The Difference That Faith Makes

"Why is the Emerging Church drawn to deconstructive theology?" Take Two.
By Carl Raschke, Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department, University of Denver.

ETs and DT (“Deconstructive Theology”, If You Can’t Speak in Acronyms)

Why are “emergent types” drawn to deconstructive theology?  The question is a more than modestly daunting, if only because what seems like a straightforward question is overdetermined with contexts and subtexts that require some sifting.  The question also seems to presume that the phrases “emergent type” and “deconstructive theology” are intuitively evident in some garden variety manner of speaking. But they are not.  A little history might be instructive.

The so-called “emergent” movement emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s amid the cultural hyperchange that followed the collapse of Communism – what Fukayama hyperbolically dubbed the “end of history” – and was propelled largely by a new global economic prosperity and the explosion of digital communications.   It started, of all places, in Texas and was a strategic effort of a major Christian philanthropic foundation to mobilize Gen-X leaders within the evangelical churches under the somewhat tendentious name of Terra Nova.  As its mission statement to this day emphasizes, it aimed to seed and support the efforts of “pioneer churches who are testing and implementing the new ideas that will drive the Church in the future.”   

Despite its Bible Belt beginnings, the emergent movement quickly took on the colorations of its main motivators and supporters.  After its initial and relatively modest conference in Houston in January 2002, the movement for the most part abandoned the South and became by and large a Blue State phenomenon with a bi-coastal demographic base.  By the middle of the present decade it had forged serious alliances with old-guard Northern Protestantism and the “social progressive” wings of the mainline institutional churches.  Its theology was no longer in any clear sense “evangelical”; it was now quite “eclectic,” almost amorphous. 

I once had a conversation with a former youth pastor in the Dallas-Fort Worth area who claimed he was the one who had come up with the word “emergent” at a vision casting session for the Terra Nova group.  He didn’t stake any claim to intellectual property rights, but the thought processes he described among the founders were interesting to say the.least.   The word “emergent” derives from the language of the so-called “new physics”, which in turn was built upon cybernetics and “systems theory” that was popular among New Age thinkers in the early 1980s.  It was first introduced by the Russian-born Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine in his theory of “dissipative” or “self-organizing” systems.  Leonard Sweet, Brian McClaren, and Jerry Haselmayer in their book from 2003 entitled The Language of the Emerging Church define “emergence” as “an approach  to science that is sensitive to ways a whole can become more than the sum of its parts.”  They observe that “this can only happen when the sharing of information within the system is maximized.”

The emergent movement indeed has been an effort – at least in concept - to envision the church as something much bigger than its “parts”, including its doctrinal disparities or sectarian divisions.    Furthermore, it has certainly been a system that has focused on the “sharing of information,” expanding from its aboriginal status as a kind of 1990s-style, neo-hippie Jesus movement redux to an all-but-the-kitchen sink method of omnivorous theological inclusivity as laid out in McClaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy.   A crisper metaphor might be that of a postmodern high-country religious avalanche,  set off by the accumulation of an unstable mass of loose and flaky powder that after surging downhill gains unbreakable momentum and sweeps everything in its path.

“Deconstructive” theology, on the other hand, has a divergent “genealogy” (as Nietzsche would say), pursuing an alternative “rhizomatic” trajectory (as Deleuze would say).   As is well-known, Derrida coined the word “deconstruction” early in his career, then eventually stopped using it entirely.  He employed it to make a subtle point about how texts are intended to be read.  We need to read them as complex and to a certain extent “chaotic” events of  flickering meaning, not as monolithic architectures of clarified Cartesian certainty.  Derrida’s notoriously difficult style of writing exemplifies his own intention.  You’re not supposed instantly to “understand it” or “even get it.”  Just like you don’t wolf down a fine filet, you don’t swallow in one gulp a great piece of literature or philosophy.  Anyone who whines that a philosopher should “just say straightforwardly” what he or she means is sort of like the guy who douses ketchup on his beef Wellington.  You’ve got to learn to appreciate what you’re eating – or reading.  Cliff Notes don’t work for Hegel any more than McDonald’s Value Meal menu works for black truffle foie gras. 

