Christian theology can and should interact with modern philosophical trends and ideas to remain relevant to contemporary society. The roots of critical engagement between theology and philosophy are ancient, going back to the nature of the Triune God and the Bible itself and his broad kingdom redemptive commission to the Church. Scripture is finite, anchored in space and time, but the truths within it can generate responses to new situations. Theology sits alongside other disciplines in a relationship of ‘first among (...) equals’, benefitting from and critiquing human thought. (shrink)

The article shows that in Foucault’s late 1970s and early 1980s analyses of pastoral, conductive power—most essentially in early and medieval Christianity—the issue of sight and visual perception recurs and occupies a crucial status. In Foucault’s discussion, these Christian relations of power, knowledge, and truth are attached with a surveying gaze that is both totalizing as well as individualizing, one that is mobilized by the thrust towards perfect visibility, transparency, and illumination of the subject turned into an object. The intention (...) is also to develop Foucault’s analysis further, by demonstrating how Christian, providential government can be and actually has been detached from the totalizing modality of optics, and instead become articulated with a very different sort of sight and seeing, one that is non-totalizing and affirms its own limits. The article maintains that from this angle, Foucault’s conception of modern, economic-liberal governmentality has essential convergences with the Christian form of providential government, even though Foucault himself leaves these convergences partly inarticulate. (shrink)

The internal resistance to religious forms of power is often at issue in Michel Foucault’s genealogy of Christianity. For this anti-clerical Nietzschean, religion is, like science, always a battle over bodies and souls. In his 1978 Collège de France lectures, he traced the nature and descent of an apparatus of “pastoral power” characterized by confession, direction, obedience, and sacrifice. Governmental rationality, both individualizing and totalizing, is its modern descendant. At different moments, Foucault rather infamously opposed to the pastorate and governmentality (...) such ethico-political spiritualities as the Iranian Revolution and ancient Greek ascesis, but he also took care to identify numerous forms of resistance specific and internal to Christianity itself. His lecture of 1 March 1978 outlined five examples of “insurrections of conduct”: “eschatology, Scripture, mysticism, the community, and ascesis.” I will detail Foucault’s analysis of pastoral counter-conducts, and explore how he sets up the nature and stakes of this tension within Christianity and its secular kin. (shrink)