“But I Mean Real Jails”

An instructive exchange took place between Jacques Derrida (the philosopher whose work serves as the methodological centerpiece of Marius Timmann Mjaaland’s intriguing book The Hidden God) and the American philosopher Mark C. Taylor (whose work has also been heavily influenced by Derrida) at the conclusion of Taylor’s paper at a conference at Villanova University. Taylor, in his paper, had offered a kind of phenomenological account of the symbolic economies at play in the architecture of Las Vegas. Derrida responded by asking about the applicability of Taylor’s framework to other American institutions—specifically, prisons. The exchange that follows is instructive:

Derrida: Could you imagine the same thing in relation to American jails?

Taylor [after a discursus on the film Wall Street]: “On the issues of prisons and light, Foucault only began to glimpse the scale of panopticism that is on display in Las Vegas. In a certain sense, part of what goes on in the prison is this kind of surveillance.”

Derrida: “But I mean real jails.”

Taylor: “I know you do. But I want to say that part of what you begin to see on display in Vegas is surveillance. Surveillance in Vegas is amazing. Those casinos are virtual jails. There is not one move you make there that is not on display. Now I understand the difference between the casino as jail and real jails.”

Derrida: “But Vegas is not a real prison.”

Taylor: “That way of putting the matter is too simple. The question we need to ask is, what is the relationship between so-called real jails and the kind of society or culture constructed around Las Vegas? . . . It seems to me that part of what is given to us to think by what is on display in Vegas is precisely the kind of social structure that creates the prison industry.”1

This interchange is so instructive because it shows that, for all of Derrida’s linguistic and grammatological playfulness throughout his canon, he was ultimately quite concerned with the concrete, material structures of justice and injustice that shape embodied experience within given contexts. While Taylor’s points about the parallels between the ephemera of Vegas and the literal bars of prisons might be well-taken, particularly towards the end of this career Derrida became less interested in relegating questions of violence, marginalization, and disempowerment to the realm of pure textuality and instead began aggressively pursuing questions around concrete structures of justice. Despite enduring some mockery from both the left and the right for insisting that justice is the one undeconstructible, in his last writings Derrida persisted in his confidence that such concretely messianic notions as the democracy “to come”2 and a kindness that could encompass issues from animal rights to immigration could be the enduring legacy of deconstruction.

This suggests, among other things, that any Derridean analysis of texts that have had decisive impact upon Western legacies of legitimation, violence, and political maneuvering—and Luther’s writings certainly are such texts, as Mjaaland ably shows—must not lose sight of the “real jails,” of the concrete interaction between textual strategies and the meeting of actual bodies. It is along those lines that I would like to pursue further dialogue with Mjaaland and his text.

Cross Formation

To what extent is Mjaaland’s Luther embodied and not simply textual? There are a number of places within The Hidden God where this question can be brought to bear, but I want to focus specifically on Mjaaland’s discussion of Luther’s theology of the cross. In Mjaaland’s discussion of the Heidelberg Disputation, he writes:

The destruction by the cross is not merely a singular event which gives rise to a particular conclusion; it is the dynamic between building up and destroying, between inflating and deflating, which characterizes this scriptural space between a reading of scripture guided by metaphysics and a reading where not only Christ but even the reader is suffering under the cross. The tension corresponds precisely to the tension between construction and destruction of sense: The reader is again and again constructing a meaning within the text, which according to Luther (and I think he might speak from experience here) tends to confirm her own goodness and superiority, as well as the infinite superiority of God’s power and justice. Yet this construction needs to be crushed and demolished, Luther argues, before the text can be perceived in mere passivity.3

On my reading, Mjaaland is exactly right—within the confines of the sort of textual play of reading and rereading that he finds recommended in Luther—to suggest that Luther wants the life of the Christian reader to be caught up in exactly the kind of narrative doubling that such a reading suggests: the Word of God mediated in the text itself works a physical and visceral effect upon what Luther would call the “old Adam” and its ties to economies of merit, glory, and earned justification (“works righteousness”). As I have sought to argue elsewhere, contrary to the fashionable deployment of theologia crucis by a number of contemporary theologians, the theology of the cross never functions in Luther as a free-floating epistemological principle to be wielded for deconstructive purposes apart from a very specific formation within the Christian life.4

This formation for Luther, however, is embodied precisely because it is tied to concrete, material things: namely church (which for Luther might have been “invisible” in certain historical and contemporary perspective but was in fact never disembodied; his Genesis lectures make clear that is serves as a concrete thin read line of faithful belief throughout history) and sacraments. In Mjaaland’s discussion of Luther’s hermeneutics, for instance, what significance is Luther’s insistence over against Zwingli that the “is” of the “this is my body” signifies real presence that has the same effect of destroying the old Adam and raising the sinner to life via God’s forgiveness as does the preached and proclaimed word? How does the insistence upon the disruptive presence of the actual “is” of Christ’s body relate to the textual strategies that Mjaaland sees at work in that same God’s disruption of metaphysical strategies of assured presence?

For Luther, after all, the sacraments were precisely indexed to the hidden God to the extent that the sacraments are the place where God promises to be present benevolently rather than destructively. God can be found anywhere, thought Luther, but in true Exodus 33 fashion God (on Luther’s account) protects us from the obliterating force of God’s majestic presence by granting material sites where God’s presence can forgive and save rather than destroy. The sacraments, to a certain extent, were Luther’s own theological domestication of the hidden God, but in such a way that preserves the divine wildness outside the strictures of these formative material constraints on piety. This, among other things, was what was at stake in the debates with Zwingli.

