God, Religion, and the Ridiculous

This begins the first of six engagements around John D. Caputo's What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church.  Adam Miller engages the first chapter entitled "In His Steps--A Postmodern Edition."

Adam S. Miller, a professor of philosophy at Collin College in McKinney, TX, is the founder of the Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, co-director of the Mormon Theology Seminar, and author of the forthcoming book  Badiou, Marion and St Paul: Immanent Grace.

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Sometimes, in the ordinary course of weekly services, Sunday school lessons, and family prayer, I forget how ridiculous religion is.

This amnesia is remarkable because there are plenty of people bent on reminding me. Many of these annoying and uncomfortable reminders come from well-meaning, rational folk who have apparently awoken from the childish and self-serving dream of an all-knowing and all-powerful (white and bearded) god whose job is to secure my eternal satisfaction and punish unremittingly my enemies and who feel obligated, as a result of having opened their own eyes, to yank off the warm blanket of my own absurd beliefs so that I too can join the blushing ranks of the roused and enlightened.

In general, I find their zeal admirable and their arguments (though inadequate) worth hearing.

The real problem, though, is that Richard Dawkins (“The God Delusion”) and Christopher Hitchens (“God is Not Great”) aren’t the only ones anxious to remind me. Some of these reminders are especially difficult to ignore because they come from those who share my commitment to religion.

Take Jamie Smith. Or John Caputo.

In “What Would Jesus Deconstruct?” Caputo works relentlessly to remind us church-goers that religion ought to be unavoidably ridiculous. Page after page, from the first chapter to the last, he presses this insight: religion is uniquely concerned with only one thing – the promise of the impossible, the preposterous, the bizarre, the unthinkably ridiculous.

It’s difficult to disagree.

Thus, in a series of recent Slate.com editorials, Hitchens, for instance, has had no trouble piling up the religious inanities to which a number of the current Republican presidential contenders are committed. Mitt Romney is taken to task in two separate essays for his adherence to the “swamp of nonsense” that is Mormonism, a “mad cult invented by the convicted fraud Joseph Smith.” This is to say nothing of the “Book of Mormon” – which, “when it is not ‘chloroform in print’ as Mark Twain unkindly phrased it, is full of vicious ingenuity” – or of Romney’s magic “Mormon underwear.”

It’s tempting to join in a modest chuckle about the whole benighted affair that is Mormonism and turn our attention back to participating in more mainstream religious nonsense but Hitchens makes equally short work of Mike Huckabee’s evangelical ties. Seamlessly glossing biblical inerrancy, creationism, and Southern “ignorance” in a single line, Hitchens describes Huckabee as “a moon-faced true believer and anti-Darwin pulpit-puncher from Arkansas who doesn't seem to know the difference between being born again and born yesterday.” Or, further: Huckabee “is an unusually stupid primate . . . who does not have the elementary intelligence to recognize the fact that this is what he is.”

What must not be lost amidst the fun of Hitchens’ witty and abusive name-calling is that he has a point about religion. And, more importantly, we need to recognize that this harsh point applies not only to Mormons and Evangelicals (easy targets, really) but can plausibly be extended to religious beliefs of nearly every kind: religion is ridiculous. And one need not be a sour and small-minded (though entertaining) essayist to effectively make the case.

Caputo, then, is with Hitchens on this point – though in siding with Hitchens he (in classically Derridean fashion) turns the argument on its head.

Religion is religious in that it harbors the possibility of a transformation so radical as to be ridiculous.

Religion is, as Caputo likes to say, about the advent of the “impossible.” It’s about “the event of the ‘other,’ of the ‘coming of the other,’ which makes the same tremble and reconfigure” (26).

Caputo’s line is to read this work of salvific transformation as the work of deconstruction. Setting aside any silly associations that the word “deconstruction” may yet trail from its academic origins, deconstruction must always be understood, first and foremost, as a drive for truth. Deconstruction does not dissipate truth, it emphatically confirms its dogged persistence beyond the whole of whatever we have already managed to do or say.

