Is Rowan Williams a postmodernist?

Is Williams then a ‘postmodernist’? I am not sure that these terms have today the descriptive usefulness they once might have had. Certainly, Williams is determined to understand from within as much as possible, whereas old school modernist Maurice Wiles finally determines to stand over and against. However, as he insists, Williams is not a radical sceptic, just critically wary of epistemological claims that are a little too sanguine. In another respect, Williams is quite ‘postmodern’: throughout his work, he is acutely sensitive to the charge that theological language can be and has indeed been used in the service of power in a malevolent way. As child of the 60s he accepts that generation's suspicion of power and of language's role in the maintenance of power.

In a third sense, Williams shares the postmodern love of flux over fixity, of many over mono. He just loves staring into the Heraclitean fire...

The Postmodern Absolute?

I thought this observation by everybody's favourite (non South American) Marxist Catholic Terry Eagleton was intriguing. He's talking about the critique of absolutes by postmodernists, and wondering if they have engaged in some sleight of hand:

It may also be that even postmodernism, with its aversion to absolute foundations, secretly smuggles such an absolute in to the argument. It is not, to be sure, God or Reason or History, but it behaves in just such a bottom-line sort of way. Like these other absolutes it is imossible to delve beneath it. For postmodernism, this is known as Culture... (The Meaning of Life, p. 31)

Culture, indeed. But what is meant by 'Culture' here?

Atheism in vestments

Despite the overt atheism of most of the leading postmodern thinkers, their concern for explicitly theological themes is obvious. Indeed, “fascination” would not be an inappropriate word to use.[1] Several theologians, for their part, have responded by a complete embrace of postmodern anti-logocentricism and espoused a postmodern via negativa, drawing on an aspect of the Christian tradition represented by Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart and others. Daniel Bulzan agrees that the postmodern and the apophatic are very similar.[2] Kevin Hart (an Australian!) ignores the protestations of Derrida himself and argues that negative theology is a form of deconstruction.[3] For him, only negative theology resists deconstruction. He writes:
Negative theology, properly understood, is that theology...which works at once inside and outside onto-theology, submitting its images of God to deconstruction.[4]

However, negative theology has been baptised via Greek thought about God in terms of attributes; and postmodernity has not freed itself from this mode of discourse. As Ingraffia points out, negative theology remains part of a Hellenist dialiectic with positive theology; and remains far from the biblical God who has revealed himself.[5] Bulzan, in response to Don Cupitt and Mark C. Taylor, points to the collapse of personal identity in the mystic and the postmodern; and the need for a properly biblical theology of language that would clarify its link with creation and ontology. Indeed, those theologians for whom postmodernity is a given are little more than Feuerbachian anthropologists for whom God is not even absconditus, but mortuus. Ward rightly complains that
The theological, stripped of any transcendence, becomes the incarnational to the point at which a Christian atheism emerges.[6]
It is merely an “atheism in vestments.”[7]


[1] G. Ward, “Theology and Postmodernism”, 435
[2] D.Bulzan, “Apophaticism, Postmodernism and Language: Two Similar Cases of Theological Imbalance” in Scottish Journal of Theology 50/3 (1997) 261-287
[3] K.Hart, op.cit., p.186
[4] ibid.
[5] B. Ingraffia, op.cit., p.226-7
[6] G.Ward, “Postmodern Theology” in D.F. Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd ed. 1997), p.591
[7] F.C.Bauerschmidt, “Aesthetics - The Theological Sublime” in J. Milbank et al (eds.), Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1999), p.217

Hart on the sublime

I am somewhat frustrated by not yet reaching the theological sections of Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite. One of the problems was the section 'The Veil of the Sublime', which I found quite baffling. I still don't know really what is meant by 'the sublime' other than 'that which is unrepresentable'. For Kant, the subline 'is suggested to us in moments when, presented by an immensity, grandeur, or force that exceeds representation - because it requires of apprehension an 'infinite' activity that surpasses the power of comprehension, which is itself dependent upon the inward synthesis of the sense of time and hence finite - reasons must return from the realm of the sensible...' p. 45-6

Anyhow, why this matters is that Hart goes on to classify postmodern thought under four 'narratives of the sublime':

1 - the differential sublime, 'which might also be called the sublimity of exteriority'. Here he characterises Derrida's differance. Instead of order and classification, the sheer play of difference is celebrated.
2 - the cosmological sublime, 'which is the form the discourse of the unrepresentable can take when the Nietzschean impulse predominates', as it does with Deleuze, and then Foucault.
3 - the ontological sublime, represented by Heidegger
4 - the ethical sublime, whose chief figure is Levinas.