This is a body. This is a jail. Text takes Luther only so far, just as it only takes us so far is we are truly concerned about how power and sovereignty operate in our own particular “states of exception.” If bodies are killing and bodies are dying, then what embodiment does the destruction of metaphysical stratagems take, and to what ends?

Pre-Theology?

Now, it may be that that sort of question falls on the wrong side of the disciplinary lines that Mjaaland stakes out when he indicates his desire to engage in pre-theological analysis of Luther. In a revealing passage, he clarifies the stakes of this engagement as follows:

It is a question of perspective, hence of theory, of how you look at things, how you approach the text, in order to find solutions and certitude or the opposite, to identify and scrutinize the problems raised—even if they are not solved, and thus simply preserved as problems, as quandaries that might trigger the reader to read otherwise. Readers of Luther continue to look for descriptions of God, for clarifications, for definitions, and for interpretations. Whether they intend to criticize his work or look for an authority to follow, they are looking for answers. I have been looking for the questions raised by [these texts]. . . . This original difference is in one respect theological, but again it is pre-theological, since it precedes the logos of theology. It forces us to take into account the concealment of the divine, and the conditions for speaking or not speaking about God, whenever we offer critique or defense of religion, whenever we look for revelation, experience, or interpretation, whenever we discuss theism or atheism, the dead or the living God.5

Here, and at other points in the book, Mjaaland is clear that “theology” for him signifies, among other things, the stratagem of either dismissing or domesticating the Deus absconditus in such a way that the radical destructive/deconstructive potential of the idea is lost. Here contemporary theologians such as Eberhard Jüngel and Gerhard Ebeling come in for particular criticism, as well as the thinkers of the twentieth-century “Luther Renaissance” whose various foundations in Kant, Hegel, and Ritschl left them unwilling to engage God’s hiddenness in any conceptually daring way.

As it happens, I have substantial sympathy for Mjaaland’s critiques here, and in raising questions of Luther’s sacramentology and ecclesiology my intent is not to suggest that other contemporary ways of reading Luther (such as emphasizing his “Catholicity,” as a number of modern interpreters have done)6 somehow are necessary as a corrective to the systematic strands from which Mjaaland demurs. But it remains the case that the range of Luther scholarship from theologians proper that The Hidden God surveys is relatively narrow given the size of the field, and so it brings focus to the question: must theology always and everywhere truck in the sort of domestication and quest for certainty based on univocal reading strategies that Mjaaland seeks to undo?

Suppose the answer is yes, and that for Mjaaland (as with Martin Hägglund’s reading of Derrida) the hiddenness of God must keep the grammatology at work in interpreting Luther strictly pre-theological (or perhaps even anti-theological).7 As Paul Hinlicky has pointed out,8 Luther is capacious enough to where we all have to sort out “our Luther” amidst diffuse and in many cases inconsistent lines of thought within his corpus, and Mjaaland has found an interesting Luther for our consideration.

But the question remains: if the framework that keeps the Deus absconditus undomesticated and “destructive” in its full metaphysical potential must needs be pre-theological, then I would like to hear more from Mjaaland about “actual prisons,” that is, actual material structures of formation that cause readers to be formed by texts such as Luther’s to the benefit of our planet rather than its destruction. Mjaaland’s sensitive readings of the Peasant Revolt and his references to terrorism in our own time indicate that his text has an agenda beyond textual playfulness; as with Derrida, perhaps, there is a core of longed-for justice “to come” that haunts Mjaaland’s Luther as well. Can any institution, any formation, any embodied structure produce readers that heal rather than harm, that bend swords rather than wield them? If Heidegger was at all right that “only a God can help,” can a fully wild Deus absconditus help us now?

Fundamentalism is not the most fashionable of issues, neither in philosophical theology nor in hermeneutics. And still, fundamentalism is probably one of the essential topics of our times, not only because fundamentalism has revealed its ugly violent face in so many political contexts over the last decades, but also because it seems to be lurking behind all sorts of nihilistic relativisms that we encounter today, in the so-called public sphere. It is therefore worthwhile to underscore, already at the outset, that in Marius Timmann Mjaaland’s book The Hidden God I tend to see a kind of philosophical theological prolegomenon to a much-needed critical theory of fundamentalism, although this important aspect of Mjaaland’s effort is not as explicit, developed and stringent as one could have wished.

In what follows, therefore, I have the ambition to discuss in what way the logic of fundamentalism is tied closely to the critical stance that Mjaaland relates to Martin Luther’s famous discovery of a new way to approach the Bible as scripture. The particular problem that I will delve into concerns the performativity of Luther’s reading strategies, such as these are described by Mjaaland. Let me start with a sketch of my general understanding of Mjaaland’s important book, just to make my brief points as lucid as possible. Needless to say, I do not offer anything like a full summary, only a trajectory that I find important in order to make sense of my further considerations on performativity, fundamentalism and critical resistance.

Destruction and Grammatology

In his book The Hidden God, Mjaaland’s overarching aim is to fill a gap in the scholarship on Luther, namely to give voice to the philosophical side of Luther’s theological texts. This task is developed from the point of view of Luther’s christological idea of destruction of metaphysics, which leads on to a conception of the subject based on scripture, questioning ontological essentialism. These two key concepts—destruction and scripture—pave the way for a substantial dialogue with modern philosophical discourse, especially Heidegger and Derrida, in which destruction, deconstruction and writing come forth as important means to shed new light on the philosophical underpinnings of Luther’s theological discourse. In light of these philosophical resources, Luther’s much-debated distinction between the hidden and the revealed God becomes crucial, and Mjaaland challenges some of the leading modern theological interpretations of Luther (e.g., Barth, Ebeling, Jüngel and Sölle) by arguing that the hidden God should not be escaped as a theologically threatening category, but rather embraced as a “pre-theological” (107) path to a serious understanding of Luther’s controversial thought.

