Narrative Prolepsis, Religion, and Sociobiology:
Public Theology Standpoint
Paul S. Chung
Director, distinguished full professor, International Public Theology in Forum-Center, Berkeley
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to connect Karl Barth’s theology of the intelligible universe within the doctrine of lights and words to Ted Peters’s proleptic theology of nature; such comparative study is carried out through an examination of Edmund Husserl’s theory of life-world.
In this multidisciplinary constellation, my primary objective is to elaborate on a public theology of natural science. Thus, I integrate religion, science, and sociobiology into the relevance of the public discourse and its elucidation.
As a result, it is crucial to redefine the prolepsis in terms of biblical narrative and life-world. In the process, the narrative approach to the biblical prolepsis critically addresses the Stoic principle of Logos, exposing its inadequacies. Life-world is the reservoir of meaning and truth which is paired with human consciousness of reflection, vivid present, and propension. So, biblical prolepsis is refined and narrated with God as the Source of creation, reconciliation, and eschatology.
Furthermore, I attempt to reconstruct Barth’s theology of divine action (concursus) in light of Peters’ postmodern holism. The latter serves as the foundation for his theology of nature which includes a critique of sociobiology. The articulated perspective on prolepsis questions sociobiology and its genetically based reasoning.
Introduction
In the biblical context, prolepsis is connected to the drama of narrative, which focuses on Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of God’s promise and future. Human time is theologically qualified in terms of God as the Source of the past, present, and future. The meaning of the promise of the future can be grasped in the expectation of the realized climax of Jesus Christ; his resurrection is intimately linked to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
In Pauline perspective, the Christian community, under the power of the Holy Spirit, lives between the vivid present of the living and ascended Jesus Christ (who continues to live within the body of the community) and the hope of Christ’s return to establish the final creation of the new heavens and earth.
As a result, the Christian faith is an eschatological form of hope; it is certain of what we hope and of what we do not see (Heb. 11:1). Hope never fails us because God has poured his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
However, it is critical to enhance the Pauline perspective in terms of narrative prolepsis because it is predicated on the dualities of reconciliation and eschatology. In the doublet ‘reconciliation-eschatology,’ reconciliation is not separated from eschatology, but there is a narrative distinction because eschatology refers to the final consummation.
The narrative prolepsis aligns with a public theology standpoint that accentuates bilingual or multilingual competency, communicative freedom, and public epistemology between the contextual, intercontextual, and universal.
The prolepsis of God’s kingdom is evident in Jesus’s use of secular parables, which suggests similarity-in-difference in his witness to the forthcoming Kingdom of God. Regarding bilinguality and communicative freedom, the parable-prolepsis characterizes biblical language, acknowledging its efficacy and capability in the interplay between context and intercontextuality within the universal.
This reframed definition of narrative prolepsis more accurately situates public theology within a cultural narrative framework when analyzing the interplay between science and religion. In particular, the encounter examines the importance of public theology in science with conceptual clarity.
Therefore, First, I integrate life-world and prolepsis in light of biblical narrative, and I elaborate on the cultural-linguistic model when dealing with science-religion engagement. In the process, it is vital to articulate a narrative sociology of multiple realities (Robert Bellah) with a phenomenology of embodiment (M. Merleau Ponty).
Second, I compare Barth’s theology of science and divine concursus to Peters’s theology of prolepsis, divine action, and postmodern holism. My intention is not to diminish the difference between Barth’s theology of reconciliation and Peters’s eschatology of prolepsis. Rather, it is to develop their own insights critically for a public theology of science and divine action.
Third, I examine Peters’s critique of sociobiology in connection with Debora Gordon, a systems biologist at Stanford. She challenges E.O. Wilson’s research with ants and genetic determinism, which is endowed with a political version of social Darwinism and its power absolutism.
In the epilogue, I conclude with a public theology of science, which is structured by sociological and hermeneutical arcs: multilingual competence, communicative freedom, and diverse epistemological realities. Public theology defends civil society, solidarity democracy, and the politics of recognition. All of this opposes a genetically determined view of life and its ideological interpellation of colonialism on civil society and democracy.
Construction: Life-world and Prolepsis
Prolepsis is a concept in post-Aristotelian Greek philosophy, especially developed among the Stoics. Pneuma pervades the physical body and rules the universe to provide sensory information to the soul, which is equipped with unified and rational elements (reason and intelligence). Prolepsis (precondition) is an innate inclination, as seen in the concept of God and the Good, which influences human ethical and rational action.
