Deconstruction, a help to those who are "on the way"

The post below continues the series of engagements with John D. Caputo's What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church.  Charlie Lyons Pardue engages the second chapter entitled "Spiritual Journeys, Postmodern Paths."

Apart from being an avid fan of  LOST, Charlie Lyons Pardue is a recent graduate of Nazarene Theological Seminary and currently serves as the Director of High School Ministry at Allentown Presbyterian Church in Allentown, NJ.

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In chapter two of What Would Jesus Deconstruct? John Caputo attempts to build a bridge between the philosophy (or way) of deconstruction and our Christian spiritual journeys. I can almost make out the grateful responses now… "What on earth does some French, relativistic, postmodern philosophy have to do with my spiritual journey?" Well, as Caputo might put it, deconstruction will give your spiritual journey some teeth! In fact, we don't have to look far within the New Testament to find an example of deconstruction at work. In Matthew's account of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus is giving some real (and unexpectedly new) "teeth" to the law, but he does so by first deconstructing it.

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. Truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, 'Raca, is answerable to the Sanhedrin. And anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.

-Matthew 5:17-22 (TNIV)

Almost as if Jesus was anticipating the reaction of his audience, he begins by prefacing his message with the assurance that he is not setting out to destroy the law but rather to fulfill it.

Caputo, like Derrida before him, (and I'm suggesting, Jesus before him) insists that we do not confuse de-con-struction with de-struction! Deconstruction does not set out to destroy the journey of a Christian longing to walk in the steps of Jesus but rather to unfold the many paths and complexities tied up in such a journey. If our question is "what would Jesus do?" deconstruction is not here to dismiss the question but rather to "supply its hermeneutics" (48).

There are two kinds of spiritual journeys or two ways to "be on the way" as Caputo would put it, the first (which is all too familiar to many of us evangelicals) is to know the way ahead of time and then just try your hardest to get there, the second is to be on a trek to find the way but all the while being a bit lost. The postmodern person understands that being lost and at the same time being "on the way" are entirely compatible. Far from falling into the black abyss of relativity that some critics might fear, this kind of a spiritual journey boasts a healthy Christian understanding of the via negativa.

If I understand Caputo, this journey of being lost but at the same time "on the way" following as best we can, in Jesus' steps is a journey that is dedicated to the possibility of being surprised, to the possibility that God will do the impossible.  Earlier in the chapter Caputo said that to be religious was not to accept things as they are (realist) or to simply substitute something else for reality (antirealist) but instead to hope for, to search for the real beyond what is real now, something that is as of yet beyond our experience. So all this talk of being lost but still being "on the way" and of hoping and working towards a reality that is not real now looks an awful lot like the Kingdom of God to me.

The first kind of spiritual journey, the kind that knows in advance where it is going seems an awful lot like "the church as plan A" if I may play on a phrase from chapter one. Those kinds of spiritual journeys, those kinds of Christianities, are in a very real danger of substituting themselves for Jesus. It is precisely this that a Christian deconstruction guards us against. Deconstruction demands that we continually revisit the scripture to read again in anticipation that the Holy Spirit would deconstruct our systems and idolatries, that the Spirit would do something unforseeable. We continue to revisit the scripture because it is not entirely obvious what following in Jesus' steps would look like. The way of following Jesus is something to be worked out with the Spirit as the scripture is lived out within a community, "You couldn't "run a computer program on [the New Testament]" to simply find out what following Jesus looks like (53).

Now, I am admittedly one of those folk like John Howard Yoder who reads the New Testament and is at a complete loss for how someone could follow in the way of Jesus and kill their enemy. As I understand it deconstruction applied to the Sermon on the Mount would be a practice of allowing the Spirit to open us to new paths that flow from the text. I am reminded of Walter Wink's Jesus and Nonviolence where he suggests that the practice of giving up your cloak to someone who sued you for your shirt might have only been effective for a very short while and then Jesus' followers had to find new ways to nonviolently resist. So the text will lead us to many different paths, and cannot simply be interpreted as a static object which a computer could extract instruction from.  Which is different from saying you can read the Sermon on the Mount as justifying atomic warfare.