The main focus is set on Luther’s ideas as developed in the Heidelberg Disputation (1518) and in De servo arbitrio (1525), and the substantial point of departure lies in a grammatological understanding of Luther’s interpretative experience—his discovery—of the objective genitive in iustistia Dei (dikaiosyne Theou, in St Paul’s Letter to the Romans 1:17 and 3:21–2), which leads Luther to the conclusion that revelation has been slumbering behind misreadings over the centuries. The discovery concerns human righteousness in its passive aspect, that is, when God’s righteousness is what human being is given by God, hence, not only a righteousness that is God’s, in the subjective sense. Mjaaland argues that this tension through the grammatical ambivalence opens up the space for Luther’s destruction of metaphysics, since it quite radically destabilizes the subjective focus on actively being righteous like God, to a passive receiving of the gift of God’s righteousness, a righteousness coram deo. The anthropological implication is that human being coram mundo is still sinful and utterly dependent on forces outside of her own self.

It is the strict scriptural focus that produces this possibility of both/and in Luther’s thought, and Mjaaland links this to Luther’s intricate discussions about the clarity of scripture, according to which scripture is given the central role for opening up one’s heart to the divine gift (inner clarity), and simultaneously being out of human control in the sense that its external structure and concreteness has to be respected as given. This externality (outer clarity) is put in favor of subjective attempts to understand the text according to dogmatic, moral or other presuppositions. As a whole, the concept of the clarity of scripture thus secures it as true revelation given to the needing and receiving human being.

In relation to Derrida, clarity and difference between the revealed and the hidden God idea is discussed in terms of “signification,” “writing of difference,” “spacing of writing,” or “Arch-writing.” Mjaaland sees a tentative relationship between Luther’s distinction and Derrida’s différance, insofar as the text—and its spaced signs—is the primary source for revelation, never the reading subject or an objectively construed reality that the subject stands in more or less direct contact with through the senses or through reason. The difference between writing and reality always precedes any understanding of reality. Written text embodies this difference in itself and, to simplify, this scriptural approach secures for Luther a fundamentally deconstructive approach to tradition. All this is set up against the dominant hermeneutic understanding of text and tradition in modern Protestant theology. This explains Mjaaland’s recurring skepticism concerning for instance Eberhard Jüngel’s attempt to do away with the hiddenness of God. Mjaaland takes the side of deconstructive thought against hermeneutical theology.

Fundamentalism

One of the many interesting aspects of Mjaaland’s endeavor is that he critically connects his grammatological understanding to the question of subjectivism and fundamentalism in the Protestant tradition and beyond. He does so via a discussion of apocalyptic thought, which for Luther is used as a pattern to unmask the illegitimate and contingent authority of kings and clerics who put their earthly totalitarian systems of thought in front of revelation. For Luther scripture and its clarity thus also become the necessary underpinning for any condemnation and destruction of illegitimate religious and social powers.

Now, there is a sharp difference detected between this political aspect of Luther’s thought and the thought of the revolutionary reformer Thomas Müntzer, whose apocalyptic and spiritualistic perspective was of a different kind. To Müntzer, who indeed also favored the principle of sola scriptura, the interpretation of scripture had always to be mediated by the needs of the present, the situation. The interpretation of this need in the situation was to be made by the revolutionary leadership. Hence, Luther’s critical apocalyptic stance against the self-confident earthly leaders, the anti-Christs, could be turned against the revolutionary elite of his own times. This means that both the pope and the revolutionary radicals could be harshly condemned through apocalyptic comparison.

In Mjaaland’s view the sectarian revolutionary apocalyptic reading of Müntzer forms a pattern that is typical for modernity at large, and the recent fundamentalist violence at the global scene can be seen in precisely this light. There are thus several patterns of reformation at play and in competition in modernity, and Luther’s deus absconditus is generally theorized by Mjaaland as “a distinction between seclusion and revelation” (178–79), which forms a fundamental scar of difference. “The place of such difference is thereby identified as the topos of critical reflection” (179).

But—and this is where I see one interesting lacuna in the argument—the Lutheran and Protestant traditions have in themselves often turned into sheer sectarian fundamentalist traditions, by means of a logic that on the one hand draws substantially precisely on the mentioned difference in God, the place of criticism, and, yet, on the other hand, abandons this (self-)critical space by imposing the content of the discovery as a single premise for interpretation. Hence, the apocalyptic violence of Müntzer’s revolutionary Protestantism is much in line with other forms of Protestantism, initially much closer to the Lutheran stance.

Mjaaland does not deny this in principle, and he touches upon the problem. First in relation to the dominant modern strand of Protestant hermeneutics, where the textual approach of Luther, via the Cartesian subject, has been exchanged for a theory of understanding, according to which the subject has the last word on the meaningfulness of a certain interpretation. And, second, in relation to the general tendency in modern Protestant theology to refer to the Bible as a source for simple and plain truth claims.

However, the internal relationship between Luther’s foundational discovery of a place for radical ambiguity and self-criticism, on the one hand, and the inherent Protestant temptation to abandon this place, on the other, can be theorized further in a way that may problematize the stability of Mjaaland’s distinctions.

Performativity

Despite this preliminary criticism, I am very sympathetic to Mjaaland’s project and I do not exaggerate when I say that the book is among the most interesting and intriguing texts on Luther’s thought that I have ever come across. However, as the suggestion above indicates, there are problems to be discussed further, of which one has to do with some kind of circularity, creating a tangible uncertainty in relation to some of the points that the author makes.

