, it's sort of that community, it draws us out, as, as in our own ways, like shows us our own humanity in a very real way. But but

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 15:26

here's the thing, because on the one hand, as a theology professor, you have a responsibility. They have a theological theology requirement to meet and you have to make sure that they have a kind of a grounding, core knowledge about theology. So it's not about conversion. It's not about spiritual growth. Nonetheless, I hope that that in the way I teach and offer the material, there is some sense of, of edification of personal growth of challenging preconceived notions, right, yeah. And that's why my method in this book is what it is, because in the end, I think where Christianity has failed, especially certain brands of Protestantism, is that they have relied so heavily on reason and argumentation. And this idea of truth being universal and absolute and unchanging, that it becomes a form of coercion, you can't possibly be a rational being and not accept this as true. Right? In a world where, you know, 1.2 billion people are either Muslim, Buddhist, or, or nothing. Yeah. So

Charles Kim 16:49

Well, that and that goes to kind of my first question. So the book is called theological fragments, confessing what we know and cannot know about an infinite God, as I think kind of what you've just been saying there. And what we've been talking about a lot, one of my questions was, as you get started, you say, these are six topics, or six myths, or ultimately you call them loci that you wanted to work through. So I asked you where they came from, but it sounds like mostly, you know, they're just coming from, you know, conversations issues that develop from your engagement with your students.

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 17:21

Exactly. No, that is, that is a big part of it. Especially that that, that struggle with the relationship between faith and science, the chapter entitled, The Myth of human uniqueness, right. These are students who, in many ways, have embraced fully that the notion that that we are just part of this evolutionary process, and that while we might be the only species on this planet at this moment that has developed to a certain point, in terms of, you know, self reflection and cognitive ability. There is nothing distinctive and preventing others from from becoming that, right. And it's fascinating, because to me that that is a critique the church needs to hear back in 2015. I don't know if you were a student at the time, but Elizabeth Johnson came and gave a talk on her book on Darwin ask the beast. And her challenge was, you know, Christian theologians, an ethicist haven't taken Darwin's challenge seriously enough. And so I tried to do that in the book. And, and one of the things I don't know if you've watched the news recently, there is a, an orca killer whale that has been sinking private yachts. And they theorized that it's a form of revenge. And she's been teaching the young, younger ones how to do it, and transmitting culture effect. And it's not the first time orcas have exhibited behavior like this. Back in 1997. There was a group of people who went whale watching in the Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest, and caught on film, a killer whale attacking a great white shark. immobilizing, the great white shark, eating its liver, whoa, and then leaving the carcass. Now, up until then, it had been assumed that the white sharks were the apex predator in the ocean. And so one of the people on this boat ride was a scientist had been studying this particular pod and had never seen this behavior before and so they they start to document Long story short, Pacific. Orchids in the Pacific Northwest are not migratory. They stay there. Orcas down in Baja, California, near Los Angeles. Are when they migrate, they migrate from the lore of Baja California out to New Zealand, up to the Pacific Northwest and back down to Los Angeles. What the scientists discovered was that the hunting technique that the whale in the Pacific Northwest exhibited resembled the hunting techniques of the whales in New Zealand when they are hunting manta rays. Hmm. Manta Rays are evolutionarily very close to sharks. Both sharks and manta rays have a behavior that kicks in. They need to move through waters constantly to survive. If they're immobilized, they fall into a comatose state to reduce the amount of oxygen they need. And so whenever they are flipped upside down, that kicks in and they go into the stupor like they're unconscious. The killer whales in New Zealand have over the years develop this hunting technique. Teach it to their young that that the best way to get out kill a manta ray is to flip it upside down, hold it upside down for several minutes till it drowns. Yeah. And then eat it. Somehow the LA pod whales, watch that behavior, mimicked it with sharks, different waters different prey. Yep. And then taught it to the Pacific Northwest whales. I mean, if that's not language and culture, right. And it's not genetic. It's not suddenly we have a new gene, or genome that then gets passed on. They teach it to their young. Yeah. And to me that that is challenging. That is fascinating. And so what does it mean that we are both image of God, and yet in the same evolutionary chain as as the rest of of all, you know, animals and organisms? Yeah. And so, so I want to make sure that that when people engage in book, they realize that that all sides come to these issues with with our own myths and our own meta narratives. And so I'm asking people to push back and rethink. On the one hand, I don't want to lose the sense of Imago Dei, that's central to my liberty of ethics. Yeah. And in fact, I was surprised that, you know, we did a book launch at St. Louis University on the book, and we had Aristotle, Papa Nikolaou. And orthodox theologian, Scott Page, a Christian, Protestant ethicist, Nicole Flores, a Catholic, moral theologian, and all three of them. That was the chapter that bothered them the most, the myth of human uniqueness and my critique of this. You know, you know, we're, we're just a little lower than the angels basically. Right. And, and I didn't think that's where I was gonna get a lot of blowback from and yet that that seemed to have hit a nerve with theologians and Christians. Yeah, so.