That’s why philosophers for a long time utterly despised Derrida, and why many even to this day will sniff that he is not a “real philosopher,” only a “literary entertainer” (that came from one of my actual academic colleagues).   Real philosophers don’t read texts; they reason about things, whatever that might imply.

Deconstruction’s Sordid Past

Now if the foregoing seems to have little or nothing to do with emergent church theology, you’re absolutely correct.   But words often embark on an odyssey of their own which takes them a long way from sight of their homeland.  Consider the word “postmodern” itself, which when first employed in the 1970s referred to a funky new style of urban architecture that had nothing to do with anything it now connotes.   Ironically, it was the religious right and the neo-cons of the Reagan era (such as Bill Bennett) that made deconstruction a household word outside of academia.  Yep, them guys. 

It was a case of what one obscure literary critic years ago termed “the productive progeny of the malapropism”  Webster by the way defines a malapropism as “the use of a word sounding somewhat like the one intended but ludicrously wrong in the context “  Such words sometimes also take on a life of their own.  The cultural conservatives of the early Eighties, when they heard all those “tenured radicals” in universities talking about “deconstruction” thought it was a fancy word for “destruction,” remembering the cries of “burn baby burn” during the street riots of the 1960s.  So “deconstruction” became a bit of pop cultural argot for post-Sixties anti-authoritarianism and has evolved into a sort of façon de parler for any sort of probing, critical, analytical, or overly nuanced way of calling into question a conventional habit of mind, or desecrating a sacred cow. 

It is not surprising – indeed, it is truly a no-brainer – that anti-establishment “emergent types” (ETs, as LeRon Shults calls them below) would be drawn to an anti-establishment strand of philosophical nomenclature.  Jack Caputo’s work has certainly made Derrida accessible in recent years, even if it is not clear to what degree one is reading Caputo and to what degree one is actually reading Derrida.  Caputo’s latest book The Weakness of God  in which he says for the first time that he is actually doing “theology” – previously by most accounts he was doing philosophy – has also helped shape a sense in which there is now something that might be called a “deconstructive theology”, even though I myself argued long ago, purist that I am, that the terms “deconstruction” and “theology” cannot be mated without causing genetic defects, namely, giving birth to an oxymoron.  The reason I made that argument (and by the way I don’t think Jack is doing “deconstructive” theology,” though he is doing theology and a very interesting one at that) is because, as I argued in The End of Theology in 1979, deconstruction is about showing the infinite open-endedness of all sign assemblages and texts, whereas “theology” is about finding an intelligible “ground”, a sort of “here I stand”, for one’s beliefs and actions. 

I wasn’t saying anything original at that point.  The observation had been made repeatedly by Heidegger in his later phase, and Derrida glommed on to it.  Heidegger and Derrida saw “deconstruction” – or what the former called the “Destruktion of metaphysics”, although the German word doesn’t mean exactly the same thing as its English homonym – as “the end of philosophy.”  Without much imagination I inferred that would also imply the “end of theology”.  It does.  Modern Christians on both the left and right side of the religious spectrum for some dang reason are convinced that you aren’t “saved” unless you have the right theology – not to mention the right politics.   That isn’t exactly what Jesus had in mind.  Jesus – and of course Paul – never harped on the “T-word”, only the Biblical “F-word”,  faith.  You have, if I may paraphrase Kant, to “abolish theology to make room for faith.”  Deconstruction is about the abolition of theology and demands instead that we walk nakedly in our faith.  Call us Christians “naked faith walkers.”

Give Me That Old Time Presbyterianism

I think the problem may be – and I realize I’m not being theologically correct to say this – that many emergent types, if indeed the adjective emergent is drawn from “systems theory”, still hanker for a certain comfort and security that “systematic theology” – or mainline Protestant theology - once provided.  Deconstructive theology – or at least the broad conception of it - perhaps is a way of being unsystematically systematic, or systematically unsystematic, in one’s religious reflection.   The first thing that one has to establish is what exactly one means by “deconstructive theology.”  If emergent types are supposedly drawn to it, that must mean there is some vast body of literature that goes by the name of “deconstructive theology,” which there isn’t. 