Even Derrida understood that deconstruction stops somewhere, or to say it another way, that which is the possible impossibility beyond our current horizons and which we hope for is what is doing the deconstruction and it is undeconstructable.  I believe that "somewhere" is the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is the undeconstructable unforeseeable reality that we hope for. So I am careful that I allow God's Kingdom and Jesus himself to deconstruct my own reality rather than using deconstruction as a weapon against my enemies! Deconstruction is a practice of continually breaking up ground where idols might be built. For example, as a minister in a local congregation I am attracted to the lectionary as a tool of deconstruction to fight my temptation to prepare sermons as if I already knew all the answers! The lectionary helps me to recognize I might just be a little bit lost and opens me to new and divergent paths I would have likely shielded myself from otherwise.

Comments

[Mikhail Emelianov]

Deconstruction does not set out to destroy the journey of a Christian longing to walk in the steps of Jesus but rather to unfold the many paths and complexities tied up in such a journey.

no, it doesn't! "deconstruction" as Caputo presents it has little to do with Derrida then, because for Derrida "to deconstruct" means to point out covered-over and smoothed-out contradictions and irreconcilable differences, tensions and "complexities" but as you mean it (i.e. as "nuances") - if "deconstruction" says anything about "a journey" then it is to point out the impossibility of such journey, and not in a cool "postmodern" way - oh, it's impossible to follow Jesus but I will anyway! - but in real anti-Christian anti-dogmatic way...

[Charlie Lyons Pardue]

Mikhail,
Admitedly, I am a newbie to deconstruction and Derrida, but that being said I really don't think deconstruction would ever point out the "impossibility of [a Christian spiritual] journey." If I understand deconstruction rightly, it is at it's core anti-impossibility. What deconstruction does want to do is to disabuse us that we can be on the journey and already know exactly where it is that we're going. So it's NOT impossible for us to follow Jesus, but we need to recognize that in following Jesus we're always going to be a bit lost and that's essential to the journey. If I said that I'm not the least bit lost on this whole journey of following Christ, that I know in advance exactly what this journey is about and where it's headed is where a Christian deconstructionist would step in and ask me if I have substituted my own ideology for Jesus himself.

Again, I'm a bit new to this (and a bit lost ;) ) but I think you're misunderstanding the prophetic (and very PRO-Kingdom of God) voice that deconstruction brings to the Christian journey.

[Mikhail Emelianov]

i don't think deconstruction brings anything to any pursuit, including Christian journey, Caputo's attempt to domestication it is at the very least naive - if you read anything Derrida has to say about deconstruction, the only "positive" constribution he seems to be attaching to it is in the phrase "deconstruction is justice" - but even there it is aimed at "taking apart" rather than "help" - i don't think one can be a "deconstructionist" of any kind, deconstruction is not a method - you might be thinking of "critique" or "analysis"...

a related question then, what's the point of "following Jesus" if you're constantly in danger of being lost? how can you be "a bit lost"?

[rodney neill]

In reading Caputo to me he seems to adopt an anti-realist stance which denies that the reality of God or Gods presence can be known through ANY idea of revelation - an abandonment of any sense that the reality of Gods Love, Mercy or Grace has been revealed to humanity in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. God is a complete unknown or an irrelevant black hole. The actual content of the Christian faith is reduced to the old liberal idea of Christ being a moral/social reformer with positive values on forgiveness, hospitality etc. His highly selective and truncated reading of the Gospels leaves the entire transcendental horizon of the Christian faith out.
Any idea of the Christian truth claims about salvation, atonement, the role of the Holy Spirit etc are dissolved into nothingness - there is not a lot of the Good News of the Gospel left......

I echo all the sentiments in the post about the complexities and difficulties of the Christian faith journey but if Caputo insists that we cannot have a relationship/encounter/experience of God what have we left? A fairly tale or fiction?

I am an ordinary church member with a full time job and and have not studied religion/philosphy academically - mine is a 'bottom up' perspective on Caputo's WWJD.

If my views are unfair and off the mark I am open to correction. Posting on this site is a bit like stepping into the lions den of professional/academic theologians, philosphers etc!!

Rodney

[rodney neill]

Charlie

My thanks for your post!!

I realise that our reading of Caputo is somewhat different and it is so easy to read a writers work through my own bias/personal lens. I hope your appreciation of Caputo is a lot nearer the mark as he is becoming a larger voice/influence in the emerging church movement.

Rodney

[Clark West]

Rodney,
A good place to see how Caputo has carved out a position between theological realism and anti-realism is chapter 6 of his book The Weakness of God. In case you don't have it or have access to it, here are a few relevant passages, from page 123 of that book:

“to summarize the hermeneutico-deconstructive issue, then, let us say that the position I am defending may certainly not be described as theological realism, because I am methodologically abstaining from treating God or God’s kingdom as a res or a realissimum inasmuch as I am refraining from making any entitative or ontological claims about God-the-being or the Being of God. But neither is this a case of theological anti-realism, because my hermeneutical phenomenological reduction does not have the slightest thing to do with any form of reductionism, with reducing God to a metaphor or a projection of human wishes or any sort of fiction. On the contrary, by my reduction I raise God up beyond entity to the event, the hyper-event, the inner heart or driving force in things. My reduction is a magnification…an event comes over us, overtakes us, imposes itself upon us, lays claim to us—‘from on high’ as Levinas likes to say—by rising up from below, from within the bowels of Paul’s ta me onta, in the name of God.”

“What I am doing should be described as a magnifying hyper-realism of the event, of the event stirring in the name of God with all the hyperbolic action of the beyond, of the force that commands my attention and demands that I collaborate in its realization, in transforming it into existence.”

Another really good place to look is to his online article, "For Love of the Things Themselves: Derrida's Hyper-Realism" where Jack also shows how crucial a notion of transcendence is for his thought. That can be found on the website jcrt.org and it’s from the August 2000 issue. This is a clear move beyond the anti-realist position of Cupitt. Here is one relevant passage from that article, paragraph 21:

"By speaking of the “hyper-real” I mean to get past the presence or real presence that deconstruction deconstructs, the reified thing, be it a chunk of matter or even a soul-thing (res extensa, res cogitans). I mean something that impinges upon from me without, that surprises and surpasses my horizons, that even shocks or traumatizes me, that overtakes and brings me up against what is not me, what is otherwise than me, or even otherwise than being in Levinas’s sense, all the while remaining out of intuitive reach. Such a hyper-realism goes beyond the reifying ousiological realism of classical ontology, where ens et res convertuntur, where being is reified and the real is ontological. What better way to overcome hallucination, on the one hand, and to overcome reifying realism, on the other hand, than to pay attention to the other who comes knocking at my door? The “hyper-” quality of this hyper-realism lies in the transcendence of the other, for the other is au-delà, on the other side, over there, confronting me by the claim it makes upon me, a claim of which I am not the origin, which does not even depend upon me to ratify or assume, but a claim that comes to me from what Levinas calls the kath’auto, secundum se, on its own."

Though it might be deceptive here, I think that the 'real presence' which 'deconstruction deconstructs' is not necessarily what all Christians mean by that language, so beloved in eucharistic theology. In fact, a theological and even eucharistic reading of the 'hyper-real' (the 'trauma' of Christ's suffering witness in the eucharistic anamnesis, which shatters our horizons and breaks our hearts open) and of 'the event' (the very desiring love of God poured into our now-broken hearts by the Spirit and 'laying claim' to our lives and loves in the name of justice for the other) can, I think, be made, without doing violence to either Caputo's thought or to eucharistically centered forms of theological reflection.

I hope this might be of some help to you in understanding Caputo's work, Rodney, which is not necessarily easy to assimilate and can be mistaken for garden variety liberal theology, which it most definitely is not. No more than Kierkegaard's thought could be so called, another thinker upon whom Caputo draws greatly.

Hoping against hope,
Clark

[rodney neill]

Clark,

thanks for info - I appreciate you taking the time to post it.

I will read, digest and ponder - especially the bit about Caputo not being a commoner gardener liberal theologian....

Rodney

[rodney neill]

I find Caputos concept of the hyper-real totally unconvincing. The word hyper-real is a jargonised specialist one that might convey meaning in the ivory towers of academia but is not a common term used in actual everyday conversation and hence the concept will not connect to the actual embodied lives of most everday Christians with their hopes,fears and dreams. No wonder there is such a yawning chasm between the theologically educated church leader/academic and the vast majority of the ordinary Christian community. It would be interesting to know who actually buys WWJD.

I have been deeply involved in the past with one of the 2 groups singled out by Caputo as an example of a postmodern faith community - the gap between the actual reality and his hype in the book is absolutely breathtaking!!! In the book he admits that his speciality is not pastoral care and this certainly shows.

Rodney

[Todd Trembley]

Rodney,

Your last comment about the yawning chasm between the theologically educated church leader and the majority of "ordinary" christians does not seem very helpful. To make the understanding of "ordinary" Christians the bar against which all theology is judged is to risk reversing everything that is supposed to be involved in Christian formation and development. It would no longer be the Gospel, with its biblical and theological categories that questions us, but rather we (unconsciously formed as we are in accordance with the ideas and culture of our day) would question the Gospel. To do this would be to do the very opposite of what you're wanting to do which is to protect the Gospel. It would be to subject the Gospel to whatever ideas have formed the common sense of each generation, rather than allowing the Gospel to unsettle and challenge common sense itself.

I cannot speak about your experiences with one of the two communities that Caputo praises (and in fact I cannot even speak for Caputo's WWJD as I have not read it) but I think that your harsh words towards the notion of "hyper-reality" are unfounded. If the notion is bunk, you should find better reasons for the fact than the yawning chasm between academia and common sense.

Peace of Christ,
Todd

[rodney neill]

Todd,

I have obvious hit a raw nerve with my comments- this will be my last.

The problem with some theology when trying to appeal with a wider church audience to-day is that it it not connected to the language of everyday usuage and thus goes over the head of many people when then characterise it as an irrelevant enterprise. The word hyperreal falls into that catergory. I thought Jesus parables and stories were drawn from the everyday imagery and language and one certainly did not need a theology diploma to understand them. I read a bit but am not a church leader or have studied theology in an academic setting. Your intial comments I appreciated and thanked you for but your last sounds somewhat snobby, elistist and condescending and slightly personal- not in the spirit of this board.

rodney

[Todd Trembley]

Rodney,

I hope that my comment will not cause you to stop posting here. The end of my post was not intended to shut you down, but rather to encourage you to further articulate what you find wanting in the concept of hyper-reality. I was certainly not intending to belittle you, or to get personal. That being said, I would hope that you could also see that when you come onto a board like this, and level the charge of irrelevancy (which is easily heard as mere ivory-tower navel gazing), that your words can also be taken personally. I was not trying to get even with you for a perceived assault upon "us" but was merely trying to get us back to the issue at hand, which is whether hyper-reality is tenable or not.

It is true that Jesus' parables were drawn from everyday language. But it is also true that Christ spoke in parables that people would be ever hearing but never understanding. It is precisely these words that I think so trouble the relationship between the Gospel and common sense, in addition to the fact that many who heard Jesus thought that he was delivering a hard teaching and simply left.

I think that everyone here is really trying to delve into these ideas because they believe that the ideas do matter, and can have a tremendous impact on the ground. If you heard me saying that "we" on this board should not be concerned with the practical implications of the ideas, then I apologize.

I will close by taking one stab at hyper-reality which I hope will show you at least a little of why it is important for all Christians. In modernity and perhaps postmodernity as well, the real is associated with being, that which exists, and being is directly connected with its presence within the mind of an experiencing subject. What this means is that being and reality are defined from the beginning as that which is capable of being cognitively represented and possessed by a knower. This has been problematic for Christians and for theology because the "object" of Christian worship and thought, is not properly an object at all, but is God Himself. It is problematic to identify God with bare reality, the reality that automatically means comprehensible reality, because God bursts all of these categories. The concept of hyper-reality is meant to convey these things about God. God is more real than reality (hence hyper-real) and can never be simply identified with the picture of him that we are able to construct in our theologies. The minute that we believe that we possess God in this way, we are guilty of idolatry. Hyper-reality is then a way of protecting the name of God, in the same way that the Jews have done by refusing to speak the name of God, it is to say that God is beyond or before reality, that he is other than reality, and that reality itself owes its existence to Him.

Again, I apologize for any harshness in my words. The whole point of this board is to bring together philosophers, theologians, church practitioners, and lay people to discuss cultural changes that are occuring and what they mean for our very concrete life of faith. You are welcome here Rodney.

Peace,
Todd

[Tim McGee]

Clark quotes Caputo,
"On the contrary, by my reduction I raise God up beyond entity to the event, the hyper-event, the inner heart or driving force in things."

Could you clarify for me (with the "event" language) whether this understanding of God makes God dependent on creation? I'm not sure if his quasi-poetic language is just a way of saying what the patristics say, that God is beyond being and essence, and is the causal power holding all things in existence. Or if he means it in some more Hegelian sense, which would make God then dependent on creation.

[Clark West]

Tim, this is a complicated question, involving a careful comparison of Caputo's thought with two quite internally complex traditions of thinking about God, the patristic and the hegelian. I am not prepared (nor competent!) to speak for Caputo on this score. I am fairly sure he would not want to be given a 'false' choice between being reduced either to Hegel or the Fathers here. I can only be tentative, but I think much depends on how one receives what you are calling the 'quasi-poetic' language, and whether one wants to or insists on translating that language out of this realm in to a more properly metaphysical or even theological register. My sense is that it is precisely this poetic realm, what Jack calls a 'poetics of the kingdom' which needs to be inhabited in order for the God-event to reach us. So he will write, for example, on page 121 of the Weakness of God:

“The eyes, or rather the ears, of this poetics are firmly fixed on the call, on the way of life that is called for, on the event of the kingdom, the style of the rule of God, that is embedded in these sayings and stories. The ears of this poetics are firmly cocked to hear the call that emanates from them, to respond to the weak force of their strong appeal. Rather than debating their scientific plausibility and historical credibility, we plunge straight ahead into their implausibility and incredibility in order to take stock of the wondrous world they both inhabit and awaken, and the marvelous solicitation of provocation by which they are disturbed.”

So what I hear in these words of Caputo here is a warning not to flee from these texts too quickly into either metaphysics or theo-philosophical speculations, but to allow the very surface of the biblical stories to disturb our attempts to fit them into our frameworks--to live them existentially rather than to explain them theoretically. Again, Kierkegaardian in its emphasis. Can we find, in the scriptures themselves, indications of God's 'dependence' on creation? I myself would say so, drawing on the mystical tradition of reading the Song of Songs, among other places ( tradition which is taken up in a rather fascinating way, I think, in thinkers as diverse as Caputo and Rowan Williams, both, I think, seeking to be faithful to what is soliciting us in those very same texts). And it is this very dependence which upends our own independent stature vis a vis the God-event, which 'knocks us off our pins' to use one of Caputo's favorite phrases. God comes in the form of a dependent, needy beggar at the gates, pleading with us to let him/her in, and there we are called, there we are responsible to answer the very weak (yet ethically all-powerful) solicitation of the other.

This is too quick, Tim, as an answer to your question, but I fear taking up any more space on this thread, so I will resist the urge to go on. Perhaps it will come up again in latter discussions.

Yours,
Clark

[Tim McGee]

Thanks Clark. I'm not trying to reduce Caputo at all, but just to see a bit more of what the language of "event" is doing when he uses it of God. I can make sense of the language quite easily when it is applied to God's kingdom, but I am not sure what it means to "raise God up to the event." Again, nobody in the tradition wants God to be a mere being, an "entity," but obviously "event" isn't the only way to prevent that reduction. So, why use that language? It seems to collapse the distinction between theology and the economy (God and God's acts to save creation).

Also, and again, nobody in the patristic tradition believed that humans were independent of God, and it was precisely the difference in relations of dependence (we are completely dependent on the free, unnecessary gift of God's love in order to stay in existence) that causes us to cling to God.

How we live the texts existentially depends as well on how we wrestle with them intellectually (doctrine informs practice).

[Clark West]

Tim, thank you for pushing me. Again, you ask a very difficult question, especially regarding the vexed theological problem of how one thinks the classical distinction between the immanent versus the economic trinity. Though my first inclination is to think that Caputo is closer to Rahner and Moltmann here, rather than with Barth and Balthasar, in which case there would be a willingness to collapse the distinction between God in se and God pro nobis, I am hesitant to say so definitively. And my hesitation here is precisely because of Caputo's event-language, which as I read it is meant to avoid a notion of a God who is reduced to our terms. To speak of the 'event' of God is not, I think, to collapse divine transcendence into pure immanence (it is not Cupitt, nor Altizer, then).
But because Caputo is not really operating within this particular set of theological assumptions, but rather from a more phenomenological set of problems, I would have to take more time to think through how his position might translate into the terms set by Balthasar/Barth and Rahner/Moltmann. I think it is an important question, and I look forward to pursuing it down the road.
Yours,
Clark

[Tim McGee]

Thanks Clark. I still have trouble seeing how the "event" language functions as negative theology, but I appreciate your thoughtfulness on the subject. Perhaps we can work through this again at another point.

Tim McGee