you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?
a mediation on contingency and particularity of creaturehood
No prophet ever sees things under the aspect of eternity. It is always partisan theology, always for the moment, always for the concrete community, satisfied to see only a piece of it all and to speak out of that at the risk of contradicting the rest of it.
- Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination
By this point, you’ve probably seen the viral speech given by Vice President Kamala Harris last year. In it, she asks “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live, and what came before you.” The clip, mixed with her memorable laughter and hand gestures, is certainly humorous. But, it is also true.
We are who we are because of the places and communities we inhabit, and the people that constitute these spaces. Our family shapes us, as does our school, place of work, and friend group. But these spaces and people didn’t fall out of a coconut tree either. They, too, were created by a long chain of decisions and consequences. Our parents are shaped by their parents, our teachers are shaped by their teachers, our are friends shaped by their friends. “None of us live in a silo,” Harris says. “Everything is in context.”
In On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, Friedrich Schleiermacher defines religion as a sense and taste of the infinite. But the infinity that Schleiermacher speaks of isn’t the endlessness of the universe or the thought of eternity. Schleiermacher doesn’t point up the starry sky, he points to the person across from him. Contained in every individual, Schleiermacher argues, is an infinite depth of knowledge and experience, which is made possible by other people—other infinities—acting upon them and shaping them into who they are today. This is an ongoing enrichment of our world and communities: we are formed and, in return, form others. Contained in the world is an infinitude of infinities.
What Schleiermacher and VP Harris both point to is the contingency and particularity of our creaturehood. They remind us that we do not sit above the world on some plateau from which we can see universally. We do not exist outside and beyond time. We do not stand unaffected by the waves of consequence—of the cycle of cause-and-effect that began when God spoke and the universe was set in motion. We exist in and are conditioned by a context.
Often, though, we speak of God and posit theological truths as if we possessed an absolute world-view. Believing that we can see the whole, Christians make universal claims about God’s nature and will in/for the world. We write long theological texts expounding upon what we believe to be ultimately true. And, even more, we go around telling others—Christian or not—that they are wrong.
However, instead of searching for a universalized theology that is applicable across place and time, what we need are particular theologies that are rooted in people and place. We need theologies born out of our exploration of infinities that exist in our congregations and our community gardens. We need theologies that acknowledge the context in which they exist and what has come before them.
We must, as Brueggemann says, be “satisfied to see only a piece of it all” because this is all we can see. This isn’t a curse. It is a blessing. It provides us the opportunity to say something good and true about God that another person might’ve never known from their location.
We can only see this brief moment of our life that marks but a speck on the timeline of the world. And yet, this speck is what God calls us to attune ourselves to and bear witness from.
Reading:
Norman Wirzba, Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis (Yale)
- , Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis after Losing Faith in the Bible (Eerdmans)
Watching:
Batman: Caped Crusader (Amazon)
The Office (Peacock) …*Rewatch #15
Thank you for the mention, my friend!