John Updike as Theologian of Culture: Roger's Version and the Possibility of Embodied Redemption

Abstract

In an epigraph to Roger's Version, John Updike quotes Soren Kierkegaard: O infinite majesty, even if you were not love, even if you were cold in your infinite majesty could not cease to you, need majestic to love. Not unlike Paul Tillich and other theologians of culture, Updike in Roger's Version unsatisfied with a self-congratulatory narrative. As Kierkegaard says, persons need something majestic to love. If Kierkegaard right, a post-Christian culture will nevertheless be religious. In Roger's Version, Updike interweaves a diagnosis of contemporary American culture's loves with theological reflection about Incarnation. He aware, as Tillich was, that ultimate concern for contemporary American culture has ceased to be located in Church's proclamation. Roger's Version presents both a diagnosis of deeply held values of culture and a theological evaluation of religious possibilities in a world in which religion, as Tillich says, without a (Theology of Culture 8). What, then, Updike's portrait of and its possible manifestations in a secular American culture? Moreover, can Christian story, for Updike, be culturally embodied, or it a spiritual undercurrent to a story? These questions relate to a central theological issue in Roger's Version--the significance of Incarnation. Updike well aware that Christian doctrine of God's becoming one with flesh in Christ has implications for how we view and sexuality. He also aware that Incarnation culminated in Resurrection, a doctrine with implications for internal versus external dualism that permeates American culture. The Incarnation and Resurrection affirm that God works in realm of bodies; involves a transformation of those bodies and their activities. In Roger's Version Updike provides a meditation on Incarnation as he examines and describes a seemingly godless American culture. As with Tillich, cultural critique and theological reflection can go together. Because religion in the totality of human spirit, it not confined to crumbling church walls but is at home everywhere (Theology of Culture 8). One thus must translate Christian message into operative concepts of culture's own story. (1) In order to sustain norms that critique a culture, however, Tillich develops notion of a latent and manifest Spiritual Community in his Systematic Theology. Such an entity a telos for religious and non-religious communities that show power of New Being (153). A key characteristic self-surrendering love (151), a criterion that ultimately derives from Jesus Christ but that appears in diverse communities, including those of pagans and humanists (155). (2) Of course, these are members of latent Spiritual Community showing some traits of manifestation and others merely of ambiguity. This model provides a way to think through redemption and even ecclesia when former concept arises in unexpected places, as it does in Roger's Version. For while Updike's novel does memorialize way we live (Kakutani), it more than simply a descriptive account of American culture. Roger's Version reflects on Incarnational question of whether spirit can come together with body in a largely post-Christian Western culture. Narrated from imagination of Roger Lambert, a divinity professor, Roger's Version dominated by two subjects reflected in his reading interests: I always feel better--cleaner, revitalized--after reading theology, even poor theology, as it caresses and probes every crevice of unknowable. Lest you take me for a goody-goody, find kindred comfort and inspiration in pornography, much-deplored detailed depiction of impossibly long and deep, rigid and stretchable human parts interlocking, pumping, oozing (42). Theology--particularly early Church heresy, an academic specialization for Roger--and pornographic description dominate text. …