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Theology and the Many Faces of Postmodernity
By David Tracy

Réné Descartes spoke for the entire modern era when he pleaded for certainty, clarity, and distinctness. He spoke again on behalf of modernity when he pleaded for a method grounded in the subjects' self-presence, a method, in principle, that would prove the same for all thinking, rational persons. The drive to clarity, the turn to the subject, the concern with method, the belief in sameness-modern thinkers embraced and embrace all these ideals in modernity's working out of its unique history. Indeed history itself, once modern historical consciousness and evolutionary theory were forged by modern thinkers, could also prove more of the same. For the genuine modern, all history leads by inevitable-indeed clear and distinct developmental stages-from the "ancients" through the "medievals" to the secret teleology of all history, us, the moderns. Other cultures often do not possess history at all (indeed they are "primitive," "archaic," "pre-historical"). Somehow all other cultures become "lesser" copies of the modern drive to sameness, the modern "Western" scientific, technological, democratic culture that is culture and history. At the limit, then, history, the last outpost of the other and the different, is, in the modern narrative, finally a secretly evolutionary version of "more of the same."

The famous "turn to the subject" of modernity can now be seen as both emancipatory and entrapping. Its emancipatory character remains for all to see: the triumph of the democratic ideal that great modern, liberal, American thinker, John Dewey, justly saw as the political implication of the scientific ideas and achievements of modernity. All of us who speak an

David Tracy is Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School and author of such works as Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (1989) and Dialogue with the Other: The Interreligious Dialogue (I 992).

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emancipatory, liberating language are moderns at heart. As are all who demand public reason for theology. As are all of us who will always remain, in our lives as much as our thoughts, believers in the democratic ideals of liberty and equality. We all believe, now as then, that the only worthwhile political theology is one that increases both equality and liberty and one that helps us reflect better on how to relate these two great and often conflicting ideals in a politically and economically just society-meaning, finally, a just world society.

Modernity includes all who still acknowledge the modern scientific revolution as not just one more important event in Western culture but as the watershed event that makes even the Reformation and Renaissance seem like family quarrels. All who demand the bracing honesty of an historical consciousness can now also note the further ethical concern with the realities of social location (gender, race, class). They, too, are moderns at heart. All moderns justly see the world of nature and ourselves within it in the context of some form of evolutionary scheme. We moderns tend to find this vision of the whole and our small place within the whole as natural to our thought as many of our ancestors found some version of a neo-Platonic emanationist schema of exitus-reditus for understanding their "ancient" and "medieval," soul-ful, microcosmic place with the great macrocosm of the universe.

"The real face of postmodernity … is the face of the other.”

All thinkers who embrace these emancipatory values-as I certainty do, as most readers of this journal are likely to do-are incontestably heirs of the modern era. These modern values, however transformed, cannot be rejected by anyone understanding the ethical-political as well as intellectual stakes in modernity's classical drive to intellectual and political-economic emancipation. Those who claim, as I do, that we are now facing not simply (as almost all concede) late modernity but a puzzling reality named "postmodernity" must clarify the meaning of that "post" and the meaning of the "modernity" it both qualifies and is determined by. Modernity includes all the values, the indispensable values, listed above. These values are familiar to and, I believe, likely to be constitutive of the worldview of any reader of this or similar theological journals. Modernity also includes more negative factors like those hinted at in the introductory description of Descartes' program for modernity.

Many moderns, with a kind of vestigial Enlightenment prejudice against the very category "tradition," find it hard, perhaps impossible, to believe that modernity itself can now be viewed as one more tradition. But so it is. And like all traditions, modernity is deeply ambiguous. Walter Benjamin's dictum holds for modernity as for every tradition: "Every great work of civilization is at the very same time a work of barbarism."

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The word "barbarism" is regrettably accurate for our modern civilization, which can thoughtlessly use its great breakthroughs in science for negative, not only positive, technological achievements. On the positive side, would even the most violent anti-modern prefer to return to the period without, among many such examples, anesthetics. On the negative side, modern communications have helped to level all traditions, all particularities, and, at the limit, the very texture of a culture's life.

Science has also helped to enforce a techno-economic realm where a purely technical reason, as the best defenders of modernity like Jürgen Habermas correctly insist, is now in danger of levelling even the democratic political achievements of modernity. ¹ A merely technical reason will inevitably destroy any genuine public realm of modernity by destroying the emancipatory and the communicative character of reason itself.

