mercredi 26 septembre 2012

Pluralisme culturel et exclusivismes religieux.

Solutions ou impasses ?





En fait, ni un ni l’autre! Gabriel Vahanian s’en explique dans Hommage au séculier (ndlr: 1, et le compte-rendu  par David L. Miller) paru il y a quatre ans.
Né à Marseille le 24 janvier 1927 de parents réfugiés en France au début des années 20 après avoir fui les campagnes d’épuration ethnique menées dans les régions de la Turquie où vivaient les Arméniens, Gabriel Vahanian décédait le 30 août dernier à son domicile de Strasbourg. Il a été professeur au département de religion de l’Université de Syracuse dans l’État de New York de 1958 à 1984, puis à la faculté de théologie protestante de l’Université de Strasbourg où il a succédé à Roger Mehl comme professeur de théologie. Depuis 1995, il était professeur émérite.

Représentant le plus important du mouvement des théologies dites de la «mort de Dieu» au début des années 60 avec le livre La mort de dieu. La culture de notre ère post-chrétienne, Vahanian a été aussi le critique le plus radical de ce mouvement, notamment avec le livre La condition de Dieu. Pour lui, le christianisme, loin d’être trahi par l’Occident, est menacé et donc mis au défi par son propre succès sur le plan culturel. Vahanian jetait ainsi les bases de sa réputation internationale en tant que penseur de la culture.

Culture et foi – Le langage

 

Dans les décennies qui suivirent, Vahanian a continué à enseigner, à écrire et à publier des livres comme Dieu et l’utopie: L’Église et la technique; Dieu anonyme ou la peur des mots; L’utopie chrétienne; La foi, une fois pour toutes; Tillich et le nouveau paradigme religieux; et en 2008, Hommage au séculier.
Des personnalités religieuses conservatrices ont l’habitude de prévenir contre les dangers de la sécularisation, tout comme certains promoteurs de l’État moderne dénoncent les tendances théocratiques de la religion. De part et d’autre, on suppose que sacré et sécularité s’opposent radicalement.

Mais le problème réside ailleurs selon Vahanian. À lumière de la notion biblique de sainteté de Dieu, il revendique une sécularité qui relie étroitement la philosophie, l’histoire, et la théologie de manière inédite. Loin de s’opposer à la sécularité, la foi trouve son accomplissement dans le monde séculier: car comprendre la parole faite chair et comprendre Dieu en tant que parole, c’est se rendre compte que cette parole exige de devenir monde.

Pour Vahanian, le langage est le milieu du divin et de l’humain qui sont livrés aux mots qui masquent autant qu’ils révèlent et qui sont des sources mais peuvent aussi devenir des tombeaux dont il faut rouler la pierre. 

Un défi : la technique

 

 Vahanian avoue sa stupéfaction devant le fait qu’on refuse encore et toujours de reconnaître que la technique est un défi; un défi qui ne s’adresse à nul autre qu’à l’être humain et qui, en dernière instance, ne remet absolument rien en question, si ce n’est l’être humain lui-même dans son for intérieur bien plus encore que dans son environnement. Cela, même si la technique amène aussi pour Vahanian une prise de conscience sans précédent de la précarité de l’environnement et du respect qu’on lui doit ainsi qu’à la vie.
 De l’illusion technicienne à l’utopie meurtrière, en passant par le cauchemar climatisé ou par Le meilleur des mondes d’Aldous Huxley, ou simplement par En attendant Godot de Samuel Beckett, rares sont les auteurs qui, du Jardin d’Éden au célèbre roman 1984 de George Orwell, ont su voir dans la technique l’enjeu du siècle. Or pour Vahanian, l’être humain est plus qu’un souvenir de l’humain, puisqu’il en est l’attente. Et plus cette attente est forte, plus profonde est la crise. 

Une sécularité à redécouvrir


Vahanian a redonné vigueur à la sécularité contre les revendications fondamentalistes qui absolutisent le relatif, et contre cette sorte particulière d’athéisme qui relativise l’absolu et qu’il appelle le sécularisme. Pour lui, Dieu n’est pas sans le monde, mais le monde n’est pas Dieu. De même, dans le Jardin d’Éden, il n’y a pas d’espace réservé au sacré, et il n’y a pas de temple non plus dans la Jérusalem nouvelle.

