England - Postmodernism 5

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46. I have mentioned a number of my friends in England so far--Neil Evans, Helen Fox, David Fox, Rachel Leonard, James Quirk, David Morton. Another friend was David Mossley, who was working on his doctorate in philosophy.

I have always liked philosophy. Sometimes I daydream about getting another PhD in philosophy. I would love to write some real philosophy book. I did write what I think is a mighty fine introduction to philosophy from a Christian perspective. David was a real philosopher.

It is fairly common to invoke postmodernism as some kind of trendy boogie man that threatened us twenty years ago but that thankfully faded away. I read a paper not too long ago by someone who casually labeled relativism, romanticism, and empiricism as postmodern. Thus post-modernism had come to be an overarching label for anything but absolutism. In fact relativism is modernist and romanticism was a late eighteenth/early nineteenth century phenomenon. Empiricism is certainly modernist and some would even describe Aristotle as an empiricist.

There was an intellectual vastness that was part of my England days. These were days where truth was truly the aim. My own thinking on Hebrews was of course limited by my own limitations. I did my best and I think some of my resulting work was good. I would go for five mile runs out South road to Darlington Road to Neville's Cross and back, thinking all the while about some exegetical decision I needed to make.

In this time I found discussions on postmodernism most stimulating with David Mossley. I already knew Derrida from my literary studies. I never had any sympathy or interest for him. Meaning happens. Derrida is thus a footnote, a reminder that language divorced of context is mere lines and squiggles without meaning. If you specify a language for the lines and squiggles--a general context--a sentence becomes polyvalent and ambiguous, but it takes on certain more probable meanings in a word cloud. But since words can have metaphorical meanings, the polyvalence is still practically infinite. Only in a specific context does the waveform collapse into a specific meaning.

My philosophy of language and meaning has become refined over the years. Wittgenstein has been my greatest partner on this quest. I stopped at Frege's house for a reference but he didn't make sense. J. L. Austin was helpful but was really only clarifying Wittgenstein. Paul Ricoeur gave me language to express the situation very nicely. If I ever write a real philosophy book, it will be on this subject matter.

47. It was from Mossley that I learned names like David Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty. Perhaps I had heard one or two of these but knew practically nothing of their contributions. Except for Derrida and perhaps John Rawls, I knew little of philosophy beyond the existentialists. [1]

The focus of our philosophy discussions, as I recall, was Michel Foucault, who had died ten years earlier in 1984 in France of AIDS. In my mind, Foucault is an extension of the fundamental ideas that Thomas Kuhn set out in science. However, Foucault applied these ideas to history and culture.

The problem I see with Kuhn and Foucault is of course the problem with postmodernism in general. They make it difficult to say that any way of understanding reality is truer than another. When I read Tom Wright's The New Testament and the People of God, I was quite taken with the construct of critical realism--the world is real and exists but our apprehension of it is skewed in our perspective.

This is a little different from Rorty's pragmatic realism, which is agnostic on the question of any underlying reality. Rather, some conceptions of reality "work" better than others. Sometimes I have wondered if my approach became a certain "pragmatic epistemology." By faith I accept the underlying reality. I believe there are constructions that are true and false, certainly ones that are more true and less true. But our language and paradigms are constructions, not das Ding an sich.

I didn't have those things worked out much in my head at the time. That would take teaching philosophy my first couple years at Indiana Wesleyan.

48. I found Foucault's thought fascinating. It had a ring of truth. :-) For example, his book Madness and Civilization showed how societal constructions of insanity had changed over the years. In ancient times, the insane were sometimes viewed as touched by the gods--"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad." Insanity was thus seen as a divine action. Even today we can sometimes think of insanity as a kind of genius.

Many have wondered whether some of those Jesus healed in the Gospels were mentally ill or schizophrenic. If so, demon possession would be another paradigm by which those at the time of Christ processed certain types of mental illness.

The "ship of fools" might have suggested to some in the late medieval period that the minds of the insane were wandering on a journey. They are looking for their place in the world but cannot find it. Then we went through a period where we locked up the insane, such as in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Currently, the insane are viewed as having an illness that needs to be treated.

Kuhn's notion of paradigms is very helpful here. The current paradigm is a medical one. Where my critical realism takes over is our sense now that insanity has an underlying biochemical, perhaps even brain structural cause. But this is not just another equal paradigm. It corresponds much more to physical reality and can even be treated by real chemical reactions. Some paradigms thus work better than others.

49.  Foucault also did a three volume History of Sexuality and a work called Discipline and Punish. I never plowed through them, but my cursory knowledge of them has again, I believe, brought me insight. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about the shift from execution as a matter of public shaming to its current "revenge" form.

This perspective fit insights I gained from Bruce Malina. His work The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology is a classic that helped attune me to the fact that the ancient world was an "honor-shame" world rather than an individual guilt world. The cross was not primarily about punishing Jesus. That's the way we process executions. The cross was meant to humiliate Jesus and to tell everyone who walked on that path into Jerusalem what happened to people who crossed the Romans.

In England I tried to brush up a bit on my British history. Why were "political" figures assassinated publicly outside the Tower of London? To humiliate and to warn everyone what happened when you opposed those in power.

Now Western culture has shifted toward individualism, away from group identity and collectivist personality. Execution is now focused on paying the individual for what he or she has done. Foucault saw modern executions as private revenge ceremonies. Of course the paradigm has shifted again in the current trend away from capital punishment altogether.

In all these things Foucault and Kuhn gave me a good sense of how any society operates on the basis of paradigms that they think are intrinsic to the world, "the way things are," when in fact we are largely driven and tossed by the winds, ignorant of the forces on us.

This is no bit less true in the church as in broader society. We think we are standing on the Bible when in fact we have no idea of the forces leading us to interpret certain passages certain ways. Sometimes we believe things vehemently and we don't hardly even have a passage.

50. Foucault catalogs similar shifts with regard to sexuality. He posits that sexuality as a category of human identity is a fairly recent development. I have not read his work so my examples may or may not be in his books. As an example, I understand that King James may actually have been what we would call "gay" today. Yet he was married and had children. Foucault suggests that this was the norm prior to recent times.

Foucault thus suggests that homosexual acts were seen as something certain individuals might do on the side within a marriage in earlier times. The idea first of a diagnosis in the eighteen hundreds (a medical condition) and then as a fixed orientation that someone might have in the nineteen hundreds are both changes in paradigms.