“Deconstruction is organized around the idea that things contain a kind of uncontainable truth, that they contain what they cannot contain. Nobody has to come along and ‘deconstruct’ things. Things are auto-deconstructed by their own inner truth.” (29)

A truth arrives, breaking recognizable forms, as what diagonally crosses the binary systems that regulate the status quo. As unconditional, truths necessarily exceed the comfortable conditions, traditions, and creeds fashioned to contain them.

This is to say that, in religious parlance, truths tend to arrive as “heresy.”

And, moreover, this is so not just in relation to what other people believe - “Of course my heresy is the truth and their creeds are false idols!” - but always and especially in relation to our own beliefs. There is no saying or doing adequate to the impossible “events” that set our sayings and doings in motion.

Caputo recounts Dostoyevsky’s telling of a tale in which Jesus shows up outside a cathedral in sixteenth-century Seville healing the sick and resuscitating the dead. The “ancient cardinal, who recognizes that this mysterious figure is indeed Jesus, has him summarily arrested” and “sentences Jesus to be burned at the stake the next morning, just as he has burned hundreds of heretics the day before – a ‘heretic’ meaning anyone who interferes with the work of the church, including Jesus” (31-32).

This story cannot be dismissed as so much uniquely “Catholic” nonsense because it dramatizes the fragility of every church’s relation to truth. We all tend to shrink from the light. Truths are difficult and dangerous and demanding and every church is called to bear forward without reduction the ridiculous, heretical excess that is its grace and truth.

Thus, the work of attending to truth requires the courage to hear truths in what tradition and reason (and good manners) often decry as heretical. Clearly, not all heresies are truths, but all heresies do mark the conditioned limit of what every truth will necessarily surpass.

In this light, might we say that: thinking religion is the work of tracing heresies and the truths that such extra-creedal heresies limn?

Or, might we say that: living religion is the work of crossing – each time and once again – the conditioned and comfortable limits of our own vanity?

This is the sharp, leading edge of Caputo’s position: Jesus as compassionate arch-heretic.

What would Jesus do?

He would do the immeasurable, speak the unmentionable, love the unpardonable, and demand the impossible.

What would Jesus do?

He would believe (and enact!) the salvifically ridiculous.

 

Comments

[curtis]

Indeed. Well put.

Caputo's little WWJD? is a great read. And your thoughts here exemplify it well.

[Clark West]

Adam, thank you very much for your comments, which have stimulated a lot of my own thinking as I prepare to discuss the chapter on Jesus. Your comment about the truth tending to arrive as 'heresy' immediately called to mind one of the classic passages of Derrida's on the monster, from Points... For those who might not have access to it, here's just a couple of snippets, which I hope might add to the discussion of hospitality and the monstrous figure of the crucified Jesus in our midst; (the derrida quotes are from p. 387 in the english translation)

“All experience open to the future is prepared, or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant, to welcome it, that is, to accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange, but also, one must add, to try to domesticate it, that is, to make it part of the household and have it assume the habits, to make us assume new habits.”

“All of history has shown that each time an event has been produced, for example in philosophy or in poetry, it took the form of the unacceptable, or even of the intolerable, of the incomprehensible, that is, of a certain monstrosity.”

[Adam Miller]

Clark,

Thanks for the comment and citation.

The question I always want to ask (and that I'm sure will come up again over the next few weeks as we discuss Caputo's book) is a practical one: given that a salvific event entails a ridiculous or even "monstrous" dimension, what do we do about orthodoxy?

Does Derrida leave us with the tools to think not only the salvific meaning of heresy but also the potentially salvific meaning of orthodoxy?

Do we have to be good dialecticians here, balancing the one with the other, or are there other options for thinking their relationship?

I've got my suspicions, but am curious to hear what other's might say.

My best,
Adam

[Clark West]

Adam, I'll lay my own cards on the table and say that, having thought about this quite a bit, I have come to the conclusion that the terms orthodoxy and heresy are nearly useless to me as a parish priest and amateur theologian, though I find it terribly fascinating to subject their usage to a deconstructive analysis as you have hinted at. Furthermore, I am rather suspicious of their use by any stripe of theologian operating today in a post-Schism, post-reformation ecclesial situation, where their theological and ecclesiological precision, it seems to me, is nearly impossible to maintain. One man's heretic is another woman's orthodox, and in my own tradition, the Anglican one, a "commitment to credal Chrstianity and the exemplarity of its patristic matrix" which is the definition of orthodoxy used by John Milbank, one of our most prominent theologians, has not been able to prevent ecclesial division and charges of heresy from taking place even when both sides would heartily assent to his definition. This is happening today, even as we speak, and so to use the word orthodox seems almost like whistling past the graveyard.