Gabriel Vahanian avait de l’élégance, c’est-à-dire essentiellement trois choses : une bonne dose de modestie, un courage certain, et une grande attention aux autres. De lui on peut affirmer ce qu’il aimait dire de Rudolf Bultmann : «un maître à la fois grand par l’esprit et humble par le cœur». Toucher, sans avoir à surprendre, encore moins à choquer! Un des penseurs les plus originaux et les plus radicaux des dernières décennies, Gabriel Vahanian a toujours exigé de ses nombreux disciples et amis non pas qu’ils souscrivent béatement à ses intuitions, mais qu’ils les prolongent à la mesure sans mesure des attentes d’aujourd’hui.

lundi 24 septembre 2012

Gabriel Vahanian: 1927-2012 A Personal Remembrance


by Darrell J. Fasching, Vice President of The International Jacques Ellul Society and Professor Emeritus, Religious Studies, University of South Florida, Tampa


I first found out that my teacher, mentor and friend, Gabriel Vahanian, had died when David Gill, President of the International Jacques Ellul Society, emailed me a few days ago. Knowing Gabriel Vahanian's age, I knew this day would come, and yet the news stuns me. I want to share a few thoughts on this great scholar and dear friend.

Gabriel Vahanian was born and educated in France and received his baccalaureate from the Lycee de Valence. He then came to the United States in 1948 on a fellowship to Princeton Theological Seminary where he earned his M.A. and then completed his Ph.D. in 1958. In that year he joined the religion faculty at Syracuse University. Gabriel Vahanian's rising star was lit when, in 1965, Time magazine published an issue on The Death of God. The article featured his book by that title, published in 1961, and offered it as a prime example of a new theological movement that included others like William Hamilton and Thomas Altizer. When The Death of God first came out, the great New Testament scholar, Rudolf Bultmann, compared it to Karl Barth's Commentary on Romans in its revolutionary significance for contemporary theology. It was a masterful cultural analysis of what Vahanian described as "the cultural incapacity for God of our post-Christian era." It led him to suggest that we Wait Without Idols (1964) and have No Other God (1966) until we could find an authentic language with which to speak of God again. 
 
Gabriel Vahanian began to explore such a new language in his 1976 book Dieu et L'Utopie translated in 1977 as God and Utopia, The Church in a Technological Civilization. It launched his experiment in a new poetics of the word that was continued in L'utopie Chretienne and Dieu Anonyme; also his Kierkegaardian meditations La foi,une fois pour toutes and his book on Tillich and the New Religious Paradigm. Most recently, in 2008, Praise of the Secular appeared. Moreover, there is at least one more book to be released with the working title: Figures of Christ: From Incarnation to Cloning.
In addition to being a prolific author who lectured throughout Europe, Asia and America, Gabriel Vahanian was a member of the founding board of the American Academy of Religion (1964). The Academy inaugurated the promotion and professionalization of the academic study of religion in private secular and public state universities in the United States. Then in 1968 he became the founding Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. During his tenure at Syracuse University (1958-1983), he held the Eliphalet Remington Chair and then the Jeanette KittridgeWatson Chair. In 1983 he accepted an invitation from the Protestant faculty of the University of Strasbourg and returned to France for the remainder of his career.

Rudolf Bultmann, who so glowingly praised The Death of God, was no doubt a major influence in persuading Gabriel Vahanian of the need for such a book. For in Jesus Christ and Mythology (1958) Bultmann argued that the Gospel had become irrelevant to modern persons because it was couched in a three-storied mythological worldview that had no relation to a world in which one lighted one's dwelling by flipping the switch on an electric light bulb. Hence, he said, the Gospel needs to be demythologized by being translated into a more contemporary language. Bultmann chose existentialism as that language and argued the Gospel called us to a new self-understanding. The argument was persuasive to many, but it succeeded at the cost of shrinking the cosmic-societal dimensions of the Gospel down to the individual transformation of consciousness. There was the potential for an almost Gnostic disengagement from the larger world in which the human drama is lived out.

Between the publication of The Death of God in 1961 and God and Utopia in 1976/77, there occurred a major incubation period which gave birth to Gabriel Vahanian's utopian poetics of faith. This poetics addressed the Bultmannian call for a new language of faith, but in a way that was more adequate to the cosmic-societal dimension of human life than existentialism. 
 
