Postmodern Theology: A Biopic

By Carl Raschke

Postmodern Theology consists in a sharp-edged retrospective and reflection on the forty-year history of the most important movement in contemporary religious thought that is only now passing from the scene. The author, Dr. Carl Raschke, is generally credited with having sparked the movement, even if he did not always happen to be its leading spokesperson. Not only has a comprehensive survey of postmodern theology in all its different phases and complexity not been published prior to the appearance of this book, but it is even more remarkable for someone who both "launched" it and had a central role in shepherding it along to offer what may be termed a "movement memoir."

Postmodern Theology surveys and summarizes the major figures and trends that have given currency to such familiar expressions as "deconstruction," "deconstructive theology," "radical theology," "a/theology," "God is dead," and of course, "postmodernism" itself. Dr. Raschke also contextualizes the emergence of these catchy phrases from a frothy soup of new intellectual theories and philosophical innovations, which were international in scope but customized for both academic and popular religious writers--mainly in Britain and America--from the late 1960s onward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jul 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781498203883

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Postmodern Theology

A Biopic

Carl A. Raschke

16241.png

Postmodern Theology

A Biopic

Cascade Companions

37

Copyright ©

2017

Carl A. Raschke. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-0387-6

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-0389-0

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-0388-3

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Raschke, Carl A.

Title: Postmodern theology : a biopic / Carl A. Raschke.

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books,

2017

| Series: Cascade Companions

37

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:

isbn 978-1-4982-0387-6 (

paperback

) | isbn 978-1-4982-0389-0 (

hardcover

) | isbn 978-1-4982-0388-3 (

ebook

)

Subjects: LCSH: Raschke, Carl. A. | Postmodern theology. | Postmodernism—Religious aspects. | Philosophical theology. | Biography.

Classification:

bl65.p73 r37 2017 (

print

) | bl65.p73 r37 (

ebook

)

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

02/20/18

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Chapter 1: Postmodernism and Its Theological Offspring

Chapter 2: Radical Theology

Chapter 3: The Thought of the Other

Chapter 4: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo

Chapter 5: Un-deconstructing Justice

Chapter 6: The Rise and Fall of Postmodern Theology

Bibliography

. . . a concise, scintillatingly incisive, and richly informative introduction to the genealogy, present status, and future prospects of what insiders prefer to call Radical Theology, but outsiders mistakenly call Postmodern Theology, by one of its early pioneers and most sustained and innovative proponents, written with the flair, wit, honesty, and scholarly shorthand Carl Raschke is so much appreciated for. The title is already a play on this irony. It is a pocket-sized, reliable compass well-suited for a journey which can easily go astray and end up in muddy waters of confusion and misapprehension. What the project of a Radical Theology is all about is explained in vivid clarity. So also in what sense it is postmodern and in what sense it is a critique of shallow postmodernism.

—WL van der Merwe, chair in Philosophy of Religion, Vrije Universiteit

Cascade Companions

The Christian theological tradition provides an embarrassment of riches: from Scripture to modern scholarship, we are blessed with a vast and complex theological inheritance. And yet this feast of traditional riches is too frequently inaccessible to the general reader.

The Cascade Companions series addresses the challenge by publishing books that combine academic rigor with broad appeal and readability. They aim to introduce nonspecialist readers to that vital storehouse of authors, documents, themes, histories, arguments, and movements that comprise this heritage with brief yet compelling volumes.

selected titles in this series:

