THE POSTMODERN CONDITION

POSTMODERNITY: A DEFINING ATTEMPT

Postmodernity, due to its own rejection of objectivity and its intrinsic challenging nature, is a quite difficult ideo-cultural age to define.

On Jean-François Lyotard explanation, Postmodernity is incredulity towards metanarratives[1]. Postmodernity, on this understanding, is not a period coming after modernity. It is the disenchantment with the established framework of those traditional narratives.

Avoiding definitions, Ihab Hassan proposes a parallel contrast to characterize post-modernism:

THE DEATH OF GOD CONTROVERSY

One controversy that would arise the question on religion and God by the postmodern philosophy can be portrayed by the Time magazine cover of April 8^th, 1966 where appeared the bold question Is God Dead? It was a theological controversy that reached the public.

Initially phrased by Nietzsche in his Thus Spake Zarathustra, the claim of the death of God and his role in the western civilization was then being discussed by theologians, such as T.J.J. Altizer, Paul van Buren, Gabriel Vahanian, and William Hamilton and later by deconstruction thinkers as Mark C. Taylor.

This doctrine had basis in the thought of radical theologians like Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonheoffer, and Rudolf Bultmann. Tillich rejected supernaturalism and argued that the only non-symbolic statement about God was that he was Being itself. As an Ultimate Concern, he is beyond essence and existence; therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him. Bonheoffer preached a secular worldy Christianity, where hoped one day humankind had would live a “religionless Christianity" of the "world without God". Bultmann called to stripe the New Testament and Christian theology of myths, through demythologization the modern person would be able to live fully without the dependence in the myth of God.

It was in this scenario the death-of-God theology emerged in the 1960’s, primarily with Gabriel Vanhanian work Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era advocated that God is not longer necessary in the modern, secular, scientific age.

T J. J. Altizer’s The Gospel of Christian Atheism, influenced by Hegel, Kant and Nietzsche defends that God (the religion of the Father) who in the kenosis became humanity in Jesus, died on the cross (the Religion of the Son), thus dying in history and fostering an “apocalyptic future” for humanity (the Religion of the Spirit), where mankind would learn to live without God.

After the death of God, a surprise return happened, this time by the post-modern philosophical inquiry and popular religiosity in many secularized spheres.

CHRISTIAN EXISTENTIALISM

Christian Existentialism is one segment for postmodern thought on God and Religion and has basis in the existentialist philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard, to whom the religious truth was paradoxal, subjective, and with dependence on faith. The next stream of influence is the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Dietrich Bonheoffer, and Rudolf Bultmann.

Paul Tillich was the major exponent of Christian existentialism and his Ultimate Concern in the Ground or Power of Being. Other influential proponents were Gabriel Marcel and anglican Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God, who popularized the theologies of Tillich, Bonheoffer and Bultmann, and has some applied adaptation for the new theology.

POSTMODERN TURN TO RELIGION

After the secularization in the decades of 1960’s and 1970 some divinity schools as the University of Chicago Divinity School and Yale Divinity School turned to the metaphysical inquiry on God.

Out of theological scenarios, the French philosophical schools centered in Sorbonne and selected philosophy department in upper New York State, such as Ithaca, Syracuse, and Cornel Universities also offered their perspectives in a post-modern deconstructive method.

The religion-related discussed by postmodern philosophies are diverse: the religious language, the problem of evil, the ontology of the Ultimacy, exclusiveness of a religion, justification of religious belief, the concept of person and the mind/body problem in religious worldviews, and critiques of modern and pre-modern epistemologies and metaphysics, mainly those systems based on rationalism.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM

In postmodern thought pluralism and relativism take the place of the certainty of reason and empirical knowledge. Postmodern thought can be traced in Martin Heidegger metaphysics, the analytical philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, and the French structural philosophy of language.

The Heidegger writing, The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics, is groundbreaking for postmodern theology as an invitation to overcome the idea of God as a causa sui in favor of a god before whom one can “dance and sing”.  Or as in Derrida terms, “Heidegger with or without the word being, wrote a theology with and without God”[2].