Hart is quite delightfully savage with some of these idols of our time. Chiefly, he attempts something very worthwhile, which is to sure why postmodern philosophers do not succeed even on their own terms. But, I am still left with that rather stupid feeling you get when you read what you don't understand...

Lyotard on 'perfomativity'...

As Jean-Francois Lyotard describes it, the validity of narrative knowledge has been denied in the modern period and replaced by ‘science’, based on ‘facts’ and producing ‘truth’. However, science cannot point to a unitive function and so requires an external source of legitimation. And so, almost sneakily, science turns to ‘meta-narratives’ to legitimate itself. Despite the insistence of the scientist that narratives are childish and primitive and not subject to argumentation or proof, scientific knowledge itself appeals to narratives for its legitimation: for example, that humanity is a hero of liberty and has a right to science; and that progressive measures to liberate it from the oppressive hand of churches and tyrants will lead humanity to fulfilment; or that humanity is the hero of absolute knowledge, and will more and more depict accurately and efficiently master the world according to its actual nature. Scientific knowledge thus delegitimates itself by referring itself to what it already excludes as invalid: narrative.

This self-refutation has led to a crisis enough; but in addition, the new technology of knowledge has shifted the character of knowledge further. Computerisation has meant acknowledging that human observation is limited; and a new, pragmatic emphasis not on the criterion of truth but on efficiency. The construal of science as a ‘true/false’ game has become an ‘efficient/inefficient’ game instead. This new postmodern discourse, however, does not require external legitimation in the same way that the modern scientific discourse did/does.

Lyotard labels this new basis for knowledge as ‘performativity’ (sounds like management jargon, no?) The goal of knowledge is no longer Truth, which necessitated reference to grand narratives, but now rather efficiency, which is self-legitimating.

Vanhoozer and the atonement, more of.

[For your greater edification and entertainment, a photo of me graduating with the Master of Studies (Research) degree from Oxford, a degree I didn't even know I was enrolled for or intend to achieve! But they let you wear a fancy gown, so - what the hey!]

I have been enjoying re-reading some of the essays in The Glory of the Atonement (ed. Hill and James). The survey of the biblical and historical material is thorough and careful and leaves me in no doubt that, if one wants to excise sacrificial language from the atonement (see below) or remove the substitutionary aspect, one does so against the overwhelming testimony of the scriptures and the tradition. Which is not to say that there isn't a subjective side to the atonement: it is just that if one has only the subjective side, it ain't enough.

Anyhow, Vanhoozer's essay is my favourite so far ("The Atonement in Postmodernity") - partly because it serves as a handbrake on some of the other essays. He goes so far as to accept the postmodern critique of theoria, at least up to a point. He writes:

The postmodern challenge requires us to develop a nonreductive doctrine of the atonement that perceives the saving significance of Jesus' death in terms other than this-worldly economies of exchange...

What the doctrine of the atonement attempts haltingly to articulate is the equal ultimacy of God's love and God's light (justice, holiness). On the cross neither mercy nor justice loses out; the cross is rather their mutual fulfillment. It is precisely for this reason that theories of the atonement must resist explanations that reduce the significance of Jesus ' death either to unconditional mercy or to uncompromising justice.

The Beauty of the Infinite: 'The city and the wastes'

Hart's style is by turns infuriating, self-indulgent, hilarious and transcendent. It is obviously a deliberate choice to write in this way because of some aesthetic sensibility, given the book's subject matter. However, he doesn't always pull it off, it must be said.

In this brief chapter he takes on Milbank's critique of the post-moderns and Heidegger, explaining that they themselves did not escape the metaphysics of violence. Despite the left-wing credentials of Foucault, Derrida and co, Milbank argues that the neo-Nietzcheans cannot wriggle out of the implication that nihilism's true practical expression is fascism. He sees the ethical work of these philosophers as aberrent, postmodernism's 'emptiest gesture'. The postmoderns as power-critics are blind to their own use of power. In addition, postmodernism, far from overturning metaphysics, actually confirms it.