Reading Paul by Michael J. Gorman

Theology and Culture by D. Stephen Long

Creation and Evolution by Tatha Wiley

Theological Interpretation of Scripture by Stephen Fowl

Reading Bonhoeffer by Geffrey B. Kelly

Justpeace Ethics by Jarem Sawatsky

Feminism and Christianity by Caryn D. Griswold

Angels, Worms, and Bogeys by Michelle A. Clifton-Soderstrom

Christianity and Politics by C. C. Pecknold

A Way to Scholasticism by Peter S. Dillard

Theological Theodicy by Daniel Castelo

The Letter to the Hebrews in Social-Scientific Perspective 
by David A. deSilva

Basil of Caesarea by Andrew Radde-Galwitz

A Guide to St. Symeon the New Theologian by Hannah Hunt

Reading John by Christopher W. Skinner

Forgiveness by Anthony Bash

Jacob Arminius by Rustin Brian

Jeremiah: Prophet Like Moses by Jack Lundbom

John Calvin by Donald McKim

Rudolf Bultmann: A Companion to His Theology by David Congdon

The U.S. Immigration Crisis: Toward and Ethics of Place by Miguel A. De La Torre

Theologia Crucis: A Companion to the Theology of the Cross by Robert Cady Saler

Virtue: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Olli-Pekka Vainio

Approaching Job by Andrew Zack Lewis

To my wife, Sunny

Preface

It is slightly unusual for someone who has been credited at times with inventing something to write an overview as well as a history of the very phenomenon attributed in certain respects to them. I cannot say that I really invented postmodern theology. I was merely the first in the field of academic theology, or any circle of theologians for that matter, actually to read Derrida and incorporate his ideas into an embryonic project in the waning of the Vietnam era that gradually mushroomed into what might be considered the prevailing drift of Western theological thinking up until at least the end of the last decade. Thus as the invited author for the book Postmodern Theology in the Cascade Companions series, I am in a somewhat unprecedented position. I come with an unabashed personal slant toward the four-decade evolution of the movement as well as the role of certain key figures, including myself, in its unfolding. In comparison with theological trends that are now thoroughly inscribed within the historical archives and presided over by deceased luminaries, I have no choice but to write about what happened, and how things came to be, from the way I saw it both then and now. My interpretation will probably be clouded at times by my own private angle of vision, and of course contested by others who were also part of the movement, and saw things entirely differently.

The problem is compounded by the fact that over the years a wide swathe of the theological profession have claimed at different times to be, or others have claimed them to be, postmodern in some sense. There was a time, long gone and now barely remembered, when many on both the liberal and conservative sides of the theological spectrum wanted to be identified with the brand somehow. The vast majority of them, however, merely grabbed the brass ring while flying by on their painted ponies. They never seriously read the now extensive canon of postmodern philosophy while weaving it visibly into their own choice of subject matter and style of writing. My apologies to the many of this sort I did not include in my accounting. But if one, for instance, were to author an overview of the invention and dissemination of the personal computer, one would concentrate their attention on the technological pioneers, not those who manufactured the knockoffs.

As an aside, I also recognize that a major, influential, and still enduring movement that appeared during the 1990s known as radical orthodoxy also claimed the mantle of postmodernism. I was one of the invited speakers at an international conference at Cambridge University entitled Shadow of Spirit in England during the summer of 1993. It was at that conference, as far as I remember from the papers presented and pub conversations on that occasion, when radical orthodoxy first showed its hand for the first time as a distinctively British counterpunch to what they regarded as the indigenous, crypto-barbarian version of American deconstructionism. Radical orthodoxy, especially under the leadership of John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, claimed to be the rediscovery of certain authentic, and much more legacy-rich, methodologically advanced, and traditionalist-friendly sources of postmodernist theological thinking in Medieval Catholic thought and Anglicanism. The perception was so strong that the publisher for Routledge, which helped market the campaign of the radically orthodox a few years later, asked me—perhaps somewhat facetiously—if I might consider commanding a charge of bluecoats waving the flag of Derrida against the RO redcoats who were ready to launch a new British invasion of theological ideas.

The discussions never went anywhere, and by then the love affair of academics with Derrida was starting to cool anyway. Radical orthodoxy did leave, and to this day has definitely left, an undeniable impact on contemporary theology. But it would be a stretch in my mind to call it postmodern theology in a categorical way any more than we can dub process theology Hegelianism, even though the former was from the outset a serious effort of Anglo-American idealists to dampen the excesses of dialectical philosophy. Furthermore, to deal with radical orthodoxy completely, accurately, and fairly would require an overwhelming expansion of this little book itself. Thus a significant segment of the relatively recent theological past has been omitted for strategic reasons.