Almost as a synonymous for Postmodernism is Post-Structuralism and indeed sometimes the terms are employed interchangeable. Structuralism was a linguistic-literary theory originally postulated by Ferdinand de Saussure, later developed by Roman Jakobson and adapted to anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss, where the arbitrariness of signs makes absolute meanings impossible. For Saussure the linguistics elements of idea and word was spliced into a paradigm where sign was composed on signifier (the medium), signified (the meaning in the recipient’s mind).

In the 1960’s the disillusionment with the established though gave place to alternative radical philosophies, such as feminism, phenomenology, nihilism and newer criticism theories.

Emmanuel Levinas wrote in God and Philosophy that God is a secular ideal, the Infinite Other, that the scriptures revealed as the traditional God. Jacques Lacan treated the theme of religion in The Death of God, in Freudian lines of God’s existence as a comforting illusion, but his concept of Otherness, as the awareness of the real order, has some abstract connotation of Ultimate Reality, localized in the imaginary order. Michel Foucault had a negative perspective on religion, regarding it as exerting power regulating culture and society.  George Bataille gave his economic view on sacrifice, to analyze religion. Also Roland Barthes gave the insight of the biblical God is both the Helper and the Opponent in a sacrifice scene.

Under influences of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Wilhelm Dilthey hermeneutics, and Husserl’s phenomenology Paul Ricoeur criticized the structural view of language for not taking the contextual situation of the discourse, but being both a Christian theologian and philosopher (and without blurring both disciplines), Ricoeur proposed a hermeneutical interpretation of religious symbolism on existential levels and applied it to biblical texts.

DECONSTRUCTION

Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes in Paris were earlier proponents of a deconstruction theory on literature. Derrida taught that the situational context defined meaning and for Barthes the meaning the author intended is not as important as it is the meaning that the reader perceives. From literary theory, the deconstruction approach influenced philosophy and theology as well.

Initially his philosophical object was a play of signifiers but in his late years, although a secular Jew, Derrida would turn to some form of personal spirituality and dedicated to the analysis of religion. He employed much of Heidegger critique of the previous philosophers’ metaphysics in Being and Time and the “onto-theo-logy” as the theology of the Being.  

Derrida philosophical approach to theology is in a negative or apophatic manner, conceiving his “religion (without religion)” and discoursed on the Undeconstructible which is the “stuff of a desire beyond desire, of a desire to affirm that goes beyond a desire to possess, the desire of something for which we can live without reserve”[3] and this “acts of affirmation”. He posed the term difference, which is neither a word, nor a concept, nor a thing, to replace the previous Western reliance on one form or another of a transcendental signifier, such Truth, God, Allah, Reason, Being, or any metaphysical, hierarchical principle.  According to Caputo “Différance is but a quasi-transcendental anteriority, not a supereminent, transcendental ulteriority."[4]

Derrida distinguished Messianism (belief in an already-here messiah or system) but had a Messianic hope in the unknown future.

The essay Gift of Death, Derrida postulates that any gift is not really a gift, because it implies gratitude from the part of the recipient – therefore a debt.

Directly influenced by Derrida`s deconstruction emerged new approaches to religion, such as Mark C. Taylor, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, John Caputo, and the Radical Theology.

Mark C. Taylor with his Erring : A Postmodern A/theology deconstructs the systematic theology of Judeo-Christian religion, rejecting the  notions of Truth, Self, and Meaning and analyze the impact of the Death of God on the Western civilization, and the transcendental signified, was the true “hermeneutics of the death of God.” as a critique of the Death of God theology of Gabriel Vahanian and  Thomas J.J. Altizer as Man-centered.

Jean-Luc Marion has a more deconstruction theological approach in his God Without Being, where in Heideggerian charges of idolatry any theology based on the traditional concept of a Divine Being. God is loving, but not static love. The post-metaphysical God is not of Reason, of Being, or the God of Morality.

On of the closest Derrida collaborators was John D. Caputo, who has focused dearly on religious matters.  Recently in his The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006) he interpret God not as a noun but as en event, since God cannot be defined according to the reason of human systems, and cannot physically or metaphysically intervene in nature, because of that is the God of slaves, widows and orphans, demanding an ethical living for the survival of humanity.