Prolepsis, on the other hand, is a figure of anticipation that represents the future in the present reality, making it easier to imagine a future event in present-minded prediction. It also implies that attention and memory are the essential defining variables in creating proleptic awareness of the future within the horizon of life-world.
Prolepsis in the narrative framework allows for the dialectical interplay between the present (here-and-now, or vivid description) and the past (there-and-then, or analepsis in flashback). It is significant to apply a literary device in narrative, specifically analepsis and prolepsis, to portray a story because such a device integrates the future impact into the present reality.
In a word, prolepsis involves activating rhetorical knowledge and expressing a human cognitive response to an unknown future event. It employs certain argument strategies to achieve rhetorical effect.[1]
The proleptic suite can be redefined in the manner of phenomenology (Edmund Husserl), which signifies prolepsis as an intentionality of protension. It synthesizes a radical reflection of the past for a vivid present (retention as a re-remembrance) through anticipation, which moves under the transcendental-immanent horizon and influence of the life-world; it is already given through language, culture, and religion.
The present is tied to the future, which appears gradually and partially in the stream of temporal consciousness. Therefore, prolepsis reasoning can be universally recognized in the human intelligent mind and correlates with world openness. Human awareness flows along the stream of time, condition, and emergence (like Heraclitus’s dialectics of eternal recurrence).
As a result, I correlate a Husserlian understanding of time consciousness and the diverse horizons of intentionality and meaning to Stoic philosophy and its emphasis on world openness and connectivity.
Furthermore, the Stoic idea of the seminal reason (logos spermatikos) underlines the cosmic source of order and influences Justine Martyr. For Justin Martyr, the Logos (John 1) exists as the logos spermatikos, which is found in the minds and hearts of all humans.
This perspective of the human mind’s attitude toward world openness implies that there may be a potential relationship between the seminal reason and prolepsis.
Nonetheless, the Stoic philosophy has not managed to explain the relationship between the past, present, and future in dealing with anamnesis (theologia crucis), reconciliation (life-world), and resurrection (vivid present) through the power of the Holy Spirit. This is because the Stoic mind does not reinforce a time-dynamic dimension of kairos in connection with the new heavens and earth.
In a biblical narrative, prolepsis refers to a rhetorical figure in the form of an argument strategy or method (proleptic suite) used to establish some future event inside the biblical setting of the vivid present (Ps. 87:1, 22:18, and Ezek. 1:1). Specifically, in Matt. 27:52, the resurrection of the dead occurred proleptically, which means it was vividly present at Christ’s death.
Thus, the living reality of the resurrection illuminates the meaning of the cross, such that anamnesis reasoning relates to the vivid present of the living Christ. This shapes trust in the hope for the believer’s resurrection and the last appearance of Christ.
The hope correlates with faith and defines theological time as the vivid present through the word and the Spirit (kairos), as opposed to quantitative time (chronos). God’s time arrives through faith. Thus, God’s time has the eschatological, future-oriented dimension of hope since it anticipates God’s promise.
It is essential to redefine and identify the prolepsis in terms of the biblical narrative of anamnesis (theologia crucis), reconciliation (life-world), and the resurrection of Jesus Christ (vivid present), whose presence is made real by the word and the Holy Spirit within the faith community and world openness.
The narrative prolepsis transforms the reality of Jesus’s death and resurrection into the fulfillment of the Jewish messianic expectations for the vivid present. Also, it identifies a horizon of anticipation within the framework of reconciliation and eschatology. Again, the doublet ‘reconciliation-eschatology’ does not separate reconciliation from eschatology in a narrative sense yet it maintains their distinction.
Between the times, prolepsis occurs when God places his Spirit in human hearts as a deposit or a pledge of what is to come (2 Cor. 1:22). The biblical prolepsis is founded on God’s promise, which means “yes” in Christ.
God’s future is grasped only with faith, though seen in a reflection as in a mirror, just as is present in the reality of Christ’s reconciliation and resurrection. We anticipate the future of God (the universal), which is brought into the discursive present in Christ’s resurrection and reconciliation. This is imparted to the faith in the public life of the church (the concrete).