Charles Kim 23:20

So what what, how does that? Does that make you think like that you should have been more clear, what is how do you respond, knowing that a lot of theologians have taken a response to that one in particular?

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 23:31

Well, what's interesting is, and maybe I'm not a good enough writer, but the point I was trying to make is that taking Elizabeth Johnson's challenge seriously, to engage Darwinism and evolution, the biggest critique and challenge of evolution has been this theological claim about human uniqueness. So what I tried to do in the chapter is to reclaim the possibility of talking about human uniqueness, not only from a dogmatic point of view as an assertion of belief, but also in the context of, of the natural sciences, where do we find common ground to talk about human uniqueness? And where I have seen that happen is in Eco theology and in, in, in the scientific community's response to the ecological crisis? Yeah, there's a suddenly a realization that we, as human beings have a capacity to impact the very evolutionary processes that brought us to this point. And so much so that, that we're now impacting the evolution of the whole planet and could lead to an environmental catastrophe that at the very least, will be the end of the species. Right?

Charles Kim 24:49

Well, in a weird way. I mean, it almost sounds like what makes us unique, isn't some grand, like, you know, super ability to do good but Almost to do harm, like, that's, it's like I mean, at least that's where the argument seems to be leading me.

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 25:06

But see, that's, that's my point that that if we can, if we are in our choices and our actions caused this climate catastrophe, we also have the capacity both intellectually and I would argue morally to then reverse it. Yeah. And that's where science and religion have been on the same page, and had been talking. And since since probably the late 80s, early 90s. Carl Sagan was no fan of Christianity, and yet he reached out to people of faith, to to address this very issue. And to get them to, to work together to look at the, you know, consequences of an instrumentalist view of the world.

Charles Kim 25:53

Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, you know, when I hear these kinds of questions and concerns about ecology and stuff, I, I, you know, I feel overwhelmed. Because I know that, you know, supposedly say, I live in St. Louis City, supposedly, our recycling sometimes goes to recycling, sometimes it doesn't. You know, it's not really something I can control.

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 26:17

Having taken a tour of the recycling facility, I have never taken a tour. Yeah, yeah. It's unbelievable how much that the biggest problem right now is that they have so much recycled material and nothing to do with it. Right. So it's not that we haven't been responsible and doing what we thought we ought to be doing. But the problem is, that's not enough. You know, it's not enough to recycle, we need to reduce our consumption, and more importantly, stop manufacturing things to be disposable.

Charles Kim 26:51

Well, and what what, you know, like the thing that we've done as a family in the last couple of years is, we we have chickens now. And like I've, you know, we've learned so much from those chickens. But one of the things that like, we've reduced our waste dramatically, just because like all paper products, all food leftovers, all of that can go into our compost area where our chickens are, and they eat it, turn it into compost, produce eggs, and then we use their, their manure, you know, the other thing like I never really, I grew up in the suburbs, I grew up in Chesterfield, actually. And but I didn't realize like, you know, poop always seemed like a problem. But actually, it's fertilizer. And so, you know, like, these are like ways like so, you know, with our little kids, like, we've been able to just as a family, like, you know, show the kids like this is, you know, this is where our food waste can go. And this is how you know, poops not all bad, it actually makes it so that the lettuce grows, and that feeds us and the chickens and, you know, like, those are like, so I like, you know, those kinds of solutions where we can sort of really be like, be, you know, recognize, again, sort of the question of human uniqueness, I'm just a part of the chain, I'm just a part of helping the chickens use their waste to grow their food, and help us get eggs, you know, I mean, you know, feeling like a part of something rather than the dominant.