So Heidegger, also:

The Heideggerian project is, both late and early, just another transcendental vantage on being, and one whose own metaphysical presuppositions confine philosophy within th enarrative of a more subtle but more inescapable ontological violence: a univocal account of being which makes out the ruptures in or transition among manifestations of difference to be inadjudicable and arbitrary expressions of a being hidden by what has being. p. 42

(what the...?!)

Is postmoderism passe?

While giving my lecture on the clarity of scripture on Wednesday, a man asked me: 'is the whole postmodernism thing now old-hat? Can we now say we have moved on?'

I found it a hard question to answer - partly because any of those zeitgeist questions are impossible to give an answer to I guess. As a lay person, I think his frustration was with popular pomo: pomo as it has been filtered down through newspapers and education departments and so on. Derrida for dummies...

I guess also that the term postmodernism is itself used to describe a variety of things: from a high-blown francophone post-Nietzchean linguistic turn to the fact that Pulp Fiction has several narratives in a non-linear fashion. It is a style as well as a philosophy.

So: how should I have answered his question?

Hart again

I added this paragraph to my 'power of scripture' essay (parts of which I have already posted here and here and here and here. Oh, and here ...)


"My argument in certain respects resembles that of David Bentley Hart in his monumental The Beauty of the Infinite. Hart mounts a defence of the ‘beauty to whose persuasive power the Christian rhetoric of evangelism appeals’ (p.1) against the same charge from contemporary philosophy that concerns us here: that this Christian rhetoric of peace is in fact inescapably violent. As Hart writes: ‘Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a great, as an episode in the endless epic of power’ (p. 3). This is our question too: though where Hart more generally speaks of the Christian evangel and the life of the church (which looms large for him as an Eastern Orthodox theologian) our focus is the Scriptures as the source and guarantor of Christian rhetoric. If the scriptures are merely an iron fist, even if placed in a velvet glove, then the Nietzchean/postmodern charge is sustained..."

[note please: self-quotation is definitely allowed within the rules!]

David Bentley Hart and Postmodernity

Sorry, Byron: I couldn't wait, and I have to confess to having dipped into The Beauty of the Infinite. It is one of those books with strong opinions - which have their own allure. His shredding of Tillich - whose theology is, in my opinion, best seen as a curious mid-century cul-de-sac - had me cheering in the stands.

Hart, like many theologians I like, is not unsympathetic to postmodernity; or rather, he sees postmodernity as moment of some opportunity for theology - 'an auroral astonishment following upon a nocturnal oblivion' (p. 5) at the moment when we discover that Enlightenment reason's attempt at universalising has failed. Having said that, he has a real go at the postmoderns too, bless him, for not being postmodern enough.

Here he finds a point of convergence:

'...if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to become a truth, from whose historical contigency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wresting of abstract principles from intractable facts..' (p.5)

Agaphour's Reading of "The Satanic Verses"

In Andrew Agaphour’s essay ‘Identity and Religion of the Status: The Rushdie Affair in the West’ he claims that, in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie outlines three types of ‘identity formation’: the ‘religious’, the ‘secular’ and the ‘postmodern’. The religious Agaphour defines in terms of traditional assignations of identity according to some transcendent ground; the secular is an identity that is utterly rational; and the postmodern (so-called) is seen in terms of ‘individual agency’. In Agaphour’s reading, then, Rushdie clearly favours the ‘postmodern’ over the other two. This a badly drafted typology, however: the ‘secular’ identity scarcely appears at all in the novel (as Agaphour defines it) and whether ‘postmodern’ is the most enlightening term for the identity Rushdie favours is extremely dubious. In fact, even Agaphour has to admit that Rushdie’s strident critique - in blatantly moral terms - of the religious identity is at odds with what may be termed a ‘postmodern’ critique. Rushdie’s analysis of identity and selfhood is contemporary (and in that sense perhaps ‘postmodern’) in that it is situated in the contemporary experiences of religious violence and of the massive movements of people-groups across the globe. However, it also solidly rooted in the Enlightenment and in the liberalism of the mid-twentieth century. There are echoes, too, of existentialism in Rushdie’s celebration of the individual forging his identity in the teeth of the circumstances, and especially death. Rushdie is perhaps a postmodern narrator, but he is no Foucauldian. The self in Rushdie is unsettled and unstable, but certainly not decentred.