It often seems to me that the words "orthodox" and "heretic" could simply be replaced "the theologians I really really really like/dislike"!

That is not to say the words don't still bite hard in eccesial contexts like Roman Catholicism, merely that I don't think even there they can stand up to deconstructive, or even theological scrutiny. My test case is, in the Roman Catholic context, is Marguerite Porete, burned at the stake for heresy in 1310, but whose book, in an 20th century english translation without her name on it, received the imprimatur and nihil obstat!

[Adam Miller]

Clark,

Thanks for the post. As a practical matter, I think you've hit the nail on the head.

At a theoretical level though I wonder (and this is a genuine question) if there is anything left of Caputo's position if the orthodoxy/heresy split reduces to a question of theological affinity. This question is certainly not even remotely novel but if the split reduces to affinity, then what happens to the "sharp leading edge" of a transformation so profound as to be ridiculous? If there is no counterpoint to the ridiculous, then how might we account for the novelty of the transformation it evokes?

This, I think, is a fundamentally difficult question and I don't know that I've got a good answer. I definitely don't have a simple one.

My best,
Adam

[Tim McGee]

The fact that there are disputes over heresy among those who agree how to define heresy is nothing new. Maximus the Confessor is a helpful example, both because his opponents were also trying to stay within the bounds of scripture and tradition, and also because he shows that much more is at stake in dogma than just having the "right" opinion: dogma is related to a concrete form of life, a mode of existence, a structure of redemption. The heresy that Maximus fought against was one that undermined the whole process of redemption, that is, it undermined his whole life now and his hope for the future (deification). The only way to treat heresy as something marking the "excess" of truth and not its deficiency is to modernize (and by that, I mean, privatize) the spiritual life, to say that nobody really knows about these esoteric questions and thus we should have a holy skepticism ("humility") about such claims. This would obviously be unacceptable to Maximus, for if the doctrine is questioned, then so too is his very form of life. Thus, we can also see two very different forms of apophatic theology. And if theology is intimately tied to the spiritual life, then we should ask, what form of life is at stake in the apophaticism implied by Caputo? What is its view of redemption?

Unfortunately, I will be out of town this next week (in the mountains, without internet), so I will have to catch up with these conversations later.

[Clark West]

Adam, your question really stirs up the pot! I had Jack as a Roman Catholic thinker precisely in mind when I added my last paragraph about the Roman Catholic ecclesial context being one where this distinction of orthodox/heretic still makes quite a difference and cannot be reduced to elective affinities! There are tremendous ecclesial and political consequences to the Catholic Church's' charges of heresy, even if they are not as grave as in Porete's case. Jack's position is one that is fighting the injustice of these ecclesial exclusions;
He's going to have a chance at the end to respond to some of this, though I don't know if he'll read the comments down below (!), but I think his reading of Meister Eckhart is an interesting one to follow to see the nature of his position. I was struck, when he taught a course recently on Eckhart and Aquinas, on how often Jack, far from wanting to turn Eckhart into a romantic heretical exemplar, as some like to do, defended his orthodoxy, in many cases on the precise charges that were laid against him in in agro dominico, the papal decree outlining his heresies.
At the same time, Jack has on a number of occasions lamented (or so I read it) the fact that when the Meister was brought up on charges of heresy, he defended his position by claiming that his writings were utterly orthodox. Instead, Jack suggests, he should have, a la Derrida, admitted to being more lost, more khoral, rather than cowering before the Inquisitor's trumped up charges. (Jack has stated that he believes the whole affair was largely about purely ecclesial politics between Franciscans and Dominicans, with Eckhart on the wrong side of the power at the time, and not so much about his theology. Maybe Eckhart should have said that!--but had he done so, I imagine the fires that be would have been toasting him long before whatever natural cause got him!)