I came to Syracuse University in 1969, the second year of its new graduate program and witnessed that poetics being formed in the seminars I took with Gabriel Vahanian over the next few years. In that period I saw Vahanian's interest in Bultmann's reflectons about light bulbs and faith transformed into a poetics of technique as the linguistic essence of a technological society. In his seminars on technology and theology, especially, it became clear that Jacques Ellul's sociology and theology of the technological society were becoming a major influence on Gabriel Vahanian's thinking. Following Ellul, he came to see the language of technique as creating a new, all-encompassing environment that replaced the ancient world's language and poetics of nature. Technique as the linguistic expression of our capacity to imagine and create new worlds offers a new and more adequate self-understanding, one that could take one beyond the limits of existentialism into the biblical-eschatological language of new creation -- a language that embraces societal and cosmic transformation. 
 
For Vahanian, if the ideological language of the technological civilization was utopian, as Ellul argued, this was so only because of the Gospel's transformation of Western civilization through an eschatological poetics of new creation -- a "worlding of the word" as Vahanian later called it. Existentialism still suggested the dilemma of the classical world in which nature is one's fate. Each person is a "useless passion" in rebellion against his or her natural facticity. Jacques Ellul came to understand technological society as our "new nature" promising us liberation from the classical understanding nature as the realm of fate. Yet this "new nature" too became our fate, he argued, imposing efficiency as a necessity upon us. In Ellul's view, it was the utopian promise of technological society to fulfill all our desires through the use of efficient techniques (in all areas of human endeavor) that induced us to treat technology with a sacred awe, and so surrender to the necessity of efficiency.

Gabriel Vahanian agreed with this analysis, but argued that this utopian ideology was itself possible only because of the eschatological poetics of new creation unleashed by the Gospel. For the Stoics, nature was man's fate but for Paul, all of creation is groaning and giving birth to a new creation, the transformative body of Christ in the world. In Vahanian's view, Ellul saw the negative side of utopianism as ideology but he failed to see, at first, that desacralizing this ideological utopianism was the equivalent of releasing the Gospel's genuine utopianism of new creation. 
 
A post-Christian civilization, Vahanian argued, is closer to the Gospel than classical civilization ever was. Utopian hope is possible because a technological civilization is no longer shaped by classic presuppositions of nature as our fate but by the eschatological utopianism of the Gospel. The poetics of the Gospel can redeem the language of utopia and the utopianism of language. The poetics of the holy can redeem the poetics of the sacred to create a world that is rendered secular by the iconoclastic ecclesiology of the church as the body of Christ; a church whose task of continuing desacralization or secularization makes the continual renewal of the world possible. The Gospel is not about changing worlds but about changing the world, utopia is not a destination but an "eschatic" source of continuing renewal. For Gabriel Vahanian, the Gospel is not about taking us out of the world but taking us into the world to be its "salt." It is significant that Vahanian's book, Anonymous God, is dedicated to Rudolph Bultmann and devoted to a trinitarian reflection on God and the utopian iconoclasm of language.

Although Vahanian and Ellul were known for their occasional theological sparing, I know from my conversations with both that they were very good friends. Both subscribed to Ellul's distinction of the sacred and the holy. In most of Ellul's work, he tended to see utopianism as an expression of the sacred, an ideology that justifies the world as it is -- making it impossible to change it. In most of Vahanian's work, he tended to see apocalyptic language as an expression of the sacred, inviting escape from this world rather than commitment to changing it. But both of these terms, "apocalypse" and "utopia," can be desacralized and so understood alternatively as expressions of the holy, and when they are, the two terms - "apocalypse" and "utopia" - converge. Ellul's book Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation, for instance, turns out not to be about changing worlds but changing the world. Ellul views the language of the Book of Revelation as a poetic mirror reflecting on the present situation, calling the church to introduce an apocalyptic transformation into this time and place. In his book, Ideology and Utopia (1929, revised in 1936) Karl Mannheim argued that apocalyptic language can be either ideological or utopian. In the first case, it justifies the status quo, in the second case it initiates a social transformation of society by breaking with the conventional view of society. It is the second where Ellul and Vahanian's views converge and apocalypse becomes utopian.