The harsh word "barbarism" fits a culture all too willing to unite two of its greatest achievements-historical consciousness in the humanities and evolutionary theory in the natural and biological sciences-into a grand narrative that tells the modern story as one of an inevitable social evolutionary teleology leading up to and finding its glorious climax in us-the "Westerners," the "moderns." This grand and, finally, bogus narrative becomes the subconscious alibi for all the sins of moderns: for example in the pecca fortiter version of the "social Darwinists" (whose number, if not whose name, is still legion). This modern alibi-narrative exists as well in the quieter but finally no less violent forms of the neo-conservatives: Western culture is culture; Western classics are the classics: where is the Proust of Samoa, etc? This narrative even drives the remaining liberal versions of the story: Soon all other traditions, all other cultures will quietly fade away as the grand social evolutionary schema of

"The famous 'turn to the subject' of modernity can now be seen as both emancipatory and entrapping. "

modern liberalism lulls all to rest with the secret promise of making everything (and everyone) just one more expression of more of the same good liberal worldview.

Any postmodern thinker who believes that she or he can now leave this ambiguous modern scene and begin anew in innocence is self-deluding. There is no innocent tradition (including modernity and certainly including modern liberal Christianity). There is no single innocent reading of any tradition, including this postmodern reading of the positive and negative realities, the profound ambiguities, of modernity.

¹ On Habermas and modernity for theology, see the essays in Habermas, Modernity and Public Theology, edited by Don Browning and Francis Schussler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1992).

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If there is a postmodernity it, too, is likely to be deeply ambiguous. ²  Postmodernity also needs not merely affirmation but also critique and suspicion. Many forms of thought announcing themselves as postmodern fully merit the suspicion that others cast upon them. The major suspicion, I suspect, is that postmodern thinkers often seem, at best, ethically underdeveloped. It is not only the incurably moralistic who believe this, nor only those moderns who sense life as worth living only if Kant has been right all along. Any thoughtful person can see this ethical difficulty with many of the proponents of the thousand and one banners bearing the title "postmodernity."

"Modernity includes all who still acknowledge the modern scientific revolution as not just one more important event in Western culture but as the watershed event that makes even the Reformation and Renaissance seem like family quarrels. "

Many of the postmoderns, for example, seem far too academic in the fully pejorative sense, far too convinced that ideas and ideas alone determine history. The combination of Hegel's early modern historicizing of philosophy and Heidegger's early postmodern philosophizing of history have yielded a curious legacy: a plethora of postmodern counternarratives that are genuinely profound in their central insights, starting with Heidegger's extraordinary "history of Being" through the new counter-narratives of Derrida and Foucault, of Lyotard and Kristeva. And yet each of these new anti-grand narratives remains both too truncated in its explanatory power and too over-extended in its ambition to merit the kind of affirmation it demands. That kind of academicism towards concrete history is not merely intellectually too ambitious. Any purely academic understanding of history as the history of ideas unites a curious intellectual arrogance with an ethical obtuseness to the massive suffering in concrete history, including the history of the present. There are times when even the best breakthrough ideas are, by their refusal at ethical-political seriousness, in danger of becoming merely academic and ethically both obtuse and finally vulgar (even, at the limit, as in Heidegger's notorious case, morally repulsive).

The postmoderns sometimes seem more determined by ennui than by ethics. They are not, in fact, so much repelled by the ethical barbarism of modernity as bored by liberal modernity's "gray-on-gray" world. This is perhaps an understandable aesthetic response to liberal modernity. But it is only that-a merely aesthetic response without the moral power of the

²I have tried to defend this belief in ambiguity in Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989).

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great aesthetic and ethical traditions of the Good and the Beautiful like Platonism or Romanticism.

Despite these faults, indeed, these barbarisms, postmodernity at its best is a fully ethical response to the ambiguities of modernity. Postmodern thought at its best is an ethics of resistance-resistance, above all, to more of the same, the same unquestioned sameness of the modern turn to the subject, the modern over-belief in the search for the perfect method, the modern social evolutionary narrative whereby all is finally and endlessly more of the self-same.

The real face of postmodernity, as Emmanuel Levinas sees with such clarity, is the face of the other, the face that commands "Do not kill me," the face that insists, beyond Levinas, do not reduce me or anyone else to your grand narrative. ³ Each of us can accept evolutionary theory for nature and for understanding ourselves as part of that nature. But natural evolutionary theory is not useful for understanding myself as a subject active in history. There, I, like you, am other and different. No one is simply more of the same, simply a moment in the grand social evolutionary teleological schema of modernity.