A universal-concrete dialectic (Hegel) can be utilized to approach the prolepsis, reconciliation, and vivid present, including the anamnestic reasoning of God’s coming. This dialectic reinforces narrative prolepsis in the dynamic interaction between the contextual, intercontextual, and universal.
The contextual understanding of God’s word is consistent with intercontextual dialogue and discourse formation as it finds significance in sharing the universal consensus in identifying the church within: anamnesis of theologia crucis, reconciliation, vivid present of resurrection, and prolepsis of eschatology.
Therefore, prolepsis is rooted in reconciliation and eschatology. As a result, it is reinvigorating a theologically qualified time that defines it in terms of God’s promise of the new heavens and earth, as well as the actuality of the vivid present in the presence of the resurrected living Christ.
Meaning and Narrative Identity
The universe of speech and narrative has an interwoven web of meaning. Meaning is embodied and realized at the level of multiple realities in words, speech, and narrative, resulting in the establishment of a new and higher meaning as diverse horizons interact.
It implies that a story is retold by a human subject who constitutes it parts by pieces, both with intentionality and across an arc of meaning horizon. It identifies the human being as a narrative creature with creative freedom and a capacity for communication.
Robert Bellah, an American sociologist of religion, enriches the significance of religion with the input of narrative, whose truth comes from the coherence of the story as a whole. “Human beings are narrative creatures, and narrativity is at the heart of our identity.”[2]
A cultural narrative inquiry is paired with intentionality and considers the intentional arc in how we deal with the world, which is constantly influenced by how things show up in the world.
The intentional arc gives a narrative whole to sociological hermeneutics that includes religious practice, discourse, and belief systems. As a result, it reinforces the interplay between context, intercontext, and universal through the relationship between the concrete and the universal.
Similarly, the intentional “arc projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological, and moral situation.” The intentional arc in our being is situated in all these respects, bringing about “the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and motility.”[3]
Bellah’s sociology of multiple realities is viewed and developed within the spectrum of the intentional arc, and it acknowledges different types of narratives as embodied in the lives of victims throughout the history of evolution and progress. Subsequently, Walter Benjamin’s anamnesis reasoning deserves attention: “The thought of history’s countless victims [is] nothing more than stepping stones along the path of development.”[4]
This perspective presents a cultural narrative position that contrasts with the universal meta-discourse of religious pluralism: “All religions are different paths to the same God.”[5]
Who recognizes and affirms this as all the same God, totalizing other paths into the gray zone of relativist absolutism? Even in the Vedanta and Buddhist contexts, there is a conflict of interpretation when discussing religious discourse and its multiple realities.
Similarly, even theological-scientific knowledge remains partial and incomplete in its openness to God’s mystery and grace of the creation.
According to Christian Link, scientific epistemology, perception of God, and linguistic expression are not always accomplished in an empty place and timeless abstraction. However, these constellations are situation-related and embodied in the historical-social reality of human life.[6]
Scientific discourse is not objective or truthful in and of itself but rather carried out within the paradigm of the scientific community, constantly competing with other scientific programs. Scientific epistemology is shaped and influenced by cultural narrative and its significance in social and political settings that condition and influence the scientific knowledge system. This is subject to discourse formation, alteration, rupture, and transformation.
However, in the literary context, a narrative reorders a given story, reinterpreting its horizon and relevance in dealing with social-political conditions and challenges. In the biblical setting, the literary constellation is interwoven in the meaningful whole. Its synthesis flashes back to the past (anamnesis), narrates in the story (analepsis), or remains in the present while flashing forward (prolepsis horizon).
A biblical narrative, as it were, defines Christian identity and relevance in a way that is both open to and related to the world. The world does not absolve and exhaust the narrative. Rather, the narrative defines the meaning of the world, transforming it according to its identity, relevance, and promise.
Barth: Public Theology and Natural Science
Within the concept of narrative, I argue that Barth’s doctrine of lights and words in the doctrine of reconciliation reinforces the word of God in its universal effectiveness. It critically renews the traditional structure of seminal reason and prolepsis position in terms of natural scientific reasoning.