In the early 1980s I edited a book that included major essays of  some leading pioneers in what came to be called (first) “postmodern religious thought” and (later) “postmodern theology.”  The volume was entitled Deconstruction and Theology, but it was not proposing any strategy of “deconstructive theology” by any accounting.   It was designed to (1) introduce deconstruction to a theological audience (2) attempt to show what deconstruction might do to the various theological disciplines.  It was a motley collection of essays.  The only author in the group to go on to write a “deconstructive theology” was Mark C. Taylor.  He actually used that word at first, but later changed it to “a/theology” to underscore his debt to Thomas J.J. Altizer and the “death of God” movement.  Since he knew Derrida well, he joined with him in discussions during the late 1980s about “negative theology”, which could be considered as deconstructive meditations on the Medieval mystics.   But that was all fairly rarefied academic discussions and clearly has not had much of an effect on the emergent movement, which has probably only begun to try to read Derrida in the last few years. 

I would surmise that Jack Caputo’s influence on the theological world, his successful “branding” of Derrida through his conferences and publications, and the fact that many of those now closely associated with the academic side  of the emergent movement – limited though it may be – are his own students has been a critical factor.   I’m not convinced that the vast majority of non-philosophical specialists who regard themselves as “deconstructive” nowadays have even the foggiest notion of what the term really implies.  But there’s nothing wrong with that.  What matters is the longer-range prognosis of the emergent movement.

I conclude with both an observation and a warning that I will develop in my next extensive post to this blog.   If one  surveys all the events these days that are promoted as part of the emergent “conversation”, it is increasingly looking like good old-fashioned Sixties-style ecumenicism.  Ecumenicism was all the rage up until the Carter presidency, when the new evangelicalism in America swept it away.  Now a once self-confident evangelical America, particularly in the North as the blue states get even bluer in the face of the Bush presidency, is having serious doubts about itself, largely because it it succumbed to the temptation that made the liberal Protestant denominations moribund a generation earlier – it overly and overtly politicized faith.  And the old Protestant establishment seems to be wooing the disaffected young evangelicals back into the fold along with some Catholics.   I suppose someone stripped the “e” out of emergent when no one was looking.  Just give me that “old time religion” of interfaith dialogues, ecumenical gatherings, and institutionalized (i.e., seriously funded) social activism.  It was good enough for my Presbyterian grandmother.  It must be good enough for me.

In all honesty I think for some emergent types to be “deconstructive” simply means you refuse in good conscience to listen to James Dobson on the radio.  But if one assesses the pedigree of the word “deconstruction,” it was always bound up with “difference” or, in Derrida’s coy misprision, with differance, the tiny difference that is almost imperceptible, yet makes a huge difference.   What would be the genuine differance for emergent types?

The genuine differance, as Søren  Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous character Johannes de Silentio observes, is the difference of faith.  Kierkegaard refers to this self-effacing “difference bearer” as the knight of faith.  No one can tell by one’s outward show – the books one reads, the clothes one wears, the politics one espouses – who exactly is the knight of faith.  The extrinsic marks are never obvious.  For Kierkegaard, whom Derrida admired and who has had a tremendous impact on the development postmodern thought, faith is the ever so subtle difference that makes all the difference.

Faith is the key to any “deconstructive theology.”  Of course, that would mean the deconstruction of theology itself, which it may be difficult for any “movement” to bear.      

Comments

[Ken Archer]

I completely agree with Dr Raschke's assessment, echoing Geoff below, that there are two deconstructions. There is (a) Derrida's deconstruction, and then there is (b) deconstruction as any critical re-examination of one's beliefs, which is central to emergents. The "end of theology", which Dr Raschke humbly sees following deconstruction, follows from deconstruction in the broader sense and has its origins in Heidegger's destruktion. For Heidegger, as a metaphysician, saw all metaphysics as originating in the experience of being thrown into existence (dasein) such that a recovery of its source required metaphysics to take a back seat to a recovery of dasein. Likewise, as Dr Raschke observes, theology originates in faith as the act corresponding to revelation, and only comes along afterwards in reflection upon this originating act (as a second-order discipline).

