About the author: Andrew Root, PhD (Princeton Theological Seminary) is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary. He is most recently the author of four-volume Ministry in a Secular Age series (Churches and the Crisis of Decline, The Congregation in a Secular Age, The Pastor in a Secular Age, and Faith Formation in a Secular Age), and The End of Youth Ministry?. He has also authored Christopraxis: A Practical Theology of the Cross (Fortress, 2014) and Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker (Baker, 2014)
On September 23rd, the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary will host a conference titled The Church, the Pastor, and Resonance in an Accelerated Age: Theological Conversations with Hartmut Rosa. In order to prepare for this event and help inform those unfamiliar with Rosa’s work, the staff at God: Here & Now solicited an article from conference speaker and theologian Andrew Root. Find the link to register for this conference below. The article below is a brief selection from his book Churches and the Crisis of Decline, produced by Baker Publishing.1
As Andy says to Red in Shawshank Redemption when planning his escape from the prison, “Get busy living or get busy dying.” But “get busy” is the key. This classic line from cinematic history reveals a normative commitment of late modernity. Inside the immanent frame and its focus on commerce and consumption, the purpose of waiting has been eroded—it’s been made only natural and material. To keep these flat reductions from torturing us, making all of modern life a prison, you need to keep busy. Getting busy becomes way more important than waiting in late modernity.2 Getting busy, as opposed to waiting, is now the sign of living. All people have to wait, of course, but supposedly the freer you are, the less you’re forced to wait.3 Those who have more wait less.
This contrast between “getting busy” or “waiting” in relation to prison life mirrors another popular cultural text, Regina Spektor’s song “You’ve Got Time.” This theme song for the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black offers haunting insights on the necessity of getting busy in late modernity. This theme is particularly poignant in Spektor’s line, “Taking steps is easy, standing still is hard.” Standing still is incredibly hard, even crippling to the human spirit, because waiting is cut off from some end. When there is nothing significant to wait for, and yet you’re kept from getting busy, as in prison life (or during a global pandemic), you’re tortured. Spektor’s lyric is directed toward those in prison, but just like the line from Shawshank Redemption it says something important about late modernity.
Late-modern people cope with the reductions of transcendence in the immanent frame by taking steps, by staying busy. Sociologist Erich Fromm has shown us how and why. Fromm explains that taking busy steps, while a legitimate strategy in late modernity, nevertheless risks a taxing alienation. But this taxing alienation of constant steps (and now your Apple Watch or Fitbit will count them!) is better than acknowledging the hollowness of the things we’re told to wait for. We stay busy because it keeps us from having to face the fact that what we’re waiting for is cold and lifeless, thin and vapid. Better to face the risks of alienation and exhaustion from all the busy steps than to stand still and face the vacancy of late modernity. Standing still too long will mean waiting, and not as just as a pause in action but as a disposition of being in the world.
From Fromm, his elder in the Frankfurt School, sociologist Hartmut Rosa sees busyness, or what he calls “acceleration,” as the problem of late modernity.4 Rosa shows that acceleration stretches into all parts of modernity, both culturally and structurally. We feel the pace of our lives increasing, just as the economy functions and stabilizes itself by acceleration, seeking constant growth. Rosa’s early contributions lucidly articulated this acceleration, showing in detail what Fromm hinted at: in modernity, activity has been made into busyness, and this accelerating activity breeds deep forms of alienation. Rosa, more than anyone, has powerfully shown that modernity means the speeding up of time. This speeding up, this getting busy, desynchronizes us. It brings inequality into the economy, frays democracies, warms the environment, and pushes human psyches into states of anxiety and depression.5 Rosa’s early work warned that getting busy has its consequences.
Rosa’s early work wasn’t quite the bombshell exploded on the playground of social theorists like Karl Barth’s Römenbrief was to theologians.6 But it had an indelible impact on both academic thought and the larger public conversations about European society. Rosa was dubbed the “slowdown guru” in the German media, but he was uncomfortable with this label. To him, the alienation inherent in modernity couldn’t simply be mitigated by getting a little (or even exponentially) less busy. The conundrums and contradictions of modernity were too immersive to assume so.
Like Barth, Rosa didn’t seek to be unmodern, taking a sledgehammer to modernity’s foundations. But he did challenge some of the core propensities of modernity. To give Rosa Charles Taylor’s language, as we have done with Barth, he saw that conceding to the closed structures and spins of the immanent frame couldn’t release us from the alienation that modernity produces.7
The immanent frame needed to be opened.
