Here’s what we have seen thus far in our series on a theopoetics of Exile: All humans feel an innate lack or void within ourselves. The serpent suggested to Eve in the Garden — and evangelicalism echoes this sentiment — that this sense of emptiness and incompleteness is not natural but foreign, and must be overcome by […]
Category: The Death of God
A Theopoetics of Exile: God’s Own Atheism
In this series we have seen that Jesus, by his anguished cry from the cross (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), utterly and completely subverted the American Gospel which promises that we can avoid the void if we just do X, Y, or Z. Rather than seeking to circumvent the darkness, Jesus plunged himself […]
A Theopoetics of Exile: The Deus Ex Machina
We are at the point in our series where we are considering the “death of God,” and I would be remiss if we didn’t pause and reflect upon Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s remarks on what he called “Christianity come of age.” In a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge written from prison on April 30, 1944, Bonhoeffer […]
A Theopoetics of Exile: The Death of God
We have seen thus far in this series that we as humans sense within ourselves a lack or a void, and further, that this void is intrinsic to the nature of reality itself. The idea, then (so prominent in Christian circles), that this sense of incompleteness is some unnatural intruder that can be overcome if we do […]