Heidegger absolutely did not, however, deny the possibility of metaphysics, but saw its possibility as rooted in a recovery of this originating source of metaphysics. Derrida's deconstruction does deny the possibility of metaphysics, and thus it is difficult to see how this negating approach can be helpful to emergents so desperate to rediscover the source of a new reconstruction of theology in authentic acts of faith. Heidegger was unimpressed with the non-metaphysical directions taken by his students Gadamer and Arendt, and called us back to the question of Being raised by the experience of being thrown into existence, of dasein. Contemporary theological education is more of a third-order discipline that reflects upon theology (that's the response to PTS critics) and thus seeks, despite it's claims, the comforts of the structural theology that it "deconstructs" (as Dr Raschke astutely observes). That's not what pastors need. Pastors need a theology that reflects upon the pretheological authentic acts of faith in response to revelation in a positive recovery of the source of theology.

[Carl]

Thanks, Ken. As this line of discussion is hopefully reminds us, it all comes down to the "source". (Heidegger, Grund or Ursprung). Is the "source" faith, or is it some theological "principle" (Prinzip)? The fact that so much conversation about "deconstruction" in the last two decades has been so preoccupied with Derrida's moves while inattentive to Heidegger's own laying of the philosophical background for these sorts of conversations has left us a little tongue-tied when it comes to "theological" issues.

The relationship between theology and deconstruction is not only prefigured, it is most superbly articulated, in Heidegger's well-known critique of "ontotheology," a word to which every postmodernist from Zizek to the radical orthodoxy crowd genuflects. Ontotheology is a theology that derives from other theological "principles" or "methods," which sums up most of theology. Even a "deconstructive theology" that tries to anchor itself in Derrida's "method" succumbs to this temptation. That is why there are so many academic and theological "Derridists" out there today who in a strange and obscure manner seem to be "doing theology as Derrida would do," even though Derrida never did theology.

We need to go back and seriously read our Heidegger, who is the philosophical source of Derrida. Derrida in many ways made a straw man out of Heidegger (as in SPEECH AND PHENOMENA), which is common among philosophers who want to chart their own place in the sun. Derrida is no exception.

Ironically, it is the later Derrida who seems to discover - albeit obliquely - what Heidegger understood, but would never say it. If we are to talk about God or "religion" in an authentic way, we can't start with theology, or fall back on any theological models or theological precedents. We have to fall back on faith, which is both prior and subsequent to all theological discourse. Now in theology we are all suspicious of faith, because we tend to confuse faith with the philosophical stance of fideism, which is simply Christian skepticism. That is not faith. As Kierkegaard stressed repeatedly, faith is a relationship, a relationship of the finite to the infinite, what he called the "infinite qualitative difference".

In this sense faith, as I have indicated in my short essay, constitutes the real differAnce for Christians.

[josh burns]

Hello Carl,

Whilst it has been interesting to read about the start of emergent church in America broadly the same thing was happening in the Uk and Australia/New Zealand - Gibbs and Bolgers book on the EC surveys around 50 groups in US,UK and Australia - is not the explosive growth in the EC not rooted in generalised cultural changes in the West?

Derrida draws inspiration and affinity with the tradition of negative theology - God reveals Himself as one Unknown etc which would deny that revelation can be a starting point to talk about faith as God is beyond our understanding, thought, experience etc. We then need to have faith in the possibility of the impossible not concrete revelation. Would this be a fair comment for those in the Emergent church who talk about religion without religion

I have read a few introductory books by B Benson and JKA Smith so I am only a beginner in this whole thing.

Josh Burns

[harris Bechtol]

Carl,
You write, "You have, if I may paraphrase Kant, to 'abolish theology to make room for faith.' Deconstruction is about the abolition of theology and demands instead that we walk nakedly in our faith. Call us Christians 'naked faith walkers.'" Do you see a corollary between deconstructions 'naked faith walkers' and the Medieval concept of implicit faith?

[tony jones]

I really appreciate this post by Carl. My post for this blog, which I wrote before reading Carl's or LeRon's, will show my cards.