Genuine postmodernity begins not in ennui but in ethical resistance. Postmodernity begins bv trying to think the unthought of modernity. Beyond the early modern turn to the purely autonomous, self-grounding subject, beyond even the more recent turn to language (the first great contemporary challenge to modern subjectism) lies the quintessential turn of post-modernity itself-the turn to the other. It is that turn, above all, that defines the intellectual as well as the ethical meaning of postmodernity. The other and the different come forward now as central intellectual categories across all the major disciplines, including theology. The others and the different-both those from other cultures and those others not accounted for by the grand narrative of the dominant culture return with full force to unmask the social evolutionary narrative of modernity as ultimately an alibi-story, not a plausible reading of our human history together. Part of that return of otherness, as we sail see below, is the return of biblical Judaism and Christianity to undo the complacencies of modernity, including modern theology.

God's shattering otherness, the neighbor's irreducible otherness, the othering reality of "revelation," not the consoling modern communality of "religion," all these expressions of otherness come now in new postmodern and post-neoorthodox forms to demand the serious attention of all thoughtful theologians. Intensity and transgression are frequent entry-points into this unsettling, new reality where sameness dissolves into either a whirlwind of sheer differences or an ethical call to otherness by more and more and more "others" and "the other" luring in the modern unconscious. In such a demanding situation, attention to the forms of theological "otherness" occurs as one way to try to pay serious

³See, especially, Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981).

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theological attention to the change all around us-changes determined perhaps by the Divine Spirit who blows whither She will.

THE TURN TO THE OTHER IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

The turn to the other takes many forms in postmodernity. Every form is an interruption of the role of the same, more often understood as the reign of the modern. Interruption itself takes many forms. Sometimes it comes as sheer interruptive event, power, gift. At other times it comes as pure revelation and grace. Where transgression often serves as a first sign of a postmodern arrival, the reality of gift and its economy is often a second and more explicitly theological sign of the presence of postmodernity. As with the earlier dialectical theologians (especially Karl Barth), if for very different reasons, both event language and revelation language have returned to theology. Both now return not so much to retrieve some aspect of premodernity (although that too becomes a real possibility) but rather to disrupt or interrupt the continuities and similarities masking the increasingly deadening sameness of the modern worldview. Event is that which cannot be accounted for in the present order but disrupts it by simply happening. Gift transgresses the present economy and calls it into

"Any postmodern thinker who believes that she or he can now leave this ambiguous modern scene and begin anew in innocence is self-deluding. "

question. Revelation is the event-gift of the Other's self-manifestation. Revelation disrupts the continuities, the similarities, the communalities of modern "religion."

The reign of modernity is also the reign of the modern construct "religion." The modern academy-precisely through its modernity not its academic status-can accept "religious studies" as more of the same. It fears "theology" as other: transgressive and disturbing-a form of thought and life that seems to live on a claim to an otherness (a gift and event of the Other's self-manifestation). When modern theology loses its courage to be other, it retreats to some premodern option. When it acknowledges its own status as a transgressive form of thought dependent upon, because participatory in, an event-gift-revelation of the Other it becomes, in many forms, a transgressive postmodern option.

Many forms of philosophy also begin to partake of such otherness. With the fine exception of that form of analytical philosophy naming itself "Christian philosophy" (and thereby, considering revelation not only religion) most analytical philosophy seems capable only of further scholasticism or of the relatively untroubled, not to say relaxed postmodernity of Richard Rorty. Moreover, most forms of philosophy of religion (a discipline invented in and for modernity) are far too caught in their own

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disciplinary modernism even to consider the otherness of revelation as worthy of their attention. On the other hand, all those forms of philosophy in which otherness and difference have become central categories now find modernity more a problematic concept, than a ready solution. These philosophies of otherness and difference have become, in fact if not in name, postmodern. Often this occurs through a self-conscious recovery of the non-Enlightenment, even at times the non-Greek resources of Western culture itself: Witness Emmanuel Levinas' brilliant recovery of ethics as first philosophy, partly made possible by his recovery of the Judaic strands of our culture; witness Pierre Hadot's and Martha Nussbaum's distinct recoveries of the literary aspect (Nussbaum) and spiritual exercises aspect (Hadot) of pluralistic Hellenistic culture rather than classic Hellenic culture; witness Jean Luc Marion's brilliant recovery of Pseudo-Dionysius or Julia Kristeva's recovery of the love mystics; witness Jacques Derrida's interest in (and critique of) the traditions of apophatic theology; witness John Caputo's recent Judeo-Christian philosophical critique of Heidegger's obsession with the Greeks.

The list of genuinely postmodern philosophical exercises could be expanded easily. Some (as, curiously, with the ancients) make it difficult to distinguish a philosophical from a theological position any longer, for example, Mark C. Taylor, Robert Scharlemann, or Edith Wyschogrod. Others speak their descriptions of the Other in more familiar theological terms-the gift is explicitly named grace; the event of the Other is named the revelation event of the Other's self-manifestation. Indeed those new postmodern theological options have exploded in a hundred new cultural and theological forms.

