This article is published in two installments. The first can be found here.
III.
Taylor’s typification of postmodernism as Flatland, however, as the quintessential Hegelian “bone”, did not sit well with the British participants in the Shadow of Spirit conference, who represented both the majority and in certain measure the intellectual heavy weights for the Church of England. Rowan Williams, who later would become Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of the contributors.
British philosopher Gillian Rose criticized Taylor for misappropriating Hegel, casting postmodernism as a kind of totalizing tour de force that results when one removes “diremption” (i.e., the act of splitting in two) from the dialectic. Postmodernism makes a “Christian new Jerusalem”, she wrote, out of “old Athens”. Postmodern theology, in particular, with its declaration that everything is text pretends to be a “prodigious, omniscient ‘western’ intellectuality that would crown [itself] or a/theology – ‘queen of the sciences’.” It is “comprehensive while decrying comprehension”.[1]
John Milbank’s article “Problematizing the Secular: The Post-Postmodern Agenda”, however, sketched out a completely unprecedented and (for those now sated with Derrida, deconstruction, and God’s death) quirky new modus operandi for Christian reflection that later in the decade would be known as “radical orthodoxy”. The phrase, developed strategically by the editors at Routledge who had already published Shadow of Spirit, does not appear in the 1992 anthology.
But the crucial themes of the movement occur throughout Milbank’s essay. Discarding Derrida, Milbank turned instead to the tower and opaque French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who was not yet a household name in the Anglophone academy. ‘”Postmodern’ thought is the legatee of a version of critique founded on an assumption of immanence”, Milbank wrote. It begins with “a refusal of transcendence, and an affirmation of the self-sufficiency, not of God, nor of humanity, but of nature or nature-in-process.”[2]
Like Deleuze, Milbank regarded the seventeenth century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose watchword was Deus sive natura (“God or nature”), as the paradigmatic philosopher of immanence. But Milbank sought to Christianize both Deleuze and Spinoza so that the playful semiotics of Derridean difference confined to a world that is nothing but the text can now be seen as “Literally and univocally, a part of God, a real advent of Being, and at the same time one is aware of its utterly non-hierarchical, non-teleological relation to everything else.”[3]
The inaugural volume of essays, edited by Milbank and entitled Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, sought to put the American or “deconstructive” strain of postmodernism in its place. A host of later writers also sought to claim some kind of affiliation with “radical orthodoxy”, but the eclectic and extremely disparate assortment of theological authors who over time assumed the mantle makes the concept almost as difficult to nail down as the idea of postmodernism itself. Even the leading representatives of the movement – Milbank, Catherine Pitstock, and Graham Ward – worked with recognizably discrete agendas.
But the one claim all of those who represented what was almost exclusively an Anglican and Catholic pushback to the “a/theologians” was that postmodernism in its American instantiation is inherently “nihilistic” – a charge repeatedly leveled by conservative cultural commentators who had never opened a book in philosophy or theology – and that “the material and temporal realms of bodies, sex, art and sociality, which modernity claims to value, can truly be upheld only by acknowledgement of their participation in the transcendent.”[4]
In essence, the cenacle of British religious thinkers who claimed the mantle of “radical orthodoxy” sought to leverage the skeptical or “critical” apparatus of French postmodernism to argue that Lyotard’s “incredulity” regarding metanarratives could only be addressed by revamping a primordial version of Medieval Christian neo-Platonism. As Milbank wrote in his “Introduction” to the volume, the theological perspective of participation actually saves the appearances by exceeding them. It recognises that materialism and spiritualism are false alternatives, since if there is only finite matter there is not even that, and that for phenomena really to be there they must be more than there.”
Taylor and Altizer’s take on postmodernism, the expontents of radical orthodoxy pronounced, is simply the old, “secularist” prototype of modernism in a fancy new guise. Real postmodernism (i.e., one that goes beyond modernism) returns to an ontology of the divine out of which the “representational” function of language and thought emerge. Behind the “density” of modern, secularist rationalism “resides an even greater density—beyond all contrasts of density and lightness (as beyond all contrasts of definition and limitlessness). This is to say that all there is only is because it is more than it is.”[5]
Radical orthodoxy, however, already had a secret ally in the French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion, one of Jacques Derrida’s own students , who had made similar moves as early as 1982 with publication of his Dieu sans l’être: Hors- texte (“God without Being: Outside the Text”). The title of Marion’s work was a play on Derrida’s famous dictum of the early era of deconstruction – il n’y a pas de hors-texte, “there is nothing outside the text”.