So in this case, can we say that Eckhart's claiming orthodoxy too quickly stifled the 'event' that was stirring in his radical German sermons, and too quickly domesticated the 'monstrous' rupture of Porete's thought, which Eckhart was in all likelihood following? Neither quite orthodox nor altogether heretical, the eckhartian event eluded its binary grasp, and that's what made it such a dangerous sharp edged sword that the church had to try to dull its blade with in agro dominico and the 'tainting' of Eckhart's work, which lasts even up to this day.

So my hunch is that for Jack, Jesus will never be caught on either side of the orthodox/heresy binary because that binary is an ecclesial/political structure ripe for deconstruction, and it is precisely insofar as Jesus comes with the sword of the spirit that he will cut this binary on the diagonal so as to open up the church to new life. Let the heretics AND the orthodox beware!

[Adam Miller]

Tim wrote:

"And if theology is intimately tied to the spiritual life, then we should ask, what form of life is at stake in the apophaticism implied by Caputo?"

I take this to be an excellent question. What form of life would Caputo's position imply? What kind of church? And how would such a radical church preserve any "momentum" over time?

Clark wrote:

"So my hunch is that for Jack, Jesus will never be caught on either side of the orthodox/heresy binary because that binary is an ecclesial/political structure ripe for deconstruction, and it is precisely insofar as Jesus comes with the sword of the spirit that he will cut this binary on the diagonal so as to open up the church to new life. Let the heretics AND the orthodox beware!"

I like how you frame the question here. I suppose that, in response, my question is about the form of the "new life" (a la Tim's point cited above). Won't the new life require a dimension of orthodoxy that draws a (diagonal!) line, gathers a community, and evangelizes those who haven't heard the good news? Won't such a community require some thing/idea/practice in common? Or will it be something else altogether?

Also, I agree that a Catholic context for heresy can't be far from Jack's mind here, but he seems in general to spend a lot more time taking shots at Protestant fundamentalists.

Further, I'm very interested in the way that this question of heresy/orthodoxy has (in multiple ways and at multiple levels) played out as a real political force this election cycle a la Romney vs. Huckabee and Romney/Huckabee vs. secularists. The question seems broadly pertinent to me. I'm not a Romney supporter but the part his extra-creedal Christianity has played in the campaign has been fascinating.

My best,
Adam

[Clark West]

Adam, I really like your questions here. I perceive the new life to be the very life of Christ born in the heart of each one of us, so that our primary form of life is to be one of attentive, prayerful listening. The strong line of orthodoxy/heresy, at least in my reading of church history, often acts to disrupt if not downright deafen, that attentive listening to the words God speaks to us from the most unusual of places. When the Church is too anxious defending its borders, I fear that it loses its ability to listen to the one outside the gates, pleading to come in and be fed. (Of even to those inside whose status as members of the body is under assault). Obviously I am strongly influenced by Derrida and Levinas on hospitality here.
Jack has often emphasized that Derrida is, in spite of appearances, not anti-institutional, but is, in fact, strongly committted to institutions, especially to making them more hospitable. So I for one assume the traditions of the church community i find myself in, as a clergy person I take active part in its councils, and I fight against its corruption as a committed member of the body. None of that, for me, is denied or denigrated by Jack's or Derrida's deconstructive energy. But the shape of the ecclesial body that is called into being by the event of Christ is not and should not be a static one. THis is why i find the two very different examples of ecclesial communities that Jack uses in the end of his book so helpful (Rollins' ikon and John McNamee's quite traditional inner city Catholic parish). There is a great flexibility here, one I appreciate especially as I have experienced the brutal exclusions of Anglican 'orthodoxy' in its recent attempts to drive out gays and lesbians from its midst.
Yours in hope,
Clark

[Todd Trembley]

Clark,

It is interesting to me that you bring in Levinas' and Derrida'a notions of hospitality here, as I believe that it is at precisely this point that Derrida himself is ripe for deconstruction. In a footnote in The Prayers and Tears, Caputo says that for Derrida, hospitality occurs when we are paralyzed by the aporetic to be as welcoming as possible without surrendering mastery of our own house. The house or home is the very site and possibility of hospitality, for we have nothing to give if we lose mastery of our house.

