‘Nihilist’ Parrhēsia as Theological Method: Truth-Telling in the ‘Later’ Foucault and the Practice of Theology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study experiments with constructing a ‘nihilist’ Christian theological parrhēsia – frank, bold, risky, critical, contingent, plain, honest, and personal truth-telling – as a postmodern theological method and as an alternative to confession. Taking Foucault’s reflections on Christian practices of truth-telling (confession and parrhēsia) as a point of departure, it builds on his insights through a critical review of contemporary theological engagements with Christian parrhēsia and a close reading of the Gospel of John, select writings of Symeon the New Theologian, and Luther’s Lectures on Galatians as examples of ‘traditional’ theological parrhēsia. The historical-analytical part of this study uses the conceptual tools of the ‘later’ Foucault’s anarcheology – ‘regime of truth’, ‘alethurgy/veridiction’, and ‘modalities of alethurgy’ – to examine the Christian pastoral regime of truth and its alethurgic modalities of ‘traditional’ parrhēsia and confession (including ‘confession of faith’ and ‘confession of self’). Through an investigation of the relational and alethurgic bonds among God, the theologian, ecclesial authorities, and audience in select primary sources, this study shows how ‘traditional’ theological parrhēsia is both entangled with/in and differs from confessional structures. The constructive part of this study deploys Foucault’s anarcheological or ‘nihilist’ attitude vis-à-vis truth – namely, the refusal of the ‘natural’, ‘benevolent’, and ‘self-revelatory’ power of truth – to develop a new ‘nihilist’ postmodern model of theological parrhēsia, including a new configuration of alethurgic bonds among God, the theologian, ecclesial authorities, and audience. Specifically, this model subverts the bonds of obedience that structure both confessional and ‘traditional’ parrhesiastic theology by using refusal, unbelief, error, and blasphemy as constructive theological tools. Finally, this study applies the provisional methodology of ‘nihilist’ postmodern theological parrhēsia to two traditional theological concepts – ‘sin’ and ‘salvation’ – and explores the ‘rebound effects’ that this methodological shift produces not only in their doctrinal meaning, but also in their function as key aspects of the relationship between God and the theologian. This study contributes to the wider field of postmodern theology by offering ‘nihilist’ parrhēsia as a way of speaking with God after the ‘death of God’ and of speaking theologically without espousing a specific ‘confession of faith’ or producing a ‘confession of self’.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".