postmodernism: theological responses, part 2 · postmodernism involves a new unity of science,...

Contemporary Theology II:

Transcript - ST507 Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 23 of 24ST507

Postmodernism: Theological Responses, Part 2

Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism

This is lecture 23 for the course Contemporary Theology II. In our last lecture, we were looking at different postmodern theological responses to the modern world and worldview. At the end of our lecture, we had begun to describe liberationist postmodernism. And I want to continue with that and then move on to another form of postmodern theology. But before we do any of that, let’s begin with a word of prayer.

Lord, we thank you again for the privilege of study. We realize that the mindset of our times is changing, and it has changed. And we want to understand better what people are thinking and how people are responding theologically in this situation. Father, it is with a goal to ministering better to people in our day and age that we study. So bless our time together as we study. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray it. Amen.

At the end of our lecture last time I had just begun to give a general overview of liberation theology as a postmodern theology. As I mentioned then, we’re not going to spend as much time on this form of postmodernism as we might because earlier in this course we’ve already studied liberation theology. But I do want to at least describe for you the liberationist, postmodern theology of Harvey Cox. Harvey Cox, you may be familiar with that name, is a professor of theology and has been in that position at Harvard University for a number of years. In particular, I’m thinking of his work entitled Religion and the Secular City: Toward a Postmodern Theology [New York: Macmillan, 1965]. This is the basis of the discussion of his theology in the book by Griffin, and Beardsley and Holland entitled Varieties of Postmodern Theology.

As we begin with our description of Harvey Cox, I think it is fair to note that for Cox, the modern worldview is the view of the capitalist, the bourgeoisie—we could put it that way. And the function of modern religion has been to legitimate this world and this worldview. But in contrast to all of that, Cox holds that, and I

John S. Feinberg, PhD University of Chicago, MA and PhD

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, ThMTalbot Theological Seminary, MDiv

University of California, BA

Transcript - ST507 Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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quote here: “The postmodern age will be the age of the poor, the masses. Politics and religion will be reunited. Theology will not be academic but liberationist meaning political from the outset. It will not seek universality but will focus on the particular concerns of the region knowing that unity comes not through agreement on ideas but through social conflict.” In other words, what he’s suggesting here is that rather than try to produce a theology that would be true and address problems for all people in all places, liberationist theology will have a different form in each of the different regions and societies where it is picked up. So it will have its own peculiar flavor for each country and each society.

Our authors go on to say as they describe Cox that “for Cox, theology will try not to revise popular religion to make it credible to elites but to strengthen it as a resource for the oppressed. Postmodern theology will be concerned less with the ideas themselves and apologetic arguments for their truth than with the social sources and the political uses of ideas.” So the thought here is that it’s not so important as to exactly what you believe but what you do with what you believe. “The sources for postmodern theology will come not from the top and the center but from the bottom and the edges, what many have called the margins of society. This means concretely that the sources will be popular piety and contact with other religions. Postmodern theology will thereby involve a fusion of modern and premodern religious elements.” These ideas you’ll find on pages 83 through 84 of Varieties of Postmodern Theology.

Though there are many who would argue that the reason for moving from a modern to a postmodern worldview is that the modern worldview is both untrue and unhealthy, that’s not the reasoning behind Cox’s desire to move to a postmodern understanding of things. For Cox, it’s really only pragmatism that moves one in this direction away from modernity to postmodernism. It’s not the matter of the truth of the ideas of the modern worldview. I think here we can illustrate his point from two examples of theological positions that he holds. In the first place, for example, Cox mentions the issue of how we know there is a God; and if there is a God, how we know that He is a God of the poor. Now Cox also recognizes that the problem of evil throws doubt on the belief in a loving and all-powerful God. As you listen to that, you think, My goodness, this is really going to get us into a weighty, theological, and even philosophical discussion. But rather than moving you into that kind of discussion, instead he offers no answer to these theological and philosophical problems beyond the purely pragmatic response of the liberation theologians that



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says you choose the theory that works best, the one that helps poor people move toward the goal of justice. So you can see that there is a certain shying away from the intellectual questions to a response that says which answer, whichever one it might be, will get us the most mileage in terms of social and political justice.

