aufhebung

"Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces much fruit."--John 12:24

I’ve been deflecting questions about my choice of the name “Aufhebung” for my blog. Mainly, I’m just embarrassed to admit that I chose it because it sounds cool and cryptic and gives the impression that I know German. Really, though, the word works well to describe my personal life journey, my understanding of theology and of God’s ways in the world, and the moment in life at which I find myself at this moment, so let me offer a few thoughts on it.

The word Aufhebung itself is open to a variety of translations. It can signify an act of lifting something up, removing it, moving it forward, destroying it, transforming it. This ambiguity makes it a handy word for certain philosophical and theological models to describe a process in which something is abolished and then taken up into something greater.

Georg Friedrich-Wilhelm Hegel used the term in the early 1800s to describe a unifying principle at work in history, the dynamic by which an entity—say, a political institution, a scientific theory, an ideology or a shared worldview—comes undone by its own contradictions and inadequacies, and is then reconstructed in a more perfect form (which in turn comes to be negated and reconstructed again, and so forth until history reaches its conclusion). So, for instance, a monarchy is brought down by a revolution and a constitutional republic arises in its place, Ptolemaic astronomy is abolished and reconstituted with the advent of the Copernican model, etc. The word Aufhebung, used in this way, suggests that all historical processes move as they must, advancing steadily toward their consummation.

My own thinking, however, is less Hegelian than Barthian. For one thing, I know virtually nothing about Hegel (which is why I hope that some Hegel scholar out there will jump in to straighten out the previous paragraph—Mike Bonn, are you reading this?). Moreover, what little secondhand knowledge I do have leaves me to wonder whether he gave too much credit to the notion of progress and underemphasized both the reality of societal evil and the distinction between God and human history. If history is progressing, stage by stage, toward its inevitable completion, one might interpret this to mean that existing economic or social inequities reflect not the consequences of choices and actions deliberately carried out to benefit some at the expense of others, but simply the conditions appropriate to a given moment in human progress. Whatever changes need to occur will arise from the processes at work within history. Thus the members of the world’s wealthier groups can justify their status in the name of progress. (It is no coincidence that Hegel himself envisioned the world proceeding steadily toward a climax that looked a lot like his own 19th-century Prussia, or that modern-day Hegelian Francis Fukuyama calls the globalized free market “the end of history.”)

Like Hegel, Karl Barth recognized a pattern of abolishment and reconsistution at work in history. Barth, however, did not consider this pattern an innate law of human progress but the struggle of a gracious God against—and for the sake of—a rebellious race: a struggle in which God enters into human history so as to destroy from the inside every basis of self-justification, every dehumanizing practice and every self-deception, and to elevate humankind into communion with its Creator. Barth saw the reality of evil and the ultimate triumph of grace revealed throughout scripture in a pattern of creation-abolishment-new creation. God creates an innocent world, the world falls into condemnation because of sin, God recreates the world as a place of justice and reconciliation. God gathers Israel as a chosen people, the nation is scattered into exile because of its idolatry, God regathers the nation into a new human community. The Word becomes flesh, is crucified, and is raised from the dead.

To carry this further, Aufhebung describes the impossible task of theology itself, the dynamic created by the fact that to speak about God is at once the thing believers must do and the thing that they must not do. God’s revelation, Barth said, was the “Aufhebung of religion,” the shocking act of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, which overthrows all human conceptions about God. To understand, respond to, and express the meaning of this act is to be confronted repeatedly with the both the importance of Christian doctrine as the repository of truthful interpretations of God’s act in Christ and the inadequacy of doctrine to utter any final word about God. Theology, therefore, is always in dynamic tension, neither able to rest in dogmatic assertions on the one hand, nor in relativistic agnosticism on the other. Rather, we are called to speak faithfully into the demands of the moment on the basis of what we have understood thus far, to trust God to use our expressions in service to the truth, but not to hold onto them as if repetition of these words and actions guaranteed our possession of the truth.

It may not be too much of a jump to suggest that Aufhebung describes a pattern of growth in the lives of individuals or communities. The simple truisms that give order to our lives—that every event fits into a perfect plan, that right is always right and wrong is always wrong, that good things happen to good people, that ours is the greatest country in the world, that every word in the Bible is inspired by God and without error, that if you work hard you will succeed—eventually prove unsupportable and collapse. But to remain in skepticism and relativism is no more acceptable than to hold onto expired absolutes, so we reconsider the affirmations we thought we had left behind and bring them into conversation with new insights, rejecting some of them forever and reclaiming others, but understanding them differently than before.

At least this has been my experience. The small, Bible-believing Baptist churches I attended in high school, college, and young adulthood instilled in me the belief that Christ alone was the way of salvation, and the Bible the Word of God. But, for the most part, they defined faith in a way that made Christ’s trustworthiness contingent on my ability to believe, and they read the Bible with a hermeneutic and a set of foregone conclusion that I felt limited Scripture’s capacity to speak in its fullness. One after another, I began to suspect that the doctrines that we took for granted in the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches—the inerrancy of Scripture, the rapture, the Four Spiritual Laws, the “Roman’s Road” to salvation—actually restricted or even contradicted the hope that they were intended to express. One could say that the separatist fundamentalist tradition into which I was trained and ordained led me away from itself.

But that’s a far cry from saying that I rejected it. I managed for a short time to sustain a picture of myself as clever critic of the dogmas I had grown up believing, but that conceit proved more false than anything that I had left behind. In truth, I am still bound to my former faith communities by the love for Jesus and the Scriptures that they instilled in me in the first place. Nor do I have any desire to uproot the seeds planted in me by people like Tony Loubet, Geraldine Clift, or myriad others whose Christlike spirit could not be reduced to doctrinal affirmations, and who still stand before me as models to follow. So even as I acknowledge a number of major shifts in my thinking over the years, I am also aware of a basic continuity running all the way through. I’m still, at heart, a Bible-thumping Baptist preacher who wants to follow Jesus. Only now I am also shaped by commitments to the ecumenicity of the Body of Christ, the prophetic indictment against socio-economic inequity, and the centrality of nonviolence to Jesus’ mission—commitments that were not emphasized in the churches of my past. Time and again, my understanding of God and the world around me has been abolished only to be lifted up into something greater.

This brings me to the uncomfortable relevance that the word Aufhebung has to my current situation, as I face the knowledge that, sooner than I wish, I myself will be abolished and lifted up. I don’t even know what this means—I don’t think anyone on one side of an Aufhebung can see what lies on the other. But, Barthian that I am, I have to understand it as an event permeated with grace, and therefore not something to be afraid of. This is, after all, the event that Jesus calls us to enact day after day as we lay down our lives for the sake of the gospel—that is, as we turn outward from ourselves, relinquish private ownership of our own personal existence, and participate in the life of God for the sake of the world. I won’t say that I’m not afraid—I certainly am—but on some level I know that I need not be. This is perhaps the consummation of every truthful and liberating turn I’ve been granted throughout my life up to this point.