Caputo Responds: In Defense of St. Elsewhere

One of the benefits of the blog format is that there really are no restrictions on the size of one's thoughts; brief or lengthy and in-depth is quite alright.  Today's post completes the engagement series with John D. Caputo's What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church, and today's post falls into the latter category as we find that Jack has graciously responded to each of the six engagements thus far.  Please thank Jack in the comments --and I'll do so here: thanks Jack!--and don't hesitate to continue the conversation below in the comments section.  The first 3 responses appear above the fold, and don't miss the last 3 responses and Jack's parting words (for now) below the fold.

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In Defense of Saint Elsewhere

I am very grateful for the thoughtful attention the contributors have given to WWJD? and I will do my best to respond in an equally careful way. I am going to undertake this response backwards, by starting with the last chapter and going back to the first. As Tony Jones and Sam Ewell have put it so well, the last two chapters are (1) where the plane landed, (2) where we debord and hit the ground running. As that is exactly what I had in mind in writing these chapters, starting with them will help me focus what I was arguing in the earlier chapters.

Ch. 6. St. Elsewhere

I deeply appreciate the comments of Sam Ewell on chapter six. It would be an exercise of the most salutary sort, a compilation that would seem to have been edited by the Holy Spirit herself, to collect all such stories, an inventory of all such radical communities, in Igreja Caminho, in every ghetto and homeless shelter, under every bridge, in every country north and south, east and west, from time immemorial. This would be a collection of stories of forgotten communities, which have been constantly reinventing the church under circumstances in which it is impossible to see that there would be a church, or that it would survive. That might just be an anthology of the Kingdom of God. The church is most likely to be true to itself when life has become impossible for the church. I have in mind places where the church is against the law, or when it is the state-established place of worship–both of which make the church impossible–or when it has as usual made itself sick with corruption or authoritarianism, or when destitution and oppression have made it impossible for people to think about anything other than just trying to survive. When we are paralyzed by these impossible forces, then the church is possible. That is the becoming possible of the impossible, which is the teeth in deconstruction and which applies not just to the church, but to any institution, educational, governmental, artistic, of whatever sort. Remember, deconstruction is a discourse aimed at institutions as well as singular individuals, that Derrida is proposing how to prevent an institution from becoming its own worst enemy, which it too often is. The impossible situations in which the church finds itself are often of its own doing. I would not close down all the big cathedral churches with their long robes and fine ancient liturgies. We can love them, too, but I would expose them always to the opening scene of In His Steps, that this church is too often the very long robes for whom Jesus tried to make as much trouble as he could, before it caught up with him. I think Jesus was a subversive character, who refused to play the power game, as Richard Holloway puts, and it caught up with him. Thinking deconstructively is one way to remind yourself of that. You don’t need to read Derrida or deconstruction for that. Father “Mac” has it down cold, and he has never paid any attention to Derrida and he loves the liturgy. But it is in radical communities of this sort that I think that the rubber of the New Testament hits the road, which is what Father Mac calls the “working church.”

Sam’s second case is just as interesting, that someone in search of justice and seeing the deep complicity of the church with the history of colonial power would reject the church as irredeemable–which means, irredeemably at odds with the “event” that takes place in Jesus–and look “elsewhere.” That might mean look for Jesus elsewhere. Or, more radically, to look for the event that transpires in Jesus elsewhere, elsewhere than under the name of Jesus. “Elsewhere” is a significant word in deconstruction. Derrida had an acute sense of this “elsewhere” and said of himself that he was a constant exile, having always being made welcome “elsewhere.” As I once jokingly referred to “St. Jacques” in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, the way Marx joked about “St. Max” (Stirner), we might in the same spirit refer to deconstruction as working under the patronage of St. Elsewhere (Catholics need patron saints.) This is the point I am making in Chapter 2 and so I will there come back to the issue Sam is raising here. There are multiple ways to be, which require of us a sense of radical and irreducible pluralism. Who is this man’s neighbor? The one who is not a member of the fold, the one who is from elsewhere. That is why as a philosopher I make use of the notion of “event.” Sometimes the event that transpires in the name of Jesus takes places elsewhere, under other names. The church is all too often up to its ears in blood and that comes back to haunt it, and you can’t always fix that. Don’t blame that on Jesus. The best we can do in such a situation is to give witness and trust that God’s capacity to deal with more “elsewhere’s” than we can ever imagine, before, inside and outside the Church, is not constrained by the limits of our imagination.

Ch. 5. Sucking it up

I do not know how to alleviate the anxieties of my friend Tony Jones.  No one can be happy with the standard-form liberal/conservative split we have here in the USA that has polarized American life, which leaves us all hoping and praying for a more felicitous future. Even as I set out to rescue the New Testament, indeed religion itself, from its present captivity by the Republicans, I don’t want to make the New Testament sound like a collection of sound-bytes for the Democratic Party. That is the reason I was resolute in WWJD? that what we find in the New Testament is not a “politics” at all, but a “poetics,” that is, a creative paradigm which it is our responsibility to actualize and interpret –whence the force of the “would.” It is we who need to come up with the politics. As for me, I am a Democrat (you may have noticed) because, in a two party system, I find it unconscionable to be a Republican. I think that ever since Ronald Reagan convinced this country to be more concerned about “welfare queens” than poverty, we have become a more mean-spirited nation and more out of touch with our Biblical roots. And in the United States, if you want to have a voice/vote (same word) you don’t get a lot of choices. Were I to start up my own political party I would call it the Prophetic Social Democrats, but you may imagine that in the United States that party would not attract a lot of big donors. So I find that when my 35,000 feet views land on the ground of actual American politics in the concrete, they usually overlap with significant parts of what we Americans call “liberalism.”

