(Second of two parts; click here to read Part 1)
As to the benefits and limitations of this approach, I see the benefits as being a way of reawakening the prophetic voice of biblical religion. I think there is a great deal in both the Old Testament and the New Testament that is the serious critique of the religion of the covenant people of God. Reading the way in which people like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud developed those kinds of critiques in modern settings helps me to see more clearly what’s going on in many portions of the Bible. Also, it helps me to update it to see what those kinds of biblical critiques would look like if they had been made in the nineteenth or twentieth century instead of in biblical times.
The limitations of this approach I’ve expressed by saying that “man does not live by Ex-Lax alone.” It’s a cathartic; it’s a purgative; it’s a critical function. It presupposes that there is something positive that does not come from suspicion itself. So it’s always a parasitic activity. There is, of course, the danger that one will become so happy about developing these kinds of critiques, especially of other individuals and other communities, that suspicion will become itself a vice. I think it can become a virtue if one learns to try to develop suspicion about oneself and one’s own community and uses it as a way of trying to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in the work of sanctification.
It seems safe to say that your interest in, and enthusiasm for, postmodern thought is not shared by many of your fellow Christian philosophers. The names Plantinga, Wolterstorff, and Alston come to mind, all of whom claim to be in the “Christian realist” tradition. All three insist that Christian philosophy is best practiced–indeed, that it must understand itself–as a kind of realism. You don’t see it that way. Kant seems to be the battleground here, as always. As a “Christian antirealist” you draw upon Kant as offering an epistemology that comports well with Christian thought yet is not realist in any simple sense. Yet these three exemplary philosophers are all antifoundationalists of a sort. Where is the common ground between Kant, antifoundationalist Reformed epistemology, Christian philosophical realism, and postmodern thought?
I would be happy to be half as good a philosopher as any of the three friends of mine you have just mentioned. I’m somewhat puzzled by their insistence that Christian thought needs to be realist, though I have some sense of why they feel that way. Kant is indeed the background to the debate, and it seems to me that Kantian antirealism, grounded as it is in the distinction between God’s knowledge of reality and our knowledge of reality, is a very important affirmation of human finitude and what it means to be creatures rather than the Creator. What it means is that we never know things as they truly are, that is, as God knows them to be. Our knowledge never manages to be identical with God’s knowledge. It doesn’t follow that there aren’t ways that we should think about the world that are better than other ways of thinking about the world. But I see Kantian antirealism, which is echoed in the postmodern philosophers in a variety of very sophisticated ways, as having an important theological motivation that Kant recognized, though the postmodernists don’t.
In a paper you delivered here at Calvin you made the claim “The truth is that there is no Truth.” You asked us to pay attention to the capital “T.” Despite this qualification, many will find this formulation disturbing. The question of God’s self-revelation in Scripture will inevitably arise as a major issue here. What do you intend by this formulation?
In the talk to which you refer, I gave that formula–the truth (small “t”) is that there is no Truth (capital “T”)–as a summary of contemporary postmodern philosophers. In my appropriation of it, it gets revised to a somewhat different claim. The truth (small “t”) is that there is Truth (capital “T”), but we are not in possession of it. I think the factors that lead the postmodernists to say that there is no truth are the factors that lead me to say that we are not in possession of it–their claims about epistemological finitude. I find them helpful at developing the Kantian insight. The reason I say that, in spite of the fact that we don’t possess the truth there is truth, is that like Kant, and unlike the postmodernists, I think there is a God, who is in possession of Truth in the fullest sense of the term. The question of God’s revelation in Scripture is important here. But I don’t see that for revelation to take place in a salvific sense it’s necessary for God to be able to impart to us his knowledge of himself, and the world, so that our knowledge of him would be entirely on a par with his own self-knowledge. I recall a teacher of mine, years ago–who held to a very conservative theology–who used to say that the Bible is the divinely revealed misinformation about God. That has always seemed to me to express a very important insight.
Let’s talk about the project of appropriating these postmodern philosophers. As you describe it, appropriation may be understood as a kind of conversation. There are two moments to appropriation: rejection (the placing of oneself as “over against” the other, the notion of critique in its traditional sense) and recontextualization, to use Rorty’s term. There is a sense in which there is no news here. For many years thinkers in every discipline have been engaged in this project. Yet there is something disturbing about appropriation; it has a long and violent history. As far back as Plato and even before, philosophers have found it necessary to kill off the father or mother figure in order to advance their own project. Plato had to kill off Parmenides, and did so in the Sophist. Aristotle did the same to Plato in his Metaphysics, Aquinas to the Aristotle he didn’t like in the Summa, and so on. How do you address the issue of violence and revisionist history in the project of appropriation, and in what sense can this truly be called a “conversation”? Prima facie, it looks more like a wake.
There is an inescapable aspect of what could be called violence in rejection and reappropriation. If I say to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, or if I say to Foucault and Derrida, I reject your atheism, and I want to recontextualize your insights into a Christian hermeneutics of finitude and a Christian hermeneutics of suspicion, they are not going to be entirely pleased. On the other hand, it seems to me that that can be a way of opening a conversation in the sense that one is saying, “Look, I agree with you about these insights insofar as they have real force. Would you agree with me that they work just as well, or even better, in the Christian context in which I’m placing them? Insofar as it is obvious that our deepest and most fundamental disagreement is over the reality of God, is it possible to find a way to talk about that? Or must we, at least for the time being, just lay that aside and talk about the best way to pursue these other insights?”
You asked whether appropriation is a gesture of possession. In one sense it is, and in another sense it is not. When I try to appropriate secular postmodernists, I say to them, “Your claim to exclusive possession of these insights, I challenge. I think that I have a right to these notions, too. And I think I can put them to good use in a Christian context.” I don’t claim in doing so that I have a unique right to possession. And since I leave them in possession of their insights, while I put them to work for my own purposes, I create a situation where we need, if possible, to sit down and talk about it and see where we can get.
One of the jokes making its way around the academic circuit is how ironic it is that while the postmodernists were taking over English departments the Republicans were taking over Congress. In other words, this is just another sign of the marginalization of the academy. And yet few intellectual movements of our day have been as widely noticed in the mainstream media–or as ferociously attacked–as postmodernism. What is your take on all this?
I think it’s terribly interesting that postmodernism, especially in philosophy and literary criticism, has created such a stir, not just among academic aficionados, but across a wider public. I think postmodernism is like Marxism in this respect. It offers a critique of our culture and society, which has a rather direct bearing on the way we go about doing business. And for all of the esotericism of some postmodern writing, the bearing of the critique in the world we live in has been perceived and has evoked responses–often fearful and defensive responses that are natural responses to feeling threatened.
I think this is a good thing. I think it compels all of us, Christians and others, to take a very serious look to see to what degree postmodern critiques really identify things that are problematic about the way our world is put together. To see what kinds of responses are appropriate. And to try to distinguish from that those aspects of postmodernism that are merely the aestheticizing of the ethical or merely rhetorical overkill because the French are fond of fads and scandals and so forth. I think one has to try to separate out the wheat from the chaff. My sense is that there’s a significant amount of wheat there that needs to be taken seriously. That’s not quite the right metaphor, because this wheat has the form of time bombs.
Gary J. Percesepe teaches philosophy at Wittenberg University.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 24
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