As Christians, this means that if we are to practice hospitality, even as Derrida exhorts us to, we cannot do it by emptying our religion of its determinitive content, but it is precisely this content that we most have to offer to others, to the world. Thus hospitality requires (besides a certain radical orthodoxy) a recovery of evangelicalism. We are hospitable Christians insofar as we offer Christ.

Your dismissal of the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy is troubling to me, because it is only by combatting heresies (through orthodox theological expressions and not burnings) that the historic church has preserved the at home which is the site of hospitality. You have spoken of your unease with charges of heresy today, in the context of the many denominational schisms, but surely you wouldn't revisit each of the traditional heresies (arianism, docetism, etc) to find out what "new" or "better" Christianity they were inviting us into.

Peace of Christ,
Todd

[Clark West]

Dear Todd,
Thank you for your queries. The footnote you refer to in Prayers and Tears is a bit oblique, admittedly. However, it is certainly not the case that Derrida’s notion is re-inforcing the idea that we are ‘masters of our house’. In fact, quite the opposite, as this quote from the interview I mentioned above shows. Regarding the way the monstrous comes in to upend our reality, he writes:
“Deconstruction, from that point of view, is not a tool or technical device for mastering texts or mastering a situation or mastering anything; it’s, on the contrary, the memory of some powerlessness…a way of reminding the other and reminding me, myself, of the limits of the power, of the mastery—there is some power in that.”

Your comment on hospitality brought Rilke’s angels to my mind. Here’s what Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams wrote about this fascinating (and troubling poem): “the poet warns us against inviting angels into the house, because they will turn the whole place upside down and seek out all the hidden corners and mould us into new shapes. It is something like this that we may sense in looking at this image of invading love, love that does not recognize boundaries. For us, of course, this is a pretty shocking notion; we are rightly taught that love should not be invasive, should always respect boundaries. But this is a caveat for human relations.”
And if this is true for angels, how much more so for Christ, I would say. We are not the masters of the house, and the one who is is free to walk through our walls and barriers and even bang out a few in the process. Even as a priest who administers the sacraments every Sunday, I am leery, in light of this radical quality of the Christ-event, of using language of how ‘we offer Christ.’ Christ is not something the church has a handle on, so to speak, and we often miss him in our midst when we are policing the borders. As the example from the original ‘what would Jesus do’ used in Jack’s new book has it, it is often Christ who comes into the church unrecognized, who is offering us hospitality, and we too often condescend with our pity, charity, condescension, or even worse.
None of this, by the way, is said with any desire to “empt[y] our religion of its determinative content.” Quite the opposite, actually, and I think it is fair to say that neither Derrida nor Caputo are interested in a ‘traditionless’ religiosity, whatever the hell that would mean!? But traditions are full of tensions, strife, and marginalized voices, and some versions of orthodoxy seem quite content to avoid this obvious reality.
As for revisiting old heresies, one of the most fascinating examples of doing just this with the arian controversy comes from Rowan Williams in his book Arius. It isn’t to say that Arius was simply right and Athanasius and others simply wrong (nor to to say the opposite, which is an equally blunt and uncharitable way to read a theological controversy), but in order to listen, patiently, hospitably, for what even the arians might have to teach us about the nature of the one we in the church call, without apology or hesitation, the son of God.

[Todd Trembley]

Clark,

I don't think that the footnote in Caputo's book is oblique, but in fact highlights why for Derrida the event of hospitality is impossible, because hospitality requires inhabiting that space where we have given the other everything but the keys to the front door. This is an aporia, and an impossibility precisely because we can and do err by being defensive of our homes, and thus not opening our homes enough, or by allowing the other absolutely unfettered access.

Derrida, Caputo, and you emphasize the danger involved with being too defensive of the at home. But I can just as validly warn against the danger of losing the home, because then the possibility of hospitality itself is relinquished. We might be able to call such an opening to the other tolerance, in the sense that we simply let the other be, as they are, but it is wrong to equate tolerance with hospitality. Hospitality requires a positive blessing, rather than a neutral indifference, and this blessing can only come when we offer ourselves and our homes. If we refuse to witness to Christ as we have experienced him personally, collectively, and historically, and wait upon the revelation of Christ that those outside of the Church are clamoring to offer, I am afraid that we sacrifice way too much. We may continue to await the Christ or messiah to come (who in fact never comes) but it seems that we fail in offering anything that amounts to good news for those who come into the Church, other than a place to be who they already are without the church.