Barth argues that the scientific discovery of the intelligent cosmos is indispensable since we live by natural science and technology, which are based on usable working hypotheses and have valid formulas, indicating relative necessity.[7]
According to Barth, there are world logoi, as well as many other creaturely truths and intelligibilities. These are integrated and instituted to be conscribed in service to God, who fundamentally changes and renews the world. They shine as expressions of God’s one truth.[8]
The current reality in the theatre of creation serves God’s future, which shines on the process of continual creation in the system of complexity. As a result, a theological concept of continuing creation in the theatrum gloriae Dei can be seen as God creating the universe in an ongoing manner through the creativity of self-organizing life in its emergence and novelty.
Barth regards a biblical narrative of creation and continual creation as an extraordinary way of enhancing divine communication in the world of reconciliation, which is characterized by the freedom of divine action in mystery.
The created world serves as both a text to be deciphered and as its own reader and expositor, including the evolutionary ecological web of life. This is an important challenge for me to elaborate on public theology in dialogue with scientific achievements and technological rationality. In so doing, I will construct a new theological venue of divine action.
The intelligibility and intelligence of the divinely created universe and cosmos take numerous forms within the symbiotic network including the many, the particular, change, alteration, and diversity. This complexity of life is not reducible to mathematical or other rational patterns of law, which contradict mathematical formulation and the technological iron cage of the life-world.
According to Barth, God does not take away freedom, movement, process, and new beginnings in the evolutionary-ecological system, though it is nevertheless plagued by trial, error, extinct species, and pain. This viewpoint is less concerned with scientific deism or with the idea of God as a deliberate, intelligent designer. Instead, Barth explicates the extent to which God would be positioned in the simultaneous activity of grace and love, undergoing the life cycle of perpetual coming and going. It is “not becoming without perishing, but not perishing without new beginning.”[9]
This epistemic stance, I believe, affirms the relational God by providing a conceptual framework for properly reformulating creation out of nothing (nihilo) as creation ex emancipation (and later resurrection).
The last creation is God’s consummation of the universe in the form of the new heavens and earth, and its reality is present in our midst through the prolepsis of the resurrection and the Spirit’s deposit. It emphasizes God as the Source of time and redemption in a wider vision of initial creation, ongoing creation, and new creation in a network of connection.
This epistemic whole of God’s life articulates a biblical prolepsis that encompasses the past, present, and future of God. The light of the future of God shines upon the beginning (Rev. 22:1-5).
The biblical prolepsis and eschatology contribute to the renewal of Barth’s transcendentalist idea of God (totaliter aliter a la Kierkegaard). Now, the transcendental God is the source of the time accompanying the world (concursus, or the influx of divine causation into the world). This perspective advocates for a relational, distinct God who materially and socially changes and affects all things—and everything in them, as expressed by Helmut Gollwitzer and F. W. Marquardt—in God’s relationship with the world and humanity.
Ted Peters: Prolepsis and an Arrow of Time
Let us now turn to Ted Peters, who has developed a proleptic theology of God’s future. Peters begins with Easter, when the end of time appeared ahead of time, proleptically in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The resurrection of Jesus Christ lays the groundwork for Peters’s constructive thoughts about the future and advent.
The advent of God’s kingdom, which has already manifested itself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, represents the future renewal of all things. In this aspect, Peters recognizes the proleptic advent of the ultimate rule of God.[10]
Peters’s constructive method is based on Karl Rahner, embracing a cosmic, proleptic eschatology. The cosmos, once created, is not left to run its own path. Instead, the original creation is related to creatio continua under the guidance of God, who is free to alter the course of natural and historical events, creating new things in the future.[11]
Peters defines the relationship between the present state of circumstances and the ultimate future in terms of the prolepsis, which connects futurum and adventus. The prolepsis of connection emphasizes God’s arrival as an advent, implying that something entirely new will emerge.
As a result, Peters regards futurum (paired with venturum) as having a future effect in the sense of prolepsis. The future has an impact on us before God’s full advent. He associates the prolepsis with venturum, which means “the invasion of the present by the power of what is yet to come.”[12]
Peters’s prolepticism also integrates Ilya Prigogine’s idea of dissipative structures and the arrow of time into his eschatological panentheism. God’s creatio ex nihilo foresees God’s novum, or ultimate indwelling and rest (1 Cor. 15:28). (Here, I argue that Moltmann influences Peters’s proleptic eschatology.)
In any case, in Prigogine’s research on the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium, an arrow of time is irreversible on the macro scale, moving from the past through the present and into the future. This means that the universe is finite in time. It has a beginning and end, but that end does not necessarily imply a frozen death.