When, for instance in the last part of the book, the theme of political theology is discussed more explicitly, in relation to apocalyptic thought, is strikes me that Mjaaland has great difficulties of being clear whether his project is normative or descriptive. On the one hand, as I have already touched upon, he offers a rather detailed narrative of Müntzer, and he also makes clear that political theological violence trickles down in historical reality independently of the particular view of the Reformation project that is favored. Hence, Luther’s grammatical subtleties do not in any way stand up as a secure bulwark against practical political violence. To claim that would indeed be to misread Mjaaland. On the other hand, however, Mjaaland’s argument as a whole seems to indicate that he prefers and even idealizes Luther’s standpoint, at least close to, and at least as long as it is philosophically decoded through the Derridean perspective of différance. The reason for this seems to be precisely that the Lutheran discovery displaces the subject, opens up a critical space, and thus points in the direction of a humbler and less violent conception or reality.

So, what is the problem of normativity in this? The question of violence is actually only the last question in a chain of other questions, or debatable areas, linking back to the scriptural approach. Let me briefly summarize this chain:

1. The question about the relationship between, on the one hand, a grammatical discovery in general, opening up a new space, destructing old readings and regimes of reading, and restructuring the possibilities of readings; and, on the other hand, a substantial theological discovery through the grammatical layer, generating a new theological insight with strong anthropological consequences.
2. This question leads to a more general question about performativity of interpretative discoveries. If a discovery is done on the interpretative level, meaning that a series of earlier options becomes obsolete, cannot this be understood in terms of the performativity of the interpretative discovery itself, let’s say in the sense of Thomas Kuhn’s idea of the revolutionary character of scientific discoveries, which henceforth changes the very preconditions for a particular branch of science?
3. If that’s the case, should not the actual theological and anthropological consequences of Luther’s discovery be understood less in terms of a general function of grammar and interpretation, and more as a paradigmatic discovery of one possible understanding of human being as radically decentered; an understanding of decisive consequences for many other issues, and with foundational weight for important branches of subsequent theorizing, such as the grammatology of Derrida?
4. Does not this mean that the Lutheran discovery first and foremost is a discovery of a new way of understanding human being as radically sinful in her saved state, that is, a new dogma of human being that actually will become a hindrance for self-criticism—at least when it comes in its theological shape, although it also carries with it a philosophical and atheistic residual that may be traced in several subsequent atheist philosophies, especially in the Nietzschean tradition.
5. This, finally, can be seen in the practical political violence of historical Protestantism, both in its rationalistic and its irrationalistic versions.

Hence, what I mean by performativity is that a discovery of grammatical kind such as Mjaaland finds in Luther can never appear in the clean sense presupposed by Mjaaland’s “place of difference.” It is Luther’s particular, contingent and theologically substantial discovery of human being in relation to God that performs or creates the conditions for the grammatological reading, which then can be interpreted atheistically as an empty place of radical preponderant difference. The grammatological discovery is thus Mjaaland’s rather than Luther’s.

The brute violence of Protestantism in history is not something alien to Luther’s foundational theological and anthropological discovery, as Mjaaland himself seems to realize when he effectively describes the relationship between Luther’s propagandistic strategies, his cunning rhetoric, and the contemporary public sphere, “with a collapse in the absolute distinction between public and private, and insulting cross-references between various styles, languages, public religions, and authorities” (153).

What I would like to push further, therefore, is the idea that Luther’s discovery, besides its theological distinctions, has fundamental anthropological implications, which will become normative for all other acts of interpretation and deliberation in the Lutheran universe. There is a crude performative moment in this discovery, a creation of a new universe of interpretative possibilities that will indeed underpin violet fundamentalism but—and this is where Mjaaland’s analysis becomes so helpful in order to develop serious anti-fundamentalist and anti-relativist strategies—also open up a potential space of severe criticism of precisely this form of fundamentalism.

What I miss, therefore, is probably only a more careful and serious theoretical elaboration of the internal dialectic between the critical (and self-critical) space that the grammatological (and nihilistic?) reading opens up, and the crude substantial violence that theologically precedes the philosophical need for critique and self-critique. In my view—not for a second denying the urgent need for a critical and self-critical space—there just seems to be no empty, “pre-theological” space beyond or before the violent theo-political performativity, creating the paradigm for five centuries of brutality in the Protestant world.

Introduction

It would be difficult to write a traditional book review that does sufficient justice to the richness of Marius Timmann Mjaaland’s book The Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy, and Political Theology. The book has so many dimensions and its questions are far-ranging, which attracts the attention of many different disciplines. The contributions or challenges of the book could hardly be detailed in a single conversation. Therefore, this work is ideal for the Syndicate forum and is an important invitation to its readers “to get philosophical” with Luther. In the following, I will articulate some of the observations and questions regarding the book’s basic orientation, trusting that the conversation on the details will take place in the back-and-forth discussion in the forum with the author’s input.1

Overview

Mjaaland leads readers of Luther into the deep waters of metaphysical thought that promises to demolish the confessionally-built dams and inspires truth-seeking that goes beyond the often stifling church language and Luther-slogans. Many of them have become too “comfortable,” which has caused us to become too complacent to understand truly their deeper meaning. The deconstructive mission of Mjaaland’s book unveils the radical offensive nature of Luther’s fundamental points, which were first and foremost philosophical, but were also deeply political. We are all familiar with these expressions: “sola scriptura,” “the hidden God,” “theology of the cross,” “justification by faith,” etc. These are philosophically loaded expressions, just as they are political. The moment that these expression cease to bear that dual energy, they are in danger of becoming dead pretty words—and, may I say, they become quite impossible to teach!