There recent analyzes on religion, God, and Christianity by deconstruction authors, such as Jean-Luc Nancy to whom Christianity provides the framework for an undeconstructible understanding of hope in his Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Another thinker is Gianni Vattimo, albeit a “deconstruction atheist” defends Christianity ethics of humility and pardon, for representing the very presupposition for public values. Charles Winquist sum up in Desiring Theology (1995) and Epiphanies of Darkness: Deconstruction in Theology (1999) what he called “secular theology”, with attention to Tillich, Derrida, and Process Thought. 

RADICAL ORTHODOXY

Radical Orthodoxy reaffirms the traditional Judeo-Christian theological transcendence, above all the idea of God, but regards temporal, historical, cultural or secular context, under the analysis of disciplines such as politics, economics, the natural sciences, social and cultural theory, but rejects the modern dependence on reason. The context provided by those disciplines as well as by ritual is a key to alternative (post)modernity and places theology in the top of sciences. The influences of Radical Orthodoxy were Neo-Platonism, Heidegger critique of Being, Derrida’s deconstruction, and employs the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Thomas Aquinas, Giovanni Vico, and Friedrich H. Jacobi.

One of the influences for radical orthodoxy is the theology of Paul Tillich, to whom the Ultimate Ground of Existence is, not a particular even if highest being or person in a world beyond this world, who gives meaning and depth to existence, and theology should be built in that presupposition, whatever the state of evidence about his existence or not.

The post-modern problem of the religious language is solved by analogy and liturgy (hence the focus on theurgy) as interaction for language and reality.

The main exponents are John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, and Phillip Blond and this school of thought has its center in Cambridge.

POSTLIBERAL THEOLOGY

George Lindbeck, Hans Wilhelm Frei, and Stanley Hauerwas, presented a narrative theology, related with the Radical Orthodoxy and inspired on Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre,

On The Nature of Doctrine (1984) Lindbeck defends that there is some “universal experience” of religion, which Christian Theology is one expression, in rejection of the “universal rationality” of modern Enlightenment

The sociological insights on the community nature of Clifford Geertz and Peter Berger provided background to formulate a historicist and communitarian epistemology, where experience and thought are defined by a collective history.

The Postliberal theology proposes a narrative theology, rather than being normative on doctrine it is essentially descriptive.

On ethics postliberalism reveals much of its postmodern connection, for considering the moral values as pertaining as to a particular community (the Church in case of Christianity), in reaction of the prevalent Kantian universals in morals, but defending an ethics of virtue, as Hauerwas does.

THE FINITE GOD

A segment post-Hegelian philosophy would come with a varying degree of convictions in God, but with different attributes from the Judeo-Christian theologies. There are a variety of theories about this philosopher’s God, but in common they share his finite nature and being bound with the universe character. Curiously the theories normally emerged in post-atheistic minds.

FINITE GODISM

The platonic Demiurge and the Aristotelian Prime Mover are examples of a finite God position. The theory of an interim finitism was formulated by John Stuart Mill. William James rejected the conception of an absolute idealism in favor of a pluralistic finite pantheism.

Peter Bertocci personalistic finite Godism offered a teleological view on God but yet gave a relative picture of God, who could have created the universe from pre-existent matter, is active in it, but limited, finite and incapable of bringing the desired good.

PROCESS THEOLOGY

Alfred North Whitehead proposed a novel theory, Process Thought or Theology, later developed further by Samuel Alexander, Schuber Ogden, Charles Hartshorne, and John Cobb.

It is a secularization of the concept of God with a natural theology/philosophy method, with strong usage of logics, and some influence on the teleological process theology of Teilhard de Chardin.

In this conception God contains the universe, it is somehow included in it, but is not identical with it (some form of panentheism,) and is affected by the actions that take place in the universe. It is a bipolar or dipolar God, since it has two poles: one spiritual and one physical, as the mind to the body. The Ultimate Being is omnipotent but act through persuasion, leaving free will to the creation. God is the underlining order that lead the process of reality and is in a continual process of changing itself. Thus, process theology seeks to solve many problems brought by the traditional absolute attributes to God, such as the Problem of Evil.