A Personal Reflection
Gabriel Vahanian entered my life in 1967 when I was on the student undergraduate committee that invited him to speak on "The Death of God" at the University of Minnesota. I was so taken with him as a person and a scholar that I ended up entering the Syracuse University Department of Religion graduate program in the Fall of 1969. Over the next several years I eagerly took every one of his seminars, struggling at first to understand what he was doing and then when the light finally came on, I was astonished and exhilarated. Those lectures were a dazzling, transforming experience. As my doctoral advisor, he became the midwife of my doctoral dissertation on Jacques Ellul which I defended in 1978 ( later published as The Thought of Jacques Ellul, 1981). Gabriel Vahanian convinced me to do my dissertation on Jacques Ellul, by telling me that in doing so I would be standing on the shoulders of a giant. Ellul laughed when I told him this (being not much over five feet tall) and said "a small giant." Gabriel Vahanian was about the same height. By the time I published my book on Ellul, I realized I was standing on the shoulders of two giants. That book opened doors for me and in 1982 I accepted an offer to join the Religious Studies Faculty at The University of South Florida in Tampa. A decade later, I dedicated my most ambitious work to Gabriel Vahanian -- The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Apocalypse or Utopia?(1993) -- saying in the Preface that my book was possible because "I learned that which can only be absorbed by studying with a master. I learned to think theologically."

The bond I formed with Gabriel Vahanian while I was writing my doctoral dissertation under his direction turned into a lifelong friendship. I had Gaby speak at the University of South Florida many times and he who would usually come to visit me and my wife a couple of times a year in Tampa, only an hour and a half from Winter Haven, Florida, where he had a second home he used when he flew in from France. Indeed, I just had a visit from him this Spring and we talked of seeing each other again at the Ellul Centennial Conference in Weaton Illinois this July. In the intervening time I was hospitalized in intensive care for internal bleeding that almost led to my own demise. Upon release, I ended up emailing him that death was stalking me and was making me too weak to travel. We never had that "last" planned meeting. The unfolding events since then remind me that death stalks us all.
Typically, when Gaby came for a visit he would make it a point to arrive on a Thursday in order to be able to join "the breakfast club" for discussion on Friday morning. The club is a group of five -- scholars, ministers, even a lawyer. We meet every Friday to discuss the events of the week, the events of our lives, and, yes, even theology. Gaby loved this forum and reveled in the discussion. He always looked forward to it when he came. He had astonishing energy and would keep me up until midnight on Thursday discussing theology and then be fresh to begin again in the morning. By the time he left to return to Winter Haven on Friday afternoon, I would be both exhilarated and exhausted. He was 17 years my senior and I couldn't keep up with him. I will miss his visits but he will always be a presence in my life. 
 
A Meditation on Language, Time and Eternity
from The Confessions of Augustine:
Suppose, I am about to recite a psalm which I know. Before I begin my expectation ... is extended over the whole psalm. But once I have begun, whatever I pluck off from it and let fall into the past enters the province of my memory .... As I proceed further and further with my recitation, so the expectation grows shorter and the memory grows longer, until all the expectation is finished at the point when the whole of this action is over and has passed into memory. And what is true of the whole psalm is also true of every part of the psalm and of every syllable in it. The same holds good for any longer action, of which the psalm may be only a part. It is true also of the whole of a man's life, of which all of his actions are parts. And it is true of the whole of the history of humanity, of which the lives of all men are parts. (The Confessions of Augustine, XI,28,282, Rex Warner translation, New American Library, 1963) 
 
May God remember his faithful servant, Gabriel Vahanian, whose life is whole and complete. 

Three Final Notes:
1. Gabriel Vahanian is survived by his wife Barbara, his son Paul Michel and his daughter Noelle. Noelle Vahanian, holds a Ph.D. from Syracuse University and teaches at Lebanon Valley College, 101 N. College Ave., Annville, PA 17003-1400. Her email is: Vahanian@lvc.edu

2. An extensive bibliography of Gabriel Vahanian's work can be found at: http://gabrielvahanian.blogspot.com/p/ouvrages-de-gabriel-vahanian.html

3. Those wishing to donate to honor Gabriel Vahanian's memory might consider a donation to the GabrielVahanian Endowed Graduate Support Fund, Department of Religion, Syracuse University, Syracuse New York, 13244

4. A memorial service was held for Gabriel Vahanian on Friday, September 7, 2012 at Saint Paul's Reformed Church in Strasbourg.

mardi 4 septembre 2012

Tristesse

© - Emmanuelle François

"Le don de vivre a passé dans les fleurs!
Où sont des morts les phrases familières,
L'art personnel, les âmes singulières?
La larve file où se formaient les pleurs."

Ces mots du cimetière marin de Paul Valéry pour vous annoncer le décès de Gabriel Vahanian. Ses obsèques seront célébrées le vendredi 7 septembre 2012 à 15h au temple Saint-Paul de Strasbourg.

Vous tous qui l'avez aimé, connu, apprécié, êtes attendus pour un dernier témoignage de reconnaissance pour tout ce que Dieu nous aura permis de vivre avec lui.