That means I have a balancing act to perform. Ever since I read Jacques Maritain as an undergraduate, and Martin Heidegger as a graduate student, I have been a critic of modernity. All the same, it is a mistake to reject the modern, secular order issuing from the Enlightenment as the work of the devil. The secular order is the public order; the opposite of the secular order is the established rule of a religion or religious confession–a Christian state, an Islamic state, a Jewish state. The secular order is the order we want to be free and liberal–for that is space of the freedom of assembly, worship and speech, freedom from censorship, from distortions by the special interests of capital or a confessional religion, freedom from a totalitarian state interest, freedom for a multiplicity of voices. It is not the secular order to which I object but secularism, which is an underlying Enlightenment thesis about the withering away of religion, its gradual displacement by science and pure reason. That turned out to be both a bad sociological prediction, to say the least, and a no less flawed philosophical view, which proceeds from a distinction between faith and pure reason that has been discredited by all the main movements of 20^th century philosophy, on either side of the English channel. I am fine with “liberalism” when that means protecting the secular/public sphere and a critic when it gets in bed with secularism. By post-modern I mean post-secularist, working our way through modernity, getting rid of its flawed presuppositions about faith and reason, private and public, subjective and objective, facts and values (and a very long list of other such oppositions). But I want to continue its work of keeping open a liberal public space while insisting that it also recall what was invaluable about the pre-modern. My first scholarly project was to link up Heidegger, the grandfather of all postmoderns, with two pre-modern thinkers, first Meister Eckhart and then Thomas Aquinas. My more recent project in the 1990s concerned the link between Derrida and Augustine. In this book, I am trying to link up the spirit of deconstruction (and a fair amount of its letter) with the New Testament.

It stands to reason that a certain amount of what I say will converge with liberalism. When it is effective in preserving this public space, liberalism insures fair elections, protects civil liberties and the right to be different, especially minoritarian rights. If that’s all I can get, I’ll take it. In most places in the world (including increasingly the United States under George Bush) we would drop to our knees and thank God for it. I have no contempt for liberalism, but I myself am left of liberalism and the pressure I bring to bear on it comes from the left, from a philosophical left as well as from a Christian conception of the neighbor, which leads me to emphasize responsibility over rights. I try to think more deeply than liberalism about the interwoven nature of our lives, indeed of all things, living and non-living, great and small, to think more compassionately than liberalism, especially when it gets in bed with capitalism. Capitalism of itself is a heartless machine for making profits. Religion, on the other hand, is supposed to be the heart of a heartless world. That means I want to insist upon a post-secularist voice in the secular/public order that needs to be preserved. It’s a balancing act, but what is not?

Add to all this that WWJD? was not supposed to be a philosophy book but a book about the church and what sort of face the church should have in the real world. To this end in Chapter 5 I singled out five hot button issues that beset contemporary public life on which a Christian witness is required today, about which it would be cowardly to avoid speaking, or hypocritical, if one says one takes the Sermon on the Mount seriously. 1 - Poverty and economic justice–about which the gospels are unmistakable; 2 - militarism, about which it says the most radical and “impossible” things –love your enemies; 3 - the repression of women; 4 - discrimination against homosexuals (3 and 4 require what is for some an unnerving deconstructive hermeneutics of Scriptural texts); and 5 - abortion, which requires seeing the deconstructive point that sometimes we only get to choose between two evils. (I regret that I did not say more about racism and the environment.) If when Tony speaks of finding a “third way,” that means finding a way beyond speaking or not speaking to these five (six or seven) points, I don’t agree. I think that a third way in that sense runs up against the third aporia that Derrida describes in “The Force of Law:” the aporia of urgency. Just as justice is always deferred and never arrives, so too justice deferred is justice denied. Real, innocent and decent people–women, the poor, displaced Iraqi families not to mention young American soldiers and their families, homosexuals–are suffering in the meantime. Our actual lives transpire in the distance between these two axioms (deferral/denial) and so we are required to speak and act now. That some of these positions rattle the church rafters a bit is no great surprise to me as I consider the Sermon on the Mount the most rafter-rattling few paragraphs in the history of western literature. I think Jesus was a trouble maker, not a smarmy Christian or a Vatican bureaucrat.

By the way, by holding the feet of papal infallibility to the coals of deconstruction, I was trying to make as much trouble for my Catholic friends as for my evangelical ones, s’il y en a. I embrace the Catholic Church’s social teachings but not Vatican authoritarianism. In the same way that I do not think that the secular order is the work of the devil, I do not think that the church is divine or infallible, attributes I would rather save for God and not use up on the church. The Vatican’s suppression of dissent among intellectuals, its collusion with diocesan cover-ups of sexual scandals, its profoundly destructive teachings on women, on birth-control, and homosexuality, its long history of anti-semitism, of colonialism under the cover of missionary activity, the whole “Constantinian” thing–is as violent and idolatrous on the Catholic side as Biblical inerrantism is on the Protestant side. Worse, really, but only because Protestantism has not had the chance to be at it as long. My own best bet is that Jesus would have had nothing to do with either camp, that he would be a radical deconstructor of both the Vatican powers that be and the bible-thumping literalists, and that they represent exactly the sorts of things he was up against and for whom he was trying to make trouble. I sincerely believe that if many, maybe most, people who call themselves Christian ever met such a man as Jesus, transposed to our times, they really would not like what they see. Enter Dostoevsky: nobody messes with the Church, not even Jesus. We should all put that thought to ourselves: if we ever met Jesus in the flesh, we really might not like what we see. We should ask not, what would he do, but what would he look like to us? A migrant worker after our jobs? That I think is the “event” that is stirring in Sheldon and in my modest attempt to restage Sheldon in a postmodern theater. That the positions I strike here overlap with the political left, not the right, is no great surprise to me, as I consider the Christian Right profoundly un-Christian on almost every important point. That is also why I think, thanks be to God, there are signs that it is beginning to unravel before our eyes–even in the time between writing this book a year ago and today–and younger evangelical Christians are becoming more and more disenchanted with the older leadership. It is to them that I appeal.