Yet without insight into one's cultural glasses, one will inevitably project your current paradigm onto a book like the Bible. Homosexual acts are mentioned in the Bible, but it is not clear that homosexuals are. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about an attempted gang rape but not at all clearly about homosexuality. There are other cultural elements here that were equally or more significant in ancient times, such as the way one treats a visitor to your city.

I used to make fun of such interpretations because they seemed to miss the "obvious." It took some time to realize that in fact certain interpretations were obvious to me because of my cultural paradigms and that, in fact, I was ignorant of the cultural influences on me and my own inability to listen to the text on its own terms.

51. I might mention the work of Mary Douglas here, Purity and Danger. This book opened the book of Leviticus to me like never before. We have a tendency to interpret the food laws of Leviticus in terms of food safety because it makes sense to us in our paradigms. Douglas unfolds possible ways of processing purity and such things in more likely cultural categories.

I have come to call this aspect of the Levitical paradigm, "kind" theology. The ancient Israelite priestly worldview processed the world in terms of certain "kinds" of things. Certain characteristics went in the bird box. Others went in the sea creatures box. Surrounding peoples ate pig, but the Israelites were shepherds. To eat pig was thus to be a traitor to your people and to your God, Yahweh. While I will not say these interpretations are certain, they fit much better in the Ancient Near East than our weak attempts to make these laws fit within our modern paradigms of hygiene.

This period opened up a dimension to the biblical texts to me that I liken to seeing a third dimension to Scripture that I had never seen before in church. It made understanding the Scriptures a profound thing. I do not expect this third dimension from preaching. A sermon is good to me if it helps people on their journey with God through life.

[1] It is noteworthy that the Principal of St. John's prior to David Day was Tony Thiselton. Through knowledge of him and his work I was introduced to Gadamer (cf. The Two Horizons).

Monday Thoughts 3: Faces Continued

Very similar to the ideas of Michel Foucault are those of Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) that we encounted back in chapter 8. Kuhn, you will remember, suggested that what we perceive to be the progress of science is really a somewhat random cycle of theory replacing theory. All scientific paradigms leave some data unaccounted for. "Normal science" does its best to accommodate such data within the prevailing paradigm.

But eventually someone suggests a new paradigm. Normal science resists, often successfully for some time because it holds the power over what is allowed to be considered truth. But if the new paradigm can gain traction, can gain power, eventually those with the older paradigm may die off. Suddenly a new "truth" emerges that becomes the new normal science, and the cycle continues.

The parallels with Foucault are straightforward. In both cases, knowledge takes place within a certain paradigm, a way of structuring knowledge. But in both cases as well, that structure is not fixed or absolute. It is rather a function of power, where those who have power are able to set the terms for what is allowed to be considered as plausible or true.

Both cases also seem somewhat extreme, although they both get at certain truths that needed to be heard. We will try to appropriate their ideas within a Christian framework at the end of the chapter.

Perhaps the best known face of postmodernism of all is that of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). If Foucault doubted the way we structure knowledge and Kuhn doubted the objectivity of science, Derrida doubted the meaning of words. He is the father of deconstruction, the idea that words do not have stable meanings. Derrida believed that any attempt to "construct" understanding of words--or the world--inevitably self-destructs in the process.

If Nietzsche believed that "there are no facts, only interpretations," Derrida hardly believed that there were even interpretations. The meaning of a word is simply other words, whose meaning simply defers to yet other words. One never arrives at any definite content, only "traces" of meaning to be found in the difference between the signs, the squigglies we call words. As part of his flamboyant personality, Derrida combined these two words--"defer" and "differ" to make his own French word: différance.

Like Nietzsche, Derrida did not restrict this problem to written texts. To him, the entire world was a text, and its meaning was just as uncertain as the meaning of written texts were to him. He thus is known for saying that "There is nothing outside the text."

It is of course ironic that Derrida wrote texts and might argue with others over their meaning. Derrida does a good job of reminding us that almost any text can be misunderstood. And we saw already in chapter 4 that the meaning of words can be very stable indeed.

Nevertheless, people at least think they understand each other far more than Derrida would have us believe. He is an important footnote to meaning, and his thoughts deserve to be taken seriously. But we can only take them seriously if we disagree somewhat with them. Only if we believe that texts can be understood to some degree can we ever take the thoughts of others seriously.

The preceding discussion leads us finally to the face of Richard Rorty (1931-2007), whom we should identify with pragmatic realism. Rorty has all the doubt of all the other postmodern philosophers we have mentioned. Yet he recognized that despite our doubts about the world outside our heads, it "works" to live as if that world is real.

For an extreme postmodern, the only real test for truth is the pragmatic test we mentioned back in chapter 3. It "works" to say that some things are true about the world and other things are not. Following Rorty's lead, we might use Derrida's words--recognizing the contradiction since we are using words--and yet chalk it up to the fact that such dialog "works." We would not thereby be saying anything about their actual "truth" or meaning, only that our acts work for us.

However, surely as Christians we hope for something more certain than this scenario, especially since we are people of faith. For individuals like James K. A. Smith (1970-) and Nicholas Wolterstorff (1932-), the situation is perfect for a radical orthodoxy. Christians believe in what they believe without a rational basis to do so. For them postmodernism makes room for Christianity at a table from which they were barred under modernism.

Another more rational approach is that of critical realism. Critical realists recognize that our perspective on reality is clouded by our rational limitations. But by faith they believe that reality exists and that God in some way guarantees that our knowledge of that reality "works" in a way that is far more fixed than Rorty might acknowledge. Like Kant, we believe that the world exists and that we can only know it as it appears to us. But unlike Kant, we are far more aware of the limitations of how it appears to us.

Hermeneutics Review for Final

Here is some review material for the final exam of my advanced hermeneutics class at IWU:

1. "autonomy of the text"
Paul Ricoeur. He suggests that once a discourse has been fixed in writing, the author loses control over its meaning. Vanhoozer disagrees because he views texts as "communicative acts." The text thus bears the intended (illocutionary) force of the author. Schenck is not as pessimistic about recovering the intended meaning of an author as Ricoeur, but he accepts the reality of the text's detachment from intended meaning far more than Vanhoozer.

2. "surplus of meaning"
Ricoeur. Because texts don't have their author's intent to "fix" their meaning, they are susceptible to multiple interpretations. Vanhoozer agrees that there are "gaps" (see next entry) that can make the meaning of texts ambiguous, but argues that the goal in filling those gaps should be to recover the author's intended communicative act. Schenck agrees with Ricoeur that texts have a surplus of meaning and with Vanhoozer that one such meaning is the intended meaning of the author.