A second example from Cox’s theology of this sort of shying away from ideas in favor of pragmatics is the rationale that he offers for moving from the modern to the postmodern worldview altogether. His reasons for making this kind of move are not philosophical or theological but really pragmatic and sociological. He makes the claim that modern theology was really correct in embracing the basic ideas of modernity. In fact, modern theology did a good job of tackling the modern world. It offered a wide variety of plausible answers to questions that modern intellectuals were raising. If it was that good, why not stick with it? Cox says that the reason to now reject modern theology is only that the audience has changed. And when the audience changes, then the questions also change. There are fewer and fewer people, Cox says, who are asking the questions to which modern theology gave its answers. So for Cox, there was really nothing intrinsically wrong with modern theology. It’s just that it’s time to go beyond that because the time of the usefulness of modern theology has really passed.

A further elaboration of this point is that Cox holds that the previously accepted picture of the modern world has lost its credibility. It’s not that this was so terribly wrong. It’s just that people are thinking in different ways. We are seeing, Cox believes, the collapse of what has often times been referred to as the five pillars of modernity. And let me briefly sketch what those five are. The first one is confidence in science-based technology, that with science and with technology we can make a better world. We can solve our problems. The second pillar of modernity is the notion of the sovereignty of nation-states. Rather than having great empires, what the modern world seems to go after was independent nation-states which were equally sovereign with others rather than having large empires that try to amalgamate peoples and cultures together. The modern mindset said let’s give each state its own identity, its own specific laws, etcetera.

A third of the five pillars of modernity is known as bureaucratic rationalism, that there are various forms of bureaucracy that can work things out. A fourth of the pillars of modernity is profit maximization that economically one attempts to make as much money and as much profit as one possibly can. And then the fifth



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pillar of modernity is the secularization and the trivialization of religion. It gets removed from public life, and in many ways, religion and religious belief has been trivialized. It has been ridiculed. It has been moved out of the public sector. Cox in response to these five pillars doesn’t argue that these five pillars of modernity were untrue or that they were based on untrue ideas. Instead his claim is the purely sociological one that they’ve lost their credibility, so it is time for us to move on. People just don’t think in that way anymore. Those things don’t seem to work, so we move beyond it. That completes what I want to say about Harvey Cox. And it gives you another taste of a liberationist theology.

I think it would be appropriate though now for us to move on to a third postmodern theological response to modernity. We’ve looked then at the deconstructionist postmodern theological response. We’ve looked at a liberationist postmodern response. And now I want to turn to a third theological response to modernity. And this is what the authors of our book term “constructive” or “revisionary” postmodernism. Let me, if I may, give you a general description of this, and then we want to take a look at some samples of this. And in one sense, you may be very pleased to hear that there is this sort of option, because pretty much what we have described so far as postmodern theological responses to modernity seem to be fairly destructive and don’t really leave us much in the way of concepts and ideas. Now it sounds like we’re going to have some people who want to actually build a theological system.

Let me begin with a few words of general description. “This approach to postmodernism,” our authors say, “seeks to overcome the modern worldview not by eliminating the possibility of worldviews as such but by constructing a postmodern worldview through a revision of modern premises and traditional concepts.” So we’re not throwing out worldviews altogether. We’re trying to come up with a new one. “This constructive or revisionary postmodernism involves a new unity of science, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuition. Rather than fragmenting each of these disciplines and each of these areas of life, we’re trying to unify them in a new way. This approach to postmodernism rejects not science as such. It only rejects that scientism in which the data of the modern natural sciences are alone allowed to contribute to the construction of our worldview. As we have seen, there have been many theologians in the modern period who pretty much said the only thing you could believe is whatever the natural sciences told you, whatever was available through empirical observation. Now this particular postmodern theology is saying no, we need



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to realize that there are other data that can contribute to our understanding and construction of a worldview.