The Wreck of Human Culture

John Carroll, professor of sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is not afraid of big ideas. His 2004 book The Wreck of Human Culture – a substantial reworking of a 1993 effort – ­is a passionate, daring and sustained attack on the bloodlines of what we call “the West.” He calls his book “a spiritual history of the West.” He writes with a refreshing polemical zeal and with none of the hedging and over-qualifying so characteristic of academic prose.

Carroll’s claim is that “humanism” – by which he means the intellectual and cultural movement originating in the Renaissance – has had its deficiencies exposed in the latter-day collapse of western culture. Most particularly, the humanist belief in the supremacy of the human free will as alternative to obedience to God has been revealed as self-defeating – not least by the devastating symbolism of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The strategy Carroll employs for demonstrating this thesis is a selectively genealogical one. In a deliberate snub of postmodern orthodoxy, he examines some of the finest works of high culture in the humanist half-millennium: Hamlet, Holbein’s The Ambassadors, Rembrandt and Poussin, Mozart and Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzche, the novels of Henry James and the films of John Ford. It is an idiosyncratic choice and an unorthodox method, which Carroll justifies because these exceptional masterpieces have “tapped the deepest truths of their time” (p.9). His interaction with these works is stimulating and masterful and makes The Wreck of Human Culture a pleasure to read.
Crucial to the history Carroll traces is the famous sixteenth century debate over the freedom of the human will between the doyen of European humanism, Erasmus of Rotterdam and the German reformer Martin Luther. Carroll bravely reads Luther as more anti-humanist than anti-Roman Catholic. The irenic Erasmus was a reasonable man. If there is no human free-will, he argues, why should the wicked reform? But Luther’s teaching of justification by faith alone meant a complete rejection of this reliance on human will and reason. For Luther, the human being is a slave to sin and sentenced to death; and must come, empty-handed, to the cross of the crucified Christ. Mere morality was a hopeless absurdity. The heart of the Protestant reformation, rooted in the writings of Paul, is an acknowledgement of the helplessness of the human as a result of sin and death and a need for absolute dependence on God. Humanism, with its alternative diagnosis of the basic goodness of human beings and their freedom to be moral, leads inevitably to the rejection of God. There are some mealy-mouthed versions of Christianity that espouse this kind of thinking, even today: but the calamities of history must be held up against them as evidence. Man has proved a very poor god; and ultimately, death still undoes him.

Luther’s insight is as crucial today as it ever was. What Protestant - in other words, Biblical - Christianity offers is a radically different diagnosis of the human condition. The humanist vision has been played out in full and now offers no comfort to the human soul. Carroll offers his work as a contribution to the funeral of humanism (p.268), with a warning for us not to give it another run.

But what does he offer as an alternative? Carroll enjoins the West to start again, to reach back into the past and recapture that right “enthusiasm for man and his works that the Renaissance attempted to enshrine” (p.266). He means by this a simple delight in place of the infatuation with the human that has bought us so badly undone. Carroll writes: “The culture of the West will not be renewed until the moment it kills Luther’s monster [ie death], and once again achieves a death of death” (p.267). For Carroll, it is in the art of Poussin that a particular alternative is indicated. Though the Frenchman Poussin was a Roman Catholic, Carroll claims that in his pictures he was able to represent Luther’s great ideas. He, too, sees that “darkness where the light of neither law nor reason shines” (p.70). He, too, sees the necessity for life and hope to come from outside sources and to be recognised as gifts. Yet he differs from Luther, writes Carroll, in that he appeals to a radically different divinity – “the sacred breath moving through the mythos” (p.71).

A evening with John Milbank

Speaking off the cuff, John Milbank gave a very interesting and compelling account of his own theological programme, or agenda. It was polemical and aggressive in tone, to say the least!

