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http://www.amazon.com/Whos-Afraid-Postmodernism-Foucault-Postmodern/dp/080102918X
The author is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Calvin College and a Fellow of the Center for Social Research at Calvin. His website describes his focus: “My work is undertaken in the borderlands between philosophy, theology, ethics, aesthetics, science, and politics. Informed by a long Augustinian tradition of theological cultural critique--from Augustine and Calvin to Edwards and Kuyper--I'm most interested in bringing critical thought to bear on the practices of the church and the church's witness to culture,” (http://www.calvin.edu/~jks4/).
Among upcoming speaking engagements:
September 15-17, 2008
"Public Theology in an Emerging World" Conference, Northern Seminary, Chicago
The Primary Question of Pastoral Leadership
The recent Pulpit & Pew National Clergy Survey, the most inclusive research project ever conducted on pastoral leadership in the United States, discovered that while most pastoral leaders express commitment to the calling and fulfillment in the work of the ministry, seventy-four percent of respondents said that reaching people in this postmodern time with the Gospel is the major problem they face today (http://www.umph.org/pdfs/circuitrider/6622LiaT.pdf).
Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church
The Christian church has been afraid of anything to do with the subject of postmodernism, understandably fearful of the philosophical phenomenon that has easily lent itself to charges of attempting to deconstruct the Gospel in its quest to question the concept of absolute truth. James K. A. Smith writes to the church that is now engaged in discussions of its context, postmodern culture. He addresses the conversation occurring among both emergent “postmodern” and mainline “missional” congregations seeking to minister faithfully and effectively. He avers that this cultural moment provides an opportunity for serious work in philosophical theory to serve the practice of the church. As Francis Schaeffer did before him, he believes that we must take philosophy seriously because it does impact ordinary life.
Smith carefully distinguishes between the terms “postmodernity,” a set of cultural realities that characterize this period in time, and “postmodernism,” an intellectual movement. Postmodernity is the time that has succeeded modernity, which Smith describes: “Within the matrix of a modern Christianity, the base ‘ingredient’ is the individual; the church, then, is simply a collection of individuals. Conceiving of Christian faith as a private affair between the individual and God – a matter of my asking ‘Jesus to come into my heart’ –modern evangelicalism finds it hard to articulate just how or why the church has any role to play other than providing a place to fellowship with other individuals who have a private relationship with God. With this model in place, what matters is Christianity as a system of truth or ideas, not the church as a living community embodying its head. Modern Christianity tends to think of the church either as a place where individuals come to find answers to their questions or as one more stop where individuals can try to satisfy their consumerist desires. As such, Christianity becomes intellectualized rather than incarnate, commodified rather than the site of genuine community,” (p.29).
Modernity has powerfully shaped the church, all the more powerfully because we are unaware of modernist assumptions and commitments that are in the very air we breathe. We lose our roots as a people wooed and won by God through the power of the great redemptive drama when we subscribe to the conviction that faith is purely a matter of doctrinal truths to be conveyed and absorbed. We lose the power of the church when we perceive ourselves to be a collection of individuals in individual relationship to God instead one body, the Body of Christ. We lose the opportunity to be the persons God has created and called us to be when we envision our destiny only as attaining heaven and forget that God wills for us to impact the world of time and space.
Smith has structured his book to reflect on three slogans of postmodernism associated with three particular philosophers and elucidates how, contrary to popular perception, the work of those philosophers does bear wisdom for the church in this time. His final chapter examines the connections between tradition and postmodernism, in Radical Orthodoxy’s claims that the way forward lies along ancient paths with a robust appropriation and confession of the narrative by which God has wooed and won us. The book concludes with an annotated bibliography and list of online resources for readers interested in delving further into the subject.
Chapter one sets the stage in a brief commentary on the three philosophers whose works will be examined and whose insights will be unpacked as material for edification of the church:
1. Jacques Derrida: “There is nothing outside the text.”
Derrida’s work pushes us to recover the centrality of Scripture for understanding the world and the role of community in interpretation of Scripture. Smith views in this philosopher’s work, often called deconstruction, the Reformation principle sola scriptura.
2. Jean-Francois Lyotard: Postmodernity is “incredulity toward metanarratives.”
Lyotard’s work pushes us to appreciate the narrative character of the Christian faith rather than the view that the faith is a merely collection of rational ideas, and to appropriate the confessional nature of our narrative in a world of competing narratives.
3. Michel Foucault: “Power is knowledge.”
Foucault’s work pushes us to be aware of the cultural power of formation and discipline (consider the power of MTV to shape persons) and to focus on countertransformation by counterdisciplines.
