The past week, make that the past few weeks, have been a whirl whind. In the midst of this wind I've been voraciously reading for classes, completing essays, and of cousre reading for the Emergent Philosophical Conversation. Last Friday I flew out to Philadelpia with a buddy from Fuller to participate in a conversation with my friends from the emergent network.
Our dialogue partners were two of the current foremost continental postmodern philosophers; Jack Caputo (Emeritus at Villanova, now at Syracuse) and Richard Kearney (from Ireland now teaching at Boston College).
Richard Kearney
Caputo, Kearney, and Jaques Derrida
The topic was "What Would Jesus Deconstruct?" Caputo and Kearney (was a student of Paul Ricoeur) were colleagues and friends with the late French postmodern (deconstructionist) philosopher Jaques Derrida. Derrida, as most influential philosophers do, is famous for a popularization of his work in the dictum "there is no meaning outside the text." Essentially he understands all of life (not just type print texts) to be texts which require interpretation. The interpretation of these texts is only done from the viewpoint or cultural lens through which the person reads them.
So rich suburban Christians tend not to emphasize the teachings of Jesus like the Sermon on the Mount because in many ways they seem impossible to do in our society. So instead we opt for reading Paul and spiritualize salvation so that it rarely rearranges our lives and the way we live as the people of God. Or televangelists find a few verses of text in the Hebrew Scriptures and conveniently proclaim that God wants us to be happy and wealthy. They do this of cousre in a society that measures meaning by happiness in the form of monetary welath and upward mobility. So they impose a hermeneutic (interpretive process upon the text to derive meaning). We all do this.
Deconstruction in relation to Derrida's dictum does not mean there is no truth or morals or meaning. It's an invitation for us to self reflect and question our own status quo assumptions to imagine that the text is breaking into our very context if we by the grace of God have eyes to see and ears to hear. So Jesus was a deconstructionst in this sense.
Jesus taught "you have heard it this way, but I say this way" or he predicts the crumbling of the Temple because the Temple was moving into a flesh and blood incarnate reality. So Christian faith and community is not a place (buildings) or a systematic treatise (abstract theology). Those things are only helpful if they assist in the process of reimagining and re-engaging our world. They are not helpful or life giving if they "encrust" us from moving into the mission of God. The Scriptures tell us that the word of God is "living and active" and therefore as God is calling a people from all the peoples of the nations, the church, then must move towards a process of discipleship in which they becoming a living text. Or as Lesslie Newbigin put it a "living hermeneutic" (a flesh and blood sermon of the gospel).
Caputo has a helpful philosophical idea. It is really more of a theology (he sees the two re-merging to a shared synthesis to pre-enlightenment fetishes with epistemology). It is the theology of "the event". He has written a book called The Weakness of God. Now I don't go wholesale, hook, line and sinker with Caputo, but he is a brother and his thought is helpful.
A theology of the event does seperates the name of God with the being of God. God is not a thing, God is an event, or in a Barthian way of saying it God is a happening that breaks into our happenings. God as event means that God saturates and overwhelms our language we use to (de)construct our understandings of God.
We often here the language of absoulte truth thrown around. Often postmodernism gets labeled as rejecting this and often the emerging church conversation does too.
God is absolute truth. God as the triune Event which overwhelms all of our events is aboslute Truth. We place our hope not in our "owning absoulte truth" but in our living as a people, who bodily, witness to this absolute Truth. We hope this absolute Truth is holding us. And in faith we do confess God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus Christ is holding us. We confess that we live and move and breath within the event of God becoming flesh(Colossians). We anticipate the resurrected Jesus coming in the flesh to call forth the resurrection of all flesh. We groan and hope for the making of all things new.
God as absolute Event illicits the response to which every knee shall bow and confess Jesus Christ is Lord of the whole cosmos (Philippians).
So my brothers and sisters, may the God who calls forth life, who sustains life, and who enters into life in the Son, Jesus Christ, and empowers us by the Holy Spirit. May this God overwhelm us. In overwhelmin us may this God form our lives in way that they spill out into the world this God is making new (Revelation 21).
Check other reflections on the conversation at
CHURCH AND POMO. You will find some more technical reflections as mine was more of a devotional response to the dicussion. James K.A. Smith (professor of Philosophy at Calvin College) and Geof Holsclaw who run this site have a series coming out with Baker Books on who the postmodern shift propels the church in new and positive directions. The first in the series is published and a very accessible and engaging must read for anyone who is pastoring and series about what is going on in the postmodern shift. The title is
Who's Afraid of Postmodernism: Taking Derrida, Focault, and Lyotard to Church. Jack Caputo's book
What Would Jesus Deconstruct will be the second and is available in November.
Hi, Im from Melbourne Australia.
I am always very suspicious of anyone who talks about "absolute truth". After all one of the doctrines of Christianity (to which you obviously subscribe) is that we are inherently sinful---how then can a "sinful" person even begin to talk about "absolute truth".
That having been said please check out these references on Real God.
1. www.dabase.org/dht7.htm
2. www.dabase.org/broken.htm
3. www.dabase.org/tfrbklih.htm
4. www.dabase.org/truthfrl.htm