3. "gaps of indeterminacy"
Wolfgang Iser. All texts make assumptions, assumptions that are gaps of meaning that the reader must fill in. Iser was what Vanhoozer calls a "conservative" reader-response critic, because his goal in reading was to fill in the gaps in terms of the intended meaning. Vanhoozer accepts the necessity of this task. Schenck agrees that these gaps are the source of Ricoeur's "surplus of meaning." He thinks that filling the gaps with our best guess at the intended meaning is legitimate, although that there are other legitimate "fillings" in other contexts.

4. meaning as a function of "interpretive communities"
Stanley Fish. Fish does not believe that texts in themselves have any stable meaning. Rather, the meaning of a text is a function of the interpretive community reading that text. Vanhoozer disagrees and would consider Fish a radical reader-response critic. If a text only mirrored the beliefs and values of the community reading, then a person/community could never come away from a text changed from when they came to it. But this often happens. Vanhoozer believes that a text has a single legitimate meaning. Schenck agrees with Vanhoozer that it is possible to be changed by texts and is not as "pessimistic" as Fish. Nevertheless, the interpretive communities to which we belong often has a far greater impact on how we read texts than anything else, including the intended meaning.

5. ideological criticism
Ideological criticism is the name we give to approaches to the text that embrace the ideas of specific ideological communities such as feminist critics, liberation critics, African-American critics, etc... Vanhoozer would disagree with these approaches just as he disagrees with Fish. Schenck recognizes the possibility of such approaches in such contexts. He would merely note that such readings stand in a nebulous relationship to Christian readings of the text.

6. "fusion of horizons"
Hans Georg Gadamer. The two horizons are the horizon of the text and the horizon of the reader. On the one hand, the author of a text does not play any role in interpretation distinct from the text itself. The reader, on the other hand, does not come to the text as a neutral or objective observer or as an all-knowing "subject." A reader comes to a text with pre-understandings, with the effect of traditions in his or her thinking. Text and reader meet and their horizons fuse. The reader reads the text and, in a sense, the text reads the reader. Both are changed in the process.

Vanhoozer critiques Gadamer on both horizons. The text, V believes, is the communicative act of an author and thus bears within it the intended meaning of an author. Meanwhile, V does not believe we are simply doomed to read texts with traditional glasses but believes we can more or less determine the intended meaning of a text.

Schenck believes we can at least try to supercede traditional pre-understandings and to grasp the intended meaning of authors. It is not always necessary to do so--sometimes traditional readings are more important. He is not as pessimistic as Gadamer about intended meanings.

7. subject-object distinction
René Descartes. Traditionally Descartes is blamed for setting up the modern era with a sharp distinction between the "I" as an all-knowing and objective knower who looks out at the world as object. Vanhoozer rejects the possibility for anyone to approach the world neutrally without some pre-understanding, something that can be a plus rather than a minus if it is the right pre-understanding. Schenck has less aversion to the language of subject and object, although he agrees that none of us have a God's eye, neutral, or objective apprehension of the world or truth.

8. "properly basic"
Alvin Plantinga. As one of the key figures in Reformed epistemology, Plantinga suggests that a number of beliefs are "properly basic" and do not need to be justified. These include things like the existence of the world outside ourselves, the existence of other minds, and for Plantinga it includes the existence of God, which he does not believe needs to be defended but inherently is a reasonable thing to assume. Vanhoozer agrees and adds to the list meaning in texts as properly basic. Schenck believes that such things are reasonable to believe in by faith, although he does not consider them immune to examination.

9. Reformed epistemology
Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff. Reformed epistemology is based on the idea that certain beliefs are "properly basic" and do not need to be argued for or defended. This is particularly true of Christian perspectives, which (elect) Christians should recognize to be true intuitively. Vanhoozer agrees. Schenck has a hunch that Arminian theology will emphasize the need for personal response before some intuitions will come, and that in the end God is more concerned to move our hearts than our heads.

10. critical realism
[Ben Meyer, not on the test] Critical realism holds by faith that reality exists outside ourselves, but that our apprehension of that reality is never fully objective or neutral. We see that reality from where we stand looking. Vanhoozer is okay with this, although I suspect he prefers the term regulative realism (see next). Schenck is also okay with this, although he suspects that the typical "critical realist" is more optimistic than he is about the degree of literal correspondance between our perspective and reality.

11. regulative realism
[not sure] Vanhoozer likes the idea that we guide our apprehension of reality by assuming the truth of "properly basic" ideas about reality. Schenck prefers a view of reality that is critical realist by faith, pragmatic realist (see next) by practice.

12. pragmatic realism
Richard Rorty. Rorty is a non-realist. He does not affirm the existence of any reality for us to know. However, he believes that certain assumptions about reality work, help us to function in the world. The world is thus "real" for pragmatic purposes. Vanhoozer thus classifies him as a "user" and "unbeliever." Certainly V disagrees with him. Schenck things that Rorty gives us the best "rational" perspective on us as knowers of reality, but that as believers we can make affirmations about reality by faith as well.

13. "There are no facts, only interpretations."
Friedrich Nietzsche, late 1800's. As a prophet of many things, Nietzsche recognized where Immanuel Kant's particular version of the subject-object distinction might lead. Kant believed that we could not know things-in-themselves, the world as it is outside of our apprehension of it. We could only know the world as it appeared to us. He reached this point when he concluded that the content of our knowledge comes from our senses, but that the organization of that content into meaning was a function of our minds.

In the case of Kant, he believed that the truthfulness of God guaranteed that the categories of our mind did in fact correspond to truth about the world (not dissimilar to the earlier perspectives of Descartes and Locke in their own ways). Nietzsche of course did not believe in God, so he was left with the conclusion that all we know are the interpretations of our minds, not facts about the world.

Vanhoozer sees Nietzsche as the consummate "unbeliever," whose failure to believe in God is reflected in his failure to believe in interpretive facts. Schenck once again sees faith as essential to any beliefs about the world outside ourselves.

14. "There is nothing outside the text."
Jacques Derrida. Derrida basically is packaging Nietzsche's claim on his own terms. When he says there is nothing outside the text, he is saying something very similar. All reality is something like a text we are reading. But there is nothing outside the text, no reality apart from words. And we shouldn't think that Derrida thinks this is a text with a certain meaning. Derrida is thus one step further than Fish, who at least sees meaning in interpretive communities.

