This article follows Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Gregory of Nyssa in a journey of epistemic dispossession. It begins by tracing two ways of wandering off this trail, two epistemological sirens that tempt wayfarers from a path of epistemic dispossession. These are skepticism and anti‐skepticism, elaborated by Wittgenstein and Cavell as joined in their enthronement of epistemically‐anchored certainty. Following Wittgenstein and Cavell into an exploration of the forms of life and death that sustain and are sustained by grasping at such (...) certainty, this article yet identifies two sources of un‐peace in their projects. One is an ill‐confessed threat that looms over their work, and the other is the inhuman difficulty of resisting the skeptical temptations of isolation and domination after this threat is named. It is the threat of death, which becomes, under the skeptic's anxiety, the threat of murder. That is, the skeptic denies finitude in such a way that he refuses to come to terms with the way that death attends life, and such refusal introduces as a skeptical temptation the further threat of murder. The difficulty of resisting skeptical temptations rides on the incompleteness of epistemic dispossession, which will always undo itself unless deepened into a more radical form of dispossession. Such forms of dispossession are suggested by Cavell and perfected in Gregory's descriptions of his sister Macrina. Macrina illumines epistemic dispossession as a form of love that refuses certain relationships to property. Yielding a vision for how dispossession might meet the threat of murderousness, Macrina's life thus interprets relationships of property, love, and death that complete epistemic dispossession. (shrink)

As Stanley Cavell has critiqued Christianity for displacing authority from the individual to somewhere beyond critical assessment, so several Christian theologians have also turned to Wittgenstein to justify just such displacement. This article suggests that both offer theologically impoverished and historically inattentive accounts of authority. It aims instead to sketch five moments in the Christian tradition to suggest five ways of naming the intimacy of religious authority with individual critical assessment. Such intimacy is then theologically described through the doctrinal loci (...) of creation and incarnation, which generate a picture of authority surprisingly near to one Cavell might want to celebrate. (shrink)

“Theater” has become a fashionable metaphor that theologians and ethicists deploy to correct what they see as a Gnostic or antinomian impulse to prioritize “inner state” over “outer action.” But their turn to theater as an easy way to valorize “outer action” conflates person and role, generating a confused anthropology that 1) obscures what theater could make obvious about occupational roles; 2) misses the distinctively non‐theatrical character of performing Christ and church; and 3) renders actions more easily legible than they (...) in fact are. These losses are traced in the work of several theater theologians, and their resultant distortions in self, power, and freedom are elaborated with the help of Stephen Mulhall's critique of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. Gregory of Nyssa's use of theater, by contrast, avoids such distortions by invoking theater together with the “mysteries of our existence”—death and creatio ex nihilo. Theater, for Gregory, becomes a way to describe the estrangement Christians must live into in a world beholden to wealth and power. The anthropology embedded in his metaphor of theater elaborates how Christians might approach their occupational roles, the world, and skepticism. (shrink)