The great insight of Radical Orthodoxy is the claim that there is no such thing as the secular. Milbank pointed to the fading away of sociology as a discipline as vindication of his own book in particular. He mentioned Benedict XVI's Regendsberg address as evidence of his own influence! Which is to say, the claim that the Pope made that faith and reason integrated is the best, nay only defence against the arrogance of reason unfettered and the lunacy of pure fideism. What both he and the pope agree on is that there is the need for a 'mediating metaphysics'.

1. Achievements. Milbank claimed that RO is one of the most influential and significant movements in theology today. It claims to revision philosophy as well as theology and to bring theology back to the centre of thought as in the medieval university. He claimed that the movement had global reach.

2. Themes 1. RO is a critique of the secular. The secular is an illusion! This is to me is the great attraction of RO. It has real apologetic teeth at this point. There is no neutrality when it comes to metaphysics. It is all metaphysics - just good or bad metaphysics. In analytical philosophy we see not argument but a buried theological decision. Theology saves common sense!!
2. Postmodernism. RO is very positive about the destruction of modernism and wishes to 'embrace the postmodern flux'. The flux is however not a cause for despair AT ALL but a sign of divine plenitude. Once again, I find this a very attractive feature of RO.
3. RO rests on a peculiar and contested genealogy. This to me is the least interesting feature of the movement. Duns Scotus is cited as the point of departure - where subsequent Christianity went wrong. As a post-Reformation theologian, this leaves me a little sidelined!
He went on a little here to speak about the mode of theological writing. The point is, that if you stick to pure rational discourse, you will go wrong, says Milbank. He has a bit of a point here: Christian theology when it attempts a pure rationality fails to capture the richness of its own scriptures. I would cite 17th C. scholastic protestantism as guilty of this. Narrative and metaphor in fact SAVE the grand tradition, says JM. To strip them away is a fatal move.
4. Theological ontology... RO talks a great deal of participation in the divine being. This it has learnt from thinkers like Maximus, and this participation is expressed liturgically and especially eucharistically. This is unashamedly platonistic - Milbank says that Christianity is inherently Platonist.

3. Criticism. Milbank said there were no serious criticisms. Sure, he said, you get politically correct US rant and you get a British version which is nitpicking about his reading of various thinkers, but these are not serious.

4. Future directions. JM spoke here of a number of themes that he was interested in exploring: geopolitical theology, the idea of gift exchange and so on. He was quite unabashed about being a supercessionist! He also spoke of an educational programme: theologians should be soaked in the classics and in philosophy and literature. And he has an interest in parish life and so on. He claims an ecumenical reach beyond Anglicanism.

A vigorous question time followed.

Kevin Vanhoozer 'The Drama of Doctrine'

This book represents a landmark in genuinely reformed evangelical thinking about the theological task.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, who is currently Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, is well known for his work on questions of fundamental theology (First Theology) and hermeneutics (Is There A Meaning in This Text?). As usual, in The Drama of Doctrine he manages to combine real creativity and a remarkable knowledge of contemporary debates with faithfulness to conservative evangelical orthodoxy – which ultimately of course means faithfulness to the scriptures themselves.

This work is occasioned by the calcification of contemporary evangelical theology and the unwillingness of church pastors to pay any attention to it at all out of suspicion and/or boredom. In answer to serious cultural, intellectual and theological challenges, evangelical theological voices have certainly been more loudly raised; but they have not been persuasive in the debate or attuned to the pastor’s weekly task of proclaiming the gospel to contemporary people. Evangelical scholars have either retreated further into fortress of Enlightenment rationalism (Carl Henry, Wayne Grudem) or given craven concession to postmodernism (Stanley Grenz). The situation into which The Drama of Doctrine is written calls for a reinvigoration of the theological task in a way which avoids both of these dire pitfalls.