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 28:18

But what I suggest is that, at least for this moment, in this time, we are the only species that has the level of awareness to not only understand these processes, but but shape them. And just as we through carelessness and greed, shaped them for the harm, we can then reverse that. Yeah. And here, and

Charles Kim 28:43

so there's a kind of uniqueness in that. Exactly. Yeah, it's,

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 28:46

that's, that's what I tried to do that, that. You know, we see we as believers see it as the moral arc of the universe, right. We might not agree with with a an evolutionary scientist, but they will definitely accept that, from a cognitive point of view and the abilities. Were the one species that can in fact, do something about it. Yeah. In fact, we're the species that caused it right so but but yeah, it's I'm not trying to get them to agree. I'm trying to get them to accept and understand that we can both care about the planet we live on. Yeah, and its evolution and understand that that not all Christian theology is dominion theology. To be blunt about right? Yeah. That's that's part of the to audiences I'm trying to. I'm writing to the triumphalist Christian to say, Hey, get off your high horse. Your call to approach these issues with a degree of humility. And at the same time, those who have completely dismissed Christianity, you know, you like like Richard Dawkins, he is the most uninformed critic of Christianity on the face of the planet shows next to nothing about Christian history and the development of Christian thought, or I might add its impact in the development of the natural sciences. He loves so much.

Charles Kim 30:26

Yeah. So I think in that response, it sounds like you're kind of asking one of one of the questions that one of the things that I was thinking of just looking at the title again, the second part, confessing what we know and cannot know about God, and it just reminded me of the we, I was able to have Howard was on the podcast a little while ago, and it was fun to get to talk to him, but he loves this joke from the Lone Ranger, where apparently the Lone Ranger and Tonto were being chased down by the SU and Tonto Asou. Like, the Lone Ranger says, What are we going to do? And Tonto says, What do you mean, we white man?

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 31:09

I get it. And there are two answers. The short one is the press's editorial board came up with the subtitle. Okay, I simply wanted your logical fragment. When I was pressed to suggest a subtitle I said, saying what we can about a sometimes hidden god. Okay. But the editorial hivemind came up with the title as it now stands. Okay. But if I have to address who the we is, in the end, the book is addressed to anyone wrestling with the Christian faith. Okay. And so I envision the collective we refers to them, myself included. And and this is important, not the institutional church, and not Christians, as an entity over against non Christian. The we hear is anyone struggling with these deep fundamental philosophical and theological questions?

Charles Kim 32:02

Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. No, that's really helpful. Also, I, when I wrote the question, I'd forgotten that oftentimes, editorial boards, yeah, choose titles,

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 32:10

oh, gosh, tell me about it. My first book was a battle. And I got the title, I want it, but then I didn't get the marketing push that I wanted. They felt like had I go into the different title, they could have made it part of a series. It could have, you know, but But to me, they were asking me to. It was a book in theology, and they were trying to present it as a book in the sociology of religion. And in fact, the first time the press sent it out to be reviewed, it was a journal of sociology of religion, and they destroyed me. And it was like, Well, that's because this, you're evaluating the book, as the book, you would have written not the book I wrote. Right. Right. And so that's, that's academic publishing. You know, you got to live with that. But but in the end, you know, I think it's clumsy. I think it covers a lot, but I still think it captures the sense of we don't know all the answers. Yeah. And so anything that reinforces that, you know, this sense of, we got to tread lightly. Precisely because, as humans, we are not in a position to speak with absolute certainty, then I'm all for it. If it works, good. Yeah.

Charles Kim 33:37

Well, one one other myths, we've talked about a few of them the myth of human uniqueness. We talked. And one of the other myths here is on the myth of free markets. And so in that place, you kind of draw on your, your kind of your, I don't know, tradition is not quite the right word. But as a liberation theologian, you know, the liberation tradition? Well, and it just reminded me that we, you know, we've been talking about how we teach theology at SLU. But this even this past semester, I had the most pushback from the reading the Exodus narrative, and I didn't have them read Gustavo Gutierrez directly. I had him in mind a little bit, talking about the liberation that God shows for the how God liberates the Israelites. But I noticed that my students, were they they were struggling to find and see God as liberative. And so one of the things like I was thinking about this book as trying to engage people, nuns, other people who are curious, maybe are interested in the question of God, but maybe don't know, you know, maybe have a different perspective. And so, I don't know, I took that as a challenge. And I was like, Okay, how am I either not presenting this correctly? Or how am I don't know so I was looking for your advice. He's like, what have you and have you ever have you ever encountered this where the students like the first thing they thought was no God just being mean to the the Egyptians?

