The FP Interview: Gaunilo, Blogging Theologian

FP: Who is Gaunilo?

G: I am a 30 year old Chicagoan who misses my home state of Colorado nearly every day. I have an M.Div., but currently am in exile in the wastelands of cubicle America until I begin a Ph.D. program in Theological Studies at Vanderbilt this fall, intending to teach theology afterward. I'm married to a wonderful wife of 10 years (yes, 10!). I'm passionate about theology, philosophy, literature and film, and beer. And I'm pretty ardent in my politics, too.

FP: When and why did you start your Blog, Gaunilo’s Island?

G: I started the blog in January of this year. I guess you could call it a New Year's resolution (although my resolutions, like providence, tend be discovered retroactively); but it was compelled by the fact that I'd been reading some of the great personal blogs and saw what a tremendous creative possibility blogging represented. It actually wasn't until I started blogging that I even begin to seek out the (vibrant) world of Christian blogging, however.

I felt utterly alone - a lapsed evangelical, progressive in politics, passionate about good theology - and wanted to see what kind of presence we former fundies might have on the internet. I wanted the possibility of dialogue and a public discovery of a better way forward in genuine faith, intellectual honesty, and political integrity.


FP: I think I remember Gaunilo from my medieval intellectual history class--wasn’t he a bit of a skeptic who said imagining the Perfect Being was no different from imagining the Perfect Island-or something like that? I should just ask, tell us about the very learned name of your blog.

G: Good memory - I'm surprised I've never been asked this before! Gaunilo is a more or less obscure 11th century monk (Belgian, as I recall) whose only real claim to fame is his dispute with Anselm, arguably the most well-known scholastic philosopher after Aquinas. Anselm in the Proslogion invented an argument (if it is an argument, that's been debated) for God's existence that, put crudely, goes like this: God is the being greater than which nothing can be conceived; if we can conceive of this being, it must exist, because if it did not, we would be able to conceive of something even greater that did exist, and there's nothing greater than God. In short, it's part of the nature of God to have the property of necessary existence. Gaunilo replied in "Reply on the Behalf of a Fool" that "Well, I can conceive of a perfect island, but that doesn't mean it exists." It's actually not a very good reply, and kind of misses the point; but I like his iconoclasm, his B.S.-meter, as it were.

Also, the name kind of appeals to my proclivity for indeterminancy: does it mean I'm trying to live on this (illusory) perfect island? Am I trying to be a pretension-demolishing gadfly like Gaunilo? Or do my sympathies lie with Anselm and the idea of the perfect island is ironic? I'm not even sure.


FP: Here’s a quote from your About Me information: I'm a mainstream Christian and theologian in training trying to recover from eight years of conservative evangelicalism, and celebrating being an "out" blue-stater. This website is an online exercise in the reconciliation of opposites, the recovery of wholeness, and the exploration of just how bizarre life is…

It seems that you’ve been making huge strides in “recovering wholeness” based upon the really interesting conversations you’ve been having with your former seminary classmates and other more conservative Christians. Does it feel that way to you, too?

G: Starting the blog was premised on a kind of philosophical wager: that only in the act of self-narration could a unity be found to reconcile the wild oppositions I felt within myself - oppositions connected with my exile from conservative Christianity. And this narration had to occur in a public forum in order to keep it from being mere narcissism (althought blogging is of course narcissistic by nature), but also so that it was contestable - that these oppositions could be worked out in dialogue.

And yes, it has been healing, remarkably so. I've been able to move from polemicizing - which, as is often the case, was as much about me as it was about any notional opponent - to dialogue. And I've also gained a greater sense of wholeness - I'm much more confident in my theological, ecclesial, and political identity. Which of course is a prerequisite for serious dialogue, the one really important task of our current situation. In a culture like ours marked by oppositional rhetoric, an ideology of binaries, the church is losing the ability to think of itself as the body of Christ; we're importing facile polarizations that reduce the church to an agent in the culture wars - or rather, import the culture wars within the church. Of course, division and schism has always been an American ecclesial speciality. And it's a heresy. We really don't need more demonizing of the other side, we need the ability to recall the humanity and Christianity of our opponent and try to discern to presence of the Spirit in our midst. Which isn't to say of course that strong words aren't at times needed. They are, and I use them. But they should be used with surgical moderation and exactitude. I don't think I really understood that until I started to go about trying to get beyond the demons of my past. As long as I was fulminating against it, without trying to understand it and those who remain committed to conservative forms of thought, it still was defining and dominating me.

