“There is nothing outside the text.” – Jacques Derrida

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” – The Gospel According to St. John

Religion has always involved a tension between knowledge and faith. Jesus taught, “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” At the same time, however, Paul cautioned believers that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Jesus made clear to the apostle Thomas that, of the two, faith is the greater goal: “Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

The Enlightenment, with its faith in human reason and science, gave believers hope that knowledge and faith could be gained together. Immanuel Kant stated that the Enlightenment was “man’s release from his self-incurred immaturity” through the “use of one’s reason in all matters [1].” It was a movement of optimism rooted in the belief that the human condition could be improved by rejecting superstition and dogma in favor of reason. Reason and science were seen as complementing faith rather than conflicting with it. George Marsden describes how some Christians responded to the Enlightenment with enthusiasm for scientific discovery; because all knowledge came from God, reason and science were just more tools for approaching knowledge. Christianity, they believed, was rational and would ultimately be validated by scientific discovery and reason. Marsden wrote, “By 1859, evangelicals, both scientists and theologians, thought they had discovered an impregnable synthesis between faith and reason. Scientific reasoning... firmly supported Christian faith. In principle, they were deeply wedded to a scientific culture, so long as it left room (indeed, a privileged place of honor) to add on their version of Christianity.”

And then came Darwinism. Initially, Christian response to Darwinism was “ambivalent,” as many believers thought that evolutionary theory presented “no new problem. If God could guide the natural evolution of mountains, he could create other entities that way.” Eventually, however, secularists moved to exclude religion from the scientific conversation, believing that “positive science must replace inferior ways that civilizations had previously used to find truth. To do this, the essential first step was the reform of science itself, to remove it from any connection to religion .... Science that continued to have the traditional references to religion must be called nonscience.” After 1910 religion had effectively been banished from the scientific conversation and the clash between the two became more like open warfare. Thus began what Marsden describes as the” dark ages” of Evangelicalism when evolution and science were attacked and demonized by believers [2].

Even believers came to accept their exile from academia. As one scholar noted, “The unspoken conventions of the academy work strongly against sectarian apologetics or confessional testimony. Arguments directly for or against the truth claims of [religion] would be beyond the pale at a mainstream academic conference or in a mainstream academic journal [3].” Modernism had turned Jesus’ blessing to Thomas on its head: knowledge was now the greater good, with faith relegated to the margins.

An opportunity to redress this marginalization came from the postmodern movement, which Jean-Francois Lyotard characterized as an “incredulity” toward the kinds of overarching “metanarratives” by which humans legitimate their beliefs [4]. But how does one define postmodernism, and what does it have to do with religious faith and knowledge? Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton explains that postmodernism “rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective Knowledge [5].”

Postmodernism can be seen as a rejection of foundationalism, or the assumption that some basic beliefs were self-evidently true and could thus make up the foundations of knowledge. Religion rested on the foundation of God as the origin and center of meaning, with scripture communicating to humans exactly what God intended to say. Postmodernism, on the other hand, asserted that meaning is diffused, suspended, or as Jacques Derrida put it, “deferred.” Instead of finding foundations of belief, postmodernism argued in favor of an elusive text, which offered no fixed or certain meaning but was ultimately empty. Eagleton writes: “Meaning, if you like, is scattered or dispersed; ... it cannot be easily nailed down, it is never fully present in anyone sign alone, but is rather a kind of constant flickering of presence and absence.” Meaning isn’t something you can get a fix on; every time you get close, it slips away from your grasp [6].

Ultimately, postmodernism questioned the assumptions behind the creation of meaning. Deconstructionism, as J. Hillis Miller states, attempted to find “the thread in the text in question which will unravel it all [7].” Paul de Man argued further that every statement undermines itself, “as if the very possibility of assertion had been put into question.” The end of deconstruction, de Man argues, is to acknowledge “the nothingness of human matters [8].”

The idea that human meaning is empty seems an odd fit with religion, whose texts provide the ultimate meta narratives of existence. The Bible, for example, provides an all-encompassing story that defines the known universe from the beginning of Creation to the end of the Apocalypse, with Christ as the Word (Logos) anchoring the whole enterprise. Yet some religious believers have enthusiastically picked up the terminology of postmodernism in their approach to religious truth-claims and faith.

Some writers have recognized that if all approaches to truth are arbitrary religious faith is as equally valid (or invalid) an approach as science and reason. These writers have attempted to define their approach as “liberal” or “postmodern” as contrasted to secular critics who are stuck in naive Enlightenment rationalism. Massimo Introvigne, for example, dismisses critics of religion as those who “are persuaded that, thanks to Enlightenment rationalism, an objective concept of ‘science and truth’ may allow them to reach factual, empirical, ‘scientific’ conclusions on [scripture] and its origins .... On the other hand, the late modernist and postmodernist position that knowledge is by no means objective and that ‘true,’ universally valid historical conclusions could never be reached, is held by [religious] conservatives [9].”