Vanhoozer disagrees and considers Derrida the consummate "undoer" who is also an "unbeliever." Our belief in God includes our belief in things beyond ourselves and beyond texts. Schenck agrees with Vanhoozer by faith.

15. Deconstruction
Derrida and a/friends. Deconstruction is the idea that there are no stable meanings in texts. As soon as one tries to "contruct" meaning that meaning unravels. All texts, no matter how apparently clear in meaning, can be misunderstood and taken differently. Vanhoozer disagrees. Communication happens all the time and is a properly basic concept. Schenck agrees with Vanhoozer, although he also accepts Derrida's very important footnote that even the most obvious texts can be taken differently than intended.

16. "logocentrism"
Derrida. This is the word Derrida coined for the idea that "Platonic" truths underwrite the meaning of words. Derrida of course disagrees. Truth is not behind words--more words are. There is nothing outside the text. Vanhoozer of course disagrees and labels Derrida an unbeliever, an undoer of meaning and truth. Schenck believes that God knows absolute truth and that He underwrites truth. However, Schenck believes there is a significant divide between our language and that truth. Human words do not correspond in any direct or straightforward way to God's truths.

17. différance
Derrida. He coined this word by combining the French words différence with deferance. Words do not point to meanings for Derrida, they "defer" to other words. We find meaning in the space or "difference" between different words which are only signifiers, never signifieds. Vanhoozer disagrees for all the same reasons. Schenck also believes there is more to words than just signifiers.

18. signs as combinations of signifiers and signifieds
Ferdinand de Saussure. In the background of Derrida's philosophy is Saussure's idea that a "sign" such as a word consists of two parts--a signifier, which is an arbitrary sound or image, and a signified, which is that to which the signifier refers. Derrida of course believed that we can never get beyond arbitrary signifiers to stable signifieds. Vanhoozer follows Ricoeur (see next) in believing that any workable concept of language must move beyond the level of the word to the level of the sentence. Schenck agrees, although he recognizes the basic usefulness of Saussure's approach in many cases, as well as its potential to "derail" intended meaning. However, Saussure's approach is seriously inadequate without some sense of Wittgenstein's language games.

19. the sentence as a higher order of meaning
Ricoeur. Ricoeur argued against Derrida chiefly by arguing that a sentence constitutes a higher order of meaning that is not simply the addition of individual words together. Aristotle of course argued that a proposition must have both a subject and a predicate. Vanhoozer agrees, as does Schenck with the further comment in the preceding note.

20. Langue and parole
de Saussure. Saussure argued that langue or language constituted a system of interrelated signs. Parole, on the other hand, refers to the specific use a speaker/writer puts the words of that langue to. As far as I can tell, Vanhoozer does not object to this distinction, nor do I.

21. Structuralism
[Claude Levi-Strauss, not on test] Structuralism was a passing phase of text-centered approaches to meaning that focused primarily on langue, language as a system or structure of binary oppositions. It tended to look for the universal aspects of a specific story or text's meaning rather than the specific meaning of a specific text or some intended meaning. Vanhoozer of course is much more interested in parole, the specific use to which an author puts language, rather than some abstract system to which all individual speech must conform. I similarly find some of the patterns of structuralism useful but only as one tool in a much broader toolbox.

22. Narrative Criticism
Narrative criticism was a much more useful application of the "deep structure" principals of structuralism to narratives. Rather than the rather complex structuralist model, narrative critics used categories like characters, events, settings, point of view, implied author, implied reader, story time versus discourse time, etc. which are more readily understandable. Vanhoozer would disagree with the early narrative critics of the 80's who tried to bracket historical and background knowledge as much as possible, making this method a text-centered approach to meaning. Schenck finds its tools useful for more than one approach to the meaning of narratives.

23. "world of the text"
Ricoeur. Since Ricoeur does not aim at the intended meaning of an author, some meaning "behind the text," he is not interested in the text as a reference to the real world. He believes that the "reference" of a text is a world that the text creates, a world within the text. Vanhoozer of course believes that this world does indeed have something to do with the world behind the text, principly the intended force of the text by an author. Schenck can see texts as extra-referential as well, but finds Ricoeur's concept of the world of the text a useful one when one is trying to methodically aim at the intended meaning of a text.

24. "intentional fallacy"
Wimsatt and Beardsley. In a famous article of the late 40's, these individuals argued that it was impossible and undesirable to think of the meaning of a text in terms of an author's intention. We do not have access, after all, to the mind of an author. They inaugurated what came to be known in literary circles as "new criticism." Vanhoozer recognizes the validity of some of their arguments, but follows the lead of Hirsch and Thiselton to develop a sense of authorial intent that is not fallacious. Schenck also agrees that W and B overstated their case.

25. New Criticism
An era of interpretation in literary criticism in which texts are read without concern for authorial intent. See above for Vanhoozer and Schenck.

26. "thinking the author's thoughts after him"
Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. Around 1800, these scholars saw "getting into an author's head" as the proper goal of interpretion. A person should not only try to think the author's thoughts, but even think the author's thoughts better than he or she did, recognizing inconsistencies that the author was not able to recognize. Vanhoozer agrees with Wimsatt and Beardsley that this approach tries to do more than is possible. We simply do not have access to an author's psychology. We can only only know an author's intent on the basis of what has made it to a text. I agree, although feel free to speculate :-)

27. text as "object of consciousness"
E. D. Hirsch. Hirsch makes his way around the problems of Schleiermacher and Dilthey's approach by speaking of the "object" of an author's consciousness. This object as it were leaves the mother ship of the author and lodges in a text, where a reader is able to hold that object in common with the author. Vanhoozer largely agrees, although he is uncomfortable with the "subject-object" language Hirsch uses.

28. meaning as "performative act"
Kevin Vanhoozer. V prefers to think of the meaning of texts as a matter of an author's performative act, drawing on the speech-act theory of Austin and Searle (see below). Schenck accepts the validity of this model as it relates to the intended meaning of authors. In practice, however, Wittgenstein's more basic language game model proves a much more flexible explanation of how meaning actually works in practice.

29. "language games" in "forms of life"
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Words do not have meanings in themselves. The meaning of a word is a function of its use in a particular "language game" in a particular "form of life." We thus do not know what the word "fire" means unless we know what language game is being played--whether that of jobs, firing squads, pop songs, or something burning. Vanhoozer agrees with some of this, but clearly prefers to go on to Austin and Searle. Schenck things Wittgenstein's approach is more all-encompassing.