This premise alone is a worthy conversation starter and central for contemporary classrooms where Luther is the dish: bringing together the words “Luther,” “philosophy,” and “political theology.” For some these words hardly jell together (I could name actual persons off the bat, presenting opposing views, but let me digress). I am with the author on his fundamental position. Namely, if Luther was not contributing to questions of philosophy and if his theology did not promise to change the world—if it was not political—then what would be the point of still getting excited about him?

If the words “philosophy” and “political theology” were outside of the parameters of a meaningful discourse on Luther, what would that imply? Is Luther best reserved as a historical figure or as a compendium of systematic doctrines that promise not to break from the sixteenth century? Is Luther best left in the late medieval ages, as a theological voice of reform who indisputably caused an avalanche of many casualties and new formation, while failing as a political theologian (if taking the Peasant’s War as the criteria, as often is the case)?

The stakes are high with the question “to whom does Luther belong?” Here, I will mention only a few of the obvious concerns: (1) The future of Luther scholarship, about which the questions are many: What is considered important and tenable in Luther? Who are Luther scholars’ conversation partners? What methodologies are to be used? And finally, who might have any interest in that in the future of Luther scholarship? (2) The possibility of constructive transformative theological engagement that reforms our world today—that is, a construction of a theology that is life-giving and reality-altering. Luther certainly believed that his theology was the latter—was not that the whole point of the Reformation?

Mjaaland engages a variety of philosophers, most of whom are associated with deconstruction, to demonstrate the political promise of Luther’s central theological arguments that open up to their fullest potential when they are approached philosophically. Mjaaland presents Luther as a truly unique thinker, who nevertheless falls short in his ability to convince his philosophically oriented contemporary counterparts (e.g., Erasmus of Rotterdam). The author suggests tracks of Luther’s influence in the orientation of several continental philosophers since his time (e.g., Heidegger and his followers). To fully converse with Mjaaland and test his arguments, one needs to spend some valuable time with thinkers such as Derrida, Gadamer, and Ebeling. While I am aware, with the author, of the criticism of flying through the centuries and places, looking for those meta-connecting places where one can engage another thinker with the philosophical questions, pushing aside contextual considerations, I ultimately find these encounters constructive for the big picture. This kind of scholarship has worked well with systematicians (whatever that word means today) but causes major “hiccups” for historically oriented scholars. That said, Mjaaland could have dealt more with the historical circumstances that led to Luther’s disassociation with the world of philosophy, or so it seems. This would have probably constituted a more historically oriented chapter.

Evaluation

While Mjaaland’s work focuses on complex theological concepts and ideas, these ideas were products of human beings who operated in particular times and places. Given that theology and philosophy are “human efforts” with language that always has its particularities to consider, the work would have been strengthened if the author had given more attention to the historical circumstances that produced these ideas. Such work would add nuance to the criteria of evaluating a philosopher’s value for the future. For example, because both Althaus and Heidegger are known for their Nazi-affiliation, it is problematic in a post-Holocaust world to simply refer to their “words” as if their politics did not matter—especially so given the intent of the book to connect the philosophical and the political. My words are not meant as criticism here, as I understand the author’s chosen methodology and also personally do believe in the value of time-traveling (even shamelessly so). My point here is that the addition of a historical context may be able to help situate the reader.

Mjaaland could have also engaged feminist scholars’ work, e.g., Jennifer Hockenbery Dragseth, Christine Helmer, Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen, Caryn Riswold, Daphne Hampson, and Sarah Coakley. Especially given the deep ambitions articulated in the book, the deconstructive/reconstructive feminist theological work would have greatly enhanced the discourse. Right now, a big wheel is missing in that regard. Related to this omission, I am puzzled regarding the use of male pronouns in the book. For a book that highlights the significance of language and theological grammar, that carefully scrutinizes every word and “iota” used, what could be the reason for those remnant “man” and “he” sentences? This is not merely a question of grammar. It is about more than “just pronouns.”

Among Luther scholars there appears to be a renewed interest in Luther’s exegetical method. Mjaaland enters this dialogue with his assessment of how Luther—“a scriptural thinker and a grammatologist” (16)—read the Scriptures and for what reason he did so. Without deeply engaging the Scriptures themselves, Mjaaland seeks to explain Luther’s method and its benefits philosophically vis-à-vis his overarching question about the hidden God. Drawing particularly from the beloved Heidelberg Disputation (1518), Luther’s attentiveness to the grammar is presented as the path to God-knowledge that, actually, consists of less knowing and more unknowing—a tension Luther explains from the cross that also serves as a hermeneutical key of sorts.

Luther’s criticism of his generation’s scholastic formulations and assertions about God was a significant act of destruction. A bold move, unpopular, utterly radical! He was onto something deeper there that became lost in the shuffle, in the shadow of the fascination about his criticism of the abusive selling of indulgences and the “economic logic” (27). What was also lost in the aftermath of such tragedies as the Peasants War(s) and Luther pulling back from his potential role as a social reformer was the politically charged and dangerous nature of his Heidelberg Disputation, the reading of which has become somewhat diluted in the time since Luther.

The way to know God for Luther is in the Scriptures, thus the importance of working with the grammar and translation. In order to reach this revelation, we need to approach the Scriptures without knowing or predetermining what we are looking for. If I understand Mjaaland’s thesis correctly, with Luther, we cannot expect to find God or see how God really “looks” like, but rather we can be certain of finding ourselves in a space where God speaks as God wants. It is this encounter that leads to a transformation that can be political. God remains hidden for the finite beings but that hiddenness per se is a discovery and a revelation, of which God is in full control and from which the human observer is passively benefitting.