Rosa resisted being called the “slowdown guru” because he didn’t think a simple slowdown inside a closed immanent frame could help. The alienation imposed by late modernity’s speed would prove too much. This alienation disconnects workers from the means of their production, and it stretches even deeper in a late-modern consumer society. When modernity makes action the expenditure of energy to have the world, we become alienated from the world. Modernity seems to love the world by wrapping it tightly in immanence, telling it to dream no more of transcendence. But modernity actually hates the world by making it into a disposable object. We are alienated from the world because the world is made into a thing.
The antidote for alienation is not slowing down, pausing your acceleration and refueling to reenter the rush of having. Rather, the treatment for alienation is resonance. The church, by waiting for God, finds itself in a hastened waiting, as the Younger would say. It is a waiting filled with action. This waiting (the hastening that is bound in the waiting) is not a desert but is teeming with
life, filled with—or full of—relationships of resonance. The church waits by actively being in relationship with the world, by being a community of resonance. The church thereby doesn’t so much do something as be something.8
Rosa explains that the Latin etymology of “resonance is first and foremost an acoustic phenomenon—‘re-sonare’ meaning to resound.”9 Resonance is a form of action that is a reverberating word-event. This acoustic analogy is helpful for a few reasons. First, it shows that resonance is not a word-event in a sense of necessitating actual words or even cognitive abilities.10 We’ve all felt spoken to by a piece of music, an ocean breeze, an infant’s smile, or a kind dog. Second, the acoustic analogy helps us recognize that resonance as a form of action in the shape of a word-event (a conversation) produces a connection without enmeshment, domination, or cut-off. Conversations that lack mutuality are exhausting and therefore lack resonance. When we sense the conversation is not free of instrumental objectives (making the conversation a means to an end), when the conversation is for winning our vote or buying a product, we feel our energy stolen. In such moments we may not enter the discourse for instrumental purpose, but we may leave it unable to evaluate the conversation in any other way. We say to ourselves, “That was a waste of time,” meaning that was a waste of the resources of my energy. That was energy that won me zero having. We feel this because our otherness, as a mutual dialogue partner, has been overlooked. Yet when we experience something that speaks to us—with or without words—we do so if we encounter this interlocutor as other, recognizing our own otherness, made aware of the other’s and our own being.
To show this, and to draw further from the Latin etymology, Rosa uses a tuning fork as an example. When a tuning fork is vibrating and it meets another fork, this other fork will also begin to vibrate. The vibrating action of the one fork leads the other fork to come to life and vibrate as well. But this other fork vibrates, at least at the start, at its own frequency. It is allowed to have its own voice, if you will. It is brought to life, but never by losing its own unique pitch. Eventually, if the two forks stay in communion, the freedom of the mutual responsive resonance will result in a synchronous resonance.
Eventually the two tuning forks will join frequencies and become stronger, but not by expending energy in having a louder frequency. The stronger frequency is produced by harmony, not competition. The power of the action of resonance is bound in the mystery of plurality and unity. Resonance’s power is in harmony. Its power is in its weakness, as Paul would say (2 Cor. 12:9). Harmony, not victory, is resonance’s transformational power. Action as the expenditure of energy creates its power in an opposite way. Its power as a form of action rests not in harmony but the singular victory in competition. The great tragedy of late modernity is that the church (at least in its practical shape) has assumed that the only form of action available to it is the expenditure of energy in the having-mode. The church has seen itself invariably in competition with the world. Or the church has considered it necessary to adopt modernity’s strategies of competition in the having-mode to survive, racing for capitalist business approaches over the waiting of theological contemplation.
Yet, resonance is a much different form of action than the competition inherent within the having-mode of action as expenditure of energy. In resonance the agent doesn’t have to produce their own energy from within themselves. The energy that feeds the action of resonance is delivered by the harmony of the union. In competition the energy is produced within the actor or by the resources owned and possessed by the actor. It’s the actor’s genius or bank account or fame or reputation that produces the energy. No wonder the church feels both depleted of energy and frantic to get more. In resonance, energy is found within relationality. Energy is found through the event of an encounter with otherness, not through the possession of having resources. The conversation—the word-event—creates the energy in resonance. And it’s always as gift. The actor finds this energy not through skill or victory bound inside themselves, but through a waiting to be addressed.
