Theopoetics: Process and Perspective

Abstract

It is at the level of the imagination that the fateful issues of our new world-experience must first be mastered. It is here that culture and history are broken, and here that the church is polarized. Old words do not reach across the new gulfs, and it is only in vision and oracle that we can chart the unknown and new-name the creatures. --Amos Niven Wilder, Theopoetic Poets write in the line of prophecy, and their work teaches us how live. language of poetry, when properly absorbed, becomes part of our private vocabulary, our way of moving through the world. --Jay Parini, Why Poetry Matters term theopoetics was first seen in the form of theopoiesis, used by Stanley Romaine Hopper in a 1971 speech that grew out of conversations that had been taking place within the Society for Art and Religion in Contemporary Culture and the American Academy of Religion (Miller 3). Since then, theopoetics has served as a noun referring a particular devotional quality of a text, a genre of religious writing, and a postmodern perspective on theology. useful working definition of the term would be the study and practice of making God known through text. Used as an adjective, a theopoetic text is one that reveals some aspect of the divine. At a broader level, the essence of the term is found in its etymology. Combining the Greek theo with poiein, meaning to make or shape theopoetics is a means of making God, of shaping experience of the divine, and the study of ways in which people come know the Spirit. (1) number of writers and thinkers have contributed current conceptualizations of theopoetics since the term came into use, and in fact, even in the years prior its inception. Though not have addressed theopoetics directly, any full view of the relevance of theopoetics contemporary religious discourse would not be complete without addressing the work of these scholars. This article draws on a variety of disciplines introduce the reader the sources of theopoetics and suggest its relevance contemporary society. Foundations section details the that undergirds the origins of the word, focusing on the work of Stanley Hopper and Amos Wilder. In Engaged Phenomenology and Embodied Process I will discuss theopoetics in relation ideas from Richard Kearny, John Caputo, Catherine Keller, and Roland Faber. Most of these writers do not concern themselves directly with theopoetics, but instead use it peripherally in the course of their own respective agendas. Consequently, it is worth holding in tension the conceptualization of theopoetics that emerges solely from their sources with that offered by Rubem Alves, Scott Holland, Melanie May, and Matt Guynn, of whom directly consider the contemporary utility of a theopoetic perspective and whose work is considered in the section A New Theopoetic. article closes by addressing some of the challenges that theopoetics faces and by offering a vision of the opportunities that further investigation may invite. Foundations: Discrete Theopoetics Hopper's speech The Literary Imagination and the Doing of Theology is the first piece of scholarship make direct use of the term (Miller 3). In this text, Hopper asserts that we are in the midst of a radical revisioning of our way of seeing and thinking (Hopper 207). He suggests that the question is not how develop a new, socially relevant theology, but whether theology, insofar as it retains methodological fealty traditional modes, is any longer viable at all (207). If it is remain viable, Hopper suggests, we must reclaim the power of myth and imagination, moving toward a poetic perspective of the divine instead of a prosaic, theo-logical approach that results in the progressive reification of doctrine, squeezing the myth out, trying contain the symbolic in a science and reduce mysteries knowledge (208). …