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 35:09

The narrative tells us right? Yeah, it hardens Pharaoh's heart. Yeah. You know, God has has a arc in the story where he things wants things to end up. And so Pharaoh has to play the bad guy in this and so God's gonna make sure you know that Pharaoh is not compassionate, and that once Pharaoh gives his word, he's gonna go back on his word, and you know. So yeah, the first time I encountered this was early on, I was an MDF student at Union seminary. And we had the Native American liberation theologian Robert Allen warrior, come talk to us and I was in seminary around 92. He had published a very important article in Christianity and crisis back in 1989. And it he was the first to problematize this liberative reading of Exodus for me and the name of the article, you're gonna love this. Canaanites, cowboys and Indians, deliverance, conquest and liberation theology today. Now, James Cohen and Gustavo Gutierrez, the two giants of liberation theology James Cohen, black liberation theology, Gutierrez Latin American liberation theology. For both of them the Exodus narrative is key and Central. It is God involving God's self and human history through the prophet Moses to liberate an enslaved and exploited people. You can see why why the descendants of African slaves would embrace that, you can see why a mestizo of a people who have been brutalized and exploited for 500 years in Latin America would embrace that. But others like warrior or like the Palestinian priests name a teak or like the Jewish liberation theologian, Mark Ellis of argues that that there's nothing liberative for them in the Exodus narrative. Because they were the people already occupying the Promised Land, who were either victims of of genocide, or or war, or in other words, they were the problem to be rid of, so that God's promises could come true. And so yeah, early on, I was aware of that, and I and I, and I know you read lightly my, my book, Christian martyrdom, political violence. One of the issues I deal with in that book is this notion that that the biblical text is dense, a shallow reading of the Bible. And that's what most young students bring to it. You can recoil from the kind of vindictive and cruel God you encounter there. And I'll add, not just in the Old Testament, there are things in the New Testament where God can be pretty brutal to what I've tried to argue in that earlier book is that the Bible is a collection of texts that represents many different and sometimes conflicting traditions. And so a patient reading of the biblical texts yields a reading of the theistic tradition that doesn't ignore these tensions. But in the end, is overwhelmingly erring on the side of God as compassionate and forgiving Exodus 34 Six or Psalm 103? Yeah, yeah. And the reason I argued this is because one of the tensions between Christianity and Judaism and that gives rise to anti semitism is this notion that somehow the New Testament God is new and improved and supersedes the old test. Yeah. And so what I tried to argue is no, this is the same God and revealed through the work of the Spirit and through the work of the prophets. And it's a consistent message and this is that message. And I don't want the students to fall into that same error to look at the Old Testament, vindictive God and then the hippie dippie, loving Jesus. Right, right. No. And so yes, there are right to raise those objections. If you're a person of faith, and you need to struggle and have patience, because in the end, I think the narrative will play out and, and for me, Abraham Joshua hassles book, on the prophets. He's aware of this issue and he wants to argue that that the tendency has been to look at the Hebrew prophets, and their two themes of Mitzvah and commandment and justice was

Charles Kim 39:52

mish bought. Yeah.

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 39:54

And what's the other word I'm looking for? I'm remembering the Greek to Kayo Sunni, but it translates to Doc. Doc. Yeah, righteousness, yes. And he says, when you interpret them properly when you read them properly, it's grace. And so he then points to the story of the murder of Abel by Cain. You know, the first act of homicide in human history, right? Yeah. And. And in the end, even though in Genesis, it tells us that the punishment for murder is death. Here we find God being compassionate towards Cain. And not only sparing him, but making it so that others won't punish him for his for his sin. And so he wants to argue that at the heart of the prophetic tradition, whether in its Christian variant oriented, original Hebrew context is is God is a God of grace. And I find that very powerful, again, as a way of overcoming I hate to say it, but But Mark Marcion

Charles Kim 41:10

Yeah, right. Right. Right. Absolutely. We

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 41:12

still live with you know, you don't know how many Sunday sermons I've endured that are marcionite. In their content? For?

Charles Kim 41:22

Yeah, well, one of the things I like to do in these interviews is do kind of a shifting gears question. And that's just so this question could be about anything in your sort of theological journey it could have to do with writing this book. But the question I always ask is, what is one thing you once thought was true, and now think is false, or one thing you once thought was false? And you now think is true? And feel free to elaborate if you have an idea of why. But yeah, I just think it's always interesting to hear how, you know, the theological journey, and the theological task often requires us to, to change some of the things that we once thought,