The constructive activity of this type of postmodernism is not limited to a revised worldview alone. It is equally concerned with a postmodern world that will support and be supported by the new worldview. In other words, we’re looking not only for a new set of ideas but a new world. A postmodern world, we’re told, will involve postmodern persons with a postmodern spirituality on the one hand, a postmodern society, ultimately a postmodern global order on the other. Going beyond the modern world will involve transcending such things as the modern world’s individualism, its anthropocentrism, patriarchy, mechanization, economism, consumerism, nationalism, and militarism. Constructive postmodern thought provides support for the ecology, peace, feminist, and other emancipatory movements of our time while stressing that the inclusive emancipation must be from modernity itself. What has enslaved us ultimately then is not so much people, although indeed they have, but ideas a certain mindset. The term, we are told, “postmodern,” however by contrast with “premodern,” emphasizes that the modern world has produced unparalleled advances that must not be lost in a general revulsion against its negative features. In other words, what we’re being told here is we don’t want to jettison the advances of modernity over the premodern worldview. It’s just that we want to see if we can incorporate those positive things while rejecting the negative aspects of modernity.

You’ll remember in my description of modernity I spoke of modern theology. And when I did, I distinguished between early modern and late modern theologies. Constructive postmodernism rejects all the characteristics of late modern theology that we described. And here we want to say that while it recognizes that Western culture is still overwhelmingly shaped by the modern worldview, it believes that this situation is rapidly changing. The change is coming about in part it holds because the objective approach to reality, that is the sort of rational empirical way of going about doing things, no longer supports the modern worldview but instead is pointing toward a postmodern worldview. And it believes that theology must in our time become public in both senses: that is it must make its case in terms of the criteria of self-consistency and adequacy to generally accessible facts of experience which is what other disciplines, other areas of life do. And it must be directly relevant to matters of public policy as well. It cannot continue to be on the sidelines to be secularized, to be trivialized



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as theology had been during the modern era. That’s some words by way of general description.

What I’d like to do is now turn to a couple of examples of this constructive postmodernism. And the first example is Joe Holland’s Catholic constructive postmodernism. And then a little bit later we will look at instead a more Protestant constructive postmodernism. First of all Joe Holland’s Catholic constructive postmodernism. And in our book Varieties of Postmodern Theology, we find this represented in Holland’s essay “The Postmodern Paradigm and Contemporary Catholicism.” Holland begins by giving his critique of the modern worldview, and he shows how he believes it has been collapsing. He then compares several different worldviews beginning with the classical or the pre-modern Catholic worldview. He discusses the modern ideology of liberalism that was embodied in many modern capitalistic democracies. And he discusses Marxist ideologies. And he sees that as an important backdrop for understanding what is now happening and what he thinks should happen. After discussing the inadequacies of both the liberal and the Marxist modern ideologies, he says that these critiques lead the way to a postmodern paradigm. As Holland argues as he begins to lay out this paradigm, he says: “Every paradigm has its understanding of several different items. Those items are time, space, the holy, governance, and then a root metaphor for how the world is seen and understood.”

Holland then lays out his Catholic postmodern worldview in light of these different elements. So first of all, let’s see what he has to say about time. Here I’m quoting from page 19 of Varieties of Postmodern Theology. He says:

The classical view [that is, the classical view with respect to time] saw history as the repetitive biological cycle of birth and decay, yet containing within its soul a transcendent core of eternal truth protected by the rock-like institutions of civilization. The two modern ideologies [and by those two he means liberal and Marxist] broke with the classical heritage by turning the repetitive cycle into a linear arrow of progress, evolutionary or revolutionary and partially or completely dissolving the transcendent religious core of the civilization into scientific secularization. For the classical view, the future was a continuation of the past and the conservation of eternal truth. For the modern view, the future became a liberation from the past and the discovery



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of new scientific truths.

Now Holland says:

I propose that the postmodern vision is moving toward a truly dialectical view of history as an ongoing creation. Linking radical memory [that would be roots] with creative imagination [that would be development] the new future emerges to challenge the present, but it remains a future rooted in the past. Past and future thus form an ecology of the historical whole. Dynamic movement continues not as rejection of the past but as a deepening of its creative energy.

