One of the more interesting postmodern philosophers, in my opinion, is Merold Westphal. Below I have reproduced a selection from his article “Appropriating Postmodernism” in his Overcoming Onto-theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (NY: Fordham, 2001), pp. 78-80.

Originally a lecture to an evangelical college board, he attempts to illustrate how postmodernism, hermeneutics, theology and the Bible correlate. He argues that postmodernism is a healthy corrective to modern theology (even modern theology in its evangelical…and we might add Stone-Campbell…versions). I found what is reproduced below particularly poignant and it also serves to round-off my series on “Created for Hermeneutics” quite well.

Westphal writes:

Let me illustrate….with reference to three theologians I encountered a few years ago during my undergraduate studies. All wanted to base their theology on the authority of biblical revelation, and all thought the right account of that authority was the theory of biblical inerrancy. So it is clear that all were far too conservative to have any sympathy for theological liberalism. Yet two of them, ironically, had wedded their conservative theologies to precisely that modernity with which that liberalism had sought accommodation. In terms of theological content no one would have called their theologies modernistic. But the metaclaims they made about their theologies, to which, it should be noted, they gave theological status, were born of the Enlightenment, children of Athens rather than Jerusalem.

One of them said, “With the help of biblical revelation we can achieve a knowledge of God wholly on par with God’s own self-knowledge. Our knowledge does not extend as far as God’s, of course, but what we know is not in any way inferior to God’s knowledge of the same truths [univocal knowledge, JMH].” This means that theological knowledge, with the help of revelation, achieves the ideal of objectivity and perfect correspondence that science was thought to achieve in relation to nature. This knowledge is entirely free from prejudice or perspective, is wholly conditioned by interests and desires, and is relative to no human culture.

N.B. Our theologian is not saying this about the Bible, but about his own theology, at least in principle, at least when he gets it right.

As a hint toward the possibility of theologically motivated postmodern protest against this metatheology, I remind that it is not just Nietzsche but also Kierkegaard’s Climacus who wages a sustained polemic against claims that human knowledge can operate sub specie aeterni [under an eternal kind, JMH], can peek over God’s shoulder and see things from the divine perspective.

Our second theologian lectured on the perspicuity of Scripture. He said, “It is not necessary for us to interpret the Bible. The Bible interprets itself. When we use the proper grammatico-historical method, the means that result are, if not untouched by human hands, at least uncontaminated by human cultures in their finitude and fallenness.” Truth in advertising might have required that the lectured be titled “Cartesian hermeneutics.”

N.B. Once again, by a curious osmosis, the absoluteness first claimed for biblical revelation has been claimed for a particular theology, at least insofar as it has been methodologically rigorous.

In its general form, this non sequitur is anything but rare. One does not even have to listen very closely to those who present themselves as defenders of Absolute Truth or Absolute Values to hear the all too frequent follow-up: “And since we are the defenders of Absolutes, it should come as no surprise that we are the ones in possession of them. Our theories are the Truth and our practices are the Good.” One of the tasks of a theologically motivated appropriation of postmodernism is to challenge this move in all its forms, blatant and subtle. For just as I do not become purple by speaking about violets, so I do not become absolute by speaking about God. The divine character of revelation does not cancel out the human character of my attempt to say what it means.

If our first two theologians would be surprised to discover how thoroughly Cartesian they are, our third would be surprised to find himself linked to postmodernism. But he used to say, “The Bible is the divinely revealed misinformation about God.” This means that his theology, based on biblical revelation, will never get it right, no matter how methodologically rigorous. His beliefs will never simply correspond to the object they intend; they will never be the adequatio of his intellect to the divine reality. He is a theologically motivated anti-realist [he does not mean that he denies reality, rather that we have no independent, absolutely objective access to reality; we contribute to what we see, we “see as” rather than “see absolutely” or “see objectively", JMH], and just to that degree we can say, a bit anachronistically, that he has appropriated postmodernism.

This does not mean for a moment that he is an anything-goes theologian, to cite an all too standard straw-man critique of postmodernism. He was as concerned with theological methodology as our second theologian and as explicitly dependent on Biblical revelation as the first. But he thought the goal of theological rigor was to think about God as humans should think about God rather than to think about God as God thinks about God. To think God’s thoughts after God is not to see anything through God’s eyes or to peek over God’s shoulders. It is to be the best possible human approximation to a divine thought that always transcends our grasp of it.

In trying to think through the notion of the Bible as the divinely revealed misinformation about God I have often come back to this homely analogy. My three-year old son is sucking on a quarter. I tell him not to put coins in his mouth. He asks why not. Since he lacks an understanding of viruses and bacteria, and doesn’t even have those words in his vocabulary. I tell him, “Because they have little, invisible bugs on them that can make you sick if they get inside of you. Remember how awful you felt last time you were sick?”

This is the parentally revealed misinformation about sucking on coins. It is false, but it is how the boy ought to think about the matter. But just for that reason, we probably shouldn’t simply call it false. Rather, we should notice that a good epistemologist would give an anti-realist account of the boy’s knowledge and suggest that his belief is phenomenally [as it appears to us, JMH] correct, by comparison with the belief that sucking on coins will cause the cat to die, but noumenally [what is absolutely real, JMH] false, relative to adult human knowledge as the criterion of the thing in itself.

JMH Comment: 

So what resonates with you?  Is the Bible so immediately obvious that it does not need interpretation?  Does the Bible, as understood by humans, give us univocal knowledge, that is, knowledge equivalent to God’s own knowledge? Does correct interpretation, despite our human situatedness in finitude and fallenness, give us access to the Truth through the Bible’s own self-interpreting? Or, as with the third theologian above, does the Bible give us true but human ways of thinking about God that are appropriate for human limitations–it is not univocal knowledge, but neither is it equivocal guesses. Rather, it is analogous knowledge–God is like this but not exactly because our human limitations don’t permit us to know God exactly as he knows himself.  “There are bugs on it that will make you sick” is true in an analogous sense–appropriate for the limitations of a three-year old and preformatively sufficient for the three-year old. God speaks to us, it seems to me, in the same way through Scripture. It is true, but not the Truth (absolutely identical with what is in God’s own head) but sufficient to equip us to missionally participate in God’s work in the world as his imagers.

 

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