Pastor Barth has argued that faithful human action is a response to God’s wholly other Word. For Barth, human action is not obliterated (though I suppose it would be if human action were reduced to the expenditure of energy in the having-mode). Rather, human action is drawn into God’s own Word as a resonant response.11 Human action as response has a deep efficacy and is not obliterated by the divine word. Human efficacy can only be assumed to be splattered like a bug on the windshield of Barth’s theological imagination if human action has been equated with the expenditure of energy to have the world.
Rosa’s work showed that our understanding of action needed to shift from being an expenditure of energy to have the world, to being a hastened waiting that allows for the action of being in relationship with the world.12 All relationships that give life are for being together, which produces (rather than depletes) energy. The energy it produces we call life. Being in relationships, which are bound in the being form as opposed to the having form, are experienced as being alive. Rosa explains in this new project that a relationship that is for being together, which produces the energy of life, is best described as resonance.
Pastor Barth provides a succinct evaluation of liberal theology that pairs well with Rosa’s account of action. Barth argued that liberal theology of his day thought it was speaking of God but was only speaking of humanity in a loud voice. In other words, the problem with the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century theological establishment was that it assumed its echo to be the content of theology. Pastor Barth’s early thought (all the attention to a God who is God and the givenness/nongivenness of reality) attempts to free the church from the echo chamber of a theology that deafeningly succumbs to the immanent frame.
Rosa too has no patience for echoes.13 The cold beams of the immanent frame seem particularly shaped as a cavernous space that creates echoes. Once the furniture of meaning, virtue, and ritual have been removed by modernity, a particularly echoey space is created that we must now inhabit. In this echoey modern space there is the danger of assuming all relationships with (and in) the world are nothing more than the echo of our own wants. Modernity has an acute intrinsic risk of making all otherness into the same,14 into objects to possess and have. Modernity’s dominant form of action as expenditure of energy causes this. Inside the echoey immanent frame there is always the perilous danger that true discourse with otherness will be lost in the cacophony of the echoes of sameness.
Rosa is clear that resonance is not an echo. It is not something locked within the self that pacifies or authenticates the self. It’s a form of action that leads to otherness, not sameness.15 Resonance is always a direct experience with something truly other. Continuing with his development of resonance as word-event, Rosa says, “An echo lacks its own voice; it occurs in a way mechanically and without any variance. What resounds in an echo is never a response, but only ever oneself.”16 Resonance is a form of action that is fundamentally a (noninstrumental) relationship. Resonance is dependent on a true encounter with something other. All true relationship (whether human-to-human, creature-to-creation, or divine-to- human) must take the form of differentiation that allows for word and response. This differentiation keeps one from swallowing the other and therefore allows for discourse. Both sides in a relationship of resonance must speak with their own voice, never parroting or echoing the other.
Resonance is a view of human action that can attend to seeking for a God who is God. Resonance, like Barth’s theology, is bound in the commitment that reality cannot be foreclosed in givenness. Rosa boldly states, “Resonance implies an aspect of constitutive inaccessibility.”17 Resonance contends that there are parts of existence that are inaccessible. Resonance is a form of action that depends on elements of reality being nongiven. Resonance, in a profound way, encounters this nongivenness. For Rosa, as much as for Barth, there are indeed elements of reality that are nongiven. Rosa says further, “Resonant relationships require that both subject and world be sufficiently ‘closed’ or self-consistent so as to speak in their own voice.”18
Resonance, as a form of action, remains distinct from the mere expenditure of energy. Action as the expenditure of energy seeks to have the world and therefore needs to take little to no concern for closedness. Every boundary must be crossed to have more resources. “Good” action as the expenditure of energy always hurries over boundaries in order to possess. In contrast to resonance, the expenditure of energy welcomes echoes as the reverberating expanse of its own voice.
Yet, to shift our view of action toward resonance allows us to release action from being conceived as getting busy. We can wait—we are even forced to wait—inside the action of resonance. Waiting inside resonance isn’t just a pause, break, or refueling to get back to getting busy having the world. Rather, inside resonance, waiting is action that upholds the boundaries of otherness. Waiting is an attentive participation in respecting the boundary of the other. Waiting is expectant listening to be addressed. Waiting is an active way of honoring and confessing that there are parts of reality, parts of every level of discourse (inside all word-events) that are closed. Waiting is the concrete form of action as resonance, and, as paradoxical as that sounds, this is so because waiting is the only way to respect and still encounter otherness.