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 42:00

yeah, no, that's a great question. I was raised in a very kind of evangelical, if not fundamentalist, Protestant household. And there were a lot of tensions there. Growing up, I, I'm not some sort of self proclaimed genius, but even I could see inconsistencies at age 1011 12. In some of the, the claims and, and, and one of the things that that I believed passionately, which I don't anymore is this idea that salvation is only for those in the church, and only for those who've been baptized as Christians, right. And I was in the ninth grade, I guess I was around 13. I was skipped a year in school. And I had this world sift professor, who, you know, public school, State School, who, in his presenting his kind of world cultures class, we studied all the major religions of the world. And I thought it was such a great approach. I thought, it's so needed in our current context, we need to have a civic education, that not only gives us the, the historical foundation for that freedom of religion in the First Amendment, right, but then models it by engaging through religions that that we're likely to encounter. And for some reason, you know, we'd studied Judaism, and I became obsessed with, with Orthodox, Judaism and has the hassy D, Mm hmm. And I came home one day and told my mom, I'm thinking of converting to Judaism. Whoa, telling your fundamentalist evangelical Christian mother that you're thinking of converting to Judaism? That's, that's gonna set off some interesting table. Sure,

Charles Kim 44:12

sure.

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 44:14

But it began my thinking of okay, if we worship Well, there's only one God. Right? And we are worshipping the same God. Then Then what does it mean? That God is known in different ways, right. Different flavors are languages if you want, and I couldn't accept that it was a flaw in God. That's perfect. Right? And therefore then it must be God's intention. And so that's what broke me out of that that thinking, why am I still Christian because to me, it's the story that that brings all the pieces together most cohesively for me, and I can then make sense of the world but I What I realized is that most of us have invested so much in our conception of God because it, it justifies something that's our core and that we want, not necessarily what God wants. And so I was at a retreat at the Montreat center in North Carolina. And I encountered at the joy blessing of meeting this this older African American woman. And we were discussing issues of race and Dr. King's Beloved Community, and addressing the historic problems of racism. And and how at the core was the sense of not recognizing the other as, as human beings. And then she says, Well, that's because you have a piss poor guy. And so that, to me, that set off a bill, that was the word the language I was looking for, we worship a pitch for God, because it's our reflection of who we are, instead of God, revealing God's self to us. And so someday, I hope to write a book, maybe cap off my career. Questions on a piss poor god. Yeah.

Charles Kim 46:17

Yeah, you could do some Fourier, Bach and stuff, you know, that sort of? Yeah. Projection? Yeah. Wow. That's quite a story. I have I have to say that is, you know, that's the most intense response. I've, I've had this is good. I like it.

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 46:33

Yeah. Well, I'm hoping that I'm building up enough capital as an academic that someday I'll be able to get away, Stanley Horwath can get away with a book title like That's right. I'm not there yet.

Charles Kim 46:47

Well, so going back to the book a little bit, a lot of the book is framed around sort of ortho praxis and orthodoxy. And it's about sort of, you know, Christians being called to a certain sort of right action, or even just people in general reading this book called to right action, and as a way of kind of fleshing out this sort of right action. I loved your story of I think you. You talked about Gustavo Gutierrez and telling a student, you know, who wanted to go to Peru, that maybe that wasn't the best idea. So I don't know if you'd mind sharing that story. And then and how that fits into this idea of what does it mean for us to live you know, to live out some of these ideas in the book?

