Or, Jones and the
Theological Worlds
A Taxonomy of
Religions Post
Behind each set of eyes is profound mystery, a tender, unique, fragile, and special creation which identifies the self as theological artist. And in such artistry, the self is always a social creature.
W. Paul Jones, Theological Worlds
I started
the series comparing Stephen Prothero’s God
is Not One and W. Paul Jones’s 1989 Theological
Worlds; this was a typical bit of arrogance on my part, since I hadn’t
read the latter. The review was enough for my purposes, of course, and I think
it all turned out well enough. But I have now read Theological Worlds, and there’s more to say about it.
To begin, theological is
perhaps inaccurate, or not reflective of how we tend to use the word. The
Worlds Jones describes are not only Christian or religious ones; a lot of the
examples he uses are non-religious (Camus and Sartre and Marx feature often).
Each of these Worlds is characterized on one pole by an obsessio—literally, “to besiege,” here a central concern or anxiety
for a person—and on the other pole by a corresponding epiphania—that idea or experience that promises to absorb the obsessio and make it tolerable. The obsessio is greater than any merely human
response; the epiphania, then, is more-than-human. For Jones, the word and idea
of God does not have a specific
content so much as a functional meaning: for each of us, God is that which can
promise epiphania. For some of us, the obsessio is more prominent; for others,
the epiphania is. Thus while Jones’s Theological
Worlds is written from a strictly Christian perspective, the worlds
described are theological in a strictly functional sense: even a
dyed-in-the-wool atheist has a “theology” if “God” refers merely to that which
makes life livable. A Christian, for Jones, is a person who identifies Jesus of
Nazareth (as either a historical figure or as a legend) as God in this sense.
According to the introduction, Jones used typical social
studies methods to determine what these Worlds most commonly look like: he
interviewed a number of people, determined common threads, looked to find these
threads articulated in theological and cultural literature, formulated Five
hypothesized worlds using the patterns that arose, and then ran those worlds
past another independent set of subjects to test their validity. I can’t speak
to the method further than that, but I will try to talk about the usefulness of
this typology in a moment. But first, let’s look at the Five Worlds he
discovered.
People living in World
One are struck, and horrified, by the way in which contingency determines
the universe. Everything seems so arbitrary; so much has happened by chance,
and it could easily have happened another way. The fact that I am alive right
now, that I did not die five seconds ago, is true only by luck. The fact that
the churning, teeming mass of evolutionary history spat out creatures capable
of self-awareness was neither necessary nor even likely, as far as we know. If
we look up, we see a jumble of planets and stars strung out in great empty
spaces, none of which have anything to do with us; if we look inward, we see
atoms and quarks and fundamental forces, all of them bumping about with no
regard for you or me. The world seems pointless. A person in World One lives as
an Alien; the longing Alien’s obsessio
is thus a sense of isolation
experienced as abandonment by whoever
or whatever made us. Any epiphania must involve a new way of seeing the world
as containing hidden mystery: epiphania is a glimpse of homecoming or reunion with
some great plan hidden behind the veil. Jones mentions Paul Tillich, Kafka, E.T., the painter El Greco, and
Beethoven’s Opus 132; I would mention Northrop
Frye and H. P. Lovecraft, noting that Lovecraft seems wholly without
epiphania.
People living in World
Two are much more concerned with history than the universe. In particular,
history is marked by war and violence; that is, history is marked by evil. The evil is so pervasive and
resistant to change that anyone in this World quickly realizes the problem isn’t
people but the system itself. People do evil but only because of the systems
that control them, and even those systems are themselves the products of death
(or entropy or, in a fancier term, the Nihil). In many Worlds death can come as
a boon; in World Two, death is nothing but bad, and against both death and
history one can do nothing but fight. A person in World Two lives as a Warrior; the angry Warrior’s obsessio is
chaos experienced as the evil and
violence of history. Because of this focus on the present world, the epiphania
cannot be a promise fulfilled in an afterlife. Instead, the epiphania must take
place here, at the end of history and as a product and redemption of history, a
sort of New Earth. Jones mentions
Karl Barth, Karl Marx, Moby Dick, Van
Gogh, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5; I would mention Richard Beck’s powers
and principalities (and almost everything else Beck has written) and Scott
Alexander’s Meditations
on Moloch.
People living in World
Three do not find their obsession in the world around them: for people in
World Three, the problem lies within. Or, really, the problem is that there
isn’t much of a within at all. They feel empty, or unfulfilled, or unlovable
(or, I would add, worthless). They
feel like they are wearing a mask and that if anyone saw what was beneath that
mask, they would be horrified—perhaps because whatever lies under that mask is
loathsome, or perhaps because there’s just nothing under there at all. This World
is marked with regret at lost opportunities, and the kind of exposure these
people fear is not death but nakedness. And yet, whatever drive a
person in this world might feel to make something of themselves, they usually
feel guilty whenever they do so: they aren’t worth their own attentions. Unlike
people in other Worlds, inhabitants of World Three do not necessarily
generalize their problem to others. A person in World Three is an Outcast, not because anyone cast them
out but because they cast themselves out, at least emotionally speaking; the
aching Outcast’s obsessio is self-estrangement
experienced as impotence or
emptiness. The only epiphania that can rescue a person in World Three is an enrichment that allows them to make
something of themselves, either in Sartre’s sense of self-creation through
every decision or in Kierkegaard’s sense that each person has a unique identity
given to them by God which they must discover and become, or something in
between these views. Jones also mentions Tolstoy, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I
would add that Echo’s character arc in Dollhouse
is pretty much pure epiphania of this sort.