But I would be greatly saddened if Tony were to reduce my view to reheated “liberalism” or “modernism.” To spell that out, let me point out that my view departs from liberalism on two fundamental points. I didn’t go into this in the book because of time and space restraints and because, to a great extent, this book is in part a kind of rhetorical-humorous poke in the ribs of people in the evangelical middle, trying to get them off dead center, in the spirit of my constant hero, the Kierkegaard of the pseudonymous works. Jeff Robbins’s piece in Global Spiral http://metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10298/Default.aspx gets the spirit of this book exactly right. The people on the left are already convinced. As for the people on the far right, whom I have perhaps scandalized by this book, for them, well, that is why Jesus taught us how to pray. It’s to the ribs of the people in the middle that I point this particular poke. But more fully unfolded, what I am saying seeks to move beyond the standard-form liberal/conservative split and push toward a third alternative, neither a religious right nor a secularist left. I am not a political philosopher and I am not proposing a new political theory. I am just trying, as I have for some time now, in all my books, to scramble the lines between religious and secular, theistic and atheistic, public and private, faith and reason, subjective and objective, and in particular to show the communication between post-modern and post-secularist. Here are the two points I would make if someone asked me to deconstruct liberalism, which I try to do even if you do not ask me.

(1) Classic liberalism proceeds from the presupposition that human beings are autonomous, self-reliant agents charged mainly with responsibility for themselves. I reject that. That is first of all bad (modernist) political philosophy. As a “post-modern” philosopher, I think of the human “self” not in terms of autonomy but heteronomy, not as a self-reliant agent but as turned in response to the other, not as self-responsible but responsible to the other, which is the bit on which Derrida got help from his friend and fellow Jew Levinas. Like Derrida, I am deeply interested in the critique of sovereignty, both individual and national. As a Christian, I think the liberal individual is separated by an abyss from the New Testament ideal of love of one’s neighbor. In global world, the answer to Jesus’s question, who is my neighbor, is everyone. I do not think of human beings as atoms but, to use a deconstructive metaphor, as “interwoven,” linked, situated inside and saturated by linguistic, social, political networks from the start, upon which they are deeply dependent. In the chapter immediately preceding the one which Tony is glossing, I ask what is the specifically Jesus-inspired thing to do, over and above some generic what would Socrates do, or Kant, or any good guy (or woman!). The answer is the invocation of the madness of the cross, of forgiveness, of loving one’s enemies, of weakness not strength, of the location of sanctity in a public execution. In The Weakness of God the picture I draw of human being marked by frailty and unknowing in a world marked by what Joyce calls a “chaosmos” is not exactly the autonomous liberal subject. I advocate a world not of fierce competition among the strong but of cooperation and collaboration that lifts up the weak. I think Christians today should advocate not a “liberal” democracy but a social democracy, and that Christianity in particular should draw its model of social solidarity from the communal life of the first Christians. I lived for four years in a community with just such a model as that and it was, to say the least, very interesting (I’ll come back to that). Of course, we should not entertain the illusions that such a community can or should be replicated in a pluralist postmodern society, but it should be nonetheless a part of the poetics that should inspire in us what Michael Hardt has lately been calling a “politics of love,” which is what I was calling for in WWJD? (87-88), not a politics of competitive individualism. In fact, when “liberals” start sounding “populist” themes, when they insist on universal health care, on restoring a more progressive tax code in order to redistribute income more equitably, on the rights of workers, or of the unemployed and the destitute, when they get accused of trying to start a class war (as if it has not already been going on for some time now), then they sound less like liberals and more like the “social” teachings of the Papal Encyclicals, more like the prophets.

(2) Liberalism is a modernist and hence a secularist view that turns on treating religion as a private matter (faith) which is to be kept out of the public discourse (reason). I reject that, too. For one thing, like Derrida, I do not contrast faith and reason, but the several faiths we all have, religious or not so religious. As a hermeneuticist, I have spent some time arguing that any sort of “understanding” is made possible only in virtue of its presuppositions, which have the structure of a faith (See my little Philosophy and Theology, Abingdon, 2006). But for another, I do not want to deal with the excesses of the Christian Right in a way that would have silenced the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The civil rights movement, which brought together prophetic passion with a secular zeal for democratic equality among people with no confessional religion, is my idea of how religion is supposed to work in the United States. I do not think that the antidote to contemporary American violence abroad and greed at home is keep the Sermon on the Mount private, for Sunday morning readings behind closed church doors. I like the opening scene of In His Steps when the homeless man had to butt in on the closed church services with the bad news of poverty and destitution. I do not think the answer is to keep theology out of politics but to get your theology straight. But–and here’s the point about keeping the public/secular order safe–that has to be balanced with respecting those whose lives are embodied in different theologies, which have their own irreducible integrity, depth and worth, with those whose theology is “elsewhere,” and respecting those who have no theology at all, who are elsewhere than theology. I want the Sermon on the Mount heard loud and clear. I cite with approval what Jim Wallis said (p. 91; cf. 108): “The Secular Left will give up its hostility to religion and spirituality or it will die.” Keeping in mind my distinction between the secular/public order and secularism, I advocate a post-secularist pluri-vocal multi-centered open-ended democracy in which the voices of all, confessional and non-confessional, theist and atheist, straight and gay, black and white, male and female, home grown and immigrant, get as fair and equal hearing as possible, in which we all concede we are in this together, and nobody claims to be hard wired to the Absolute Truth. I advocate a politics of noise, an enormous and confusing noise out of which the threads of a pluralistic and fair minded public policy will be filtered.