But, as indicated a few paragraphs back, I have to write from my own wide, but not necessarily complete, perspective. As often happens, when a certain modest notoriety is the ultimate prize in the kind of intellectual competition the making of postmodern theology happened to be, egos get in the way, and the public narrative of the process is not necessarily the honest one. I can only tell it like I think it was. And what it was remains in many respects a riddle wrapped in an enigma to this day. Yet postmodern theology was a name that can to be its own kind of brand name, even if no one consciously aimed to brand the name itself. Postmodernism was a brand all its own, a brand for which nobody really knows what it is, and appears recently to have lost interest in. It was only natural that postmodern theology would become its own sub-brand. But what remains indisputable is that the brand has stuck and has become indelibly etched in our lasting social memory, even if nowadays it retains a certain retro feeling. Hence, what follows is a kind of inside story, draped with a disciplined effort to be as fair and as comprehensive in setting the context for the story as one can be under the circumstances.

In the preparation of this manuscript I would like to acknowledge the generosity of the University of Denver, especially the Department of Religious Studies and the Division of Arts, Humanities, and Social Science, which funded a sabbatical to complete a major portion of this manuscript. I would also like to thank the following research assistants who both dug out material and citations for me while providing bits of the actual text of the manuscript: Timothy Snediker, Jeffrey Appel, and Tali Bitton. I would also acknowledge the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory for granting permission to reproduce certain selections of an interview I did with them in the spring of 2013.

1

Postmodernism and Its Theological Offspring

What Is, or Was, Postmodernism?

On September 29, 2008, the stock market plunged 774 points, marking the advent of the so-called Great Recession. Yet in light of recent cultural history it also signaled the end of a different period, what had loosely been termed the postmodern era. The postmodern era was never really an era in the sense of a time interval that could be precisely dated. The term postmodern had come to serve as a master metaphor for what was, in truth, the cultural odyssey of the West throughout the post-Vietnam decades. If the referent of an era is registered only by a hyphen, we must still be postmodern in some decisive way of framing things, because there can technically be no such as thing as the post-post-modern. The hyphen leaves it thoroughly open-ended.

At the same time, 2008 marked the onset of a certain disenchantment with the breezy and wide-eyed optimism that had distinguished not only the 1990s but most of the Reagan and first Bush administrations. That optimism had found an outlet in what was essentially an upbeat mood inherited from the cultural revolutions throughout the West during the sixties, namely, that the old, authoritarian and unassailable frameworks of meaning on both the right and left that had persisted throughout the industrial age were cracking and coming apart, and that a brave new and experimental world dominated by what Richard Florida¹ would later term the creative class with their free play of ideas and the imagination was inexorably taking shape. But the Bush presidency, which ended just as the economic sirens were sounding, marked a turning point, and the optimism slowly began to ebb away. In consequence, something in our culture changed irreversibly after the autumn of 2008.

We are here, however, not to chronicle the rise and fall of postmodernism in the West. As with every cycle of history, what was once all the rage has left its indelible impression on the present generation, and will affect generations to come. Even if we can’t put a hyphen after the hyphen, time has already left its profound signature on the times from that hyphen. How do we characterize postmodernism? Overall postmodernism, if we can genuinely portray what was always an elusive, shape-shifting entity in both its birth and dotage, was consistently marked by a kind of highbrow inventiveness as well as commitment to intellectual and artistic boundary-breaking that accompanies times of collective confidence and optimism. Its quirkiness was an extended holdover from the cultural craziness and political anarchy of the late sixties and early seventies, corresponding to the life cycle of the Baby Boomers from impetuous youth to modish middle-agedness. When the general mood began to darken immediately after the turn of the millennium, especially after the destruction of the World Trade Center in September 2001 followed by the Afghan and Iraq wars, pomo (as it was popularly known) had gone mainstream and had even embedded itself within the academic establishment, including that declining discipline loosely denominated as theology.