"Many forms of thought announcing themselves as postmodern fully merit the suspicion that others cast upon them. "

Surely the very question of form itself is what should command our attention most. My own belief is that across the Christian theological spectrum there is occurring an event of major import: the attempt to free Christian theology from the now smothering embrace of modernity-an event that is as difficult, as conflictual, and as painful as the earlier (equally necessary) attempt in early modernity to free theology from the suffocating embrace of premodern modes of thought. Moderns have now become, in every discipline-including theology-the most defensive and troubled thinkers of all. They always seem to be searching for one more round of the premodern versus modern debate in order to display their honest modern scruples and arguments one more time. Fortunately for them, there are more than enough fundamentalist groups (that curious underside of the modern dilemma) to allow the "modern" debate to continue.

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Unfortunately for the moderns, however, the more serious debate has shifted to one they continue to avoid: the debate on the unthought aspects of modernity itself. Was the modern turn to the subject also a turn to the same? Was the "religionizing" of all theology more of that same? Is the modern form of argument adequate to understand genuine otherness and difference? Is not modern liberal thought far more engendered, racial, classist, and Eurocentric than it seems capable of acknowledging? These questions begin to haunt the modern conscience like a guilty romance. For some, the only honest option is to find better ways to honor otherness and difference by transgressing the modern liberal pieties, if necessary, in order to honor in thought as in life the otherness manifested in Jesus Christ and the otherness explosively disclosed in all the new theologies of our day.

"When modern theology loses its courage to be other, it retreats to some premodern option.”

The question of form itself, I repeat, is one way to begin to address these new theological questions with new resources for thought and action. Christian theology should never be formless,⁴ even in its most apophatic, that is, formless moments (for example, Meister Eckhart). Christian theology should always be determined in its understanding of God and humanity by its belief in the form-of-forms, the divine-human form, Jesus Christ-the form that must inform all Christian understanding of God and transform all Christian understanding of human possibility for thought and, above all, action.

There is no serious form of Christian theology that is not christomorphic. This is a more accurate designation of the christological issue, I believe, than the more familiar but confusing word "christocentric." For theology is not christocentric but theocentric, although it is so only by means of its christomorphism. But my present concern is what form this christomorphism might take in the present situation of the turn to the other. The answer, I believe, is ready at hand in all the new theologies occurring across the whole Christian world (not only in its Euro-American corner). The answer is likely to occur in even more cultural forms in the future. The answer-whether evangelical or mystical, whether Euro-American or African, whether feminist or womanist, whether explicitly postmodern or only implicitly so-is the explosion of what Gustavo Gutiérrez and others have named the mystical-political form contemporary theology needs to take .⁵

⁴The most eloquent defense of this proposition in modern theology remains Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Seven Volumes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982-92).
⁵See Claude Geffré and Gustavo Gutiérrez, editors, The Mystical and Political Dimensions of the Christian Faith, Concilium, 96 (1974).

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My own suggestion is that this now familiar mystical-Political naming, although resonant to many of the needs of our moment, is not the most adequate way to describe the fuller range of options for rendering the Other in new forms. For that we may consider the following hypothesis of the fuller spectrum of possible forms needed (and, as it happens, available) for our present question of postmodern theology's turn to the other. Any Christian theology that claims its basic continuity with its biblical roots (as, I believe, Christian theology must if it is seriously Christian) may find what it needs in the full spectrum of forms in the Bible itself. The two most basic religious forms in the Bible are the prophetic and the meditative (wisdom) forms. From these two forms and their dialectic emerge the fuller spectrum of past, present, and likely future forms of Christian theology.

First, the prophetic. The prophet speaks not because he or she wishes to but because God as Other demands it. The prophet speaks on behalf of the other-the neighbor-especially the poor, the oppressed, and the marginal other. Jesus is the eschatological prophet bespeaking the Other for the sake of all others. There is no way around the prophetic core of Christian self-understanding. Even our earliest christologies come in prophetic form. Not only the liberation and evangelical theologies but all serious Christian theology must maintain that prophetic form or admit that its transformation into some reality has become something perhaps rich and strange but no longer Christian, that is, prophetic.