Chapters two through four unfold as explorations of these interpretations. The following flow of commentary and selected quotations from those chapters begins to illustrate Smith’s engagement with the three philosophers’ perspectives to address the church. To do any sort of justice to his analysis of postmodernism and its insights on contemporary sensitivities as they address the church, there is no alternative to reading the book.
1. Jacques Derrida: “There is nothing outside the text.”
Derrida links textuality to interpretation. Because nothing is ever experienced other than through a lens of interpretation, the entire world is a sort of text that requires interpretation. We all see the same realities but from such different angles and locations that we do not experience them in the same way. God’s revelation shines through Scripture and indeed through the goodness of God’s creation, but through the darkened lens of fallenness humanity can see God’s truth only by the power of the Holy Spirit.
“Wall Street and Washington both want us to think that their rendering of the world is ‘just the way things are.’ Deconstruction, by showing the way in which everything is interpretation, empowers us to question the interpretation of trigger-happy presidents and greedy CEOs -- in a way not unlike the prophets’ questioning of the dominant interpretations of the world. As such, we are free to interpret the world differently,” p. 51).
Now indeed the whole world is a sort of text to be interpreted, but we fall easy prey to the lure of false interpretations such as capitalism, consumerism, militarism and hedonism, unless we govern our perception of the world by the narrative of Scripture. The church is called to proclaim and witness from the Gospel narrative that interpretation of the world, so that the Body of Christ is empowered to see false interpretations and live from the God’s.
2. Jean-Francois Lyotard: “Postmodernity is “incredulity toward metanarratives.”
While metanarrative literally means the sort of “big story” that has characterized every age, postmodernism views metanarrative as a phenomenon of modernity that is not just a grand saga but a story that claims proof of legitimation through an appeal to universal reason. However, God’s revelation is not conveyed through a series of proof claims to be internalized as rational propositions but within the narrative of a drama that extends from Genesis through Revelation and captures our hearts and imaginations here and now.
“If postmodernity is incredulity toward metanarratives, then does postmodernism signal a rejection of Christian faith insofar as it is based on the grand story of the Scriptures? The answer is clearly negative, since the biblical narrative and Christian faith claim to be legitimated not by an appeal to a universal, autonomous reason but rather by an appeal to faith…” (p. 68).
“The narrative character of our faith should affect not only our proclamation and witness but also our worship and formation… Christian worship should reenact the narrative of the gospel week by week in order to teach us to find ourselves in the story. Crucial for our discipleship and formation is being able to write ourselves into the story of God’s redeeming action in the world – being able to find our role in the play, our character in the story,” (p. 75).
Seekers are looking for transcendence and mystery. Our privilege as church, for their redemption as well as the world’s, is to live out our roles in God’s drama. “Our storytelling should be supported by our story living,” (p. 79).
3. Michel Foucault: “Power is knowledge.”
Foucault perceives that what we consider “knowledge” is not a neutrally determined reality but a construct shaped by social, political, and economic networks of power. At the heart of our ideals and in the center of our institutions, such as hospitals, schools, businesses, and prisons, a network of power relations determines “knowledge.” In modernity we live in a “disciplinary” society where we are subject to mechanisms of control and repression aimed at shaping us into the image of modern society’s capitalism, consumerism, militarism and hedonism.
However, discipline in itself is not a negative. In fact, the church can learn from Foucault’s analysis to unveil our eyes to the cultural shaping that occurs to us as we live within our culture, and to use the power of counterdisciplines for counterformation of members of the Body of Christ.
“..we can distinguish good discipline from bad discipline by its telos, its goal or end. So the difference between disciplines that form us into disciples of Christ and the disciplines of contemporary culture that produce consumers is precisely the goal they are aiming at. Discipline and formation are good insofar as they are directed toward the end, or telos, that is proper to human beings: to glorify God and enjoy him forever (Westminster Catechism, question 1),” (p.102).
The goal of discipleship transcends training of minds in belief systems through the far more powerful means of shaping of persons in the image of Christ to manifest the fruit of the Spirit, love God and neighbor, care for the least and the lost, in short, do what God has shown us is good. Spiritual disciplines that shine up the light of Christ within us lie at the heart of the church in postmodernity.
Applied Radical Orthodoxy
Grappling with the works of Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault in the light of Christian theology, we comprehend how modernity has perverted the faith and we yearn for the ancient practices that shaped the church in the first place. We begin to understand how a postmodern culture years for premodern practices.
The result is faith that is not “a thinned-out, sanctified version of religious skepticism (a ‘religion without religion’) offered in the name of humility and compassion but rather should be ground for the proclamation and adoption of ‘thick’ confessional identities,” (pp. 116-117).
Review by Kate Harvey
Executive Director
Ministers Council, American Baptist Churches USA
October 2007