People living in World
Four also find that the problem with everything is inside: that problem is
that they’re awful. They are selfish
and arrogant and striving and cruel, but so is everyone else. In order to
thrive, we must compete; we must kill to eat; whatever we do, we do damage. So
each and everyone one of us is guilty and condemned. Even in our attempts to
make reparations, though, we are guilty: we try to make amends because we are
afraid of punishment. Reason becomes only a tool for rationalization; charity
becomes a way of promoting ourselves. A person in World Four is thus a Fugitive; the guilty Fugitive’s obsessio
is idolatry, specifically the
idolatry of self-interest and arrogance. Any epiphania must then be a kind of forgiveness, in particular one unearned.
Even accepting forgiveness, though, is difficult, since accepting forgiveness
is a selfish act; in order to be free of guilt, the epiphania must in some
sense give such a person both forgiveness and the ability to accept it
unselfishly. Jones mentions Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, and American Gothic. The Buffy-spinoff Angel hovers between this World and World Two, I think.
People living in World
Five are not worried about any of those things; the obsessios of the other
worlds are perhaps out of reach for those in World Five. Here, people are just
overwhelmed with suffering. This is the world of hard living, of slaves and
miners and poverty. Hope, in such a world, is always false: hope is merely the
prelude to disappointment. Suffering is perpetual, and it can always get worse.
There’s a certain pride to this world, at times: one mustn’t pity the old or
the scarred, because they survived. A
person in World Five is a Victim; the
overwhelmed Victim’s obsessio is engulfment,
engulfment in life itself (which is to say, suffering). Epiphania cannot take
the form of hope here; epiphania is only endurance
and survival. Often this is a
survival in a community, where people suffer with (com-passion) one another if they cannot suffer for them.
Jones mentions Elie Wiesel, Tennessee Williams, and Rembrandt. I would mention
strains of Buddhism.
So for a Christian in each of these worlds, it is Jesus, the
Christ, that offers epiphania, but in very different ways. In World One, Jesus
offers access to the Creator who made the world and made it good; Christ offers
reunion with God. In World Two, Jesus promises to make a New Earth and cast
down empires; Christ is God entering history. In World Three, Jesus tells us
that we are beloved by God and invites us to grow and be fulfilled in him;
Christ is license to love yourself so that you can love your neighbour. In
World Four, Jesus condemns us and then forgives us; Christ is God taking on
guilt and punishment so that we do not have to. In World Five, Jesus is
crucified in his compassion for us; Christ is God suffering with us in
solidarity.
One of the problems in Christianity is that most people
consider their own world to be the
legitimate one. When an evangelist turns to someone and says, “Jesus washes
your sins away,” they are not going to interest anyone who does not live in
World Four. When a progressive mainline church promises to help congregants
grow and affirm themselves, anyone who does not live in World Three will
probably roll their eyes at best and mutter about children starving in Africa
at worst. (That said, many World Three people will do the same, since the problem is that they don't believe in self-affirmation or growth.) Or, when an atheist points to the randomness of the world and says
there are no traces of God’s plan, no one living outside of World One will even
see the point of the objection. (This might well be what happened when I wrote
about how wonderful
it is to be an alien.) Thus so much discourse is just people talking past
one another; Jones looks to fix this.
However, every example Jones gives in this book suggests
that no one lives in a single World; every person has their own World, which is some mix of the
obessios and epiphanias of the five he describes. Jones himself is mostly in
World Two, with World One’s fear of abandonment, raised in a small World Five
town which deeply impacted him. These five worlds are more like clusters of
data points, patterns arising from all these idiosyncrasies aggregated. No one,
or almost no one, is a pure type.
There’s a lot more to say about these Worlds, I think, that
I don’t have space to say: Jones does not at any point discuss the relation
between these Worlds and what the world is actually
like, though this might be outside the scope of his project; psychoanalysis
lurks throughout the whole book, often without consideration; race and gender
play sophisticated but strange and problematic roles in his discussion; his
ecclesiology, which relies heavily on sub-congregations segregating people with
different Worlds, seems pretty improbable and maybe undesirable, especially
when no one is a pure type.
What I want to spend a moment asking, though, is how
exhaustive these Worlds are. In 1989, perhaps, these were the dominant Worlds;
were there smaller ones that he did not detect? Were there others in other
countries, or cultures, that did not enter his sample? And are there other ones
now? Might there be others in the future? What could they look like? Or are
these five Worlds representative of some deep and fundamental orientations,
exhausting all possibilities? I can maybe imagine a spectrum between the
Human/Self and Universe/Outside: World Three is entirely concerned with the
human’s own self, and the Outcast makes no claims about anyone else at all;
World One locates the problem entirely outside the human, in the Universe’s
lack of human meaning; between them, World Four focuses on universal human
sin, World Five on a harsh world, and World Two on a system of humans shaped by
death to be destructive. I don’t know. This seems to be a stretch, but since it’s
an empirical question, it’s one we can test.
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