That prophetic core, in turn, can move in two directions. First, the prophetic insight can be taken in a generalizing direction wherein its religious/revelatory core is seen as, at its heart, also an ethics. This is what Emmanuel Levinas has found in his simultaneous discovery that ethics is first philosophy and that true ethics is grounded in the face of the other. The other-the biblical neighbor-is what no ontological totality can ever control. The temptation to totalizing modes of thought is disrupted once and for all by the glimpse of the Infinite in the face of the other and its ethical command, "Do not kill me." Is it really so surprising that Levinas' work has become so central not only for Jewish thought but also for Christian liberation theology with its instinctive prophetic-ethical sense for the other, especially the preferred other of the prophets-the poor, the marginal, and the oppressed.

One or another version of this prophetic move determines the new kind of Christian theological ethics in many postmodern political, feminist, womanist, and liberation theologies across the Christian world. The difference between a postmodern ethics focused on the Other and others and the kinds of ethical positions developed in modern liberal theologies focused on the modern autonomous self and its rational obligations is clear. Some move to ethics (or with the ancients, more accurately, the ethical-political realm) is necessary for Christian theology. Postmodern positions (like Levinas) seem to me far more hermeneutically faithful to the prophetic self-understanding than the more familiar modern deontological and teleological Christian ethical options.

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But the prophetic center can also break away from any generalizing move at all in favor of the intensification, indeed transgression, of the prophetic form into a radically disruptive apocalyptic form. "When prophesy fails, apocalyptic takes over." And so it may. History then becomes interpreted not as continuity at all but as radical interruption. In philosophy, the apocalyptic urgency of the early Frankfurt thinkers (especially Benjamin and Adorno) will return-as it surely does in the apocalyptic political theology of Johann Baptist Metz, where theology yields great ethical-political urgency driven by the meaning of suffering but does not yield generalizing ethical principles. When apocalypse is understood in and through the forms of excess, transgression, and negation of continuity, then apocalyptic returns as the favored form of many radicalized political theologies.

"The two most basic religious forms in the Bible are the prophetic and the meditative (wisdom) forms. "

In the meantime, the other great biblical form, the meditative or wisdom form, may also move in these same two directions. First, at its center, the meditative form turns away from the more historical and ethical prophetic core of the Bible in order to reflect upon our relationships to the cosmos and to face the kind of limit-situations (death, guilt, anxiety, despair, joy, peace, and hope) that human being as human beings will always experience. Job and Lamentations will always speak their meditative, penetrating truth to anyone capable of facing the tragedy that is human existence. The Gospel of John-that meditative rendering of the common Christian narrative-will always describe the beauty and glory of the whole of reality (even the cross as the lifting up and disclosure of glory) to all those capable of genuine meditation on the limit experiences of peace, joy, beauty, and love. Meditative humans, then as now, will turn to intelligence and love, to nature and to cosmos, to mind and to body, to aid their reflections on the vision of life, the wisdom, disclosed by the biblical narratives for our common human limit-experiences.

When these meditative positions make even further generalizing moves, they are more likely to develop profound participatory metaphysics (like Platonism in all its splendid forms). When more ethically oriented, a wisdom ethics will prove an aesthetic ethics of appreciation of the good and of beauty (like Whitehead and Hartshorne). When more historically conscious, these meditative positions will develop into a hermeneutical philosophy disclosing the dialogical character of all reality. A wisdom grounded metaphysics (never totalizing, if hermeneutically faithful to its biblical core) and an aesthetics will unite to relate themselves to some form of prophetic ethics, more likely in these traditions an ethics of the good, as in Iris Murdoch.

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The meditative traditions, however, need not stay in those participatory moments. They, too, may take their own turn to the Other. Then the meditation is intensified to the point of becoming transgressive of all participation-as typically with postmodern recoveries of the more radical mystical traditions. Love then becomes not relationality or overflow but sheer excess and transgression-from Bataille through Kristeva. Radically apophatic Christian mysticism (for example, Meister Eckhart) becomes a genuine option for contemporary thought. The recovery of mystical readings of the prophetic core of Judaism and Christianity is one of the surest signs of a postmodern sensibility. In a similar fashion, the return of the repressed "pagan" emphasis on nature becomes an equally clear sign, as Scholem insisted, of the presence of a new mystical reading of a prophetic tradition.

"The recovery of mystical readings of the prophetic core of Judaism and Christianity is one of the surest signs of a postmodern sensibility. "

This fuller spectrum of a seemingly endless series of new prophetic and meditative forms of new possibilities in new theologies across the globe will surely increase. As both cross-cultural sensibilities and inter-religious dialogue take further hold on serious Christian theology, moreover, this prophetic-meditative spectrum will increase yet again. Theology will never again be tameable by a system-any system-modern or premodern or postmodern. For theology does not bespeak a totality. Christian theology, at its best is the voice of the Other through all those others who have tasted, prophetically and meditatively, the Infinity disclosed in the kenotic reality of Jesus Christ.