Rather, the increase in entropy in an open system far from equilibrium is linked to the ongoing creativity of the dynamic world through the interaction of randomness and chance. When it reaches a bifurcation point, it is indeterminate about a shift in future direction caused by fluctuations—whether it will disintegrate into further chaos or leap to a newer and higher level of order.[13]
I understand Peters’s synthesis of prolepsis (future impact) and an arrow of time in terms of reconciliation and the vivid present of the living Christ.
According to Prigogine, an arrow of time is connected with the emergence of a higher order of life in a state “far from equilibrium,” implying a definition of creatio continua. It supports the perception of the organism in a dynamic relationship with the environment.
God accompanies all creaturely life in concurrence, bestowing them with self-organization (autopoiesis), creativity, and contingency. The narrative prolepsis maintains its own place of future impact within the course of evolutionary-ecological complexity in terms of reconciliation.
The prolepsis impact occurs as the reality of new emergence in the vivid present in the course of continuing creation. It is evident in the dialectics of punctuated equilibrium and the emergence of novelty and innovation in the condition of nonlinear equilibrium or at the edge of bifurcation.
In sum, the scientific theory of dissipative structure can be articulated in terms of an ecological-emergent model. It assists public theology in engaging with systems biology and life-sciences through biblical prolepsis and narrative communication, which are interwoven with God’s creation, reconciliation, and eschatology.
Postmodern Holism and Double Agency of Concursus
Peters discusses the free-will defense of divine self-limitation, arguing that God freely limits divine power by allowing for creaturely self-determination. Thus, human beings may experience and exercise free-will in self-determination. The free-will position makes the case for natural selection as the mechanism for speciation. As a result, it tends towards tacit deism.
Against this trend, Peters endorses Barth’s theology of concursus in double agency, since God’s power is an expression of grace, making human freedom possible.[14] Within this theology of concursus, there is the influx of divine causation or operation upon secondary causes which do not destroy, but continually make free.
More than that, Peters advocates for the theological prolepsis, which is based on a postmodern notion of holism. The whole of creation is greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, underlying God’s creation from the future, divine action is in the form of top-down causation.[15]
Postmodern holism comes to terms with the systematic view of the significance of living organisms underlying the network interactions between whole and part. Holism, seen in the organismic view of life, helps us to elaborate on an aspect of dynamic interaction with other components.
I think that the downward causality can be open to the term autopoiesis because biological systems (such as cells) are a product of their own production in circular structures. They are in a circular reproduction of the cell.[16]
I define autopoiesis in terms of continual creation in contrast to process philosophy. Process without structure leads to a dialectics of flow and becomes an eternal recurrence. A structural understanding of evolutionary theory (Stephen J. Gould) implies a new emergence of life, which receives the flow of energy and spiritual inspiration from God’s Life.
A proleptic holism remains critical in Barth’s insight into the natural and cosmic existence of interrelationship, a whole-part system: “The general divides off into the particular and the particular is subordinated to the general. The whole is only in the part, yet the part, too, is only in the whole.”[17]
A two-way interaction of the whole and part sees certain patterns of creaturely beings. For example, it sees recurrence in alteration, the identical in the different, and ordered qualities, diversities, and relationships within the course of an unbroken and never-ceasing cycle (Gen. 8:22).
In the two-way interaction of wholes and parts, God acts through the matrix of secondary causes (world theatre), respecting human freedom and the lawfulness and free activity of the created order for divine glory in Barth’s concurrence in double agency. Therefore, “the relative autonomy of creaturely activity” collaborates with God’s free and gracious love.[18]
The evolutionary, secondary cause implies that divine action as the primary cause in the sense of concursus continually makes the activity of the creature into a free, emergent, and creative cooperation with God.[19]
At the level of theological anthropology, a human being created in the image of God is God’s collaborator, as seen in the double agency of concurrence. The systemic view of the relationship between parts and wholes remains central in Barth’s ecological view of evolution. This intelligible universe involves the emergence, or the new beginning of a new form of order, having its own existence, rhythm, and contrariety—“bound by law yet also freely active.”[20]
It is significant to bring Barth’s double agency in concurrence into discussion with divine action, which may find consonance with postmodern holism in the organismic understanding of life. This articulated perspective critically renews the American neo-orthodox picture of Barth, which is reiterated in Ian Barber’s abstract formulation of divine sovereignty and creature autonomy.[21]
A doublet ‘divine sovereignty and creature autonomy’ can be defined as the correlation between divine grace and creaturely existence, which articulates that God is accompanying its freedom, autonomy, and creativity. This conceptual clarity contradicts biological reductionism, which dictates and determines the complexity of life at the genetic level.