In his foreword to the English translation of Marion’s book in 1991 American theologian David Tracy wrote that Marion had “forged a new and brilliant postmodern version of the other great alternative for theology: a revelation-centered, noncorrelational, postmetaphysical theology.” It was one embodying “a rigorous and coherent theological strategy focused on the reality of God’s revelation as pure gift, indeed as excess.”[6] In God Without Being Marion aimed, as did radical orthodoxy, to bring the question of God as the most fundamental of all questions in light of the postmodern problematic. “Modernity is characterized first by the nullification of God as a question. Why does God no longer inhabit any process of questioning?”[7]
But after Heidegger’s devastating critique (Destruktion) of metaphysics as “onto-theology”, the question must be posed in a radically different fashion, Marion insisted. It is to pose the question in order to “liberate ‘God’ from Being” in all senses – univocal, equivocal, or analogical. If “deconstruction” is all about the text, it is still about the Being of the text, and thus snared within the most rarefied flytrap of onto-theology. Although God Without Being is a complicated and torturous discussion of the fate of Scholastic theology in light of the postmodern “turn” in contemporary thought, Marion’s solution to the problem he raises is quite similar to that posed by radical orthodox writers – we can only talk about the divine as some kind of “real presence” that is neither conceptual nor metaphysical, but liturgical.
In both God Without Being and later writings Marion adapts both Heidegger’s and Derrida’s conceptual play on the German idiom es gibt (“there is”, but literally “it gives”). The “Being of God” has nothing to do with the verb “to be”. Rather, it is manifested through the love and grace of which Scripture speaks forcefully. That is, the divine presence is a “gift”. Contrary to “deconstructionist” theology, the Biblical text in which the Christian tradition has maintained harbors the revelation that is Christ Jesus is not what ultimately matters.
Even if there is nothing outside the text, it is the text that brings the real presence of God in Christ to light. According to Marion, the “hermeneutic” or interpretation of the text activates the donum gratiae, or gift of grace, that makes the divine present. The “proof text” of all texts is the Eucharist itself. “The Word intervenes in person in the Eucharist (in person, because only then does he manifest and perform his filiation) to accomplish in this way the hermeneutic. The Eucharist alone completes the hermeneutic; the hermeneutic culminates in the Eucharist; the one assures the other its condition of possibility: the intervention in person of the referent of the text as center of its meaning, of the Word, outside of the words, to reappropriate them to himself as “what concerns him.”[8]
IV.
By the turn of the millennium postmodernism as an intellectual movement had reached its apex of influence and was trenching on a period of slow, but inexorable decline. The death of Derrida in 2004 signaled the beginning of the end. At the same time, the trauma of September 11, 2001 and the global financial crisis of 2008 also played an outsize role. It was no longer text and cultural “canons” that were “deconstructing”. The sense of security and cultural optimism that had held the Western democracies together since the end of World War II seemed to be unraveling at the seams.
The “postmodern moment” in Western letters had coincided with the political and economic ascendancy of the Baby Boom generation, and the movement had aged along with them. The precipitous collapse of world Communism around 1990 along with the conclusion of the Cold War had temporarily buoyed what Derrida himself had described as its “messianic” spirit, which in his 1993 tome Specters of Marx held out a vision of a “new international” that would somehow bring into being a global “democracy to come”.[9] Specters of Marx was the high point of Derrida’s so-called “political phase”, which overshadowed the last fifteen years of his life.
It also marked his concurrent interest in religious questions, which he often framed in prophetic language. “Deconstruction”, Derrida wrote, is no longer simply about texts and textuality. On the contrary, it amounts to a “certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice.”[10]
The coterie of progressive religious thinkers and critics who had introduced postmodernism to the study of theology and the reading of religious texts, however, did not seem at all interested in, let alone responsive to, Derrida’s “messianism”. One exception was a former Catholic philosopher by the name of John D. (“Jack”) Caputo, who had introduced Derrida in the late 1980s to a more conventional and conservative academic audience steeped in Heidegger, Husserl, Gadamer, and the phenomenological tradition with his book Radical Hermeneutics.[11]
In 1993 Caputo published The Prayers and Tears of Derrida: Religion Without Religion which caused an initial sensation in its own right, because for the first time it offered an affirmative and relatively simplistic take on religious postmodernism without the heavy and complex jargon that had dominated both the literary and philosophical strains of the kind of “theory” associated with early deconstructionism. It also popularized Derrida’s later ideas on faith and politics while downplaying his erstwhile associations with Taylor, Altizer, and death of God theology. In addition, Caputo had a playful and somewhat polemical style, aimed primarily at religious conservatives of both Catholic and Protestant persuasion, which endeared him to mainline religious liberal, who had long been suspicious of Derrida.