One last point of agreement, since I have so far emphasized disagreement: I do find Derrida's notion of hospitality compelling when it comes to how we interact with and treat others. Christ himself identifies himself with the least of those with whom we interact. We are hospitable when we give as much as we can to others, which means a sacrificial giving that pushes us to the limits. But the limits do remain. And I think that a love which never challenges is not love at all. Which simply means that whatever else tolerance is, it is not love and it is not hospitality.

Peace,
Todd

[Clark West]

Dear Todd,
Thank you. Of course you are right that the event of hospitality is in some sense impossible, and he is quite clear that boundaries and limits are essential; here I think of what Williams says--in human relationships, boundaries are essential and a good--otherwise we get a reading of hospitality that is indistinguishable from a passivity that opens us to the greatest kinds of violence, a point some feminists have worried about. Having served a church that had a pedophile for its priest, I am well aware of the need to have boundaries of all kinds, and not make tolerance or hospitality mean that we leave the sheep completely vulnerable to the wolves in our midst. This is the aporia of hospitality of which you speak and rightly. My sense is that it is this very tension between our desire to protect and nurture in our homes, and our desire to recognize that we are always pilgrims not of this world, so that the house is never ours do do with what we might like, that leads us to a heart-rending and hopefully a humble acknowledgement that we are never masters of the house, but always guests and servants. In that way heart-breaking, which I see as our daily repentance and metanoia, we bear witness to Christ to those who come into our midst, just as we seek, in our very vulnerability, signs that the other is also, like the angels unaware and like the incognito Christ, offering us hospitality and witnessing love to us. This is not, I hope, 'neutral indifference', but a rather passionate attempt to bear witness to Christ, who, along with the spirit, drives us, at times, out of our homes and into the wilderness, and teaches us love in the face of strangers, even as we are strangers to ourselves.

Yours in Christ's peace,
Clark

[Sam Ewell]

Chapter 1-Adam and Clark,

I'm on the books to post an engagement with Chapter 6, but I wanted to make just a cameo here before we moved on to Chapter 2. (By the way, I'm still not sure how/why Jamie got in touch with me to join in this lively discussion, but I'm happy to be on board!)

I've been following this string of comments b/t you two and I basically want to add some comments to the orthodoxy/heresy exchange and pose a question.

So, deconstruction and the orthodoxy/heresy issue: As someone who went to seminary at Duke Divinity School (MDiv '00), I would have to say that the commitment to orthodoxy loomed large in my formal training. I still remember the study charts of the ecumenical councils with Christ's full humanity/divinity (or the denial thereof) swinging between Arius, Apollonarius, Nestorius until the pendulum finally steadied and came to rest several hundred years later. This notion of orthodoxy of theology "at rest" and heresy as "disturbance" was how I came out of my first year at seminary. Theology had for the most part been worked out by patristics and the task of theology now lies in articulating that--in articulating orthodoxy. How rude of that third year grad student to announce in my first year church history class that orthodoxy was simply the history of doctrine written by the winners! No, I would have said (or at least thought) that the losers were wrong and that orthodoxy is the history of right ideas about God.

By the time I came through Duke I had been breathing in the air of postliberalism for three years, so the take on orthodoxy got nuanced a bit in the "grammatical" direction: doctrine/orthodoxy serve as rules for our speech and for a way of life together. So, doctrines are not words on a page, nor ideas to which we assent and move on, but rather (as one professor memorably put it) doctrine is "the house we live in." (That comment actually opens wide the door for reflection about how orthodoxy might sustain hospitality, something that Todd and Clark spoke to earlier.) Then, I read Yoder's essay on "The Authority of Tradition" in The Priestly Kingdom, which speaks of tradition (I think you could drop orthodoxy in here, too) as the ongoing process of "looping back" to the primary witness of Scripture to tell the same story of Jesus differently. For Yoder, this may or may not involve using the term "homoousion," but it certainly will involve more that just repeating it. All this to say, I read this "looping back" or "pruning" as I believe Yoder calls it elsewhere to be the deconstructive drive to truth to which Adam refers in his initial engagement.