So I am not sure what else to say to Tony other than to take a deep breath and let everyone know where you are on these points, point by point. If somebody calls you a “liberal,” suck it up. Sticks and stones. In the United States, calling somebody a “liberal” is the way Ronald Reagan (who would have depended on his advisers to inform him that “John Locke” was not only a character in Lost) taught the Right to come up with a cover for their personal greed and hatred of the other. The tragedy is the extent to which Christians–who are supposed to know better–fell for it. Tony, don’t fall for it.

Ch. 4. Back to Southwest Philly

I am grateful to Clark West for trying to get me back in the graces of my Catholic friends. That gives me the chance to get something on the record about a Catholic publishing with Baker. I spent most of my career (36 years) at Villanova, which is a Catholic university, in the beginning trying to get the philosophy department off the dead center of Absolute Thomism, which is at least as paralyzing as Absolut Vodka, and at the end trying to prevent it from throwing out the baby of Catholicism with bath waters of dogmatic Thomism. But I am by education and life long habit formed by the Catholic intellectual tradition, by the spirit of Thomas Aquinas for whom being a Catholic did not mean checking your intellectual faculties at the door, the spirit of a philosophy inspired by theology and a theology disciplined by philosophy. Luther’s idea that Aristotle was sent into the world by God as a punishment for our sins seemed to me perfect nonsense. Early Christian theology is inconceivable without the “pagan” Plato, just as the theology of Thomas Aquinas is inconceivable without the “pagan” Aristotle. Theology without philosophy is just Bible-thumping and choir practice. As a young man, I was ecstatic about the renewal that Pope John XXIII proposed and over later years I was demoralized when it was so cruelly crushed by John Paul II and Ratzinger. I was inspired by progressive Dominican theologians like Schillebeeckx and Jesuit theologians like Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Rahner and Henri de Lubac, by liberation theology and by the tradition of radical Catholic communities like the Catholic Worker movement of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. To give you an example of where I come from, Villanova is conducted by the Order of St. Augustine, which gave the Church and the world at large both the Rev. Martin Luther, O.S.A., the father of the Reformation, but also the Rev. Gregor Mendel, O.S.A, the father of modern genetics. Both of these fathers took themselves to be loyal sons of St. Augustine, although their followers today from time to time have run afoul of each other. At Villanova, we do not forbid evolutionary biologists from speaking; in fact, we give them a prize, the “Mendel Award,” one of the first having been given to Teilhard de Chardin. The idea of Christians whose limited imagination prevents them from conceding that God has enough wits about him to make use of evolutionary biology would be a source of merriment to us at Villanova–about two drinks into the cocktail hour before the annual Mendel Dinner. Science and cocktail parties (and dancing) are, you see, eminently Christian where I come from. I had the good fortune to be educated by the “Christian (De Lasalle) Brothers,” who are intelligent and progressive men of the Church. I had the equal good fortune to have spent four years as a member of that religious order, where on Holy Saturday, Clark will be amused to learn, the Brothers got no meat or fish and very little else to eat! I grew up in pre-Vatican Catholicism, in a city neighborhood in Southwest Philadelphia made up mostly of Catholic blue collar working families. We all lived just a short walk away from our local parish church and school, which was the center of our lives. To this day, when people from the old neighborhood meet, they ask one another what parish they’re from, not where they lived.

So my culture is very Catholic. (For example, while many of you had read of In His Steps years ago, I never even heard of it before I started researching this book!) I hope I have not betrayed all that. According to Clark, I have not. He seizes upon something that he treats as belonging to my second nature, my singling out of a day from “holy week.” He is probably right, although I was not thinking of that, which may prove his point. Parish life was deeply marked by the rhythms of the liturgical calendar. The year round calendar of our lives was punctuated and highlighted by the holy days, and “holy week” was the most important of all. Clark offers a beautiful meditation on Holy Saturday, and has thereby enriched this chapter beyond my means, and given me even more reason to read more of Von Balthasar than I have thus far. (Clark, I must warn you, has read everything!) I have only this to add to the interesting discussion that followed his piece. The liturgical calendar is a cycle of repetition, and so the idea is to keep Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday in tandem, in sequence. Each day would be distorted by being detached from the others; something is taken away from the other two if one is neglected. My idea was to draw our attention back to the one we are most inclined to pass over and neglect. Death and rebirth are more spectacular than the transition between them, but we live our lives in the “between,” in the distance between the two. The meaning of “interest,” Kierkegaard pointed out, is inter-esse, being in between. Holy Saturday keeps us safe–it reminds us of mortality and suffering and it protects us from the triumphalism of premature resurrection. It is the sphere of becoming, of twilight zones, of specters, of ambiguity, a holy day that, dare I say, was made in heaven for deconstruction.

Ch. 3. And a Good Thing It Is

I labored quite a bit over chapter 3, trying to fit the characteristic themes of Derrida’s later writings to readers of the New Testament without compromising either. I had a longer section on the early Derrida but on Jamie’s advice I condensed it to a long footnote in order to get quickly to the point in a book which could only go on so long. I agree with Jamie and other Derrida commentators that there is no sharp divide between the early and the later Derrida. I think Derrida was already dreaming of the “undeconstructible” in the early writings, even though that is a word he does not use in those days. Its equivalent can be found in the early analysis of the “proper name,” for example, or in the idiomaticity of a poem, that is, in structures whose singularity make them impossible to repeat, but whose repeatability make them possible in the first place! In the 1960s and 1970s, when he was thinking more about literature than ethics or politics, Derrida was dreaming of the coming of the absolutely idiomatic poem, s’il y en a. Just so, in the later writings, dreaming of the undeconstructible does not mean the dream of “presence without différance,” but the dream that is set off in and by différance, by the disseminative play of concretely situated and historically contextual terms–like “justice” or “hospitality.” I think the undeconstructible is once again the dream of something singular, like the justice due to each and everyone singular one (parable of the lost sheep), and that it has the structure of a promise that is set off or ignited by the differential play and infinite iterability of words like forgiveness and hospitality. My idea was to show the extent to which submitting ourselves to such possible/impossible dreams and imperatives resonates with the New Testament, when it tell us that we need to love our enemies, not just our friends, and in its insistence on a radical forgiveness. I tossed in what I thought was a little rafter-rattler, that such a view of forgiveness would cause us to seriously rethink the traditional version of atonement as a sacrificial exchange in terms of the idea of the radical gift of forgiveness (74-75), something that is going on in several quarters these days. To be sure, at some point we need to separate (Jacques) Derrida and deconstruction. Jacques was a particular fellow, a lovely man if you ever met him, one of the most “Christian”/biblical fellows I myself have ever met, although he rightly passed for an atheist, far more Christian/biblical than many of us who pass ourselves off as Christians. But his views are his. Deconstruction on the other hand is a style of thinking and acting, of inhabiting our beliefs and practices, for which those who take it up must assume responsibility. It can be set in motion anywhere, anytime, from architecture to the study of ancient history. I was trying to show in this chapter what a good fit (what good news) the “becoming possible of the impossible” is for readers of the New Testament. Deconstruction is good new for the Good News.