Caputo’s book sparked a particular interest for the first time in philosophical postmodernism among younger, more educated Christian evangelicals, who had begun to chafe under the regime of the religious right. Informal, experimental, and more hip kinds of ministry and worship led by GenX evangelicals had been trending throughout the 1990s and affixing the label “postmodern”, even if they had absolutely no clue what French philosophy was all about. The focus of the book on “justice”, even if it was still heavily sheathed within the strange and idiosyncratic discourse of the Derrideans, also intrigued them.
Very few evangelicals at the time attempted to read Prayers and Tears. Yet in evangelical seminaries second source works on “postmodernism” were beginning to pop up, most of which were friendly disposed, but quite crudely represented its philosophical import. Theologian Stanley Grenz, who acquired in the late 1990s a kind of celebrity status among progressive evangelicals, characterized the movement this way: “Postmodern philosophers applied the theories of the literary deconstructionists to the world as a whole. Just as a text will be read differently by each reader, they said, so reality will be ‘read’ differently by each knowing self that encounters it. This means that there is no one meaning of the world, no transcendent center to reality as a whole.”[12]
This characterization, of course, was virtually indistinguishable from what conservative adversaries had been saying about “postmodernism” since the 1970s, namely, that it was simply “relativism” with a more fashionable nom de guerre. But Grenz, unlike the conservatives, did neither condemned postmodernism nor cautioned against it. He encouraged his readers to take it seriously since it is basically the intellectual oxygen, he suggested, that present day religious seekers breathed every hour of the day.
The task of actually explaining postmodern thought in detail to the evangelical world fell to myself when I was asked to address the Evangelical Theological Society in the fall of 2001, just two months after 9/11. I had expected a hostile audience, but the opposite turned out to be the case. I called it “the next reformation”, which became a book by the same title that appeared in 2004.[13] The evangelical publisher Baker Academic thereafter launched an entire series The Church and Postmodern Culture, which did not include evangelical writer per se, but eminent academic philosophers and theologians such as Caputo[14], James K.A. Smith[15], Merold Westphal[16], myself[17], and even radical orthodox thinker Graham Ward[18]. In many ways these books were as much about introducing academic philosophy to a more sophisticated and inquisitive evangelical establishment than spreading any “gospel” of postmodernism, which was on its way out anyway.
Today, the word “postmodernism” (or “pomo” as it was known in the vernacular) hardly comes up at all in cutting edge religious discourse. “Critical theory”, which has a similar academic pedigree and as vague and diffuse connotations as “postmodernism” ever did, is both all the rage and the new gravamen of controversy. The phrase “postmodern”, however, defines both a complex and a sequence of intellectual sea changes that span a half century of recent history that remain irreversible.
Carl Raschke is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Denver and Senior Editor of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. He is the author or co-author of over 20 books, including Postmodern Theology: A Biopic (Cascade Books, 2017). His book The End of Theology (originally published as The Alchemy of the Word: Language and the End of Theology) is generally considered to be the book that launched the postmodern revolution in religious studies.
[1] Gillian Rose, “Diremption of Spirit,” in Shadow of Spirit, op. cit., 46.
[2] John Milbank, “Problematizing the Secular: The Post-Postmodern Agenda,” in Shadow of Spirit, op. cit., 34.
[3] Op. cit., 35.
[4] John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Wards (eds.), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999), book jacket.
[5] Ibid., 4.
[6] Ibid., 14.
[7] Ibid., 57.
[8] Ibid., 150-1.
[9] See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994).
[10] Ibid., 74.
[11] John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1987).
[12] Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 6.
[13] See Carl Raschke, The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity (Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic, 2004).
[14] John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic, 2007).
[15] James K.A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic, 2006).
[16] Merold Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic, 2009).
[17] Carl Raschke, GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn (Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic, 2008).
[18] Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens (Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic, 2000