FP: You offered some powerful criticism of the effect of the rigid radio orthodoxy of many on the Christian Right. “ Theology here is like a stained glass window, looking not to itself but to the light beyond, or better, an icon whose only purpose is to focus the imagination and the eyes of faith beyond itself to God. I could say so much more. How evangelicalism is so deeply individualistic. How incredibly misogynistic the majority of conservative evangelicals allow themselves to be. How easily racism and cultural imperialism manifest themselves in evangelical churches and missions. How the social justice imperatives of the prophets are forgotten entirely for the practically gnostic emphasis on "saving souls for Christ". How the evangelical churches are, to me, incomprehensibly short-sighted in how they align themselves in the current political climate - supporting a deeply unjust war, casting off the imperative to care for creation, doing their very best to ensure that homosexuals will never attend their churches…”

As someone who knows conservative evangelicals from the inside--how does the sincere faith of people on the right come to have these negative and seemingly distorted and un-Christian impacts?

G: This is such a tough question. In many senses, I think it will be an ongoing research project in my academic life to figure out just this issue. First, though, you're right to say we should immediately acknowledge the sincerity of conservatives. Understanding is going to have to start there.

I think much of the answer lies in the history of American Christianity, a history of fairly reactionary populism, that really came to a head in the Fundamentalist movement at the beginning of the century. Everything in our current climate in the church has its roots there. The rebellion of the fundamentalists against science and its perceived undermining of the veracity of Scripture, against the modernists controlling the mainline denominations, and against the expansion of the American urban centers marks a very clear dividing line. The fundamentalists latched on to a few core beliefs - the Fundamentals. For really the first time in history, the only legitimate mark of a true Christian was having correct belief, according to a rigid code. The results of that are disastrous, as I've written about, because that means that absolute demarcations have to be drawn, and a Christianity organized around boundaries rather than the center is a Christianity that defines itself by excluding the other.

The curious thing about fundamentals is that they often are marginal issues. The original fundamentalists spent all kinds of time defending miracles. Inerrancy debates tend to be over insignificant trivia (how many times did the rooster crow?). Modern evangelicals get up in arms about predestination, women's ordination, the timing of the "rapture," and divine foreknowledge, none of which are even remotely necessary for salvation in anyone's book. And, of course, homosexuality. My theory on this is that these are all identity signifiers - they are boundary conditions that function to define who's "in" and who's "out." They purport to show with one or two easy check boxes where a person stands theologically, and therefore, whether they're orthodox or heretical. It's a convenient way of excluding an opponent's argument from the outset. It's also a means of isolating the conservative church from the culture. Conservative evangelicals tell a narrative of cultural decline - their eschatology demands it - and the isolation of the church as a lonely light in a dying world. You can't fight everything at once, so an issue, say homosexuality, comes to be a signifier for the enormity of the of the perceived cultural oppresion and apostasy. It becomes, in a sense, the distillation of the evil of the realm of the ungodly.

What I haven't figured out is how fundamentalism got so closely aligned with patriotism in this country, with a revisionist history and everything. Certainly there's a political disenchantment - undergoing persecution is also a necessary ingredient of the fundamentalist mindset. It's amazing how much the rhetoric of persecution and marginalization is still used today, with this president and Congress, but the language is built into the theological system. But how it was decided that the Republican party was an adequate stand-in for the Kingdom of God I really don't know. But realizing that - in November of last year - was the last straw in my break with evangelicalism.


FP: Who are your favorite thinkers and writers in the areas of theology and politics?

G: I come to politics from theology, so I have embarrassingly few political writers to cite, although I do think that "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" should be at the top of the list for inclusion if the canon were ever opened.