The purpose of this work is to present Vanhoozer’s vision of a ‘canonical-linguistic’ theology organized around the metaphor of dramatic performance. Doctrine is not merely a set of flat propositions, but rather a dramatic direction to be performed by Christians, individually and collectively. That is to say, it is a gospel to be lived! The exposition of his theme falls into four parts. In the first, “The Drama”, Vanhoozer shows how theology responds and corresponds to the words and deeds of God and serves as ‘direction for the church’s fitting participation in the drama of redemption’ (p. 31). It is rooted in the gospel itself as its first premise. Second (“The Script”), Vanhoozer addresses the place of Scripture and tradition and how they should relate. Against the post-liberals who make scripture merely subject to the church, he wishes to affirm sola scriptura. However, he is receptive to the insight that these doctrines of scripture do describe and prescribe ecclesial practices of scriptural reading. This is the real strength of the book, in this reviewer’s opinion: Vanhoozer has offered a way forward from the intractable battles about the doctrine of scripture without conceding its constitutive and authoritative place for the church’s life. Here is at last an evangelical doctrine of scripture which does not ignore ecclesiology. With John Webster, Vanhoozer also argues that Scripture has less an epistemological than a soteriological function.

Part III (“The Dramaturge”) fleshes out the role of the theologian in the ‘canonical-linguistic’ approach to theology following the theatrical model. Vanhoozer coins the term ‘post-conservative’, a move which nods to the emphasis on communal practices in post-liberalism and yet preserves an authoritative canonical script. The theologian engages in both practices of scientia in interpreting scripture and sapientia in reading and engaging with the contemporary cultural context. The aim of the theology is to enable Christians to better ‘perform’ the Christian life as disciples of Jesus by ‘improvising’ on the script(ures). Vanhoozer here proposes a move beyond both propositionalism and foundationalism in theological method while affirming the place of propositions and foundations as necessary to theology.

The fourth part (“The Performance”) extrapolates the task of theology in its congregational and pastoral setting, using the doctrine of the atonement as a case study. Doctrine is something that we are invited to live out in the church and the world: “The direction of doctrine…enables us…to render the gospel public by leading lives in creative imitation of Christ” (p. 32). One of Vanhoozer’s favourite themes – martyrdom – here emerges as a disturbing sign to the church of what imitating Christ might mean. It is a rare piece of systematic theology that can address the Christian walk so concretely. Under this schema, and with his ears attuned to postmodern currents, he is able to emphasise the need for action without losing the theological reason for it. Doctrine and ethics flow seamlessly together - as of course they should.

Some features of the book serve to dampen my overall enthusiasm. First: the guiding metaphor of ‘drama’ is a well chosen development on the insights of narrative theology; but it does at points feel stretched further than it will go. In particular, the pastor as ‘director’ (Part IV) feels like a poorly chosen equivalence and smacks somewhat of clericalism. Surely it is the Spirit who directs the church. Second, Vanhoozer’s incessant quotation of other authors impedes the smooth flow of his text; and at times appears forced. He seeks congruity in quotes but not in arguments; but when he quotes someone – say, Geoffrey Wainwright on the role of the sacraments (p. 412) - who is diametrically opposed to his conclusions, it is less than convincing as an appeal to authority. Third, Vanhoozer tends to state rather than argue his case. He articulates his point with great clarity and even aesthetic flair. This is a deliberate and self-consciouslessly postmodern strategy of depending on the explanatory power of the ideas themselves to convince his readers rather than leaning on some evidence external to the subject matter. With that I have much sympathy: however, this reader felt that there may have been more for Vanhoozer to offer by way of argument. I am surprised he spends so little time, for example, on showing how the scriptures themselves demonstrate his case by presenting a word that demands performance from its readers.

However, these shortcomings should not deter potential readers. This is a courageous and timely book that exemplifies theology taking mission seriously; and should be read by pastors, students and teachers who are like-minded. Vanhoozer does not ignore or side-step the toughest questions of postmodernism. Most salutary is the call of this book for the churches to renew our communal practices. Vanhoozer shows what an evangelical theologian can achieve if he or she is truly attentive to the task of serving the church. His vision is to recapture the reformed vision of deep theological reflection as belonging to pastors and lay people, not the preserve of the academy. Here is no brittle orthodoxy; rather, we have in The Drama of Doctrine an imaginative reiteration of evangelical truth.

Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori's linguistic theory...

"All language is metaphorical, and if we insist that particular words have only one meaning and the way we understand those words is the only possible interpretation, we have elevated that text to an idol..."

Well I am not unhappy with language being metaphorical and all... but where's the logic in the accusation of idolatry? Of course, if you undermine the authority of texts, then all you have left is... the tyranny of the bishop.