This is from page 19. So that’s the new concept of time. It is a dialectical concept of how time moves. What about space? Hhere again I quote from Holland. This is from pages 19 through 22. He says:

If the mutuality of rootedness and development constitutes the historical axis for the postmodern vision, network communion constitutes its structural axis. The social body is not a hierarchical pyramid as in the classical ideology [where you had people at the top who were likely clergy and then you moved down the pyramid at the foundation were just average normal people]. So the social body is not a hierarchical pyramid, nor is it simply a collection of Newtonian particles liberally dispersed in a competitive equilibrium or politically massified as a single force. [Again that’s a slap at both liberal and Marxist understandings of things.] The social body is not simply a collection of Newtonian particles as in the modern ideologies. Rather the parts exist in holistic communion with each other. Each part has distinct dignity, while each cooperates creatively for the whole. Above all, the creativity is in the communion so that the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts both structurally and historically. Community is the foundation of the creative act. Community in turn unleashes its creativity by tapping its historical roots and freeing its creative imagination.



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Then Holland moves on to his description of the holy. He says:

For the classical ideology, the whole was sacred. But its sacrality flowed from the domination of the lower by the higher pursued by a non-historical spiritual flight from nature. The modern ideologies rightfully awakened historical consciousness although they still set it against nature and substituted religious privatization and public secularization for holistic sacralism. For the postmodern paradigm, however, secularism is rejected; and the sacred is rediscovered but as disclosed in the creative communion across the natural and social ecology of time and space. The sacred is revealed in the creativity of natural, social, and religious communion continually tapping the roots and opening the imagination. Formation of community, tapping the roots, stirring the creative imagination these are ultimately religious acts which begin to pervade and transform the whole social and natural ecology. The classical image of God as objective domination fades as does the modern image of God as subjective privatization. What discloses spiritual power is the living Mystery revealing itself in ongoing creation and recreation. [this from page 21]

Then Holland goes on to explain his postmodern notion of governance. Here on page 21 we read: “Here we see governance not as the traditional hierarchical rule nor as liberal pluralistic management nor as strategic intellectual control. Leadership remains important with real authority as does the institutional embodiment of leadership. But governance becomes the service of communal creativity.” We don’t get a whole lot of explanation of just what that means, but that’s what he has to say. Then he turns to what he calls the root metaphor for this kind of understanding of worldview. And he compares his root metaphor with that of the classical premodern period and the modern period’s root metaphor. Here’s what he says:

The root metaphor of the classical premodern period was organic, the body, housing a fortified, transcendent soul. The root metaphor of the modern period became mechanistic, namely the machine. Initially in liberalism only a physical machine, later in Marxism a cybernetic machine. The root metaphor of the postmodern period



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becomes artistic, the work of art expressed in the creative, ecological communion of nature and history across time and space and flowing from the religious mystery. [taken from page 21]

Holland then turns to the postmodern praxis. He discusses how such a praxis might be found in the current praxis of the Catholic Church. But then he offers his proposal for a more global praxis. Here’s what he says on page 23:

In sum I propose that elements of the new global praxis of the Catholic church contain implicitly a vision of history as the creative yet rooted power of living tradition, of structure as the creativity of community, of the holy as experienced through human participation in the ongoing divine creation and recreation, of governance as the institutional mediation of communal creativity, and beneath it all of a postmodern artistic root metaphor. [page 23]

Now Holland also believes that the rise of a postmodern praxis within the Catholic Church suggests a postmodern theological foundation for an ecumenical Christianity. After he discusses various elements of that theological foundation, he then concludes as follows:

The postmodern Christian vision thus represents a postclassical Catholic and postmodern Protestant theological position, therefore, a truly new and profoundly ecumenical creation. Sin becomes the idolatry of the present revealed by negative judgment but overthrown by tapping the ongoing creativity of the tradition and unleashing the ongoing and complementary power of nature and grace. The negative sense of dynamism and judgment is a Protestant legacy. The positive sense of the goodness of creation, ecological and social, with its complementarity to grace is a Catholic legacy. Synthesized they could represent a new historical stage of Christianity. It would be the remarriage of the evangelical and sacramental principles to produce a new offspring. The Catholic Church’s postmodern opening is thereby also an ecumenical opening, a retrieval of the foundation, biblical, prophetic, and priestly vision of