Ironically, some writers have used this dichotomy to cast secular critics as fundamentalists who believe that “it is imperative that scripture be treated as inerrant and that [believers] accept targeted statements from religious leaders as infallible.” Conversely, “the average” believer holds “more theologically liberal positions.” Unwittingly, these writers have simply asserted the superiority of postmodern thought over Enlightenment thinking: “We have a simple promise that is not dependent on extrapolating truth from disputed facts by using current standards of science and logic: ... the power of the Holy Ghost. ... This is where truth resides for [believers ] [10].” Such writers use the language of postmodernism to recast certain kinds of spiritual knowledge as more reliable than science and reason, ignoring postmodernism’s implicit critique of their own preferred avenue toward truth.

Other writers try to find parallels to postmodernism in their religious faith. Benjamin McGuire describes three themes in Mormonism that he finds compatible with postmodernism: “continuing revelation, the theological hierarchy of the [Mormon] church, and its approach to pluralism.” McGuire argues that, because continuing revelation can “overturn that which we [previously] held sacred ... the only certainty is that change is inevitable, and that we never know quite as much as we think we do.” Despite the “rigid hierarchy” of the LDS church, he writes, spiritual authority “lies with its members at the bottom instead of with the leaders at the top.” And Mormonism’s assertion, he says, that “there is no universal standard by which everyone is judged, nor is the LDS Church the only repository of truth” encourages “the rejection of a meta-narrative, and the introduction of pluralism.” From this perspective, religion “helps build narratives that give us a sense of purpose in our lives. It allows us to embrace ambiguity, to appreciate mystery, and to develop a mature faith that challenges us to change.” Implicit here is a rejection of a “security of knowing” that religion has traditionally offered in favor of a more ambiguous but more rewarding faith [11].

Others have found in postmodernism a proper questioning of human reason in favor of God’s knowledge and truth. Kevin Vanhoozer writes that “modernity cultivated autonomous knowing subjects” and thus reflected “pride in human reason, pride in human goodness, pride in human accomplishments.” Postmodernism was a needed corrective to “situate reason, reminding modern pretenders to a God’s-eye point of view that they are in fact historically conditioned, culturally conditioned, and sexually gendered finite beings.” But postmodernism fell short in that it replaced pride with sloth: “The question is whether certain forms of postmodernity act as corrosive conditions for the possibility of commitment, poisoning the will by depriving it of anything in which to believe ultimately [12].”

For such writers, postmodernism presents an opportunity to reject both pride and sloth by returning to a pre-Enlightenment view of God as ineffable – outside the grasp of language – but speaking to us intimately through spiritual experience. Peter Rollins writes, “I discovered a way to embrace both the wisdom of those who would say that God is unspeakable, and must therefore be passed over in silence, and the wisdom of those who would say that God can, and must, be expressed: ... That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.” Rollins argues for a “mystical” approach, an “ancient language” predating Cartesian thought: “For the mystic God was neither an unspeakable secret to be passed over in silence, nor a dissipated secret that had been laid bare in revelation. Rather, the mystic approached God as a secret which one was compelled to share, yet which retained its secrecy [13].” Similarly, Kevin Vanhoozer argues for a return to received wisdom. Christians know truth “not because they discovered it but because they were told. The knowledge claim that Christians make about human nature and destiny is based neither on speculation nor observation, but upon apostolic testimony. It is not an apodictic truth, but a story: good news, a gospel.” Truth, then, comes from hearing the Word and living it, accepting on faith that what God has spoken is true, no matter our ability to articulate it.

What we see in these responses, then, is an attempt to reverse the rejection of religion as a legitimate avenue to knowledge and truth. In a way, these authors want to level the field not by reasserting religion’s power to approach reality but by insisting that all human attempts at knowledge are hamstrung by human failings and biases. In this view science and reason are no more suitable than religion for gaining knowledge. As we’ve seen, some authors have gone further in arguing that their particular brand of spiritual insight is more reliable than other methods, which is a decidedly non-postmodern position. Ironically, the appeal to postmodernism has succeeded only in reducing religion to just another relative dead-end in the human search for meaning.

References

1. Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment? 1784
2. George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1991.
3. Daniel C. Peterson, mormondiscussions.com, 2010.
4. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis, MN: 1984.
5. Terry Eagleton, After Theory, New York: Basic Books, 2003.
6. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota UP, 1996.
7. Hillis Miller, “Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure: II,” Georgia Review 30 (1976): 330-348.
8. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971).
9. Massimo Introvigne, “The Book of Mormon Wars: A Non-Mormon Perspective,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies: Volume - 5, Issue - 2, Pages: 1-25.
10. Juliann Reynolds, “Critics in Wonderland: Through the Liberal Looking Glass,” (Mesa, Arizona: FAIR, April 2003).
11. Benjamin McGuire, “Is Mormonism a Postmodern Religion?” Patheos.com December 29, 2010 http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additiona1-Resources/Mormonism-a-Postmodern-Religion-Ben-McGuire
12. Kevin j. Vanhoozer, “Theology and the Condition of Postmodernity: A Report on Knowledge (of God),” in “The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology,” ed. Kevin j. Vanhoozer, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 3-25.
13. Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, London: Paraclate, 2006, xiv-xv