I think this is the case of someone who thinks they are being all postmodern-hip not really understanding the pomo thing anyhow.

Weird.

Secular Western Liberalism in my sights again...

Secular western liberalism is a species of political thought that consciously rejects religious ideas from public consideration. It argues that for peaceful human cohabitation a truce needs to be achieved between conflicting visions of human flourishing.

Postmodern critiques of secular western liberalism expose its weaknesses, especially in the areas of epistemology and anthropology. Lyotard and Foucault have uncovered the hidden metaphysical, even theological, commitments of liberalism, suggesting that its appeal to universal or rational concepts is less compelling than at first glance. However, the postmoderns were themselves guilty of some problematic arguments...

Secular western liberalism trespasses frequently beyond the boundaries of the role of ‘contributing to a social order less unjust’. At least in part this is because of the deliberate step liberalism has taken away from divine authority that it might assert its own (covert) theology instead. It would be preferable for liberalism to name its theological commitments; or at least to assert openly its ‘thick’ moral vision and give up the pretence of moral minimalism. Public discussion of preferred theologies and of the telos of human life need not exclude in this way some of the strongest commitments people have (namely, their religious ones); neither would religious people be asked to frame their public discourse according to the theological and/or moral commitments of liberalism. In turn, the theological and moral assertions of secular western liberalism could be properly evaluated, if at least they were made explicit.

What must be heard is a call to the end of the open hostility of contemporary liberal order to Christianity. We can see in liberalism a prodigal child of Christianity: a millennium of Christendom meant that politics in the west has been moulded out of theological clay. We would not assert, for example, that Freedom and Equality are bad ideas in themselves; rather, that without an understanding of them as they were given birth by Christian theology they lack coherence and may become harmful. Christians can support a vision of liberal order that permits people freely to hear and respond to the gospel of God, which itself calls its hearers to deep concern for justice and peace in the present age while at the same time promising a final divine intervention to ‘shatter the spear’. However, the dominant form of liberal order on the contemporary scene is remorselessly secular...

Seyla Benhabib: postmodernism and feminism and the 'end of the self'

Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish-US feminist political philosopher I have been reading...

What is she talking about? The philosophical debate she enters is one in which the reasoning subject of Kantian philosophy has been severely attacked by postmodern thinkers in particular. But is there any 'universal human' we can rescue?

Postmoderns wish to destroy all essentialist conceptions of human being or nature. In fact Man on this account is a social, historical or linguistic artifact not a noumenal or transcendental Being. 'Man' is a construct of our discourse. 'Man' is forever caught in the web of fictive meaning, in chains of signification, in which the subject is merely another position in language. Taken very strongly, this means that the subject dissolves into the chain of significations of which it was supposed to be the initiator. Ouch!

For Benhabib, this version is NOT compatible with the goals of feminism.

She admits: ‘Surely, a subjectivity that would not be structured by language, by narrative and by the symbolic codes of narrative available in a culture is unthinkable. We tell of who we are, of the ‘I’ that we are, by means of a narrative.’ p.214 BUT: we can concede all that but we must argue that we are not merely extensions of our own histories but are author/characters in our own stories…

She attacks Judith Butler's position that we are all self-constructed performers:
‘if we are no more than the sum total of the gendered expressions we perform, is there ever any chance to stop the performance for a while, to pull the curtain down, and only let it rise if one can have a say in the production of the play itself? Butler's work undermines the normative vision of feminist politics.

Further, she says, it is impossible to get rid of the subject altogether and claim to be a fully accountable participant in the community of discourse and inquiry: the strong thesis of the death of the subject undermines the discourse of the theorist herself. Good point!

INSTEAD: we can think of the self as a subject, but as a 'situated subject': that is, a person who is a body and so gendered, situated in time and space and so on, and so place in a context of unique or close to unique conditions from which the self responds and reasons.

She says:
‘my goal is to situate reason and the moral self more decisively in contexts of gender and community, while insisting upon the discursive power of individuals to challenge such situatedness in the name of universalistic principles, future identities and as yet undiscovered communities.’ p.8
Nice.

thinking about the self with Linda Woodhead

Linda Woodhead makes a very perceptive observation when she says that the common dictum that 'the postmodern self is fragmented' needs to be looked at more closely. In fact, the fragmentary thesis is worked out in several different ways, and there is major disagreement about the processes by which the self became fragmented anyways.