Prolepsis, Systems Biology, and Sociobiology
In Evolution from Creation to New Creation (together with Martinez Hewlett, pp. 59-69), Peters undertakes a genealogical analysis of Edward O. Wilson’s work on Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975)[22] by looking back at social Darwinism and the eugenic program in the American context. This espousal had been buried in the sub-consciousness of the biology academy, but it was unprecedentedly challenged by the arrival of Wilson’s book in 1975, drawing upon his work on the colony of ants.
Combined with the neo-Darwinian principle of population and genes, Wilson presents a thesis for a strong genetic component of the behavior of social insects. From this, he advocates for a similar understanding of human behavior. Wilson’s biological determinism searches genetic factors structuring social behavior in animals while making the argument for deciphering social behavior in humans. A reaction in the academic world erupted: Should social Darwinism, and even the revival of Nazism, haunt us once more?
Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin at Harvard University discerned the dangerous political ideology and social implication underlying the sociobiological claims. They protested such a discipline centering on genetic determinism, sexism, and racial injustice.
Indeed, Wilson's position retains a genetically determined view of human behavior as subject to natural selection. Fundamentally, he undermines how an organism and its phenotypic variation operate in dynamic interaction within the ecological landscape.
Furthermore, in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson attempts to redefine all human behavior according to biological reductionism and genetic determinism. He was labeled a Darwinian fanatic, aligning himself with Richard Dawkins’s central concept of the selfish gene. According to Dawkins’s theory, selfishness in the DNA works in the driver's seat, dictating every organism and determining human culture.
Thus, the genotype entirely controls the phenotype of the organism. The organism serves as the vehicle of DNA’s replication at the level of both animal and human society. If genes select social groups and kin, its consequences lead to a sociobiological logic that racism, xenophobia, and genocide are also natural according to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest.
Wilson believes in Consilience that the unity of knowledge (including human culture, ethics, morality, and religion) can be located within science in recourse to a genetic explanation. Thereby, he implies that genes hold culture on a very long leash, impacting the human gene pool.
Against Wilson’s sociobiology, Lewontin writes convincingly in The Triple Helix:“Just as there can be no organism without an environment, so there can be no environment without an organism... The earth will process on its axis and produce periodic glacial and interglacial ages, volcanoes will erupt... But glacial streams, volcanic ash deposits, and pools of water... are physical conditions from which environments may be built... The environment of an organism is the penumbra of external conditions that are relevant to it because it has effective interactions with those aspects of the outer world.” [23]
In support of Lewontin, Deborah Gordon, a system biologist at Stanford University, extends beyond the gene myth of sociobiology. Her ecological approach to the collective behavior of ants is carried out in the dynamic interaction regulating system. It became an alternative to E. O. Wilson’s novel Anthill (2010) in an American academic study.
Wilson depicts the ants as having agency. However, they are compelled to sacrifice in military strategy for the queen who is a fountainhead of the colony. They are programmed and driven by an instinct machine.
Aside from that, Deborah Gordon contends that a real ant colony has no primary goal and functions as a complex system without central control. No ant cares about the queen’s death.[24]
Wilson’s portrayal of an ant colony (Anthill Ch. 22)[25] makes me uneasy (and even disturbed) because his assessment of the ant colony contains a metaphorical political overtone that is ideologically harmful. He romanticizes ant colonies and military conflict in the context of slave-making colonies. A vanquished ant colony’s queen is not allowed to live and is immediately destroyed. The conqueror is determined by its desire for absolute sovereignty, which cannot tolerate an alien queen; a surviving queen threatens that sovereignty.
His discourse of ‘absolute imperative for absolute sovereignty’ is not merely figuratively communicated but applied to political ideology. This reminds me of a dictum of the war of all against all (Bellum omnium contra omnes).
This political philosophy provides an ideological foundation for Carl Schmitt’s collaboration with National Socialism to justify state authoritarianism through totalitarian dictatorship. It underpins a biopolitical strategy that establishes class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in a hieratical manner within a social and cultural stratification.