I am very grateful to Heather for her reflections on this chapter and for the concern she lays before me, which I am glad to clear up. She says that where “Caputo goes astray” is “in his relinquishment of the church to the realm of ‘thing.’” In general, I am not against “things.” A thing is what is real (res) and what is real is what there is, what you get, and it should not be taken lightly. The idea in deconstruction is just to make sure that being real (or “present”) is not the whole story. Still, coming from Heather being a thing sounds bad, like something you throw on the back of a truck, and so I better try to clear my name by clearing up the status the church has for me. One way to do that would be to look through the chapter to see if I ever said anything to counter that impression. Upon a careful enough search I would come up with the following: “We are constantly praying for something that has already happened but is always arriving, for something remembered, but also promised, for something nameless that goes under many names, something that overtakes us and draws us out of ourselves (58).” Fortunately, Heather has cited this very text, which says that the church is not reduced to a thing but is the expression of what I call the event. In other words, I am distinguishing between a call and a response, an event and the way the event is enacted in words and things. Without words and things, events have no reality; without events, words and things have no heart. I am saying that the Kingdom of God which Jesus embodies and calls for is the event, while the church is the response made to the event–a response which is real and so deconstructible, because it is constructed in the first place. In that sense the church is not commonplace thing, but the response to the event that takes place in Jesus. The church is not constructed by solitary autonomous agents (modernism) but beings in response, answering a call, those who are called, which is literally what ekklesia means, beings who are furthermore up to their ears in history and language and who reflect the local circumstance in which they speak and act.

So deconstruction helps the church keep its head on straight by not confusing itself with Jesus, by not declaring itself divine, infallible, or inerrant. In my view, that kind of ecclesiastical self-congratulation ends up in an unbridgeable dualism between an ideal church that is no where to be found and the real one everyone knows and loves anyway–or knows and hates. The church is a real thing (a res, a thing), and a good thing it is, but as such it is deconstructible, even as it is always inwardly driven by an event to which it really responds and which it can never make fully or really real, which is not deconstructible. Jesus is more important than the church. Jesus is the only reason the church is important at all. From a Biblical standpoint, the “deconstruction of presence” corresponds to the “critique of idols.” So deconstruction helps ecclesiology steer clear of ecclesiolatry, the church’s own version of idolatry. I treat the church as a real thing but I am trying to nudge the church away from being a merely real (res) thing in order to become even more event-driven and madly real, or hyper-real, as I put it. That response has already really happened in the church, which is where the event can be found. But it is also always coming, still arriving, never really real enough. I like the way Sheldon positions the church: always already under the permanent injunction to consider what it would do if Jesus should butt into solemn Sunday morning services, uninvited and dressed in rags, and demand an account of what is going on in his name. Jesus did not expect what we today call “the church;” he expected the imminent arrival of the Kingdom. Paul and the early Christians did not expect this church either; they expected the imminent return of Jesus, even before any of them would die, at which point the gentiles would be grafted on to the tree of Israel (with no mention of “Christianity”). The church began to form only with the deferral of these expectations, which is the difference between the letters that Paul actually wrote and the “pastoral letters” written after his death, when “Christianity” began to make some rules for itself and to prepare for the long haul. That’s why I say the church is “plan B.” It’s a wise crack, but it makes an historical point that the church should not forget. Sheldon puts the church on permanent “call,” as in “being called on the carpet,” which is exactly what an ekklesia is. There’s another piece of free advice for pastors: every time you are about to start your sermon, look around to see if there is a strange and suspicious, uninvited and unkempt character sitting in the congregation!

