Not Quite Postmodern

In his very fine, lucid book, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? (Baker 2006), James KA Smith notes that many postmodern theologies, especially influenced by Derrida’s apophaticism, are anti-dogmatic: “postmodern religious faith eschews knowledge and therefore also eschews the particularity of dogma and doctrine. In other words, according to this line of thinking, postmodern faith sees any particular, determinate religious confession as still tainted by knowledge.” Postmoderns thus advocate a “religion without religion.”

As Smith rightly points out, this whole line of thinking assumes a modern distinction of knowledge and faith:

Knowledge is indubitably certain; faith is a form of guesswork or opinion. The difference between modern and postmodern is simply that postmodern theologians think knowledge in this sense is impossible, and therefore they are left with “mere” faith. This “religionless religion” is modern also in that it entirely repeats the fundamental move of theological liberalism. Smith, again rightly, argues that the most truly post modern church will be unabashedly dogmatic.

Smith also sees modernist impulses in some sectors of the emerging church. He describes the Tillichian/Tracyan notion of “correlation,” namely, a theology that attempts to adapt Christian faith to the certainties of science or social science (lberation theology is an example), and then says this: “I wonder whether, in the name of creating a postmodern church, the emerging church continues this correlation by other means. While this is by no means a monolithic phenomenon, there are certainly streams in the emerging discussions that are simply looking to update the church and bring it back into correlation with a postmodern rather than a modern culture. Those in the emergent conversation who are more reflective see this for what it is: more of the same and really just an extension of (modern) pragmatic evangelicalism. However, even among more reflective emergent thinkers, one can see hints of a retained correlational stance. There remains a certain notion that the church needs to ‘get with’ postmodernity such that postmodern culture sets an agenda for the church, rather than postmodernity being a catalyst for the church to recover its own authentic mission.”

This last distinction is one that he returns to again and again: Bringing postmoderns to church does not mean conforming the church to the theories of Derrida, Lyotard, or Foucault, but rather selectively employing postmodern thinkers to provoke the church to be the church.