30. speech-act theory
Originated by J. L. Austin and further systematized by John Searle. Speech act theory recognizes that words do not only inform, but they "do" things. When a couple says "I do" at a wedding altar, they are not only informing each other of their willingness to marry--they indeed marry each other with the words. The words do something beyond informing. Vanhoozer strongly agrees and builds his hermeneutic on these principles. Schenck agrees that words can work this way.

31. locutionary content
Austin and Searle. The part of speech that is fairly obvious is the (propositional) content, the sense of the words. Vanhoozer agrees. Schenck says fine.

32. illocutionary force
Austin and Searle. The key to authorial intent for Vanhoozer is the illocutionary force of the words. This is what the author intended to do with the words--promise, command, assert, etc... Schenck says fine.

33. Vanhoozer's definition of infallibility and inerrancy
Using the concept above, Vanhoozer seems to process the above terms in the following way. To say the Bible is infallible is to say that it always does what it is intended by God to do--its illocutionary force is always accomplished. To say the Bible is inerrant is to say that when the illocutionary force of a Scripture is to make an assertion, the locutionary content of that assertion is always true.

34. perlocutionary force
Austin and Searle. If the locutionary dimension of a speech act is the sense of the words and the illocutionary force is what the words are intended to do, the perlocutionary force of a speech act is its effect. Authors of course usually intend for their words to have a certain effect on their audiences. Of course they do not always have that effect. Vanhoozer agrees. He does not consider the intended perlocutionary force of a speech act to be part of the meaning, but rather of the significance of the utterance. Schenck says fine.

35. meaning and significance
E. D. Hirsch. Hirsch makes a helpful distinction between the meaning of a word and its significance. An utterance will only have one legitimate meaning, the intended one, but it may have countless significances. Different readers thus change the significance of an utterance, but not its meaning. Vanhoozer agrees. Schenck thinks this distinction is very helpful, but ultimately believes there are potentially far more than a single meaning that may be found in the same words as well, depending on the "language game" a reader plays with them.

36. Vanhoozer on the role of the Spirit
Vanhoozer sees the role of the Spirit as one of illuminating a reader's mind as regards the meaning of a text, its intended locutionary content and illocutionary force. Yet the Spirit may bring about countless different significances to the text, perlocutionary forces, depending on the reader, audience, and situation. Schenck believes that the Holy Spirit certainly can do these things. But the NT and church history indicates that the Holy Spirit also plays with the potential meanings of biblical words as well.

37. typology versus allegory
An important distinction for modernist evangelical scholarship of the late twentieth century was to distinguish allegory from typology as interpretive methods. In particular, typology is said to build figural interpretations off of literal ones, while allegory is said not to be concerned about the literal meaning. Vanhoozer acknowledges that there are allegories in the biblical text, but sees these as explicit ones that recognize the literal meaning. He would distinguish sharply between allegory and allegorizing, where the latter is said to be an orientation around meanings that disregard the literal meaning or original intent of the words.

Schenck does not think the NT knows or cares about this distinction, which is more modern than ancient. Even the distinction between so called Antiochene and Alexandrian exegesis is overplayed as modern controversies have over-read the distinctions of another day.

38. Vanhoozer on literal versus literalistic
The literal meaning for Vanhoozer is the intended meaning in his locutionary and illocutionary force. A literalistic reading is one that insists on taking a text literally even when that is not the author's intent. Schenck says fair enough.

39. definitions of metaphor
For Aristotle, a metaphor was little more than the substitution of one thing for another. For Ricoeur, however, a metaphor involves the creation of new meaning by the juxtapositioning of two unlike things. Schenck agrees and thinks that Vanhoozer is okay with this as well.

There you have it. The second half of our advanced hermeneutics class at IWU in a nutshell.

Friday Review: Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text? 1

Today (d.v.) we begin a three part review of Kevin Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text? My intention :-) is to review chapters 2 and 5 on the author today, chapters 3 and 6 on the text next Friday, and then finish two weeks from today with chapters 4 and 7 on the reader
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Background
Vanhoozer's book was, in my opinion, a kind of watershed moment for a movement in biblical studies (1998), a movement I am calling the "speech-act" approach to the biblical text. It not only defends the legitimacy of talking about authorial intent in texts, but argues that this is the only proper meaning of a text--what its author was "doing" with that text.

Given my current state of knowledge, I consider Anthony Thiselton to be the "Luther" of biblical speech-act theory (Two Horizons), and Vanhoozer I would consider its Melanchthon. We now see the concept everywhere in a particular stream of hermeneutical writing, not least in Jeannine Brown's very well written book that came out this year, Scripture as Communication (an excellent choice for a hermeneutical textbook).

Vanhoozer's book is laid out in two parts. After the introductory chapter, the next three chapters deal with postmodern challenges to authorial intent (chap 2), stable meanings in texts (chap 3), and the reader as interpreter rather than creator of meaning (chap 4). In the second half of the book, he then constructs a theory of textual meaning that claims that we can speak of authorial intent coherently (chap 5), that it exists in texts (chap 6), and that the reader is responsible for trying to determine it (chap 7).

He prefers to relate the domains of author, text, and reader to the three primary domains of philosophy. Authorial intent is the reality behind the text (ontology). We can know it in the text (epistemology). And the reader is obligated to try to determine it (ethics). In today's review, we will look at Vanhoozer's treatment of authorial intent.

Chapter 2: "Undoing the Author: Authority and Intentionality"
I wondered as I read this chapter if it reflected the beginning of Vanhoozer's writing process. It seemed to me to have a tone that does not show up as much later in the book. By this I refer to a rather straightforward equation he seems to make between deconstructive readings and atheism, where the death of the author is coupled with the death of God.

This is such a dangerously simplistic connection that I wondered if he wrote it before he had really dug into the details of his investigation. I certainly would not want to claim, for example, that those who do not believe in authorial intent must thereby surely be atheists. Vanhoozer does not say this, but it is the tone I picked up on here and there in this chapter.

a. Undoing the Author's Authority
Vanhoozer speaks of three types of "hermeneutical non-realists" who have undone the author's authority: undoers, users, and unbelievers. By hermeneutical non-realists he means that these individuals do not believe in the reality of meaning, that meaning truly exists.