So, my comment comes down to this: it may be, as Clark comments, that orthodoxy is not the most useful term for working "on the ground" with Christian communities/churches--I serve a Baptist church in Brazil and teach at Protestant seminary there, and I honestly don't remember that last time I used the term or when "right doctrine" was THE issue at hand. But, for the sake of argument, let's say that we are committed to orthodoxy as a theological categoricy and to deconstruction as a stance or way of doing theology. If so, I want to say that setting up the work of deconstruction as a drive toward and event of truth, should not be moving us away from something called orthodoxy and the "always more/excess" to be found in Jesus and to which orthodoxy should point. Rather deconstruction should be moving us away from the ways in which orthodoxy gets "frozen"(thus, no drive to truth, no event, no "looping back")--like it did in my first year at seminary or at the first Mass celebrated in the Americas before these lands were "discovered" and then stolen, all in the name of the Trinity.

I''ll close with a question: couldn't we read Caputo (and his Virgil, Derrida) as saying: orthodoxy is the memory of the event of truth that comes to us in the person, Jesus Christ, and when he comes, he always bring "good trouble"(30)? Could we not read him as saying orthodoxy is the truth we arrive at and articulate to continually place ourselves before "Jesus Christ Deconstructor"(30)?

[Clark West]

Sam, I find these very interesting questions. I will take some time to think about them. My comments above, I realize, are hurried, and leave out a lot of what concerns me--and that has much to do with the ecclesial crisis my own Anglican tradition is suffering, in which the language of orthodoxy and heresy is being used in a number of different, if not mutually incompatible ways: for rhetorical effect, for ecclesiological and canonical reasons, and, I am afraid all too rarely, with a sense of what a theological reading of the language of orthodoxy might mean in a situation of ecclesial division. Oddly enough, two of our leading theologians, Ephraim Radner and Eugene Rogers, were both trained as Yale School postliberals, and share many of your own theological presuppositions. However, on the very issue that is threatening to split the Anglican Communion (presumably because one side has decided that same sex blessings and ordained gay clergy is heretical--again, on what grounds is unclear) Rogers and Radner are in complete opposition. So in my situation as an Anglican, the language of postliberal othodoxy is currently unable to resolve the most looming crisis in my church. And I am asking why, and beginning to question the very language of orthodoxy, which is not, I think, exactly biblical, and so, I hope, not at the very heart of what it means to be faithful to Christ.

[Sarah Grace]

To point the discussion somewhat outside of theology, I'd like to comment that the original post made me understand why I appreciate surrealism so much. Surrealism embraces the ridiculous, if I am allowed to generalize. I could so far as to say it celebrates aporia in some sense. Borges was incredible at it and my spirtual life and faith went deeper through exposure to his collection of short stories in 'Labyrinth.' The same could be said for other modern day philosophers and thinkers.

This is to say, what I appreciate about deconstructionism, post-modern philosophies, surrealism and, oh, let's add globablisation, is the deeper yearning for how to incorporate the 'Other' with our own perceptions of Truth. Surrealism toys with our ideas of reality just like Jesus toys with our notions of religion. Deconstruction toys with our idea of being able to know anything.

The common thread here, in my opinion, is an ability to see or love God or reason in a new light.

To go back to the necessity of the riduculous, Jesus made the normal into the ridiculous and the ridiculous into the standard. Mud makes blind men see, the dead are resurrected, five thousand are fed by a few loaves. Why? All to prepare for the advent of the "Other."

I brought up globablisation, because for me, it is intricately linked with understanding the "Other." My view of the orders of the clashes with beliefs put forth through my coming to know of how other cultures, beliefs, 'religions' order the world. I may find these other cultures 'ridiculous' at first glance because they are so much different from my own. In the end, however, I seek first the Kingdom. Through that lens, I find God has a bigger plan and bigger love that I know through knowing the 'Other.'
Call it ridiculous, but God loves 'Others' in the same measure He loves me and my culture. That's a radical statement. Equity, in my book, means application of humility; which may be my bandaid for the issues mentioned about resolving conflict and boundaries of hospitiality.