As long as I’m reading Mjaaland correctly, I share his assessment that for Luther, the hiddenness of God is best understood as a space for a (I’d say holy) discourse with and within the Scriptures, where the reader is not in control but needs to remain open to the seemingly contradictory, opposite meanings. The simple principle of sola Scriptura becomes quite complex, and becomes less a matter of a law or a rule. Instead, it becomes more of a signpost that points to the Word as the voice, the subject, the revealer of what is being revealed, or the writer of what is written. For Luther, scripture is its own interpreter, “being interpreted by itself” (50).

Luther embraces the kind of approach that echoes the radical deconstruction necessities of our time. The conversation points with thinkers like Derrida are obvious. The political consequences of reading the Scriptures with such openness “to be illuminated” and to focus on the grammar as the specific way to understand them originate from these spaces of encounter. One way to explain this event or encounter is philosophical, which is Mjaaland’s chosen language. Another, I might suggest, is the mystical language of negation. As Mjaaland discusses, the Dionysian model is an invitation for the mystics to join the conversation as full-fledged partners with equally trustworthy ways of “knowing.” Mjaaland does not use the word “spiritual” but that word might well be considered in the effort to describe the space that belongs to all, per Luther’s egalitarian grace-grammar-induced inclinations.2

Conclusion

To conclude, I will consider a couple of Mjaaland’s statements where he suggests new directions for the well-rehearsed topics of Luther’s theology. Although they are well-rehearsed, they deserve critical reconsideration. They truly inspire, if we hear Luther for what he really was saying:

First, on reading scripture, Mjaaland writes that “Luther insists on a change of perspective: Reading and understanding a text is not a question of what you understand, but of how the world proceeds in the light of scripture” (14). His question “what if sola scriptura originally initiated a critical, interdisciplinary discussion about the conditions for both philosophy and theology” promises to end the beating of the old horse called “word alone,” so to speak. In other words, it sets new questions of Luther’s originality as a philosopher grammatologist and also stresses the importance of reading scripture in the midst of our own experience, as Luther himself practiced. To this end, it is indeed helpful to remember that “sola scriptura was a slogan with the purpose of liberating [my emphasis] the text from the institutional control of its meaning” (24). We appear to be constantly struggling against different mechanisms which seek to control rather than to liberate the readers of scripture in hearing what the word speaks for us to do. Sounds political—and that tends to make Luther’s associates nervous, just as he himself was nervous about the political implications and dangers of his own theology.

Second, on the question of the deus absconditus, Mjaaland concludes with Luther that “the problem of hiddenness cannot merely be located to the doctrine of God, as was often the case within theological discussions of the issue. The problem should at least be articulated as a more generic one, a problem concerning the origin and place of theory, including philosophical inquiry and the theory of texts” (19). In other words, Luther needs to be liberated from the clutches of the dogmatists. There are plenty of reasons for us to return to Luther for the purposes of “what he was up to,” with the promise of being intellectually stimulated. I agree with Mjaaland: “It would be incorrect to say that Luther rejects metaphysics and metaphysical arguments altogether. On the contrary: He struggles with metaphysics in many respects, and the passages where he struggles most intensively with metaphysical notions are also the ones that are philosophically most interesting” (39).

For Luther, scripture was scandalous and offensive (62), as was the theologizing of Luther. To dilute the scandal of Luther would be a shame and it would be to keep Luther in a closet—and scripture’s meaning hidden to us. For Luther to speak to a modern person—to heed his call to go “beyond” the tradition (35)—we need to liberate Luther in order to meet him under new terms, perhaps the very terms Mjaaland has presented us. For us to do this kind of work, we need to be a little bit like Luther, a little bit mad. Mjaaland, along with Luther, reminds that madness and foolishness are prerequisites for good philosophy (65). Let this be an open invitation, then, for all of us to be foolish and utterly mad in our search for the deeper meanings that ever haunt us.

One of the many merits of Derrida’s 1993 study Specters of Marx was the revelation of the hidden Marx. At the very moment when Europe felt it was over and done with Marx, about the last thing one would expect to come down the pike was a thoroughgoing investigation of the remaining philosophical value of Marx. And yet this was precisely what Derrida offered his readers, albeit in a uniquely Derridean manner: not in the sense of a straightforward defense of the Marxian legacy, but in the form of a reading of Marx against Marx; of Marx the critical philosopher against Marx the historical materialist.1 A couple of years later, Derrida repeated the same strike with regard to Freud. Just as psychoanalytical therapeutic traditions were being pushed to the margins by CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and a growing emphasis on evidence-based methods, Derrida set out to defend the hidden Freud. Not Freud the positivist Aufklärer, so often derided for his stubborn defense of psychoanalysis as a science, but rather Freud the incisive critic of civilization who still today offers invaluable tools for deconstructing the rationalistic hubris of certain scientific and above all quasi-scientific discourses.2

Among the many great authorships that Derrida engaged with throughout his career—from Plato to Shakespeare, from Hegel to Levinas—he never got down to writing anything lengthier on Luther. Had he done so, I am quite sure it would have been something very much akin to Marius Timmann Mjaaland’s The Hidden God. The title notwithstanding, this is not so much a book on the hidden God as it is a book on the hidden Luther, a marvelous reading of Luther against Luther, of the critical proto-phenomenologist Luther against the political theologian who at crucial moments transgressed the fine line (drawn by himself) between worldly and spiritual matters and encouraged the most violent deeds (be it against the peasants or the Jews) with the most disastrous consequences (mass slaughter of poor people, widespread pogroms).

