Postmodernism and a New Theological Agenda

Postmodernism is generally taken to be something of a cultural sensibility without absolutes, fixed certainties, or foundations, which takes delight in pluralism and divergence, and which aims to think through the radical “situatedness” of all human thought. In each of these matters, it may be regarded as a conscious and deliberate reaction against the totalization of the Enlightenment.

To give a full definition of postmodernism is virtually impossible. In part, this is because there is substantially less than total agreement on the nature of the “modernity” that it displaces and supersedes. In fact, the word “postmodernism” itself might be argued to imply that “modernity” is sufficiently well defined and understood that – whatever it is – it may be said to have ended and been superseded. The problem is particularly acute in the case of literature, where “modernism” has always been a contested notion. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify its leading general feature, which is the deliberate and systematic abandonment of centralizing narratives.

The American scholar Kevin Vanhoozer has recently suggested that the complex phenomenon of postmodernity is best summed up in four criticisms it directs against older ways of thinking.

Reason. The “modern” approach of reasoning by argument is viewed with suspicion by postmodern writers. Where modernity believed in a single universal reason, postmodernity holds that there are many different kinds of rationality. “They deny the notion of universal rationality; reason is rather a contextual and relative affair.”

Truth. Postmodernity is suspicious of the idea of truth on account of the way in which it has been used to legitimate oppression or to give justification to vested interests. Truth, in this view, is “a compelling story told by persons in positions of power in order to perpetuate their way of seeing and organizing the natural and social world.”

History. Where modern writers tried to find universal patterns in history, Vanhoozer suggests that postmodernity is “incredulous toward narratives that purport to recount universal history.” From the standpoint of Christian apologetics, this means that any attempt to see universal significance in the narrative of Jesus of Nazareth will be viewed with intense suspicion by some in today’s culture.

Self. Following on from this, postmodernity rejects any notion that there is “one true way of recounting one’s own history” and thus concludes that there is “no true way of narrating one’s own identity”. All ways of understanding the individual are open-ended and partial. There is no universal answer to the question of human identity.

It will thus be clear that there is an inbuilt precommitment to relativism or pluralism within postmodernism in relation to questions of truth. To use the jargon of the movement, one could say that postmodernism represents a situation in which the signifier has replaced the signified as the focus of orientation and value. In terms of the structural linguistics developed initially by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), and subsequently by Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and others, the recognition of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and its interdependence with other signs marks the end of the possibility of fixed, absolute meanings.

According to de Saussure, a “sign” consists of three things: the signifier (the acoustic image of the spoken words as heard by the intended recipient of the message), the signified (the meaning that is evoked in the mind of this recipient through the stimulus of the signifier), and the unity of these two. For de Saussure, the unity of the signifier with the signified is a cultural convention. There is no universal or transcendent foundation that relates signifier and signified: it is arbitrary, reflecting the contingencies of cultural conditioning.

Developing such insights, writers such as Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), and Michel Foucault (1926–1984) argued that language was ultimately arbitrary, whimsical, and capricious. It was not grounded in any overarching absolute linguistic laws and was thus incapable of disclosing meaning. Baudrillard argued that modern society was trapped in an endless network of artificial sign systems, which meant nothing, and merely perpetuated the belief systems of those who created them.

One aspect of postmodernism that illustrates this trend particularly well, while also indicating its obsession with texts and language, is deconstruction – the critical method that virtually declares that the identity and intentions of the author of a text are an irrelevance to the interpretation of the text, prior to insisting that, in any case, no fixed meaning can be found in it. This movement arose primarily as a result of Jacques Derrida’s reading of the works of Martin Heidegger in the late 1960s. Two general principles can be seen as underlying this approach to the reading of texts.

Anything that is written will convey meanings that its author did not intend and could not have intended.

The author cannot adequately put into words what he or she means in the first place.

All interpretations are thus equally valid or equally meaningless (depending upon your point of view). As Paul de Man (1919–1983), one of the leading proponents of this approach in the United States, declared, the very idea of “meaning” smacked of fascism. This approach, which blossomed in post-Vietnam America, was given the semblance of intellectual respectability by academics such as de Man, Geoffrey Hartman (1929–2016), and J. Hillis Miller (1928–2021). “Metanarratives” – that is, generalizing narratives that claimed to provide universal frameworks for the discernment of meaning – were to be rejected as authoritarian. Far from discerning meaning, such narratives imposed their own meanings in a fascist manner.

The rise of postmodernism has had an important influence on the shaping of many theological discussions. We shall consider two areas of theology briefly to indicate the significance of postmodernism to theological reflection in recent decades.

Biblical interpretation. Traditional academic biblical interpretation had been dominated by the historico-critical method. This approach, which developed during the nineteenth century, stressed the importance of the application of critical historical methods, such as establishing the Sitz im Leben, or “situation in life,” of Gospel passages. A number of leading literary critics of the 1980s – such as Harold Bloom (1930–2019) and Frank Kermode (1919–2010) – challenged such ideas as “institutionally legitimized” or “scholarly respectable” interpretations of the Bible. The notion that there is a meaning to a biblical text – whether laid down by a church authority or by the academic community – is thus regarded with considerable suspicion within postmodernism.

Systematic theology. Postmodernism is, by its very nature, hostile to the notion of “systematization” or any claims to have discerned “meaning.” Mark Taylor’s study Erring (1984) is an excellent illustration of the impact of postmodernism on systematic theology. The image of “erring” – rather than more traditional approaches to theological system-building – leads Taylor to develop an anti-systematic theology that offers polyvalent approaches to questions of truth or meaning. Taylor’s study represents an exploration of the consequences of Nietzsche’s declaration of the “death of God.” On the basis of this, Taylor argues for the elimination of such concepts as self, truth, and meaning. Language does not refer to anything and truth does not correspond to anything.

Yet postmodernism now seems to be in retreat, perhaps because there is a growing realization that human beings cannot afford to lose sight of self, truth, and meaning. Perhaps the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 can be seen as a turning point, marking a recognition that goodness and truth cannot be maintained simply as convenient social fictions, but are necessary as integral aspects of human identity. Perhaps the most interesting question is what name scholars will find for the movement(s) that will eventually displace postmodernity.

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