Epilogue from Public Theology
In this paper, I attempted to address a narrative prolepsis by identifying God as the source of the past, present, and future. It is crucial to examine Barth’s ecological systemic view of the universe and divine action (concurrence) in light of Peters’s theology of prolepsis and postmodern holism.
Reinterpreting Barth in the framework of divine action cuts through restrictions of his notion of totalter aliter in a Kierkegaardian sense by bringing it down to the double agency of God’s concurrence with creaturely life. Barth’s double agency may have its significance in Peters’s theology of prolepsis and postmodern holism. It emphasizes the spectrum of self-organization and creativity in autopoiesis when dealing with the dissipative structure. Similarly, it underscores its emergence of invocation and novum in light of creatio continua.
Throughout my argument, I expand on a public theology of science while employing the ecological-emergent paradigm to promote bilingual competence, communicative freedom, and openness to a multireligious society.
Narrative prolepsis focuses on Barth’s irregular and unconventional thought-form. This reinforces both communicative freedom and the extraordinary ways of testifying to God’s mystery in the reconciled world. Insofar as the created universe is seen as both a text to be deciphered and its own reader and expositor, Barth’s theology of lights and words is compatible with Peters’s proleptic theology of nature and postmodern holism. This requires a project of public theology of sentence in the narrative framework.
This viewpoint is aligned with public theology in dealing with the contextual, the intercontexual, and the universal, as elucidated in the sociological hermeneutical arc when dealing with narrative identity, relevance, and openness to the world. Biblical narrative shapes and influences the identity of a faith community, the meaning of life, and world openness, while engaging with divine action in the world through concurrence, prolepsis, and postmodern holism.
This public theology of science integrates Barth’s concept of totaliter aliter into God’s relationship with the world through reconciliation, resurrection, and an eschatology of hope. It emphasizes the correlation between the future impact of prolepsis and the vivid present of the living Christ for our engagement in public spheres to critically evaluate discourse and power relations.
The public theology of science questions the regime of sociobiology and its biological determinism, allowing public theology to continue its insights when confronted with its alliance with political and social-cultural issues.
In science and religion interactions, it is vital to emphasize theological anthropology in which a human being is a collaborator with God. This follows in the footsteps of Paul’s theology of grace and solidarity with subaltern (1 Cor. 1:28—“God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things… to nullify the things that are”).
In advocacy for the subaltern, public theology defends civil society, inclusive democracy, common good governance, and eco-justice, while defeating ideological interpellation to absolute imperative and absolute sovereignty.
[1] Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher, “Rhetorical Figures as Argument Schemes—The Proleptic Suite,” Argument & Computation, vol. 8. no.3, pp.233-252, 2017.
[2] Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 34.
[3] M. Merleau-Ponty, Perception of the World (London: Routledge, 1962), 136.
[4] Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 598.
[5] Ibid., 603.
[6] Christian Link, In welchen Sinne sind theologische Aussagen wahr?: Zum Streit zwischen Glaube und Wissen (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2003), 38.
[7] Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Creation. IV/3.1: The Doctrine of Reconciliation (London: T. & T. Clark, 2004), 166.
[8] Ibid.,157.
[9] Ibid.,144.
[10] Ted Peters, God—The World’s Future: Systematic Theology for a New Era. 3rd ed. (Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2015), 321.
[11] Ibid., 320.
[12] Ibid., 321.
[13] Ibid., 132.
[14] Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett. Evolution from Creation to New Creation: Conflict, Conversation, and Convergence (Nashville: Abingdon, 2003), 130.
[15] Peters, God—The World’s Future: 142. 146.
[16] H. Maturana, “Autopoiesis.” in Autopoiesis: A Theory of Living Organization, ed. Zeleny, M. (New York: Elsevier North Holland Inc., 1981), 21-32.
[17] Church Dogmatics IV/3.1: 144.
[18] Church Dogmatics III/3: 97.
[19] Church Dogmatics 4/3.l: 110.
[20] Ibid., 149.
[21] I. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. Rev. and exp. ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000), 311.
[22] Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975).
[23] R. Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment (Harvard University Press, 2002), 48-9.
[24] Gordon, “Colonial Studies” BOSTONREVIEW.NET, Sep/Oct. 2010.
[25] Wilson, Anthill: A Novel. (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010).