But I do wish to register an objection to the last section. I hear this a lot: "You emergent are just the next incarnation of the Jesus People, or the liberal ecumenicists, etc." I beg to differ. Recently, I posted on the God's Politics blog about Mitt Romney's coyness when discussing the practices of his Mormon faith, and I was savaged by liberals. I had, it seems, crossed some line of "tolerance" or "sensitivity."

Postmodernity, I argued, demands a robust accounting for the various beliefs and practices of our faiths, with the very real possibility of stepping on some toes. We need to be honest (and, even, playful) with one another. 1960's ecumenicism eschewed distinctives for lowest-common-denominator interreligious conversations about social justice. In this way, at least, the emerging movement in the American church is dissimiliar to earlier attempts at pluralistic Christianity.

[Carl]

Interesting comments, you guys. I was up very late last night jawing with a guy here in Houston (where I am this weekend) about these very same issues. It just might be a "God thing."

Let me start with the last comment by Tony, who I'm glad weighed in on this one. Sometimes I agonized over finding the fine line between provoking to get people thinking and being misunderstood to the point that they get irritated, or at least don't engage you in real conversation. But real conversation often has to start at a point of real "difference."

If there is no real difference there is no difference - period. The problem with difference is that it sometimes doesn't come across as difference, or the real celebration of difference, but as bland sameness. The diffusion of difference into a similarity that incrementally begins to resemble sameness (sort of like what Baudrillard meant by the "simulacrum")is nothing pathological. It is a quite normal process. It results from a plurality that seeks commonality. Christianity is a weird thing. It starts from the standpoint of radical difference - you know, Abraham, Moses, and that "elect" or "chosen people" deal; God says he chose Israel not because they were like the nations, but because they were so unlike them - and envisions ultimate, eschatological unity, a profound cosmic unity (Read Colossians) based on radical difference. That ain't easy from a theological point of view to really pull off. That's why as Christians we really don't walk by our theologies (though many of us would like to); we walk by faith, naked faith.

"Movements" have by definition a hard time preserving difference while seeking commonality without stumbling into sameness. My quip about Sixties ecumenicism was based on some observations about the subtexts that seem evident from how Emergent has emerged, or evolved. In the interests of commonality, the discourse - or at least the official discourse - strikes me as less and less edgy and more (though obviously not the same) as what I remember from my youth as a California Presbyterian ministerial wanna be who got blown away by God on the beach at Carmel and ended up reading Derrida when it was a very strange thing to do. At that time theologians spoke only German, not French.

I do realize emergent is quite different from what happened in the Sixties. But there are similarities as well which is not necessarily bad. Nietzsche, the Urpostmodernist who really invented the postmodern concept of "genealogy", argued that the most powerful "deconstructive" force, even for incurable deconstructors, is history. History demonstrates that sometimes difference is not so different (a form of radical difference in itself).

However, they are "dissimilar similarities." How's that for a different sort of DIFFERANCE? One of the things history shows us is that difference repeats itself and produces the "simulacra" of our "common" identities. That is Deleuze's important point in DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, which is really about as important in terms of the genealogy of postmodernism as Derrida's OF GRAMMATOLOGY. That's also why Christ repeatedly ends up, as HR Niebuhr showed years ago, becoming a Christ of culture. Culture is about identity formation, or about the "simulacrization" of dissimilar identities. Christ "transforms" culture (Niebuhr's normative principle) when difference is constantly subverting identity and transforming it (a loose rendering of Deleuze's "deterritorialization" and "reterritorialization", which are complementary terms).

The only true Christ is the Christ of faith, which Kierkegaard understood. Emergent has to resist the temptation of becoming a "cultural movement" (which is easy to do, what one is who is somewhat famous among you who shall go unnamed calls the "rock star syndrome" that afflicts the trendy, probably why Jesus didn't have an agent) as opposed to an ongoing migration of faith walkers who see themselves as the "stranger in the strange land."

More on this. I have to go. Hope you'll all respond to what you think you interpret what I myself am not sure I'm meaning to say. One other point, which I'll later elaborate. I'm not sure we can get away in faith-talk with pinning it down to "possible impossibles", though that does sound very Kierkegaardian on the surface (and I realize it comes from Derrida, who actually got it from Bataille). Faith requires the difference of the other. The true impossible impossibility is face-to-face dialogue with the wholly other, and a lot of concrete others.