Writing from a traditional stronghold of Lutheran theology, Lund—once the site of the Lundensian school, featuring prominent figures such as Anders Nygren and Gustaf Aulén—I find this book extremely refreshing. As the city is gearing up for the climax of the Reformation Jubilee, voices tend to get more and more polarized between those who see in Luther the founder of all that is good and bright in the Scandinavian societies and those who find in the Reformer nothing but a sinister anti-Semite and betrayer of any truly liberating ideals. Rarely is Luther seen in all his complexity, and even more seldom is the effort made to read Luther against the grain.3 Timmann Mjaaland’s venture to read Luther as a critical philosopher, even as the originator of critical philosophy as we know it from Kant to Derrida, is therefore a both thought-provoking and ingenious strike.

My endeavor in this essay is to delve deeper into what is hidden behind the philosophical Luther that Timmann Mjaaland so lucidly brings to the fore. Admittedly, there is no need for a Sherlock Holmes here. Timmann Mjaaland makes no secret that much of his inspiration is taken from Derrida’s grammatology. This is also what makes the project both original and innovative. In applying Derrida’s early concept of writing (écriture) to Luther’s theology, Timmann Mjaaland achieves two things.

First, he breaks open and expands Luther’s notion of scripture. As is well known, the sola scriptura principle was for Luther a decisive argument in his critique of tradition. This strong assertion of the authority of the Bible has usually been analyzed in terms of a theology of revelation. To be sure, this was Luther’s own view, and large parts of the Lutheran reception history have consequently been centered on the word of scripture as the unique site of revelation. However, as Timmann Mjaaland reminds us, the Latin term scriptura also designates writing in a more general sense, i.e., the way in which phenomena are qualified and described through texts. By expanding this aspect and simultaneously queering it with Derrida’s concept of writing, Timmann Mjaaland argues that “Luther’s emphasis on scripture alone can be read as . . . a rigorous methodological device for studying the written text in its precise grammatical form” (17). Throughout the study, he reveals how Luther builds up his arguments through detailed exegeses of the grammatical structure of the Bible texts, a methodology that gives access to new configurations of meaning which in their turn open up new ways of structuring our perception of subjectivity as well as of broader historical and political processes (the classic example being Luther’s discovery of a double meaning of the grammatical construction of iustitia Dei in Romans 1:17, which becomes the basis of the doctrine of justification by faith alone; see 57–60).

The second thing Timmann Mjaaland achieves in applying Derrida’s grammatology to Luther is a new reading of the notion of deus absconditus, the hidden God. While this notion has sometimes produced mythologizing images of the divine as a terrifying but fascinating mystery, Timmann Mjaaland finds in Luther a very different understanding of the concept. Rather than an invitation to speculations about God’s hidden nature, deus absconditus functions for Luther as a critical limit-concept aiming at a demystification of idolatric images. As such, it also serves as a reminder that what human beings may see or understand of the divine is very limited. Having clarified the sense and function the concept had for Luther himself, Timmann Mjaaland goes a step further and explores the wider philosophical implications of the hidden God. The most significant implication is the way in which the idea of God’s hiddenness—through the very distinction between hiddenness and revealedness—opens up a difference that precedes both the absence and presence of God. Rather than being concerned with questions of God’s nature or essence, Timmann Mjaaland contends, “what is of our concern is the difference between ‘deus absconditus’ and ‘deus revelatus’; that is, the line of distinction, and the temporal, spatial, linguistic distinctions that are at stake. My theory . . . is that this distinction as such has been overlooked by the innumerable authors who have written about Luther over the last five centuries, and the situation is not very different today” (107).

While both these aspects—the notion of scripture and that of God—invite to numerous topics worthy of discussion, I shall have to limit myself to the second. I think Timmann Mjaaland is entirely right that the intricacy of Luther’s concept of deus absconditus has often been overlooked and his rereading of the concept through the lenses of grammatology discloses dimensions that may engender significant new discussions within Luther scholarship. However, while Timmann Mjaaland thereby contributes in an original way to Lutheran theology, he simultaneously inscribes himself in a wider discourse about the affinities between Derrida’s philosophy and negative theology that has been going on for decades. Already in 1968, in a discussion following a lecture Derrida gave on the concept of différance, Brice Parain remarked that there were unmistakable resemblances between différance and the concept of God within negative theology: in both instances, it seemed to be a matter of something utterly ungraspable which nonetheless was the source of everything.4

Derrida was at this stage of his career quite reluctant to admit any such resemblances and contended that différance, in contrast to Parain’s assumption, “blocked every relation to the theological.”5 This did not, however, prevent theologians from finding in Derrida’s work a critical resource for their own work. In the 1980s, an array of path-breaking works applying deconstruction to theology appeared, the most significant of which was probably Mark C. Taylor’s Erring: A Postmodern A/theology.6 As the years passed, Derrida’s position on theology softened, and from the mid-1980s and onwards, negative theology became a recurrent theme in his philosophy, partly as a consequence of his critical dialogue with Jean-Luc Marion.7 This ongoing dialogue culminated in the 1997 Villanova conference on “Religion and Postmodernism” convened by John Caputo.8 By this time, Derrida had also begun to portray deconstruction in increasingly ethical-political and even messianic terms—as the hope of future justice, as a cry for the possibility of the impossible.

I would like to linger for a while on this shift in Derrida’s thinking towards a more messianic approach, a shift which also entailed a stronger emphasis on temporal metaphors (messianicité, démocratie à venir), although the ambiguity between the temporal/spatial divide would always remain at the core of his reflections. It seems to me that The Hidden God can above all be situated within the framework of Derrida’s thought before this shift. Although temporal considerations are far from absent, a clear priority is given to spatial images, not only through the explicit statement of the centrality of the problem of place and topology at the outset of the study (19), but also through the radically anachronistic character ascribed to the “difference” or “gap” that precedes the logos of theology (see, e.g., 133).

