Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church

2008 February 18

by Josh

James K.A. Smith’s book Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? is one of the books I had to read for school. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the book before reading it. As opposed to some of the other books I have to read, this one is more theory and less application. It is more of an overview of the postmodern worldview, how that has shaped the world we live in and how the church responds to it. The interesting thing, that I appreciated, was he didn’t destroy postmodernism as some have tried to do, instead, he showed how the church can redeem it and reach a postmodern world.

To do this, Smith looks at the writings of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Michel Foucault, three of the most influential postmodern thinkers. He looks at what they wrote, how that has influenced our culture (and the church), and how the church can react and reach the world we live in. Too often I think the church takes the defensive stance, trying to keep the world out, but we are supposed to be on the offense (read more about that here).

Here are a few thoughts from the book:

“One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative…If we want to be fair, we must teach the young to be revolutionaries, revolutionaries against the status quo.” – Francis Schaeffer
Two keys for the church from Derrida: (1) The centrality of Scripture for mediating our understanding of the world as a whole, and (2) the role of community in the interpretation of Scripture.
”The first and chief defense of the gospel, the first ‘letter of commendation’ not only for Paul but for Jesus, is not an argument but the life of the church conformed to Christ by the Spirit in service and suffering.” – Peter Leithart
Conceiving of Christian faith as a private affair between the individual and God – a matter of my asking Jesus to “come into my heart” – modern evangelicalism finds it hard to articulate just how or why the church has any role to play other than providing a place to fellowship with other individuals who have a private relationship with God. With this model in place, what matters is Christianity as a system of truth or ideas, not the church as a living community embodying its head. Modern Christianity tends to think of the church either as a place where individuals come to find answers to their questions or as one more stop where individuals can try to satisfy their consumerist desires. As such, Christianity becomes intellectualized rather than incarnate, commodified rather than the site of genuine community.
Everything must be interpreted in order to be experienced.
The world is a kind of text requiring interpretation.
The Scriptures give us good reasons to reject the very notion of objectivity, while at the same time affirming the reality of truth and knowledge.
Christians who become skittish about the claim that everything is interpreation are usually hanging on to a very modern notion of knowledge, one that claims something is true only insofar as it is objective – insofar as it can be universally known by all people, at all times, in all places. On this account, the truth of the gospel – that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself – is taken to be objectively true and thus capable of rational demonstration.
One of the crucial insights of postmodernism is that everyone comes to his or her experience of the world with a set of ultimate presuppositions, then Christians should not be afraid to lay their specifically Christian presuppositions on the table and allow their account to be tested in the marketplace of ideas.
Postmodernism can be understood as the erosion of confidence in the rational as sole guarantor and deliverer of truth, coupled with a deep suspicion of science – particularly modern science’s pretentious claims to an ultimate theory of everything.
The notion of reducing Christian faith to four spiritual laws signals a deep capitulation to scientific knowledge, whereas postmodernism signals the recovery of narrative knowledge and should entail a more robust, unapologetic proclamation of the story of God in Christ. This is why the Scriptures must remain central for the postmodern church, for it is precisely the story of the canon of Scripture that narrates our faith.
Public worship is both a “converting ordinance” and “an edifying ordinance”; that is, worship can be both a way of inviting the lost into the body of Christ and a way of building up the saints, forming them into the kinds of people that pursue the kingdom with heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Seekers are looking for something our culture can’t provide. Many don’t want a religious version of what they can already get at the mall. And this is especially true of postmodern or Gen X seekers: they are looking for elements of transcendence and challenge that MTV could never give them. Rather than an MTVized version of the gospel, they are searching for the mysterious practices of the ancient gospel.
We need to be attentive and discerning about the way modernity has eroded our identity as the “peculiar people” who make up the body of Christ and seek to retrieve the strangey ways and ancient practices of the communion of the saints in order to re-form who we are.
Taking the incarnation seriously means taking bodies seriously, which means affirming the space that they occupy as an arena of revelation of grace. The sacramental imagination begins from the assumption that our discipleship depends not only – not even primarily – on the conveyance of ideas into our minds, but on our immersion in embodied practices and rituals that form us into the kind of people God calls us to be.

The book was a great read, real quick and easy to connect with and understand. Definitely worth checking out if you are wondering how to better reach the world we live in and understand where they are coming from.