Celebrating the Neuroscientific Body Sacramentally: Reading the Body as Sacrament – A Radical Incarnational Theo-logos

Abstract

Philosophy of religion can embrace the discoveries of neuroscience and thereby endorse these scientific texts, whilst offering a prophetic discord with regards to the reading of these texts. Certain neuroscientific discoveries are arguing for a radical immanence or total material embodiment, as everything can be explained via the internal neurological functioning of the body/brain. However, if one understands the body as text, how does this radical embodiment differ from the radical immanence of Derrida’s famous statement that there is nothing beyond the text? This would open the way to interpreting the radical embodiment or materialism of neuroscience as something inter- and intra-textual with no beyond the text. Yet Derrida’s famous statement is part of his auto-deconstructive reading of texts within their contexts and thus there is a radical openness towards the other (alterity), because of différance. The task of philosophy of religion is to challenge the one-dimensional (closed/conclusive) reading of these texts (body as text), and rather argue for the radical openness of texts as something that is internal to the grammar of the text itself. In reading the body as a text, a neuroscientific text, such a reading remains fundamentally open to various readings thereby not denying the discoveries of science, but embracing these discoveries as texts in need of reading. It is in the reading of these texts that philosophy of religion can play an important role – not in the traditional sense of bringing to the reading alternative normative texts, but exploring the structures of texts and in the structural make-up of these texts discovering the role of faith, trust and hope in both the construction and reading of texts. This exploration of the fundamental structures of texts will focus on Derrida’s ‘grammar of faith’ and thus celebrate the neuroscientific texts whilst reading them sacramentally.