[len hjalmarson]

Perhaps we have learned to avoid liminality; it's easy enough to wax philosophical about the desert. The progression for Jesus was first the desert, and then power to serve. But if we don't first stand in that place, our deconstruction is likely to be a philosophical moment than a God encounter. Maybe this is why it's so much easier to keep on talking (as Francis in Brother Sun, Sister Moon: "there was a time when I believed in words") than to pray. But until we stand in emptiness of our words and agendas, we don't have the experience of l'avenir. I blogged about this as learning to pray, because I'm so lousy at it. Lent is a good time to re-member and relearn prayer.. and waiting for God's surprising newness.

This knowing that unknows
Has mastery so great,
Should any sage oppose
He’d blunder in debate,
being no such advocate
as know not knowing there,
burst the mind’s barrier.

St. John of the Cross, “Deep Rapture”

[Carl]

Len,
Amen.

[Carl]

I realize that I didn't answer Harris' question from yesterday about "implicit faith." It's interesting that this concept is raised here - a Medieval notion that really has its roots in Aquinas' effort to do "natural theology" without sacrificing revelation. Some have compared Kierkegaard on this score to Aquinas, but I think that's like comparing Descartes' critique of metaphysical scholasticism to Heidegger's. It sort of works, but it's jumping contexts. All faith is "implicit" if by "explicit" faith we mean what happens through the process of fides quaerans intellectum, faith seeking understanding. All theology represents in principle the intellectum as the object of the quaerans. The problem arises when one inadvertently reinvents the formula as "intellectum [theologicus] quaerans intellectum," something which Heidegger recognized and is what is meant by "the end of theology." Theology begins in faith and ends in faith (even Augustine, who gave currency to the term, understood that), or at least in the mystery of faith-walking. That is the visio Dei in a nutshell, which for A. is the goal of faith seeking understanding.

I like the desert metaphor. Theology is our guidebook to the desert with all its flora, fauna, and environmental wonders. But when we put the book down, we're still in the desert under the blinding son (the "holy").

[Geoff Holsclaw]

In response to Tony's response about Emergent being just Protestant Liberal Theology dressed up in a pomo goatee, and although I have felt that way many times, I agree that these labels don't really help much. Many think that the theological trajectory that has nourished my soul is nothing other that a nostalgic regurgitation of tradition coupled with a communitarian escapism. (but really I'm much more nuanced than that...aren't we all?)

Of course there is somewhat of a friendly turf war between those Princeton reformed-pragmatic-Moltmannian Thugs and the Radically Orthodox Duke Schoolers of the Hauerwasian Mafia.

Along with Len's concern about the wilderness, I too wonder if we valorize the desert too much, making it an end instead of a means. Israel was in the desert, so too was Jesus, and the Church lives in the desert during Lent, but what about Easter and Pentecost?

Now of course Caputo/Derrida have a great deal to say about the desert (his favorite metaphor) as well as "faith", but just from the comments here, its seems that many are not going to be willing to swallow the pill Caputo is offering us.

We'll have to see.

My questions are, if it is a matter of faith (the differance of faith) then is Christian faith and Deconstructive faith (the faith that Caputo is at great pains to attribute to Derrida) the same faith approached differently (via theology and philosophy), or are they different faiths? If different, is one derivative? If one is derivative, which one?

[Carl]

Geoff, excellent question at the end. But I would turn the question around and ask if we pluralize "faith", and talk about "faiths", is it faith any longer? Faith is one of those robust and (in truth) "shocking" f-words you can't really nuance. We can nuance our theologies all we want, and we do. That's what people do in seminaries, and that's why we have all these denominations.

If I understand the meaning of faith correctly (fidelis=faith, as in "fiduciary",which implies a profound commitment to relationship, such as when one is faithful to their spouse) in the Biblical and Kierkegaardian sense, it is a relationship between finite and infinite, or a relationship of finite to infinite that is somehow glimpsed through the presence and revelation of the finite other (Levinas). If, as Plato may have said, philosophy begins in wonder, then theology begins in the wonder of faith, and wonder requires no distractions. That is why we go into the desert.