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 47:30

No, that's That's great. I'm good. Harris is wonderful. I don't know if you ran into him in your times at Princeton seminary, but he would often come to us the library there. Okay. And the first time I met him was walking from the Dinky you remember to the little tree up to spear library, which is no longer spear library. I don't know what they call it now. But I see this little old man struggling with a suitcase. Notice he has a clubfoot and suddenly, it's like, oh my gosh, that's father Gutierrez. So I introduced myself. I say, Where are you headed spear library. I'm heading there myself. I take his suitcase and we walk we start talking. So that was when I was a student. years later, I'm teaching here at SLU. And I've been doing the the Palacio program, which is this immersion experience in Latin America. And I was at a conference at Princeton, and he was there and we sat together for breakfast and over breakfast. I told him about this one student who didn't return from the immersion trip and stayed in Latin America and began to live in this base community, working with the poorest of the poor becoming the poorest of the poor. To which he responded and I wish I wish phones back then were what they are today. So I couldn't have recorded it is as great just what Latin America needs one more poor person. And I was I was like, whoa, wow, let me Yes, that. Yeah, by the end of breakfast, he says, Look, you know, no disrespect, I understand youthful zeal and idealism. But but the reality is that, that that's not solidarity. Okay. Solidarity is when you when you acknowledge and recognize your position, your privilege, your power. And then you live in such a way that you use that position and power and wealth to help break down and tear apart the unjust social structures that are causing. So rather than giving up like this romantic St. Francis, all your material possessions and living as poor, right. You can live a simple life as all of us tried to do and keep our consumerism in check and, and not continue to to abuse the planet and its resources etc. But then use our education then use their positions in society to, to, in other words, enact transformative social change. And that's solidarity. Okay? You know, because because in the end, you know, this manifests itself. I see this all the time, I was just at a conference on Tuesday morning at the Danforth center and religion and politics at Washington University here in St. Louis. And it was on Simone Vale. Yep. And a good friend of mine, Elliot RASSMAN, was reflecting on the absurdity of upper middle class academics living in solidarity with the poor, or the working class. And Simone de being, you know, the model for this, her working in a Renault car, auto plant, and then contracting tuberculosis, right, or heard living in solidarity with the Jewish people in the death camps and an eating, living eating what they were eating to the point that it led to an early death. Right? And he says, There's something ridiculous about that. And he didn't say it to to minimize or, or, or insult to motivate in any way, or the student of mine, right, who became one added to the masses of the poor of Latin America, but rather to say that, that we need to confront that that absurdity. He says that there's something inherently jarring and irreconcilable about someone going to Harvard, and then becoming a labor organizer, but but we need that. Right. Yeah. And so he simply, like Gutierrez is problematizing, WHAT SOLIDARITY means. Yeah. Right? And how do we live solidarity in solidarity when we don't inhabit the same spaces? Yeah. And here's the thing. In the end, my student wasn't really one of the poor. Because at any point, he could have called mommy and daddy and they would have sent him a ticket, and he'd be halt. Right. And that's a reality that people born and raised there don't have a possibility for. And Gutierrez, you know, not as much in his writing, but sometimes you have to read between the lines, but But he, he does not romanticize the poor, he does not view them as as saints. He also told me in that same conversation, when he was parish priest in you know, in Lima, Peru, he loved his his parishioners, but there are some of them he wouldn't want to run into in a dark alley at two in the morning. Right? Yeah, yeah. So there's this we can't, we're committed to to orthopraxy. This, we're committed to solidarity and and working together for this common good. But we can't ignore certain theological realities. Yeah. That namely, we're fallen creatures, right? And especially those who are in extreme living conditions, might resort to extreme acts. Right. Now he will, he will tell you, the criminality of a person who who steals to feed his children is of a different source than the criminality of the board members of Enron, who knowingly defrauded, you know, billions of people and stole and you know, right. But nonetheless, it's still some we're still sinners. Right. Right. So we can't be naive. You talked about this orthopraxy this versus orthodoxy. I don't want to reduce the Christian faith to just orthopraxy. Yeah, and I don't think I do that in the book. What I do say is, this is we're looking at fragments to hold on to this is one we can't do away with, okay? If your belief does not lead to a certain kind of concrete action, as defined by the prophets, right, then and by Jesus, then we've taken something essential away from Christianity. Gutierrez suggests a way forward. I don't know if you'll agree, but he appreciates the prophetic tradition in the Bible that seeks God's justice and advocates on behalf of the victims of tyranny and oppression. But he also recognizes that God is Great Other than any one conception of God, he has a sense of mystery. And therefore, God transcends all our conceptions of God. Right. So he challenges us to embrace. Yeah. And you mentioned that earlier, the contemplative versus the active, right? He uses that same framework in his book on job. And he challenges us to embrace both the whole them intention and prophetic theology that leads deliberative practice, but grounded in this contemplation and reflection on the mystery of God. And there's this passage, which I find is more powerful in Spanish, I don't like the English translation, I've worked with tried to my own translation, but I can't quite capture what the Spanish says in English very well. But he says justice alone, does not have the final say about how we are to speak of, of God, only when we have come to realize that God's love is freely bestowed. Here's that grace again, right? Yeah, do we enter fully and definitively into the presence of the god of faith? Now in Spanish, it says maths idea that I who Stasia in English, they translated as Justice alone does not have the final say. But what it says in Spanish is that the truth of God goes way beyond just so that like that sense, that it's something more, it's bigger, whereas this emphasis is reductionist. Right, justice does not have the final say, right. Yeah. But it already assumes in some sense, that that justice is the central way. And what Gutierrez is actually saying is, yeah, justice is necessary. But God trends is way beyond that. Right? You know, and I don't want to lose that. And along with a liberative political praxis, there is a spirituality of liberation.