OPEN THEISM

Post-Evangelical theologians such Gregory Boyd, John Sanders, Clark Pinnock advocate the Open Theism, doctrine where God is not exercising meticulous control of the universe, or does not exhaustively know the future, in a Christianized form of Whitehead’a Process Theism and Betocci finite Godism.

ALTERNATIVES THEOLOGIES

The pluralism of postmodern condition proportionates the voice of once marginalized groups to be heard in the fields of theology and philosophy of religion. Social inequality, De-colonialism, Post-Colonialism, Civil Rights Movements, Gender equality concerns, ecological movements were the milieu for the elaboration of theologies in a new perspective.

LIBERATION THEOLOGIES

The Radical liberation of the oppressed have always had been present in Christianity, from popular heresies in Middle, Taborites, radical Anabaptists, and the work of socially-concerned protestant such as Bishop Colenso. But, in the twentieth century an expression that properly can be called Liberation Theology was elaborated.

The theologian Jürgen Moltmann had Marxist and Hegelian views on history influences on his Theology of Hope, where eschatology is emphasized with God pointing to future and social revolution as a medium to herald the Kingdom of God on Earth.

Based on Moltmann theology of hope, Social Gospel, Marxist socio-economic analyzes in Latin America Liberation Theology took form and action with the works of Gustavo Gutierrez,  Jose Miguez Bonino, Ruben Alves, Juan Luis Segundo calling a political action to heal the social disparity as the mission of the church.

Another North-American exponent is Harvey Cox, who sees the Church as the primary agent as people of faith and action to fulfill the gospel command in the Secular City.

Martin Luther King, Jr and James H. Cone were theologians taking the black experience to interpret the intervention of God in history. Cornel West presents an interesting synthesis of Marxism and Black liberation theology.

 Post-colonial theologians such as John Mbti in Africa and Vine Deloria among Native-Americans focused on the traditional non-western perspectives and insight on religion.

Marcella Althaus-Reid, Graham Ward, and Mona West are voices on the Queer Theology, re-interpreting alternative sexualities and Christianity.

Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest, was defender of an inclusiveness of the mentally disabled population among other radical positions.

Feminist and Womanist liberation theologies emerged with the works of Sallie McFargue, Linda E.  Thomas discussing among other things about the gender of God and the position of woman in religion. The feminist epistemology seeks an alternative to the male objective inquiry of doing philosophy and theology,

Peace Theologies also emerged in the postmodern context by influence of Quaker and Anabaptism, liberation, existential and radical orthodoxy theologies. Some advocates were Ronald H Stone and John Howard Yoder.

COSMIC ECOLOGY

The American scholar Theodore Roszak, based partially in environmental ideologies such as Gaia hypothesis, holistic philosophy, and also in the the progressive-evolutionary theology of Teilhard de Chardin, proposed a worldview where the Cosmos is as a living presence and mind containing all living beings. God is a realm encompassing everything, making the cosmic ecology a pantheist system. This view is also espoused by many New Religions Movements of Neo-Pagan and Nature Worship extractions as well as by many ecological activists in the Gaia Hypothesis. Arne Naess on the Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy (1989) has systematized this pantheistic view.

RECONSTRUCTIVE APPROACHES

In reaction to the uncertainty caused by post-modern philosophies defied the traditional Christian theology to respond in a philosophical manner different from fundamentalist anti-intellectualists, principally by Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians.

Based on Reformed apologetics of Cornelius Van Til, Francis Schaeffer and the politico-cultural view of Abraham Kuyper made philosophers as Gordon Clark, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston,  Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Peter Kreeft defend that Christianity is conceptually true and culturally relevant for the present society.  There is a Reformed epistemology where belief in God does not require the support of evidence in order to be rational, but is based in presupposition.

Popes John Paul II, notably in his Veritatis Splendor, and Benedict XVI condemned the postmodern relativism and its implication on morality, and advocated rationalism synthesized with charity.