Ch. 2. Lost and Found

I also labored quite a bit over chapter 2 and I very grateful indeed to Charlie Lyons Pardue for the superb presentation he made of that chapter, for sounding the right notes, and for extending it beyond my own limits. This also allows me to come back to Sam Ewell’s “elsewhere,” and to my “St. Elsewhere.” One way to think about my main point in this chapter is to take it as a description of faith in a high-tech and pluralist world of instant global communication systems, where we are increasingly and intensely aware of other cultures and other ways to be, of which we have variously inadequate understandings. Ever since Kierkegaard and Heidegger we have been insisting on our concrete “factical” life, our historical situatedness, which is what postmodernists call “(con)textuality” and a Christian would call our “incarnate” condition. Now that implies the “situatedness” of our beliefs and practices, which are up to their ears in historicality, linguisticality and contextuality, which in turn implies that were we factically situated elsewhere, concretely incarnated in some other place and time –this is the “elsewhere” which Sam Ewell is bringing in–where we never heard the name of Jesus or Christianity, then we would believe something different. Elsewhere there are other theologies, or cultures in which Latin and Greek words like “religion” or “theology” do not exist or have no fit, and in them too human lives are incarnated and expressed with comparable depth and integrity. So in our postmodern condition we have an sharpened sense of the elsewhere, of the multiplicity of situations, contexts, traditions, incarnations, here and elsewhere, and that confronts us with an unavoidable confusion or vertigo. There are a lot of “ways,” more than we can count or understand. That means that in the postmodern world the question of following “in his steps” is not rejected–as it is in modernity, where the idea is to start out by yourself and on your own–but gets very complicated, since we have a heightened sense of plurality. That is why I argued for a deconstructive reading of In His Steps, where for us postmoderns there is a confusing plethora of steps to follow. I think there is a kind of radical or irreducible or “archi-” being-lost that is the condition of possibility of anyone who belts out “and now am found” every Sunday morning. You can imagine deconstruction as advising us not to break the tension between “lost and found.”  Being found (having a view or standpoint) is possible only under the condition of still being lost (recognizing the irreducible plurality of such standpoints) as a condition which make it impossible. I do not trust anyone who is so found as not to admit he is lost, as not to see the integrity of the elsewhere, even as I do not advocate being so lost that one does not hope to be found. Deep in the heart of the truest search is a certain non-knowing of what we are searching for, an unavailability of the future, which makes this search a genuine search. That is what I mean by a religious journey with some teeth in it, which sees to it that we cannot be so self-assured as not to be haunted by the elsewhere, this “elsewhere” having the status of a saint in deconstruction while looking like the devil himself to some of the faithful. I think that deconstruction is “good news” for the church, but it is not necessarily comforting news and it does not make for sound sleep. It brings the sword. It keeps reminding us that we have found something only in the midst of an irreducible element of being lost, that we are all lost and found, and that we are all in this together, everyone, around the globe. That is a way of saying that we are all elsewhere, all situated in the most diverse situations, in the most diverse incarnations, and we do not in any deep way know what is what, although we all have our several faiths, which we must cultivate in good faith.

Ch. 1. Heresies and the Mendel Dinner

I am very grateful indeed to Adam Miller for his robust endorsement of the impossible. If I still believed in the idea of a universal transcultural philosophy of religion, in which the idea would be to come up with a list of the invariant transcendental properties of a universal transcultural thing called “religion,” this would be my entry in the contest. The “becoming possible of the impossible” seems to me an elementary structure of our being-in-the-world, as Heidegger calls it, as elemental as being political or having an aesthetic life, or being in love or having a vocation. It seems to me a defining feature of the structure of “desire,” where desire and religion conduct a constant correspondence with each other, desire being deeply religious and religion being a matter of a desiring heart. That is why Augustine’s famous cor inquietum would also be on my list (if I believed in such a list!). But Adam raises two important points, not only about the impossible but also about heresy, which I want to address.

(1) I am quite struck by the insightful treatment he makes of “heresy,” and by his striking portrait of the “arch-heretic Jesus,” a portrait that has deeply deconstructive flair to it and which I love. As a philosopher of the “event,” all my affective sympathies are with words like anarchy, anomaly, dissent, heterodoxy, heteronomy, disruption, interruption, etc., things that separate themselves off from the mainstream and force a reconfiguration of the settled course of the whole. My claim throughout WWJD? is that this disruptive trouble-making is exactly the sort of figure that Jesus cuts, which is why he didn’t live to a ripe old age and die in his bed. Who is a heretic? Anybody the church says is a heretic, including Jesus–here comes Dostoevsky one more time. Like a lot of “postmodern” philosophers, I cast all this in terms of a theory of the “event.” It is of no little interest that the most famous theory of science in our times employs just such a schema: it is the anomaly that disturbs “normal” science, which provokes scientific revolutions, according to Thomas Kuhn, whose idea of an event-provoked paradigm switch cuts across religion, ethics, science and art. The oddity, the odd man or woman or child out, the incommensurable, the one we can’t count, the one that upsets our accounting and requires a recount, or a new way of accounting, the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son–that is the odd and anti-establishment event I hear in the parables and which I think deconstruction in particular is repeating (and for good historical reasons, actually, when you bring Levinas into the picture.) It is precisely the event that keeps a structure from folding over into an airtight and exclusionary whole, and so keeps it on the move. The idea behind any institution worth its salt is that it contains an uncontainable event, contains an event it cannot contain, so that its orthodoxy is inwardly disturbed by the forces of what it cannot imagine or foresee for itself. As Adam said, it itself first arrived on the scene as a heresy, a haeresis, a specific choice and dissenting voice, whose institutionalized tendency thereafter is to suppress any further dissenting choices! Constantly returning to that anarchical archi-heretical event is deconstruction in a nutshell.

Now notice that I choose two different examples of the “working church” in chapter 6. The theology of John MacNamee is, as far as I can tell, completely orthodox doctrinally, but it is no less deconstructive; the deconstructive energy is located in the determined resistance he puts up to an archdiocese more interested in recruiting vocations to the male priesthood than in the Kingdom of God, in the resistance he offers to institutional rigor mortis. That is to be loyal to the radical event that stirs within Catholicism, not to the boys club it has become. This is particularly delicious to me because the boys down town cannot accuse him of heresy, which would deflect attention from them and on to him and get them off the hook. Ikon on the other hand is quite different. It brackets the very idea of orthodoxy, is not part of an established church, is theoretically and practically experimental, pushes against the constraints of the container in order to reinvent the life of the church in both theoretical and practical ways. I welcome and embrace both of these ways of putting it to the church in order to put the church to work, for both are ways of remaining loyal to the event by way of being resolutely disloyal to what would constrain the event. We need both of them, and many other ways beside, intra ecclesiam and extra ecclesiam, ways we have not even dreamt of yet. We need to be ready to respond, whenever and wherever we are hailed by the saving event.