I think you could read the whole of Gutierrez published works as an unpacking of his first book, the theology of liberation. In that book, he devotes 12 pages to a spirituality of liberation. In 1983, or there abouts he published we drink from our own wealth, he took those 12 pages and expanded it into a book length study on a spirituality of liberation. And I often get my undergraduates students to read that book, it's challenging. It's problematic. It presumes a knowledge of Christian monasticism and asceticism that most students don't have. And so I've shied away from using it, I now use his book on job, because it lets us enter into an immediate conversation about the problem of evil. Yeah, right. And then look at how liberation theology responds to that. And then it brings this both active and contemplative, and that we need to nurture the soul and the body. And so students respond better to that. Yeah, but I still think his book on spirituality is well worth wrestling. Yeah. And it's a line I believe, from St. Benedict, about drinking from our own wells.

Charles Kim 58:28

Yeah, often I've not read that one. I'll have to look that one up. Yeah. Well, we're kind of we're drawn close to an hour here. So I don't want to take too much of your time. I may just go to my last question, which I sort of, you know, you talk early in the book. And then in the end about this difference between Heraclitus and Plato and Hare cleitus, and the, the sort of the flux, and then Plato has been this kind of idea of, maybe the roots of our ideas of like, divine society, and, and, and these sorts of things. And so, in your, you mentioned at the end, that a friend challenged you on this, and kind of made it sounds like the friend was maybe leaning more towards the the necessity of understanding God as immutable, and the necessity of understanding God as in, you know, in a more platonic way. And you said his reaction reflects the human desire for certainty amid the radical plurality of the cosmos, but he makes the mistake of assuming God talk as a zero sum game. And then the next paragraph, I'm not interested in all or another, all or nothing arguments. It is ridiculous to assume that simply simply because I deny the Platonic demand for a single universal unchanging truth, I am unable to make any true statements, especially about God. And so it just, it just struck me that you know, like, thinking with the kind of the Christian tradition, especially With Augustine, you know, when they read phrases in the Psalms that say like God is a rock, it does have the sense of the permanence of God the fixity of God. And that's, you know, the idea behind immutability in society. And especially for Agustin in some ways, like what changes his whole life in the confessions, is recognizing that God doesn't change. And so he, he now sees that there's something amidst all of what feels like to him the chaos of life, there's something that he can hold on to.