BTW we all belong to different "mafias." God is my father, but my godfather was a famous (and long deceased) Biblical scholar by the name of James Muilenberg (who happened to have introduced me to the Bible at a liberal Presbyterian seminary) who said in effect it all comes to down to faith in the above sense. Whenever he lectured on the Job, he always referred to Job's friends - whose arguments take up most of that book - not by their Biblical names, but he gave them the names of famous contemporary theologians. That was a joke, which most of the class - being Presbyterians - never got. Muilenberg was another one of those Mennonites by background.

Derrida discovered deconstruction as a young "soldier" of the Husserlian mafia. He discovered faith - I believe - after he realized he was being used and abused by countless philosophers and theologians, who even preceded Caputo. Derrida discovered faith through deconstruction (which of course I have argued repeatedly) rather than the other way around. Actually, that was Kant's whole program as well.

When DECONSTRUCTION AND THEOLOGY was published in 1982 by a rump group of then-youthful paleo-emergent, relatively unknown, theological wannabes, Derrida reportedly was given the book and said something to the effect of, "I didn't realize that theologians would allow themselves ever to be deconstructed. Do they know something I don't know?" Apparently Derrida found his own answer a decade later "in the desert." That's when he stopped talking about deconstruction and started talking about faith.

Theological discussions always come back to the a priori of one's cultural or conceptual or "tribal" (i.e, intellectual tradition-driven) predilections.

What philosophy do you use in your "theology"? Dude, I used Derrida. He's awesome. Why do you use Derrida? Because, dude, he's so "out there", and that's where I want to be too. Well, I don't know about this Derrida guy. You'd be better off with C.S. Lewis because he's more "Christian". And if that's too hard core for you, let me strongly recommend you bone up on your Calvin, because you can't really do theology unless you're Reformed. Aw, man, those dudes aren't cool any more. Now Derrida's cool. But, dude, if I have to, and you say so, I'll read Miroslav Volf. He's Presbyterian, and he's European, and besides he teaches at Yale. Alright, so why don't you read your Bible first? Dude, you mean read THE Bible? You don't mean "study my Bible," like my megachurch youth pastor is always telling me to do? I traded my Student Bible at half-price books last week for my copy of GRAMMATOLOGY. It had a cool cover.

Now this somewhat facetious and highly confabulated version of a real conversation actually was something I overheard a few months ago as an exchange at a church seminar. In the interest of saying only positive and encouraging things about ET, I will disclose that this young man, in his exchange with a 40-something college minister from Baptistland, had never been to an Emergent gathering, or read this blog. He had actually heard about Derrida through one of my students, who was his friend, at the university.

It's my understanding that the young man decided to read Derrida instead, and sign up for my course on Derrida in the spring term. We will see. I imagine he will be disappointed, because he will discover quickly that Derrida isn't easy. In fact, he's maddeningly difficult and "unclear." Derrida was always faithful to the "deconstructive" style because, I suspect, he was deconstructing himself as he wrote. That's why you really can't have a deconstructive theology in any familiar sense of the word. Certainly, not one to include in a "life application Bible." He is going to learn that Derrida in a much more intentional, French, cafe-cum-conversational style is doing what Heidegger did for the Western philosophical tradition. Both H. and D. were philosophers who set out to deconstruct philosophy (e.g., Pascal's quip that "to be a true philosopher is to make light of philosophy."

Derrida would in the first phase of his career say to all theologians: "dude, don't take yourselves all that seriously. Loosen up." When Derrida realized late in life that the fun of deconstruction was over (perhaps when his mother died or he discovered Jackie the Jew who if he had not been in Algeria might have died in Dachau), he sort of like Heidegger had his own "turning" or Kehre, but instead of turning to hear the voice of Being, he turned to faith. Unlike Abraham, he probably never heard God speak, and that's why he used instead "negative theological" faith-based words like l'avenir, the "messianic," and the "impossible." After absorbing Levinas, he couldn't quite digest the "face of the other", but he did get big on "hospitality".