(2) Adam writes, “What would Jesus do? He would do the immeasurable, speak the unmentionable, love the unpardonable, and demand the impossible.” That, I would add humbly, is my whole point and I would have shamelessly stolen this line from Adam had he said it to me in an email. I am also grateful to Adam’s eloquent remarks because his contribution give me the occasion to clarify something that I might not have made clear. The impossible does not mean what is impossible simpliciter, like a square circle, or “p and ~p,” a logical contradiction or something that is implausible to the point of being simply nonsense. As Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus says in the Postscript, by the “Absurd” we do not mean logical “nonsense” but an ethico-religious shock, a trauma to our autonomy. As when someone says to love our enemies, to do good to those who harm us, to turn the other cheek, to forgive those who do us ill. When we emphasize affective or aspirant structures like the “oui, oui,” the affirmation of the impossible, we do not want to pit our faith in opposition to scientific research and humanistic learning, as if the latter do not provide still more ways to explore the mystery of the world God has created. The last thing anyone should be led to do, for example, by what I am saying is to give themselves licence to hold what Aquinas used to call the two-truth theory. Like holding that while all rational evidence tells us that the universe God has created is millions upon millions of years old, we hold instead, in virtue of the impossible, it is only six thousand years old. That is not God talking, that is us. That is not exposing ourselves to the mystery of God’s world, that is just us being ornery. Like the ornery bunch of church cardinals utterly innocent of astrophysics telling Galileo what he is allowed to see when he looks through his telescopes. The church tried that once before and it did not turn out well. So when Mike Huckabee recently said, “Folks, I didn't major in math. I majored in miracles,” my reply is that he would have done well to have at least minored in math. We should not think that God is only interested in miracles, not when we consider that God lets math do most of the heavy lifting in nature and makes only occasional use of miracles. Most of the miracles that Augustine ticked off in the City of God turned out to be just a matter of knowing more mathematics (Bk. 21, ch. 4). I am not thereby advocating the return of “modernism” or showing “scientific reductionism” a way to sneak in the back door. I have a whole bag of criticisms of those things. But I am opening the front door to a robust religious faith that embraces all of God’s creation while not checking our God-given rational faculties at the door. I advocate a faith that is robustly open to the world in all of its multi-leveled multiplicity, multi-colored and uncontainable mystery, a faith that does not underestimate the unfathomable complexity of the world God made. If you don’t believe me, I’ll see if I can get you an invitation to the next Mendel Dinner at Villanova when we lift a glass to the Rev. Gregor Mendel, O.S.A., father of genetics.

Credit/Blame

For making all this happen, we may thank or blame Jamie Smith. I leave it to you to decide. Derrida thinks that our most important words are undecidables. So we cannot always be so sure that a “promise” is not a “threat,” or that a “gift” is not a “poison” (for that second one you need some German), which also means that sometimes we are not sure whether to thank someone or blame them for what they have done. With this in mind, I want to thank Jamie Smith for the invitation to contribute to this exciting new book series in the first place and for setting up this blog and inviting me to respond. I also want to thank everyone who has contributed, some of you repeatedly, to what for me has been a lively and instructive exchange. But while I thank Jamie for welcoming a book on deconstruction into a series on the church, some of you might be inclined to blame him for letting the camel nose of deconstruction under the tent that the church has pitched. Either way, Jamie is responsible; he deserves the credit/blame. He not only issued this invitation, but at one crucial point, when I was seriously tempted to give up this whole idea–I am after all a philosopher not a pastor, which makes me love even more Sam Ewell’s line that “that’ll preach”!–Jamie made a careful and immensely helpful reading of a draft of the manuscript which turned everything around and allowed me to finish. Many of you know that Jamie was one of my first doctoral students at Villanova. Of course, some of my secular-deconstructor friends will blame me for this, accusing me of having contributed to the career of a blatantly Christian philosopher, and some evangelical Christians will blame Jamie for having studied with the devil. So you may thank or blame Jamie as you see fit, but I for one have decided to offer and to accept only the thanks for our friendship and for our dialogue and to put an end to all this nonsense about undecidability.

Comments

[Matt Wiebe]

Thank you Jack, for taking the time to make this involved response to the engagements with your book thus far.

More than anything else, I appreciated the more autobiographical notes sounded here, as I've always felt that the "death of the author" has been a bit exaggerated. I see someone battling on the (impossible) twin fronts of religious absolutism and secular absolutism (although I dislike my own militaristic metaphor).

I find myself fighting different battles in the different context and time that I'm in, but it's really a very similar fight. Drawing a lesson from this, I think that someone like Tony Jones, who is afraid of being branded a liberal, needs to spend more time scandalizing secularists so that he can feel a little more balanced.

On a different note, I would also be very interested in seeing a response at some point to Jamie Smith's friendly push over at Global Spiral. He raises some interesting points, and I'd love to see your response.

Thanks again for this lengthy response. I'll have to read back over it again to see if I have anything more substantive to say.

[Jonathan Dodson]

I am interested in jumping in but haven't read the book. A church planter in Austin, TX, I am constantly deconstructing false notions of Jesus, and reconstructing a faithful, contextualized gospel to this highly diverse city.

Any chance on a blog for book deal? I typically get front page Google placement on topics like this...

Thanks for the fine writing on such an important topic.

[Tony]

Really, the next step for Caputo is to write a book on Jesus... But will he have the courage to write on Jesus who is also the "Jesus Christ" of Christians???

[Clark West]

Tony, it is true that Caputo does not use "Christ" language in WWJD?, a point worth noting. I do not think it is for lack of 'courage' (anyone willing, as Jack has been for many years, to bring Derrida into the belly of an uncomprehending, often hostile ecclesial beast is hardly lacking in that particular virtue!), but rather I think there are strategic reasons why Jack puts his emphasis on the porous body of the suffering Jesus. 