She asks: was the self ever a stable entity? Can we point to an easier period to be a self? Woodhead questions the handwringing 'we are in a time of crisis' assumptions that undergirds a lot of secular and theological thinking (she has Anthony Thistleton in her sights, for one).
Thinkers construe 'the self' in one of four ways:

1 - it is bestowed. That is, there is an authoritative source/s from which selfhood comes to us. True selfhood responds to the bestowal.
2 - it is rational. That is, the self is a thinking reasoning entity above all else. Being a true self is being more reasoned.
3 - it is boundless. That is to say the self is a free entity. True selfhood = freedom!
4. - it is effective, in the sense that it is chiefly an expressive entity.

Theological thinkers usually try to assert the first type of self over against the others. That is, they say - people think of themselves as (say) rational selves but that isn't right - they are and should realise that they are bestowed selves.

Woodhead says: wait a second - it is more complicated than that...

Radiohead's OK Computer: Airbag

Airbag [Elation]

“Airbag” opens with a swirling, distorted guitar figure and a crashing drum loop like Mack trucks rumbling past on a motorway; and bizarrely, sleigh bells. It’s a grim and slightly menacing sound alleviated only by some angelic-choir synth. The guitar lead flexes up and down a middle-eastern mode, sounding like a call to prayer.

in the next world war
in a jack-knifed juggernaut.

It’s a diabolical scene, a postmodern-ordinary apocalypse: the freeway car/truck crash.

In a voice that is dreamy and unreal, Thom Yorke tells a mini-narrative of a quasi-religious experience: the feeling of elation you get when you almost die in a car crash. It is an unlikely scene for an epiphany: the modern motorway is a soul-less no-place from which nature has been erased; a not-anywhere-really, a place for flesh and blood to be ground down by steel and rubber; where the natural sounds are the shriek of brakes and the suck of tyres.

As the music builds, soaring wordless monk-chant vocals come in, adding to the sense of a new beginning of spiritual dimensions.

I am born again.

It’s a moment of sheer grace. The buzz of adrenaline creates a feeling of that life is new. This is consciously religious language: but in the dark asphalt world of the song perhaps that is as good as it is ever going to get. Yet Thom howls triumphantly:

In an interstellar burst I am back to save the universe!

His brush with death makes him feel impregnable and immortal. For a moment, he forgets the vulnerability of the human body before the whizzing masses of the mechanical monoliths, and feels superhuman, capable of might feats.

I’m amazed that I survived/ An airbag saved my life.

Technology is one of the great themes of OK Computer. Here at least technology is a life-saver: his face instead of beating the steering wheel of his fast german car plops gently into the inflating airbag, and he walks away from the accident. The technology may have created the danger, but also saved his life.

It’s faintly ridiculous, of course. The scene for this exhilarating experience is banal and dispiriting. The salvation is only momentary. But for a moment, life is precious and delightful: ironically, it takes a flirtation with death to fill us with an appreciation for life.

But it isn’t a moment of grace: it is only luck.

A postmodern martyr?

Well I have to report that I dutifully attended the service at St Mary the Virgin to commorate the martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer 450 years ago.

It was a 1662 Lord's Supper, and I think they even toned down the bowing and scrapping that usually goes on. Still, the influence of the Oxford movement was much in evidence...
Rowan Williams preached the sermon. It was astonishing really. I was glad that a particular friend of mine was not in earshot: he would have hurled a stool. I certainly came close. What we got was a 21st century Cranmer in postmodern agnostic dress: a man who had become aware that human words (like.... John's Gospel was the example pulled out for us) can never exhaust the divine word. "The word of God is not bound" was the text he preached from. This was the explanation for Cranmer's use of repetition in his liturgy - that is, the inability to ever perfectly capture the divine word in human expression.

So what did Cranmer find to die for? In the end this was the question i felt was not really resolved by His Grace. Where was the truth that one finally might decide to offer oneself up for burning for?
Then we marched up to the cross in Broad St and heard from Foxe's book of martyrs read by Roger Beckwith, while the tourists stared blankly and took photos because I am sure they thought something must have been happening.