But what did the word postmodern actually imply throughout what has been an almost forty-year run by now on the marquees of the cutting-edge culture? Whether postmodern over this span of time was utilized in a commendatory sense as progressive and hip, or in the calumnious voice of political conservatives during the Reagan interlude to excoriate so-called alternative lifestyles and values, the term itself had become irremediably diffuse and incapable of specification. Yet, in reality, it encompassed everything that was good, bad, or indifferent about the sea changes in social life that took place after the upheavals that commenced in the late 1960s and continued into the mid-1970s. In the early phases the ideas swirling around what we now understand as postmodernism were intrinsically associated with the intellectual movement known as post-structuralism, which in turn was affiliated with the critical approach to reading texts that acquired the name of deconstruction. Post-structuralism, as the locution implies, connoted a clutch of savants and thought-leaders from a patchwork of disciplines, primarily in France, who sought to transition from the dominant paradigm of cultural and linguistic analysis known as structuralism.

The éminence grise of structuralism in France at the time had been the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, but the same methodology had also played a feature role in the work of the famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Deconstruction as an interpretative procedure was launched on Gallic turf by the philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1960s and imported into the United States with the translation into English of some of his most important early works during the seventies. These diverse trends, however, did not receive the postmodern stamp until the appearance of a book in the early 1980s by French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard entitled The Postmodern Condition.²

The word post-structuralism itself was given initial impetus by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of Derrida’s students, in her translation into English from the French of his sprawling, early tome Of Grammatology.³ However, the concept still was intimately ensconced with the somewhat recondite sensibility concerning arts and letters after structuralism, that is, the next generation following the great suzerains of structuralist thought themselves—Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes as well as Lacan. The notion of deconstruction was part of the legacy of Martin Heidegger. In his Letter to a Japanese Friend (1983) Derrida discusses his desire to stay close to Heidegger’s destruction (German=Destruktion, or Abbau) of the history of metaphysics. Derrida wrote,

At that time structuralism was dominant. Deconstruction seemed to be going in the same direction since the word signified a certain attention to structures (which themselves were neither simply ideas, nor forms, nor syntheses, nor systems). To deconstruct was also a structuralist gesture or in any case a gesture that assumed a certain need for the structuralist problematic. But it was also an anti-structuralist gesture, and its fortune rests in part on this ambiguity. Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented (all types of structures, linguistic, logocentric, phonocentric)—structuralism being especially at that time dominated by linguistic models and by a so-called structural linguistics that was also called Saussurian—socio-institutional, political, cultural, and above all and from the start philosophical.⁴

It was actually a little more complicated. Structuralism was by and large a European project. One might even be more selective and call it a French obsession, even if it had its own coterie of American adherents. The latter tended to congregate in the academic specialties of literary criticism and theory, which is why Derrida first secured his American beachhead among lit-crit professors at Yale University (the so-called Yale School) that included Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. Even the majority of these then-fashionable poststructuralist luminaries, who acquired notoriety in the late 1970s, did not see themselves as offering primarily what Derrida called anti-structuralist gestures. Post-structuralism referred primarily to the ongoing impact of Derrida’s 1966 lecture Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.⁵ From the very beginning the post-structuralist movement, later fuzzed in its range of implications as it was rebaptized postmodernism, was closely associated with Derrida. Derrida, as his own correspondence suggests, was doing something rather unique.

The real context for the immigration of post-structuralism into the United States was the mere fact that more and more scholars in the humanities were fed up with the quasi-totalitarian regime of Anglo-American linguistic philosophy. It is hard to imagine from the vantage point of the present how pervasive analytic philosophy was in the academy from the early 1950s until well into the 1970s. Continental philosophy, whether French or German, was considered a weird kind of cult, as my own department chair in philosophy when I was an undergraduate referred to