That is not to say that within deconstructive terms, "Christ language" it out of bounds. Though it certainly can be and has been used in the name of the kind of 'strong theology' Caputo rejects, and so is in need of a deconstructive reading, Caputo's point is, again and again, that no language is pure, all language is dangerous. There are no 'magic words' that immunize us from betraying the Christ-event, even the very name of 'Christ The Lord' repeated over and over (Mt. 7:21), so a focus on linguistic orthodoxy is mistaken in Caputo's view. (A troublesome corrolary to this idea is that just as no language is pure, so in speaking of God no language is inherently ‘bad’, wholly immunized from harboring the Christ-event. As Barth would say, God can speak through a dead dog or even godless Communism! Maybe even, dare we think, as Adam suggested in his first post, through heretics and devils!) Discernment, as Richard Kearney has rightly pointed out, is key here.
This does not mean that language is utterly ambiguous, untrustworthy, and therefore that a deconstructive theology inevitably tends toward linguistic nihilism. The question Caputo will ask over and over is: what event might stir in the name 'Jesus Christ'? We could point here to the Barmen Declaration as an example of where Christ language is not a power-play by an insecure ecclesia, but a show of prophetic resistance to the principalities and powers that manifested themselves in Nazi Germany. Here the language of orthodoxy is tethered to the event of justice, just as it is in Caputo's example of Father McNamee, who is, in Caputo's words, 'as orthodox as they come'.

[Adam]

I think I agree (for whatever that's worth) with Tony that Jack's next step is to write a book on Jesus. What I'd really like to see (because I think that this is where he is often at his best) is a book that is simply a sustained reading of one of the gospels or a major Pauline epistle. This would involve less philosophy and more hermeneutics but who doesn't want MORE radical hermeneutics? :)

[Tim McGee]

Clark said,
"Caputo's point is, again and again, that no language is pure, all language is dangerous."

This made me think of David Hart's point, that postmodern philosophy represents the failure to think of difference positively, and thus cannot account for a Christian view of the gift of creation: "the gift [of creation] lies in just this 'impurity,' this deferred presence, the ceremonious delay of a rhetorical gesture, which enjoins a rhetorical response: a sacrifice of praise" (Beauty of the Infinite, 293).

The inability of our words to capture the Word (or the distance of created logoi from the Logos) is seen as an "impurity," a distance that is a rupture, and hence dangerous. This danger leads one to either withdraw or to "get one's hands dirty," meaning risk violence (including linguistic violence) for the sake of stopping a greater violence.

Your point about "linguistic orthodoxy" is certainly valid. But we need not label the distance and deferral between our words and the Word as a space of sin and impurity (how platonic that would be!) in order to push us away from a hollow linguistic orthodoxy. In fact, detaching the "porous body of the suffering Jesus" from his divinity actually cuts us off from what saves us from our sinful orderings of the world: his body is not one we emulate, but one which, through the Spirit, we actually inhabit.

[Clark West]

Tim
In regards to David B. Hart, who gives quite a strong reading of postmodern philosophy, one in which many of the thinkers he attacks would not recognize themselves, I think Jamie Smith's response to his book at the AAR a few years ago, and Hart's response to Jamie was most revealing (as was the interchange with Gerard Loughlin, himself an original contributor to Radical Orthodoxy). And the question that came out of that interchange (which you can read in New Blackfriars Sept. 2007), at least for me, was, should Christian martyrs have as their goal the 'winning of an argument'? If so, how is Hart's rhetorically sharp thrust toward Christian orthodox victory related to the integrity and vulnerability of the eucharistic body of Christ and to the church's struggle to faithfully witness and praise this salvific, cruciform event?

I have my own thoughts about this question, but I wonder what you or others think.
Yours in peace,
Clark

[Tim McGee]

Clark,
That is a very great question, and has been the one I have been pursuing as I'm rereading sections of his book. The way I've been phrasing it to myself has been: what are the "labors of vision" that allow one to affirm a harmonic ordering in a creation mired by sin and death? I've also been thinking about it in terms of his theme on music, using Coltrane to bring the question: how much dissonance can the song of creation--can our lives--maintain before the harmony collapses?

I've noticed an underdeveloped theme in his book, one that I've found a bit more clearly in Maximus the Confessor, namely, that the vision of the harmonic ordering of creation occurs through a "labor of vision" (Hart's phrase) a praxis, and is upheld in hope. I find it a bit ironic, as I'm rereading Hart, that the problem I see in his text is the last one that, traditionally, one associates with the Orthodox: a theology not properly grounded in the Christian spiritual life, in asceticism and prayer.

I've found Philippians 3:10-11 to be a key text with this question: "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead."

The power of the resurrection is one that we step into through the practice of becoming like him in his death (but this participation in his death is powerful precisely because of the resurrection). This iconic representation of (by participation in) Christ is possible precisely because the deferral of creation is one that is not essentially a dangerous impurity; but we see this truth only in light of the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. Thus, we come to see the iconic status of creation (of the logoi's participation in the Logos) precisely within the disciplines and practices of the church's spirituality. And, as I'm rereading Hart, I am wishing he had fleshed out the spiritual background more thoroughly.

Blessings--and please share your own take on the question,

Tim McGee

[Clark West]

Tim, your reading of Hart resonates with some of what I have thought reading him. I too think that a focus on an ascetical theology of prayer is crucial. Though Hart's reading of Derrida, Levinas, Caputo, among others, is almost wholly negative, I think he misses valuable resources in their thought for a constructive ascetical theology. But to get into that would take far more time and space than I can give here, and truth be told, I should be prepping for my qualifying exams as we speak!
I have enjoyed very much our exchanges, Tim and I wish you well in your pursuits. By the way, your mention of Coltrane and the question of dissonance is of great interest to me. Monk is my favorite in the jazz world, but for liberative, dissonant chaosmos, Cecil Taylor (who has to be heard live to get the full effect!) is my muse.
Peace,
Clark