The discussion that I would like to initiate is not whether theology is best served by Derrida’s earlier or later philosophy. What interests me is rather the more substantial question of which metaphors we use when reflecting on the terms and conditions for doing theology; for speaking and not speaking of the divine. While I fully share Timmann Mjaaland’s endeavor to formulate a theological discourse able to resist the self-referring arguments of certain revelation theologies, I am less convinced by the metaphors he uses to characterize this discourse. Here is an example: “Confronting the reader with deus absconditus means emptying the fixed meaning of the name ‘god,’ a bit like walking into the desert or wasteland, hence what Heidegger calls a ‘desertification’ (Verwüstung) of language, and thus forcing the reader into a desert of not knowing, incessantly reminding us of an ancient biblical topos” (105–6). To be sure, the topos of “desert” is firmly rooted in biblical imagery, but the overall rhetoric is more reminiscent of Mark C. Taylor’s aimlessly erring a/theology formulated in his already mentioned classic from 1984. However, while this invitation to a more erring attitude may have been refreshing for theology in the 1980s, I am concerned about where that leaves us today, in the post-truth era of endless virtual spacing making for a desert inhabited by filter bubbles and “alternative facts.”

Indeed, both spatial metaphors (like desert or wasteland) and temporal metaphors (like messianicity) are nothing but categories of thought. As such, however, they determine how we perceive, think and imagine the world. Part of the reason why Derrida increasingly came to emphasize the latter set of metaphors, I think, was that they contain a prophetic impulse that allows us to conceive of the world differently. While spatial metaphors tend to become static, at best inviting us to a directionless erring, temporal metaphors allow us to nurture hope for a justice to come, for a different world order (what Derrida termed a “new international”) and for democracy as an ongoing but forever unfinished project. As Derrida knew all too well, temporal metaphors may also incite violent apocalyptic and utopian ventures.9 But this is not an argument against temporality. It is rather a reminder of the complexity of temporality, a reminder that temporality is also about the past, about memories that haunt us and historical debts that lay claim on us and therefore tie our future aspirations to specific traditions and even places (these aspects are spelled out beautifully in the works on Freud and Marx mentioned at the outset). Hence, future aspirations that cut the moorings to the past will always run the risk of dangerous utopianism.

Unsurprisingly, the most exciting parts of The Hidden God, to my mind, are those that touch upon this complexity—the brief mentioning of the “war of two temporalities” (regular time versus the time of promise) at the heart of Luther’s political theology (102), as well as the analysis of the early modern controversies on apocalypticism in the last chapters. It would be interesting to hear more of Timmann Mjaaland’s reflections on the way in which these temporal tensions could serve as (de)constructive tools not only for Lutheran theology, but for critical thinking in general. Would the notion of a “time of the promise” be able to activate the inherited prophetic impulse of the biblical inheritance and thus open yet other dimensions of the deus absconditus concept?

By infusing a stronger temporal dimension in the elaboration of the hidden God as a critical limit-concept, I also wonder whether that may engender a different notion of human subjectivity. As Timmann Mjaaland demonstrates throughout the study, the “scriptural” turn in Luther’s theology implies a new perception of subjectivity, “in the sense that the self is subjected to the law, and thereby subjected to the grammar of scripture” (80). By accepting in faith the promise of grace, the self becomes at once radically free and bound to absolute necessity: a free lord before God and yet the servant of every other. While this double structure implies an unconditional call to serve your neighbor, it has a flipside which manifested itself already in the violence of Luther’s political theology (as indicated above) and which has later recurred in Lutheran churches’ failure to stand up for the victims of political violence at fatal moments of history (most notoriously, of course, in the Third Reich). Timmann Mjaaland comments repeatedly on this Achilles’ heel of Lutheran theology, not least in his incisive analyses of the controversy between Luther and Erasmus on the free will. And yet he never seems to address the core of the problem: the definition of subjectivity in terms of radical passivity and receptivity:

The space given to scripture as prior to the subject implies a suppression of other definitions of subjectivity, for example, according to works, according to social status, or according to philosophical determination of the human being. Spacing the scriptures in the vein of Luther’s sola scriptura thus means accepting the loss of control and passively handing oneself over to the economy of death. (136)

Once more, I am concerned about the metaphorical logic at work here and wonder what it does to our understanding of subjectivity. Above all, I wonder whether a stronger emphasis on the “temporality of promise”—on the human self as existing on promissory notes—would be able to take more seriously Erasmus’s concern for humans as morally responsible agents.

All of which brings me to my conclusion of the detective work I set out to do in this essay. While my admiration for the intellectual tour de force of the Hidden God remains unblurred, what seems to lie hidden behind the philosophical Luther brought to the fore is to my taste still too much of a spatial-anarchic imagery of a Heideggerian format. As Timmann Mjaaland correctly remarks when elaborating on the notion of différance, Derrida at an early stage of his intellectual trajectory followed “the transition from temporal to spatial categories introduced by Heidegger’s Kehre” (134). While Derrida started out as an (albeit critical) Heideggerian, I have argued that an opposite transition—i.e., from predominantly spatial to temporal categories—took place in his late philosophy. The significance of this transition is that it allows us to connect human subjectivity to a different imaginary register, not primarily to the economy of death, but rather to life, hope and promise. My remaining query is whether Timmann Mjaaland would be prepared to follow suit here.10