There is no deconstructive faith, or faith in deconstruction, or deconstructive theology that substitutes for faith. There is only f___. As Kierkegaard said, there are always those who want to "go beyond faith". But you can't. You can't have two faiths any more than you can have two wives, or two husbands, though it has certainly been tried over and over.

Faith is not the impossible possibility. Faith is the face of the Face.

There are not two faiths, but it takes two for faith.

[Jason Hesiak]

"Christianity is a weird thing. It starts from the standpoint of radical difference - you know, Abraham, Moses, and that 'elect' or 'chosen people' deal; God says he chose Israel not because they were like the nations, but because they were so unlike them - and envisions ultimate, eschatological unity..."

Carl, you Deleuzian, you're making me doubt myself...but one of us must have read our Bible backwards. And I really don't know which one. I remember reading recently, I think in Deuteronomy, that God chose the Isrealites out of His own love for them, and not because they were different or special in some way - in fact they had demonstrated that they are subborn as mules, like everyone else!

I also wonder...if indeed I'm not the one whose backwards (?)...whether this "sameness" we are referring to is an abstracted philosophical concept (of modes) or an eschatological hope in the power of a personal God. Religious faith and philosophical detachment are two different things, no? The image of the desert can easily relate to both. I know that part of my journey as been that a philosophical detachment (as a direct misconception or of faith) has left me alienated from interpersonal relationships and in the end reliant upon myself and my own powers...RATHER than being a faithful servant. So...I ask these questions for the same reason as Len...because "I'm lousy at it".

:)

Jason

[Jason Hesiak]

I think Carl and I just posted at the same time. I may have to reask renounce my question later...but I have to get to lunch...

[Jason Hesiak]

My question stands. In addition, what is: "he couldn't quite digest the 'face of the other', but he did get big on 'hospitality'"? Did he start taking in the homeless or something (genuine question)? And if, "There are not two faiths, but it takes two for faith", then what of my friend who grew up in Compton and after coming to faith went door to door to apologize to all the neighbors whose arms he had broken or Mom's whose sons' pains he had caused, who would neither know nor care whether philosophy means "love of wisdom" or "wisdom of love"?

[Carl]

Jason,
When I was speaking of "it takes two" I was talking about the faith relationship between two persons, or between the person and God.
I was not talking about faith and philosophy. I totally agree with you that faith can't be reconciled with philosophical detachment, though often we have to flee into the desert of solitude to meet the Eternal One, the Wholly Other. At the risk of oversimplifying, let me say faith is dialogical, philosophy is monological. We find philosophy in its most radical manifestation in Plotinus and neo-Platonism, the "flight of the alone to the Alone." Same for Gnosticism, which both anticipates and develops neo-Platonism. Gnosticism is not just a Christian "heresy", whatever that might imply. It is a denial of the God whom we meet face-to-face. It denies what I have in my writings called God as "vocative," as summoning, challenging, drawing, loving, and of course redeeming.

[Jason Hesiak]

Thanks Carl,

I look foward to hearing more in future posts about the various relationships at play in the works of Caputo and Darrida (or maybe in their own writings). I'm still a bit suspicious. And I guess I don't know Deleuze well enough...what he has in mind in terms of "relationships"...I doubt his writings with Guittari consist of a "dialogical" conversation like the ones between Socrates and his fellow citizens. But he still sounds to me to be pretty individualistic and reliant upon a philosophical kind of detatchment - from what I've seen so far. Again...I am suspicious because I am lousy at faith based relationships. Neoplatonism (and/or Gnosticism) and myself get along quite easily without God's intervention. As a comedic aside...are you saying that lovers of wisdom are foolish!? Ha ha.

Jason

[Stephen Bean]

I have no recollection of a group of people who love to hear themselves talk. Talking about nothing at all. Post Modernism invading Christianity. The two cannot exist together. Well the avalanche has indeed fallen but we all no what happens after an avalanche. The sun comes out and melts away the snow. You first notice all the dead people who were caught under the avalanche. Then snow keeps melting and all you have is the rock which is the Word of GOD that hasn't changed one bit.

Enjoy,
Stephen Bean