CONCLUSION: THE POSTMODERN GOD

If we take Jonathan Culler statement that "meaning is context bound, but context is boundless"[5] as true, the post-modern critique of language can be taken a metanarrative per se since it provides a hermeneutical framework. Under this postmodern proposition the problem of meaning and verifiability of verbal conceptualizations of religious language deepens.

On Ludwig Wittgenstein view, meaning comes from usage, what gives language and meaning a social dimension, and religious concepts like “God” are bound to the understanding of within a specific believing community. Also  based on Wittegensteinian fideism one can defend that faith in God should be in a groundless basis, but create a problem on the religious speech, since God cannot be described nor having qualities and attributes ascribed with words and faith is ‘belief IN something’, so how could one believe without an object of belief?

What God is the One to be object of religion? In whom to believe if the range of post-modern postulations on God varies from absent “Not-Being” and impersonal Ground for Existence, passes through a Progressive yet limited cosmic entity, to return to the monotheist Christian God, but explained with a different theological rhetoric from orthodox Christianity?

In addiction to Martin Heidegger ontology the Ultimacy of God was blurred not as a name, but as a being. Should the Western civilization turn into skepticism and nihilism?

Maybe the existential Christianity of Tillich could solve angst by providing a faith in the unknown. Or the liberation theologies and the call to discipleship of Bonheoffer would bring near the kingdom for the real self.

With Deconstruction arbitrarity of the word and the void of Being the situation seems helpless. However, one of the mentors of Derrida, Paul Ricoeur focused not on meaning-and-context, but in hermeneutics and possibility of chance by providing symbolic sense in the Age of Interpretation.

REFERENCES

PRIMARY TEXTS

·         Altizer, T. J. J. The New Gospel of Christian Atheism. Davies Group Pub.

·         Derrida, Jacques Acts of Religion. Routledge

·         Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

·         Heidegger, Martin. Time and Being.

·         Irigaray, Luce Sexes and Genealogies. Columbia UP

·         Kearney, Richard. God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion. Indiana University Press, 2001.

·         Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1984, reprint 1997.

·         Ricoeur, Paul The Critique of Religion

·         Ricoeur, Paul The Language of Faith

·         Taylor, Mark C. Erring. U Chicago Press

·         Tillich, Paul.  Ultimate Concern. London: SCM, 1965.

·         Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology.

·         Vanhoozer, Kevin. Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1990.

·         Vanhoozer, Kevin. Is There a Meaning in this Text? the Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge. Zondervan, 1998.

·         Vattimo, Gianni After Christianity Columbia UP

·         Vattimo, Gianni Belief

INTRODUCTIONS

·         Anderson, Pamela Sue A feminist philosophy of religion: the rationality and myths of religious belief (Oxford; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998

·         de Vries, Hent Philosophy and the Turn to Religion

·         Hughes, Glenn.  Transcendence and History. The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. Columbia, MO:  University of Missouri Press, 2003.

·         Penner, Myron, Christianity and the Postmodern Turn. Brazos, 2005.

·         Robinson, John Honest to God. John Knox, 2003.

·         Shanks, Andrew.  God and Modernity: New and Better Way to Do Theology. London, UK: Routledge, 1999.

·         Vanhoozer, Kevin. Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1990.

·         Winquist, Charles Desiring Theology .U Chicago Press

ANTHOLOGIES

·         Blond, Philips, ed. Post-Secular Philosophy, between Philosophy and Theology. London: Routledge, 1998.

·         Geisler, Norman L.; House, H. Wayne; Herrera, Max. The Battle for God: Responding to the Challenge of Neotheism. Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2001.

·         Milbank, John, Pickstock, Catherine, Ward, Graham, Illuminations: Theory and Religion. Blackwell.

·         Phillips, D. Z. ed. Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

·         Vanhoozer, Kevin J. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

·         Ward, Graham, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005

·         Ward, Graham, ed. The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

·         Westphal, Merold, ed. Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.

·         Christian Faith and Postmodernity An Index of WWWResources

      http://www3.baylor.edu/~Scott_Moore/Xnty_Pmism.html