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 1:00:32

No, I agree, I agree entirely. I'm not a fan of nihilism. Okay. I believe that God speaks and that we're capable of understanding God. But as the formation of the biblical canon demonstrates, tradition is complex and has many layers and can come to contradict itself. What we're dealing with is a difference between God's revelation and the human interpretation of God's revelation. Yeah, and and so this particular colleague in our department who shall remain nameless. His concern is that everything would become like, like a feather in the wind, right, with nowhere to stand firmly on. Again, not my intention. I always found it fascinating that Gutierrez embrace Bart and rejected a Bultmann. Boatman, after all reflects almost a deliberative approach. He begins with the zits and lay from the situation in life, the human condition and then reflects theologically from there. So when interviewed by Robert McAfee Brown, Gutierrez was asked, you know, why Bart, and not Bulma. And he said, Because Bart preserved for us, this idea of having, namely through the prophets, a place to stand from which to then critique oppression. Right, it re, it revived the Word of God as judgment over against a sinful world at a point where Protestant liberalism had equated culture with God, and whatever was was God's will. And so it reclaimed the prophets and their judgment, for Christian activism and Christian theology. So I am not saying that we can't speak with certainty about God. What I'm saying is, we can't speak with absolute certainty. And that sometimes even in God's revelation, God only gives us bit fragments, you know, I titled the book theological fragments as as a kind of a tip of the hat. To Soren Kierkegaard is philosophical fragment in the Danish is philosophical Mueller, which translates as philosophical crumbs or philosophical tidbits. Okay. And my intention was, we look down on that. And keep in mind, he knew the risk he was taken at a time when Hegel was the pinnacle of philosophy, and this overarching, comprehensive system of human rationality right? He publishes a 78 page pamphlet called philosophical crumbs. Yeah, and it was this massive critique of Hegel. And then he writes a two volume postscript to the concluding unscientific postscript. God does not do theology, humans do theology, God speaks. And that's unchanging. And that's eternal. And I argue that that through through a careful reading of of the scriptural tradition, and here I include not just the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament, but the Koran in my own work. I've been doing comparative work. The God who speaks is consistent. When it when it when I deal with issues of a society, I deal with it in the way that my former professor diamond laureate, Princeton did, and I'm sorry, you never studied with Yeah. Because for him, it's not a metaphysical statement about God's substance and be. It is a moral statement about God's character. And why we can trust God is because God in human history has proved reliable and consistent in God's actions. Right. And I think that I think Augustine would agree with that. I don't know if Aquinas would, but I know Augustine would. And so God is unchanging, God's eternal God is reliable. What proves ephemeral and unreliable are what we humans do with that revelation, because we have this tendency to create God in our own image. He even when God is very clearly speak, right? Calvin Schrag was a philosopher did a lot of work on religion and science but but he argues that interpretation goes all the way down. And all the way back, we find something similar and gossamer you find something similar and Richard Rorty the pragmatists. So just to say that it's all interpretation is not to say there is no truth. It's to say that that is our human condition. You know, in the end, what Kierkegaard argued, is that we have to stand on faith, because we're not going to be able to objectively verify that this is what God said, in the end, because of the nature of Revelation. It's given to us in faith, and we have to live our lives and carry it on and share it with others in faith. Does that make sense? And I think what a lot of my Christian colleagues are trying to do, especially those who who place a high emphasis on on apologetics is, is do away with that dimension of faith, which is that from an epistemological perspective, we live with uncertainty. Yeah. Now, from a faith perspective, we can have certainty. And so Kierkegaard you know, talked about this in the philosophical fragments. And I had I had a note somewhere but the Kierkegaard made the claim and the philosophical fragments, truth is subjectivity. Christians, especially evangelical Christians hear that and they think cultural relativism, right. He is here emphasizing ortho Praxis over Orthodox, he's recasting Christian theology as a concrete practical discipline and not a theoretical problem. The question for the Christian is not Does God exist? The question for the Christian is, how does God want me to live? Right? And so, in my previous book, dogmatics, after Babel, I developed a very clumsy analogy to explain what Kierkegaard was trying to say. And Kierkegaard notion that Christian truth is subjective. I compared to learning how to ride a bicycle, you're a bicyclist, you probably don't remember when you couldn't ride a bicycle. But for some of us, it was a very trying process. He basically said that you could have complete and total objective knowledge of what it takes to ride a bicycle. Had he had the abilities, he would have said you could even create a a computer simulation, that it's exact, you know, that takes account for for wind speed and shifting of body weight, know that it accounts for every objective, muscle movement and change that needs to occur to keep you on that bike and propelling forward. But you still don't know how to ride a bike. Right? What does it take to learn to ride a bike you get on it? You fall skin, your knee? You curse at it, and you keep at it until you've what's the word embodied? The act of riding a bicycle? Yeah. Guard is concerned about and the kind of truth that he says we should all be striving for is that existential reality, we need to embody Christian truth. Instead, we spent all this time on debate and argumentation. And in the end, we might memorize the catechism and the Lord's Prayer and, you know, site Bible and verse. But if we are not living, you know, and so it's we've lost a sense of theology is spiritual theology. It's about the formation of the Christian. Yeah, in the journey of the Christian life. And we've turned it into a theoretical discipline. That's Kierkegaard to argument. And then.

Charles Kim 1:09:10

Well, I appreciate your, your book, I appreciate the time that you've taken to prepare for the interview. And I think you just ended on the, you know, great place to end right. That's the call. Right? That's, that's where we are headed.

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 1:09:28

Chad, this is great. I haven't had much chance to talk to you since you were my TA we've, we both been so busy. And you're teaching at two different institutions. So that's got to be fun. But it's been great. I hope that that you continue to do this podcast because I love these. I love podcasts. I listened to them all the time. Oh, good. Yeah, yeah. Well, I

Charles Kim 1:09:50

mean, I have to say, you know, I feel like I've learned I mean, I learned a lot from reading, but even just talking with you, you know, I hope I hope for the listeners, that this conversation And we'll be you know, not a replacement for the book. But but just a, a way to sort of flesh out some of the stuff that was written in really

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez 1:10:09

well said, because I hate books on tape or audiobooks. I don't deal well with my students love them for some reason. I don't. But I love podcasts because people then take the book, which which I've read, and then they go off, right. Yeah. And, and to me, that's, that's the joy because that's what makes a seminar work. Right? Because we've all read the book, we've all come to it. But now we're, we're seeing Oh, I didn't get that from my reading or, you know, and so I love that about the podcast in and I love that it's such a in terms of resources, such a cheap thing to produce and yet, so rich and content, so kudos to you for doing awesome. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai