The cultural landscape of the world is transforming as the presuppositions which undergird it heave and shift. Modernity, with its ideal of pure scientific objectivism, is giving way to a postmodern perspective. The eighteenth and nineteenth century theological polarities of Liberalism and Fundamentalism have had their modernist roots exposed as their common foundation crumbles.[1] Christians are left to sort out which elements of their kerygma were gospel and which were messages build on the sandy foundation of modernity. James K. A. Smith wrote Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? to provide a map of this new land for “students and practitioners—to those trying to orient themselves to the issues and those on the front lines of cultural engagement in the postmodern world” (11). Smith succeeds in his goal by offering a counterintuitive positive perspective on key postmodernism thinkers

Summary

Postmodernism is a “pluriform and variegated phenomenon” (26) which is difficult to describe. Historically, it is a response to modernism (19). Philosophically, it is the French (19) child of existentialism (21). While many Christians harbour a deep distrust of postmodernism, Smith shows how this distrust is rooted in a naïve understanding of the key philosophers. Smith demystifies the central claims of three key postmodern philosophers in the central chapters of his book, showing how their perspectives in fact have a “deep affinity with central Christian claims” (22). For each philosopher, Smith begins with a film which illustrates the central postmodern claim. He then clarifies misunderstandings of that claim before exploring its implications for the church. In the final chapter Smith demonstrates how Radical Orthodoxy, his theological base, can thrive in a postmodern milieu.

Derrida: Nothing Outside the Text

Jacques Derrida famously claimed that “there is nothing outside the text” (34). On the surface, this statement challenges Evangelical Christianity’s understanding of scripture since the canon does point to historical and theological realities beyond the text. Derrida, however, was not a linguistic idealist (35). Derrida’s claim was intended to emphasize that no one can bypass their own interpretive lens. To put this positively, “there is no reality that is not always interpreted through the mediating lens of language” (39). Indeed, in order to experience anything, it must be interpreted (39). With the initial Christian criticism debunked, a more valid challenge appears: If everything is interpretation, then how can the gospel be “objectively true” (42)?

If objective truth is that which “can be universally known by all people, at all times, in all places” (48), then scripture itself gives us good reason to reject “the very notion of objectivity” (43). Reality is never unmediated. For Christians, the Spirit mediates our access to reality. In the end, Derrida’s claim is helpful for Christians in that it pushes the church to recognize the formative role of the text as it is interpreted within community.

Lyotard: Incredulity toward Metanarratives

Jean-François Lyotard argued that the essence of postmodernism was “incredulity toward metanarratives” (63). Metanarratives, literally translated from the French grand reçits, are “big stories” (63). Many Christians quickly respond that the story of scripture is precisely a metanarrative and therefore reject Lyotard’s claim. Once again, this criticism betrays an inadequate understanding of what Lyotard intended to communicate. Lyotard’s criticism of metanarratives was in fact a criticism of the way in which scientific inquiry represented itself as the objective truth to which all other narratives (including scripture) must submit. The idea that scientific inquiry is somehow exempt from Derrida’ claim that everything is interpretation is naïve. “Whenever science attempts to legitimate itself, it is no longer scientific but narrative, appealing to an orienting myth that is not susceptible to scientific legitimation” (68). The idea that the Christian narrative cannot function (like the scientific narrative) as objective truth can be disheartening since it undermines evidentialist apologetics. However, this truth also frees the church from the compulsion to modify their narrative to fit a logical-positivistic framework.

Freedom from the bondage of scientific metanarratives allows the church to take their own narrative tradition seriously. In the church, believers become grounded in the story of God as it is reenacted in worship, particularly the Eucharist (77).

Foucault: Power is Knowledge

Michael Foucault turned Francis Bacon’s maxim on its head by claiming that “power is knowledge” (85). To clarify, this is not to say that power and knowledge are identical, but that they are inextricably related (85–6). Foucault appeals to the legacy of discipline in the prison system to validate his claim. The power exercised through these social structures “produces reality” (91). There is some question as to how Foucault should be interpreted. Is he a Nietzschean who simply describes what power looks like, or is he a product of the Enlightenment intentionally disturbing the reader to motivate change? Smith believes the latter.

Foucault’s work emphasizes the radical freedom of the agent. While many Christians reject liberal theology, they have absorbed the message of personal autonomous freedom to the point of idolatry (100). In contrast to this, scripture has a place for the proper exercise of discipline and the curtailing of freedom (101). Foucault was correct to expose the power structures behind societal institutions. Christians should recognize that the power of disciplinary formation can be found in many places beyond the prison such as in marketing and consumerism (104–5). Smith calls on Christians to counter the formational power of the surrounding culture with the counter-cultural power of spiritual disciplines (106–7).

Radical Orthodoxy

In the final chapter Smith synthesizes the insights of the three postmodern thinkers and shows how his particular theological stream—Radical Orthodoxy—proceeds from and best leverages postmodern assumptions. Radical Orthodoxy disavows “pretensions to absolute knowledge or certainty” (120) and seeks to develop a thick confessional identity rooted in an “ancient-medieval-properly-postmodern model” (120). This model takes the incarnation seriously and therefore gives deep value to time and history through “an affirmation of liturgy and the arts and a commitment to place and local communities” (127). Commitment to the value of time cuts against the ahistoricism prevalent in the post-Kantian church (128) and leads to the most radical of Smith’s claims—that “[i]n order for the church to be postmodern, it should be catholic,” (132) although not necessarily Roman (143). Smith concludes with an eclectic vision for a postmodern worship service.

Critique

Smith has succeeded in his goal to create a map which orients students and practitioners to the new cultural topography created by postmodernist thought. He has taken notoriously dense subject matter and made it understandable to a professional yet nonacademic audience. Before considering further points of reflection, three critiques must be weighed.

First, consider a general observation. One of the techniques employed by the postmodern philosophers is to take a common theme and reverse it. Foucault uses this technique repeatedly in his philosophy of history. In Madness and Civilization, for example, Foucault argues that the ‘civilized’ way we treat mental illness today through medicine is far more barbaric than the way the mentally ill were treated in the past. In Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism, Smith follows the same method. Since it has been widely acknowledged that the various tenets of postmodernism are a threat to Christianity,[2] Smith shows how the opposite is true.

In his desire to show the positive side of postmodernism, I question whether Smith has minimized legitimate problems. In his discussion of Lyotard, for example, Smith emphasizes how the inability to appeal to science as an objective metanarrative is a boon for Christianity since theological Liberalism and Fundamentalism are distorted reactions to this appeal. However, the Christian narrative makes claims that are explicitly objective. Jesus calls himself “truth”[3] and Christians take that to be a universal claim, not just something meaningful within a particular language game. No singular worldview (whether postmodernism, modernism, or even the pre-modernism context of scripture) will fit the message of Christianity perfectly. A more balanced look at areas of incongruity between postmodernism and Christianity would have been helpful.

Second, there are methodological inconsistencies in the way that Smith handles the three postmodern philosophers. Smith’s interaction with Foucault was markedly different from his interaction with Derrida and Lyotard. Smith admits, “my engagement with Foucault is complicated, as is my criticism” (99). With Derrida and Lyotard, Smith explained how Christians misunderstand the philosopher’s central claims and how a deeper understanding yields generative outcomes for Christianity. With Foucault, Christians already are tempted to side with him since “much of modern Christianity has unwittingly bought into the Englightenment notion of autonomy” (103). This change of method, while necessary, complicates the reader’s ability to follow Smith’s logic. Ultimately, Smith portrays Foucault as more of a “Liberal or Englightenment” (97) figure despite his status as one of the foundational[4] figures in postmodernist philosophy. Smith could have made his discussion of Foucault more clear by stating this change of method at the beginning of the chapter.

Third, the final chapter is disconnected from the three central chapters. In chapter five, Smith argues that Radical Orthodoxy (his theological home) is the theological tradition that takes postmodernism seriously. While Radical Orthodoxy is explicitly rooted in postmodern thought, it is not the only theological stream to grapple with these issues. Process theology[5] and pentecostalism[6] have found positive ways speak the lingua franca of the postmodern world. Smith’s exclusive promotion of Radical Orthodoxy felt like a sales pitch the end of an otherwise well-argued book.

Reflection

Two key areas of thought in Smith’s book connect with my professional context and deserve deeper reflection: the emergent church movement and virtue ethics philosophy. The emergent church entered my professional context with the publication of Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian in the early 2000s. Some thoughtful parishioners read the book and encouraged me to do the same. This opened a dialogue where we discussed the future shape of the local church together—McLaren’s explicit goal.

In his books, McLaren questions the modernist presuppositions of the church and forges a new eclectic vision for a postmodern community. Smith acknowledges the role of McLaren this field, suggesting that Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? could function as a “supplement (or better, prerequisite)” (20) to McLaren’s analysis of postmodernity. Smith’s more detailed engagement with Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault provides an important philosophical foundation for McLaren’s more practical musings.

Smith’s evaluation of the emergent church and postmodernism is nuanced and counterintuitive. Although the emergent church wrestled with postmodernism, their desire to experience a “religion without religion” (119) revealed their “deeply modern sensibilities” (120). Smith argues that an affirmation of the incarnation respects time and space in a way that does not allow for such ethereal religion-without-religion fantasies (127–43).

In his discussion of the narrative nature of our faith (74–79), Smith builds on the virtue ethics tradition of Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas. MacIntyre described the human as a “story-telling animal. . . . a teller of stories that aspire to truth.”[7] Smith similarly quips, “[w]e were created for stories, not propositions; for drama, not bullet points” (140). This theme intersects my professional ministry in the field of pentecostal hermeneutics. Authors like Archer and Noel have reemphasized the old pentecostal practice of “testimony,” linking it to the narrative nature of community. This confluence of postmodernism, virtue ethics, and pentecostal hermeneutics is a fruitful area for further reflection.

In the end, Smith argues that “[a] more persistent postmodernism—one that really follows through on the implications of claims made by Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault . . . —will issue not in a thinned-out, sanctified version of religious skepticism . . . but rather should be ground for the proclamation and adoption of ‘thick’ confession identities” (117). There is an irony here. That which follows modernism calls the church back to its premodern confessional roots. Although Radical Orthodoxy is not the only postmodern path, Smith’s positive evaluation of postmodernism provides the practitioner with a reliable compass to find their way back home.

Smith, James K. A. Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006.

Notes

[1] Kenneth J. Archer discusses how theological Liberalism and Fundamentalism are opposite responses to the same modernistic worldview. See especially his chapter on “Shifting Paradigms” in A Pentecostal Hermeneutic 47–88.

[2] For an academic example of this perspective see “Jumping off the Postmodern Bandwagon” by Robert P. Menzies.

[3] John 14:6 NRSV

[4] There is an irony in recognizing a postmodern anti-foundational figure as foundational to the movement!

[5] See John B. Cobb’s “Two Types of Postmodernism.”

[6] In A Pentecostal Hermeneutic Archer argues that early pentecostalism was a “paramodern” movement which rejected the rationalistic nature of modernity even though it was born in a modern context. In Pentecostal and Postmodern Hermeneutics, Bradley Truman Noel takes Archer’s comments one step further and suggests that early pentecostalism was a proto-postmodern phenomenon.

[7] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 216.

Bibliography

Archer, Kenneth J. A Pentecostal Hermeneutic: Spirit, Scripture and Community. Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2009.

Cobb, John B. “Two Types of Postmodernism: Deconstruction and Process.” Theology Today 47.2 (July 1990) 149–58.

Foucault, Michael. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage, 1988.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. 3^rd Edition. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

McLaren, Brian. A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey. Hoboken: Jossey-Bass, 2001.

Menzies, Robert P. “Jumping off the Postmodern Bandwagon.” Pneuma 16.1 (1994) 115–20.

Noel, Bradley Truman. Pentecostalism and Postmodern Hermeneutics: Comparisons and Contemporary Impact. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2010.

Smith, James K. A. Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006.