1). He spends most of his time in this section targeting the "undoers," by which he refers to deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida. By the end of the chapter, Vanhoozer has explained some of Derrida's signature concepts:

Logocentrism: the idea that there is some stable point outside of language that guarantees meaning, something to which language points, a realm of truths.

"There is nothing outside the text": Words are arbitrary signs connected to signifieds (meanings) that, for Derrida, do not point to anything but more signs. "Meaning" is like a dog chasing its tail or someone who sits and looks up the definition of a word only to find more words to look up. You never arrive at any substance, any "presence" of meaning but only more arbitrary signs.

2). Vanhoozer spends less time with the "users" or pragmatists. These are individuals like Richard Rorty, who believes "knowledge" is a matter of coping with reality rather than truth. Vanhoozer places Stanley Fish in this same domain. An author does not have the authority to tell his or her readers how to read the text. Interpretive communities inevitably decide how they choose to read a text.

I have not fully explored the possibility that Vanhoozer was on the road to contradiction when he first wrote this part of the chapter. The historical roots of speech-act theory go back to Wittgenstein, where Wittgenstein posits the meaning of words being a matter of their function in language games. Indeed, I have not found a negative word toward Wittgenstein in the book (except that Austin and Searle are refinements of his approach to language).

Herein you will find the seeds of my central disagreement with the biblical speech-act movement. It is an impressive meta-edifice to justify one legitimate use of words, indeed, one of the most important ones. But it fails in its attempt to be an overarching theory of meaning because 1) it does not practice what it preaches and 2) the Bible itself does not practice what this theory preaches. Ironically, Vanhoozer's book would have provided Derrida with an easy target for deconstruction.

While I agree with Vanhoozer far more than Derrida, he and his compatriots have only made plausible arguments that 1) there is a stable authorial intent for texts and 2) it is a significant interest in interpretation. They have not succeeded at showing that there are not other meanings for the biblical texts that may in fact be more Christian than the original intent.

3). The third category Vanhoozer styles the "unbelievers," by which he has in mind not only key players he has already mentioned--Derrida and Rorty--but also Friedrich Nietzsche. As I've mentioned, I find this framing distracting. He is correct, of course, that Nietzsche is a forerunner of the deconstructionists. "There are no facts; only interpretations." And certainly Nietzsche did connect the death of God to the death of some sort of God's eye view.

It does not go the other way, however. To argue that we do not have a God's eye view does not deny that God exists and that He has a God's eye view.

At times I have not found Vanhoozer's book well put together on the level of subheading. Don't get me wrong. It takes a lot of mental energy and skill to present such diverse and complicated material in an organized fashion. The headings within each chapter generally make sense. But I've found it hard to discern the logic of the subheadings and sub-subheadings at times. So you can imagine that my students have! The book seems to wander on unnecessarily at times.

2. Undoing the Author's Intention
In this section Vanhoozer presents the thought of E. D. Hirsch as well as what some have called the "intentional fallacy." My students found the section on Hirsch confusing, because Vanhoozer starts with the impression that he agrees with Hirsch and will build on Hirsch. But by the end of this section, it appears that Vanhoozer does not agree with Hirsch. I find myself wondering if V's position toward Hirsch changed a little in the process of writing?

Hirsch (following Husserl) makes a distinction between an act of consciousness and an object of consciousness when authoring a text. By authorial intention, Hirsch refers to the object of consciousness or the message the author was conscious of as s/he wrote the text. It is this shared object in the text that allows a reader to understand the meaning of a text despite his or her differing context from the author.

Reading between the lines, Vanhoozer and others like Thiselton no doubt strongly resist this language of subject-object. No doubt they prefer the language of Gadamer that talks of a fusing of horizons, with less language of Cartesian dualism that sharply divides me as subject from that which is outside of me as object of knowledge.

A second distinction Hirsch makes is between meaning and significance. Meaning is a property of a text for Hirsch. Significance, on the other hand, is the relationship of the meaning to something else, such as a reader. A text, in Hirsch's view, has a single meaning, but it may have as many significances as the individuals relating to that single meaning.

It is only later in the book (frustratingly) that Vanhoozer makes the difference between Hirsch and himself clear. Intention is not a matter of the consciousness of an author, but the concrete act that is embodied by a text created by an author.

The idea of an "intentional fallacy" was raised by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in a famous article in 1946. These two individuals argued that all we had before us was the text an author created, not the author him or herself. They thus believed it was a fallacy to speak of the author's intention. It confuses psychology with the semantics of a text.

Other critiques of Hirsch (who is more contemporary with us than with Wimsatt and Beardsley) include the fact that an author is not always conscious of the forces at work in his or her creation of a text (unconscious forces). Nor is any author objective toward his or her creation.

c. What about the Bible?
At the end of the chapter, Vanhoozer gives us a small taste of how these lines of undoing might impact our approach to the Bible. For example, if a text has no meaning, the Bible can hardly be authoritative. Further, because Christ is the Word, Vanhoozer argues that Christianity is "logocentric" in a way that falls apart if Derrida is right. And, to modify Dostoevsky, V suggests that "if there is no author, then everthing is permitted."

Chapter 5: "Resurrecting the Author: Meaning as Communicative Action"
a. In this chapter, Vanhoozer will try to reconstruct a sense of authorial meaning. We found the beginning of this second half of the book a little disingenuous. Vanhoozer implies that he is going to proceed along the lines of a Reformed epistemology that unapologetically proceeds from Christian premises. For V, this clearly includes certain premises about God's "design plan" for communication, the nature of Trinitarian relationships, and meaning in texts as "properly basic" (showing the influence of Plantinga).

To say that something is "properly basic" means that it does not need to be defended because it is such a foundational item that sane people don't question it. We might spend a few moments questioning whether the world outside us exists or if I am a brain in a vat. But in real life we simply assume the existence of the world around us.

Vanhoozer suggests that meaning in texts is like that. To a large degree, I agree. Communication works... a lot of the time, even in text. To be sure, I've had people seriously misinterpret my comments. But it does seem to me reasonable enough to believe in communication, despite Derrida's important footnote.

Where my students and I found the beginning of V's second half a bit self-contradictory was that he had been reasoning and talking about meaning for almost 200 pages! So now he's just going to impose a structure on reality by faith? That's not exactly what he goes on to do either. He goes on to discuss meaning philosophically throughout the second half, only occasionally bringing in his theological deus ex machina. Jeannine Brown's book seems more consistent in this regard, starting and proceeding with an assumed position, informing of it rather than arguing for it.

b. So a good deal of this chapter addresses deconstruction from a theoretical perspective. We have Ricoeur's sound judgment that a "sentence" represents a higher order of meaning than a word. You cannot reduce the meaning of a sentence to some addition of the words within it. The meaning of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I agree and thus accept Ricoeur's criticism of Derrida on this point.

But Vanhoozer's hero par excellence is undoubtedly John Searl, who built on the speech-act theory of J. L. Austin. Language is far more than just the logical, "propositional," or "locutionary" part of it, the content of what is said. Language is a kind of action. When we speak, we do things with our words. The words, "I do" at a wedding are not simply communication--they enact a marriage (well, the whole license signing thing in the back room afterwards aside ;-). I might add that William P. Alston has apparently tried to extend Searle's classification of text acts even further in his 2000 book, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning.

More than one movie makes a joke based on this fact (Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Incredibles). It has a conversational "I do" coincide in one way or another with a wedding "I do"--thus the humor.

While Vanhoozer likes a good deal about Ricoeur, he uses speech-act theory to critique Ricoeur's sense that a text is divorced from the event of its creation. The creation of a text for Vanhoozer is not an event, but an action, and we cannot understand the text unless we identify what action an author was doing with these words (asserting, questioning, commanding, promising, etc...).

Vanhoozer also draws on the work of Jürgen Habermas, who tries to avoid Descartes' subject-object dichotomy (unlike Hirsch). Habermas speaks of structures of inter-subjectivity that are implicit in communication. He believes in a universal language game that all competent speakers inevitably play. This universal game makes communication possible, despite our individual subjectivity. Language is thus a social activity rather than one aiming at representing the world. Vanhoozer's exception to Habermas has mainly to an overemphasis on the "propositional" aspect of communication.

Finally, this chapter draws on other scholars like P. D. Juhl, Steven Knapp, and Walter Benn Michaels. The last two suggest that the idea of "intentionless meaning" is incoherent, something we could only talk about in theory--not in practice. Juhl suggests that we can only speak of meaning in terms of whole texts, which automatically leads to the question of a text's purpose, which involves assumptions about an author's intentions.

c. The "Christian assumption" part of Vahoozer's work begins to peek out in this chapter. He speaks, for example, of a "design-plan" for language. Language, like my mind, was designed by God to be used in certain ways. "The design plan of language is to serve as the medium of covenantal relations with God, with others, with the world" (206).

From my perspective, this is a fine "working theology." However, it would be Christianly irresponsible simply to assume this point without further examination. For example, James Smith raises the question of the Fall's affect on the human mind (The Fall of Interpretation). Similarly, we must at least consider alternative conceptions of the relationship between rationality and faith (Kierkegaard, Pascal). This design plan for language seems quite possible to me--in a fallen world it is fantastically messed up.

In one part of this chapter, V considers potential similarities between meaning in text and God's presence in the Eucharist. Is there a real presence in the text? I found this section distracting. On what basis might one defend such perspectives? At best they seem illustrations of a position one has determined on some other basis. Maybe an interesting aside for a long footnote?

d. So after much circling and driving around, we finally arrive at Vanhoozer's definition of a text: "A text is a complex communicative act with matter (propositional content), energy (illocutionary force), and purpose (perlocutionary effect)" (228), which is "fixed by writing" (225).

"Every text is the result of an enacted intention." "Every text is an embodied intention" (253).

The perlocutionary effect may be intended by an author, but Vanhoozer, following Habermas and Searle, does not consider it normally to be a part of the meaning of the text. It rather has to do with the intended significance of the text for its immediate audience.

Vanhoozer acknowledges some of the complications of authorial intention. By avoiding "perlocutions" as part of the meaning of a text, V acknowledges that the effects a text has are not always what an author intended. V also acknowledges potential ambiguity about what an author intended.

The final section of the chapter potentially deconstructs it. Here V talks about the possibility that a "fuller sense," a sensus plenior might "supervene" on the level of the canon. V has invoked the idea of supervening meaning before. It was when he affirmed Ricoeur's claim that a sentence is a higher level of meaning than a word. Now V suggests that the canon might have a higher level of meaning that is greater than any of the individual biblical texts, a meaning that God intended the canonical text to have. "The divine intention does not contravene the intention of the human author but rather supervenes on it."
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What are we to make of Vanhoozer's material on the author?

Well, for the most part, I agree with him. Communication happens. The words we say and write usually have intended meanings. We do things with words.

As I've said elsewhere, Derrida is an important footnote to meaning. Texts are easily interpreted differently than their authors intended. And Fish's footnote is significant too--while I don't believe the quest for the intended meaning of a text is unavailable (contra Ricoeur as well), interpretive communities usually dominate interpretation.

But intended meanings exist. The contrary suggestion deconstructs on life.

I am less concerned about restricting or cataloging meanings, although V and others have already done the heavy lifting. It really does not make sense to speak of the meaning of a text either in terms of something an author psychologically intended that didn't make it into the text or in terms of some intended effect of the text. The intended meaning of a text is an embodied meaning "in" the text.

Where I would differ with V is in the extent to which he sees this as a property of the text. Authorial intention as embodied in the code of a text is a theoretically stable meaning. It is probably the most "natural" reading of a text in most instances. But there are other stable meanings in relation to texts, such as the meanings that particular communities find in texts. An individual can read a text in a relatively stable way for that individual. We will wait for the chapters on the reader to see if V can give us a compelling reason to restrict a text's meaning to the originally intended one.

In particular, the idea of a canonical meaning potentially decontructs V's whole enterprise. The diversity of the canon makes it susceptible to countless systematizations of meaning, as the plethora of Protestant denominations shows.

Friday Review: Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?

In preparation for James Smith's visit to campus, a number of faculty and student reading groups read through his little book, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? The book has five chapters: 1) an introduction to postmodernism, 2) a chapter on Jacques Derrida, 3) a chapter on Jean-François Lyotard, 4) a chapter on Michel Foucault, and 5) a concluding chapter making his pitch for radical orthodoxy.

1. Each chapter begins with a long summary of some movie. For example, the first chapter, "Is the Devil from Paris?," begins with Matrix. Neo is emerging from one construction of reality to another, from modernity to postmodernity (17). Not really the best analogy. Postmodernism would be for Neo to recognize that he lives in a matrix from which he can never emerge.

And herein is probably my central critique, not just of Smith's book, but of postmodernism itself. We can push back on modernist certainty to be sure, but the dualistic "myth" of subject over and against object has served truth very well these few hundred years. Postmodernism is a footnote on this distinction. It is a big footnote, but life doesn't work if we treat the footnote as the central thing and the "world as other" as the footnote.

Postmodernism is the eternal reminder that almost every meaning machine breaks down at some point. But it would be stupid just to sit on the machine while it was still actually working. The Enlightenment enterprise has worked very well, even when it has worked to make nuclear bombs. It has worked in the sense that we have learned to manipulate our reality to where we can go to the moon or speak to people across the globe while walking in the park using a small hand held device.

I'm getting off track. In the introduction Smith introduces the three thinkers he will be discussing and suggests that we need to recover some of the pre-modern that we have lost. The final goal of the book is to "issue in a thickly confessional church that draws on the very particular (yet catholic) and ancient practices of the church's worship and discipleship"--a radical orthodoxy (25).

2. The second chapter deals with Derrida, focusing on his famous statement that "there is nothing outside the text." Smith cleverly suggests that we as Christians can consider that text to be Scripture, giving all new meaning to the phrase "sola scriptura."

What Derrida means is along the lines of Nietzsche earlier, "There are no facts, only interpretations." By saying that there is nothing but the text, Derrida suggests that there is no part of the world that we know by any means other than by interpretation. To this degree, I agree with Derrida.

Derrida also wishes to claim, however, that there is no stable meaning in these texts. In my opinion, Smith sugar coats Derrida just a little too much--at times I could hardly distinguish how he was describing Derrida from how I view things. Then again, Smith is ultimately a little more post-modern than I am...

However, I agree with Smith's critique of D. A. Carson's critique of Derrida (assuming that he has accurately described Carson). There is a vast difference between saying what I just did above--that all our conscious knowledge of the world involves interpretation and that no human being is objective--and saying that a person does not believe in truth.

To me, the "truth" I gain from Derrida is that any text can be interpreted differently from the way its creator might have intended and, indeed, from the way other people understand it. Texts--mirroring their human creators--are prone to internal inconsistencies on some level.

But this is a footnote. It's a very important footnote, a very true footnote. Yet Derrida spent practically his entire career on a footnote! To make his point, he went to ridiculous lengths to find alternative readings of texts whose meaning otherwise seemed pretty clear.

Thanks, Jacques. I got the point back in '67.

Smith then goes radically orthodox on us. If the world is ultimately all text, then, hey, let's make the Bible be that text--sola scriptura. There is nothing outside the scriptural text.

Pure genius. I suspect it basically translates into getting scripture into our imaginary. It's a beautiful poetic image... But it doesn't really tell us anything about interpreting specific biblical texts. :-)

3. The third chapter deals with Lyotard, who as much as anyone gave us the terms "pre-modern," "modern," and "postmodern." Lyotard defines postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives" or in French "big stories."

By "big stories," Smith doesn't think Lyotard has in mind the kinds of narratives that in fact have been the very stuff of postmodernism. In fact, I found it a little hard at first to understand Lyotard, for I have always associated postmodernism with the idea that you can't step outside the story to give some God's eye interpretation of it. I've always associated propositional interpretations to be the modernist and staying in the "stories" they try to interpret as the postmodernist.

... which is why "grand stories" is a bad translation in English of what Lyotard is saying. A metanarrative for Lyotard is an overarching rational supertheory that is meant to stand alongside reality to explain it objectively. Smith does not think that, when properly understood, Lyotard contradicts the idea of understanding the world through the eyes of the Christian story.

I largely agree with Lyotard, at least as I understand him. We would do well to think of the systems by which we describe the world as expressions of the world rather than literal explanations of it. This approach requires the revaluation of metaphor and a realization of the value of myth. As I've said before, we do well to think of scientific theories as very useful myths, expressions of reality that accommodate massive numbers of "characters" in the expression. These myths allow us to predict and manipulate reality. But they are not strictly statements of that reality. They are metaphors for things-in-themselves to which we do not have access.

With this last comment, of course, I distinguish myself from Smith, who with other postmodernists has tried to abandon Cartesian and Kantian dualisms. For me, these dualisms are also myths. But they are extremely functional ones.

4. The fourth chapter deals with the third of the three postmodern giants (why does Smith not treat the pragmatist Rorty, I wonder): Michel Foucault. I found Smith's movie clip here the most useful so far--One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Foucault's famous saying is "power is knowledge" reverses Frances Bacon's old dictum, "knowledge is power." Foucault's basic claim is that what we consider true is not a matter of what is simply fact but that what is considered true is a function of lines of power.

Let me say with Foucault as with Derrida that there is an incredible amount of truth to what Foucault is saying here. What is considered true is as much and usually more about who has the power to convince others of their ideas as it is about some blunt truth out there. Foucault's case studies are far more valuable than Derrida's, describing how our conceptualizations of things like punishment, medicine, and sexuality have changed over the centuries.

Smith suggests that with the givenness of power, we would do well as a church to use the inevitable systems of power at our disposal to form others Christianly.

5. In the final and longest chapter, Smith furthers his agenda of a radical orthodoxy for the emerging church. So when it comes to dogma, we unapologetically affirm it without concern over the Cartesian drive to correlate it to the facts. This is the Christian "take away" from Derrida.

The Christian take away from Lyotard is a re-embrace of the Christian story and Christian traditions. This is the ancient-future trend that we see, for example, in the late Robert Webber's book on worship. We reaffirm the value of ritual and symbol, the role of the tactile in worship rather than just the cognitive.

Smith perhaps best sums up his overall take away in this way: "the best way to be postmodern is to be premodern; to be emergent, one must be catholic" (135). We develop a sacramental imagination rather than, as modernism has, a "gnostic" or dualistic one.

An Ode to Derrida

Once upon a pan'cras churning
Went the Da to death a learnin'
Over the under takers he received the endless snore

Derrida went over the hill
To fetch beyond the pale
Death fell down and up he went
or down to the hereafter

Cancer comes without a care or bias
Can Sir Derr be present though he's gone?
All that's left is traces chasing traces
The dog is gone and only left a tale

So live that when your summons comes
Comes summons so that you no longer live,
Ol' Jacques had lived in Lethe,
For Lethe now he pines
As his pine box remembers
What in life he had forgot

Because he would have stopped for death
Had no effect on her
So buy some kind of presence here
Lest absence hear and kindly stop by in life, leaving a kind of emptiness.