In Overcoming Onto-Theology, Merold Westphal begins by urging a hermeneutic of suspicion. To which I cheerfully reply, “Okay! When can we start?”
In this book he is addressing his postmodern friends who don’t share his faith, and his Christian friends who “are allergic or even a bit apoplectic when it comes to postmodern philosophy” (p. xxi).
In his introduction, Westphal says some healthy things. But however much he might want it, these healthy things cannot be reconciled with what goes by postmodern. But he also says some things that indicates some unhealthy things are going on also.
First one of the healthy things. He is right that consistent Christians (particularly Augustinians) have always emphasized our creaturely finitude (which affects our knowing) and our rebellion against God (which affects our knowing). But what follows from this? We should do as we are told. God gave us light in a dark place, and He did so in order that we might be able to see.
But Westphal draws precisely the wrong conclusion from this reality.
“For whenever Christians tell the biblical story in such a way as to make their systems the repository of absolute truth or to claim divine sanction for institutions that are human, all too human, they become more modern than biblical” (p. xvi).
There is clearly some confusion here. Does this assessment apply to the men who met at the Council of Nicea? Did they think their system was a repository of absolute truth? Did they claim divine sanction for their Catholic church, an institution which even at that time was clearly “all too human”? Did this make these gentlemen of the antique era modernists? After the benediction that closed the council, did they all give a big shout out for Descartes?
Westphal makes the same distinction that Smith does, that between metanarratives and meganarratives. He argues that metanarratives are (according to Lyotard) philosophically-constructed stories that justify the Enlightenment project, and that Christians should rejoice that these secular metanarratives are coming in for such withering criticism. And thus it does not apply to the Christian account of all things, the Christian meganarrative — creation, fall, redemption, etc. Our story is kerygma, and therefore out of reach of the postmodern critique of “scientific” knowledge.
Two points. The first is a restatement of the point I have been making in my last series of posts. It is that the Christian mega-narrative would come in for just as much hostility from the secular postmodernists as would any metanarrative if we act as though that mega-narrative is truth for the whole world, and authoritatively binding on the world. If we tell the kings of the earth to kiss the Son, lest he be angry, we will hear something like, “Sure, you are calling this a mega-narrative instead of metanarrative, but that does not change what you are doing. You are imposing on all our autonomous selves, and that is verboten.” In other words, if we insist that the future of the world must be a resurgant Christendom, then we will be accused of being modernists. Ironically, this accusation will be based on our biblical rejection of the autonomous individual, which is the cornerstone of modernity.
And this relates to the second point. When Lyotard defines postmodernism as “incredulity toward all metanarratives,” what this amounts to is that there is no such thing as postmodernism. No one among the “postmodernists” shows incredulity toward all metanarratives. Not even close. They snipe at some aspects of some metanarratives, but as academics they are deeply attached to the central metanarrative that governs academic discourse — marketplace of ideas, free interchange of ideas, and so on.
Those who use postmodoern jargon but who have a hard Marxist future waiting for all of us are simply hypocrites, and one kind of modernist. Those who use postmodern jargon, thinking they believe it, and who like the fact that their department is filled with “all kinds,” and who yet go to faculty meetings confident that the discussion will not end in gunplay are also modernists, of the liberal democratic variety.
The alternatives are stark. Modernity governs all discourse now. If you don’t replace that goverance with something else, in what sense are you postmodern? And if you do replace it with something else, what will it be? If primacy is given to one particular worldview (Islam, the Christian faith, communism) then this is chronological postmodernism, but it does not resemble at all the current intellectual fad.
There is much more to say on all this, and I hope to get to it.