The emphasis of Pastor Barth’s theology, up until at least the publication of Römenbrief II, is to remind the church of this closedness. The church is called to wait, not in inertia but as action, as the active way of seeking a God who is God. There can be no encounters with a living God who is God, escaping our own echo, until we confess that God is wholly other. The church waits as a confession of this closedness, making its waiting a seeking for a resonant encounter with a God who is indeed God. Waiting is the way to inhabit the immanent frame without succumbing to its echo. Waiting is the paradoxical way of action in the immanent frame that fills the immanent frame with the new possibility of encountering God’s otherness.
Andrew Root, Churches in the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022). Chapters 11–12 make up this selection.
Getting busy was also a 1990s euphemism for having sex, usually in a kind of fast hook-up style, which fits my point. In a reductive modernity, getting busy just with activity or free sexual encounters is a way of finding meaning or even a kind of effervescence. Inside the immanent frame, waiting has no value because there is no transcendent reality to wait to encounter. But life can still feel full if you just get busy—making money, winning recognition, or hooking up. Sex is the frontier where waiting is excommunicated, made prudish, and considered to be a boring loss of living.
In the early twenty-first century there was a return even inside the immanent frame to waiting. The rise of yoga and meditation and mindfulness practices were the most direct examples. But these practices were much different from their original religious forms. In religious forms you did these practices to wait for something outside of yourself to meet you. Inside late modernity your waiting actually becomes a way of coping with your busyness, preparing workouts (e.g., yoga) to ensure you are the windshield, not the bug, of a busy late-modern world. These practices become about the project of the self, meaning they’re less about waiting and more about strategies for self-fulfillment.
For more on this, see Andrew Root, The Congregation in a Secular Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021), chaps. 2 and 3.
If Fromm is considered a late-first-generation Frankfurt School thinker, Rosa would be third generation, following the mammoth impact of the second-generation thinker Jürgen Habermas. Axel Honneth also needs to be mentioned. Honneth, as one of Habermas’s most established students, stands between Habermas and Rosa.
To make this point, Rosa and many other continental thinkers have drawn on Alan Ehrenberg’s brilliant text, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016).
The phrase “exploded on the playground of the theologians” comes from Karl Adams’ introduction to Barth’s theology in A Unique Time of God by Karl Barth (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2016), 5.
It is much easier to give Taylor’s language to Rosa than to Barth, most obviously because of historical sequence but also because Rosa has been in dialogue with Taylor since the day of his dissertation. Rosa wrote his dissertation on Taylor’s understanding of human action. Central to Taylor’s understanding, which has never left Rosa, is that human beings’ acts are always in relation to some expressed or inexpressible commitment to the good. Rosa makes the commitment to the good life central, differentiating him from the more Marxist-committed Frankfurt School scholars. This hallmark of Rosa also properly gives him a sense that the immanent frame—or modernity itself—is open. Rosa is shy in claiming any faith commitments. He is nothing like Karl Barth in this regard. But he does recognize the importance of faith in a God who acts. He made this clear in a personal conversation I had with him in 2019—though without offering much detail.
John Zizioulas says something similar: “The Church must cease to be looked upon primarily as an institution and be treated as a way of being. The Church is primarily communion, i.e., a set of relationships making up a mode of being, exactly as is the case in the Trinitarian God” (John Zizioulas, The One and the Many: Studies on God, Man, the Church, and the World Today [Alhambra, CA: Sebastian, 2010], 15).
Rosa, Resonance, 165 (emphasis original).
Of course, right at this point, Barth’s concerns about the analogia entis rush to the surface. I’ll ask the interested reader to explore chapter 13 of Churches in the Crisis of Decline, where I’ll pick up some of these issues using a conversation on Barth and Mozart. In chapter 13, I move the whole project in a christological direction, which I hope will assuage some of these concerns. I remind the reader that I’m not seeking to offer a piece on Barth but a piece that, while consistently drawing from Barth, seeks to answer larger questions of a practical ecclesiology inside the immanent frame of late modernity. Therefore, I don’t feel overly concerned about being completely consistent with Barth in every way.
For a much longer discussion on human action in Barth, see Paul Nimmo, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2007). For my own articulation of Barth’s sense of action, see Christopraxis, chap. 6.
For more on this, see Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 116–17.
See Rosa, Resonance, 167.
This shares some of the language of Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1961).
Rosa further discusses otherness in Resonance, 447–50.
Rosa, Resonance, 167 (emphasis original).
Rosa, Resonance, 174. Bonhoeffer in Sanctorum Communion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1963), 66–68, says something similar about relationships. He articulates beautifully that relationships are always determined in and through the dialectic of openness and closedness. There is no relationship without closedness.
Rosa, Resonance, 174.