I may be going off on another track, but with your references to Mormonism and Evangelicalism, with orthodoxy versus heresy, I see the need the need to frame Christianity as a means to bridge differences. How do we view and interact with the 'Other' that is different from us, different by what we believe and how we live out our religious traditions?

Maybe understanding why religion is ridiculous is half the battle. It's easy to see the ridiculous of other's behaviors, but harder to see our own.

Besides, hasn't always the 'heretical'( defined as controversial) thing to do been to build bridges with 'the Other', the group that is different from you? Is that not a main tenet of Jesus' ministry? Bridging rich to poor, sinner to healthy, man to God, the Samaritan to the Jew?

Post-modernism, because of its quest to scrutinize everything, in my opinion, seeks to know the answer to the question 'what is truth?' And the process of that questioning makes the answer of the gospel shine brighter and brighter. The gospel handles controversy and orthodoxy and the ridiculous and the deconstructed. As believers of it, can we?

I think that brings in the idea of our limited abilities. We are broken vessels unable to fully embrace the grace extended not only to us, but to All, to the "Other." That maybe why I see the merit in deconstructionism. Through this philosophy we easily arrive at the knowledge of our incapacities and see Jesus there, reconstructing us... in love, in grace, in truth and in suffering.

[Brandon Blake]

Sorry about coming in this late but I think some chapters in Clark Pinnock’s book, “Tracking the Maze” would be apropos here. First, Clark speaks of biblical texts that “express fear and misgiving that the Christian message will be distorted in serious ways and alert believers to guard the gospel (2 Cor 11:3 Gal 1:6, 1 Jn 4:1)--that the history of doctrine is the history of the struggle with deviation from the truth of the message. And lastly, the innovations in modern theology are so astonishingly radical (many Christians wonder if modern theologians are serving the gospel that the Church has believed) that the question of what heresy is cannot be avoided.

But just as there may not be an infallible norm for preventing modern theology from collapsing into chaos, modern theologians can still be impressed with the liberating story and choose to live under it’s authority, as their “ostensive denial of cognitive revelation may not have the expected radical effect, much to the disappointment of modernist and fundamentalist alike.”

Accordingly, if Christianity is a “story,” neither a bare event nor a rare experience but both an integrated event and interpretation (God is communicating to us via his saving actions) this would mean that the “interpretive dimension is not left up to chance.” Thus, sound theology is that which “…is faithful to the biblically narrated story and articulates its meaning and significance in a way that respects it original integrity.” That which strays from the “canonical narrative, operates out of another story and inhabits a different universe of meaning.”

On the other hand, there is also a diversity of interpretation such that “it is important for Christian communities to allow unsettled questions to exist without breaking fellowship” as both liberals and conservatives can have unsound doctrine i.e. recognizing that there is a difference between that which seriously damages the fabric of the story from that which doesn‘t. Heresies are unsound to a “perilous degree”…“such that they seriously mis-represent its meaning that they actually imperil the salvation of the hearers.”

[Thom]

I have reviewed WWJD? on Everyday Liturgy. The link to the review is: http://www.everydayliturgy.com/magazine/february-2008/articles/review-what-would-jesus-deconstruct

[Thom]

What I found most profound about Caputo's text is that he ends his treatise with a thrilling, if not a tad scary, contemplation of how deconstruction re-inserts doubt into the Christian life, and that within the Church is a remnant of people who live the deconstructive lifestyle of radical love and hospitality amongst the majority Church which is about hierarchy, power, and comfort. The role of doubt in the midst of faith, as the reason for faith, and even as that which is beyond faith is a kind of postmodern negative theology, an acceptance that we cannot prove God, prove Christ, prove our faith beyond a shadow of a doubt---and once we accept this we are then capable of living like Christ for we know longer cling to comfortable legalism or "What Would Jesus Do?" mentalities. Only in a postmodern world does doubt lead to freedom to realize our impossibility which is only answered in the wondrous mess of impossibility which is the church, our faith, Christ, the Spirit, the Father, and the coming kingdom of God. To read the rest of the review go to http://www.everydayliturgy.com/magazine/february-2008/articles/review-what-would-jesus/deconstruct