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ongoing creation and new creation. This vision was statically diminished in the classical covenant of Catholicism with Greco-Roman culture and negatively disfigured in the dynamic Protestant covenant with modernity. My aim has been simply to outline the hypothesis that aspects of the contemporary praxis of the Catholic Church contain implicitly a postmodern ecological, social, and religious vision and a new ecumenical opening. The point of my critique of the mechanistic root of modernity has not been to be anti-modern but rather to suggest the need for a postmodern social and spiritual vision to understand how contributions of both capitalist and socialist modernity can be preserved while moving beyond their destructive crisis. [page 25]

As you ponder the various themes that Holland raises, you sense that there is some sort of theology or philosophy behind this, and of course there is. The basic understanding of the world that seems supposed or we might say presupposed by Holland and incorporated into his thinking is, I suggest, Whitehead’s process metaphysics. What seems implicit though in Holland winds up being made very explicit in David Griffin and William Beardslee. And it’s to Griffin that I now want to turn and look at his constructive postmodernism. David Griffin would consider his constructive postmodernism an example of a Protestant constructive postmodernism. In our book Varieties of Postmodern Theology, we get David Griffin’s constructive postmodernism laid out in several places. Specifically I am taking it from his articles in this book, his chapters in this book entitled “Postmodern Theology and A/theology: A Response to Mark C. Taylor.” Then also his chapter entitled “Liberation Theology and Postmodern Philosophy: A Response to Cornel West.”

Griffin claims that perhaps the most basic difference between deconstructive and his constructive postmodernism involves their respective attitudes about theory and practice. Deconstructive postmodernism follows Hume’s precedent in rejecting from theory all those commonsense beliefs that are in conflict with modern premises. Hume did not stop believing in causality as real influence. He didn’t stop believing in an actual world which existed independently of his perception. But because these beliefs could not be justified by his philosophical theory given its premises, he relegated them to the status of practice. Whitehead, by contrast,



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said that we should appeal to practice not to supplement our philosophical theory but to revise it.

If you’re wondering what all of this is about Hume, Hume was a very, very strict and thoroughgoing empiricist believing that one should only strictly believe in things that are empirically observable. And so, for example, when it came to matters of causality, everyone seems to believe that you can see causation in the real world. What Hume argued was that what you actually are able to observe is what he called “the constant conjunction of two events.” And because of the constant conjunction of certain events (what may be two; it may be any number of events) which are then followed by other events, we attribute to all of this the idea that the first event or set of events was the cause of the second set of events. But we don’t actually see, that is, perceptually observe, the transference of causal power from one thing to the next. That’s an idea that we impose upon what we see.

Think, for example, of what happens if someone is playing billiards. And this seems to have been the kind of example that Hume himself used. The person who is playing billiards hits the cue ball, and one sees that cue ball move up to and against a second ball. And then one sees that second ball move on the table. Typically those who see this will say, The first ball hit the second ball. And by doing so, it caused the second ball to move. Hume is such a thoroughgoing empiricist that he says actually we attribute causal power from the first ball to the second ball. We don’t really observe empirically through sense perception or any other way. We don’t really observe the transference of the power from one ball to the next. It’s just that we have repeatedly seen the conjunction of this sort of thing happen on many occasions. One ball moves. It comes contiguous to another ball, and then the second ball moves. And so we have come to the conclusion that the first ball’s movement next to the second ball causes the second ball to move. But that’s not necessarily so. It might even be on some occasions possible that when the first ball comes next to the second ball there would be no movement at all. Or the first ball might move backwards, or it might go up in the air. We don’t know that that’s not so. It’s only that we attribute the idea of causality from the first ball to the second ball that makes us believe that one thing is gonna happen. The second ball will move as a result of the first ball being moved against it. And yet we don’t know for sure that that’s so. That’s the kind of idea that Griffin is talking about here when he says Hume didn’t stop believing in causality as real influence in an actual world which existed independently



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of his perception. But because these beliefs could not be justified by his philosophical theory, given its premises, and I’ve just explained to you his philosophical theory, he relegated them to the status of practice rather than theory.

Let me come back to Griffin. I thought though that that little explanation, that little detour so to speak, might help you to understand what Griffin is saying. Griffin says then, following Whitehead, that we need not just to supplement our philosophical theory with praxis and practice, but we need to revise it. The rule for philosophical theory is that, and I quote him here: “We must bow to those presumptions which despite of criticism, we still employ for the regulation of our lives. Philosophy should be the search for the coherence of such presumption. Metaphysics should be empirical primarily in the sense of including and reconciling these various notions” (page 40).