I first understood the possibility of a Christianity engaged in rather than isolated from culture from reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In The Cost of Discipleship he writes of Luther's realization that the call of God was taking him, not into the cloister, but out of the monastery and into the world, that the Christian as a Christian is a citizen of this world, not the world to come. Everything that is radical in Bonhoeffer - the plot against Hitler, religionless Christianity, the suffering God - it's all there in nuce.

Jurgen Moltmann taught me, as he did for a generation, how closely connected the theological and the political is - how the future of the coming God contradicts and transforms the suffering of the present.

Though we quarrel, Karl Barth was the first Christian thinker I read that made me want to become a theologian.

I think that the late Paul Ricoeur, carrying on one aspect of Heidegger's legacy, gave us one of the most well-articulated attempts to come to an understanding of human being-in-the-world. He was certainly unique in the degree to which he thought together Christianity and rigorous philosophy, and his last works especially focused on justice, history, and politics.

Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre have both been key thinkers in helping me understand modernity and the western tradition of liberal democracy (the latter perhaps not in the way he intends!). Wolfhart Pannenberg is probably the most rigorous contemporary Christian theologian I've read, and a subject of my admiration for his ecumenical work.

FP: Many people feel frustrated by both the perception of religious people and with the reality of the Bush Administration, how can they best overcome these feelings and present a positive alternative?

G: I'll take that, if I can, as asking about the theological possibilites I see for a progressive Christianity and the politics it might engender. I think first - and this is the initial insight that led me out of fundamentalism - that we have to understand and preach that Christianity is a religion of liberation, in every sense of that term. Liberation from sin, angst, and isolation; liberation from oppression and poverty; liberation from ideology and dogmatism. Of course fundamentalists aver they're about liberation too - they'll send a 16 year old boy to a homosexual reeducation camp to "liberate" him from sin. But liberation does not entail a negation of identity - it's an affirmation of identity and a freedom to be. If we can somehow communicate the fact that Christian ethics is about realization and not repression, justice and not judgment, we'll have come a long way in our culture.

The second key thing is for Christians to be and present a new community. The perception of my generation and the one following us is that the church is a controlling, stultifying institution - the "spiritual but not religious" idea. We have to make the case that spirituality must be connected to tradition and community if it is not to be a pacifying illusion. We have to be a church that is really about love and the life of Christ. Which means that we have to really look at how we're perceived. If there's a perception that the church is all about rules, that the church hates gays, that the church doesn't believe in dinosaurs, and there is, that says a lot about the hermeneutic of the faith that we signify. We have get real about our values and our focus as Christians and the culture has to see this.

The final thing is to seriously examine what it means to be prophetic. And this is where progressives, as the minority, are now called upon to fill this role, because the prophet always speaks from the state of exclusion. A prophet's first duty is to critique her own side first, and I hope and pray that progressives will be as quick to criticize injustices of a Democratic president or Congress in the future as they are the outrages of the current administration and legislators. Of course, we must critique, and vigorously so, the unjust actions and policies of Bush, DeLay, and Frist. But we must be wary of an uncritical alliance with the political left. An uncritical alliance means acceptance of an ideology, and we in the church term that idolatry. It happened to the Christian Right, and God forbid it happen to the Left. It remains a truth that the church can and must present a third way, an alternative in our current political scene. Much of the country is very disenchanted with our two party system. We have to be able to give voice to that. That's not for a second to back away from political engagement - far from it. Critical distance does not entail active engagement. It strengthens it, because it comes from a purified and self-conscious awareness of the task at hand.


FP: Are there one or two posts you are most pleased with?

G: I'd certainly have to point out my three-part "An Open Letter to my Evangelical Friends" (Parts One, Two, Three), which was an attempt to give a full statement of the reasons I left evangelicalism.

I also wrote two posts, "The Future of an Illusion" and "Or the Illusion of a Future?" in relation to a interblog debate I got involved with on ethics and relativism, which segued into a discussion of dialogue and tolerance. The first is a summary of the discussion and a series of questions for each side, and the latter my own response to those issues.