As we have already noted when we describe the basic ideas of modernity, two key dogmas of modernity are its epistemological belief in sensate empiricism and its ontological belief that the fundamental existence of the world are devoid of spontaneity or the power of self-movement. That’s the kind of mechanistic view of nature. Now Griffin refers to this second view, the ontological position, as the non-animistic view of nature. Or Griffin says you could also call it non-animism. Griffin claims that this second tenet of the modern world, this non-animism, was derivative from supernaturalistic theism with its belief in divine omnipotence. If God has all the power, then how can nature have any power? It must be non-animate. As to sensate empiricism, it too, Griffin says, arose in a supernaturalistic context. What you could know of the world was known through sense perception. Any other knowledge that was unavailable through sense perception would be provided to us by divine revelation of some sort. So what you couldn’t know by sense perception you could know in some other way.

But as modernism moved on into its later period, Griffin says, the eighteenth through the twentieth century, more and more God was left out of the equation. And the results were that people began adopting materialism with respect to the mind. There wasn’t anything such as immaterial substances like minds. And in regard to knowledge about good and evil and God, it was simply groundless. You didn’t have any basis for believing if you couldn’t confirm it. And you couldn’t do so because this sensate empiricism didn’t allow you to observe anything of this sort.



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And now you were leaving God out of the picture. You couldn’t believe that there was a God, or if there was a God, you couldn’t believe that He revealed Himself. The ultimate result, Griffin says, epistemologically was solipsism, a belief that you could only know your own private experiences, your own sensations and the like. Griffin’s revisionary postmodernism though has a different answer to all of this. It does not accept the nihilistic conclusions of deconstructionism which simply take this modern rejection of God and the rest to its sort of logical extreme and conclusion.

Griffin doesn’t go in that direction. But on the other hand, it doesn’t return to the view of a supernatural God either. Instead, Griffin’s view rejects the premises about nature and perception that were formed under the influence of belief in that supernaturalistic God. You see what we’re going to get here is not a rejecting of God altogether or a return to the premodern view of God, but we’re going to get a different view of God altogether.

What is this going to look like? Let me read to you from pages 42 through 43 of Varieties of Postmodern Theology as Griffin lays out his views. He says: “In contrast with the non-animism of modernity, Whiteheadian postmodernism develops a neo-animistic view in which all actual individuals embody a principle of spontaneity.”

There again you see this is really adoption of process metaphysics. He says:

The ultimate or absolute reality which is embodied in all actual individuals is creativity. Creativity eternally oscillates between two modes. In one mode, creativity is self-determination, final causation, or concrescence in which an individual becomes concrete by creating itself out of others. Through the embodiment of creativity in this mode, every individual is partly causa sui (cause of itself). As soon as this act of self-creation is completed, creativity swings over into its other mode which is other creation, efficient causation, or transition. The individual’s own activity in self-formation passes into its activity of other formation. The actual world is comprised entirely of creative events and the societies they form. The human mind or soul is a society composed of a series of high-level creative events. The human body is a society composed of a vast number of lower-level creative events of various levels. This perspective thereby contains no mind-body problem

Transcript - ST507 Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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Postmodernism: Theological Responses, Part 2Lesson 23 of 24

of how a soul exercising final causation can interact with bodily substances exercising only efficient causation. Mind and body are both composed of events, exercising both kinds of causation. This perspective likewise contains no problem of how an experiencing mind can interact with non-experiencing physical atoms. It is part and parcel of this neo-animistic viewpoint to regard all creative events as occasions of experience. Whereas the dualism of first stage modernity treated human experience as virtually supernatural, revisionary postmodernism refuses to place human experience outside of nature.

What exactly does all of that mean further? I think you’re getting a feel for this. But in our next lecture, I want to pick it up at this point and see what this neo-animistic view of nature gives to us. You can pretty much go back to our thinking on process theology and plug in all of that and adapt it to postmodern themes, and you wind up with what Griffin is going to say. But exactly how Griffin does that, we’re going to take a look more closely in our next lecture.

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