159 - Straddling Modernism and Postmodernism

Straddling Modernism and Postmodernism
By Leonard I. Sweet

"Why has what Cobb positions as the two basic forms of postmodern theology, process and deconstruction, made so little impact on theological education, to say nothing of grasping the imagination and loyalty of either the church's faithful or its disaffected? Why has process theology not lived up to its potential within the church, which has devoured 'group process' (and been devoured by it) while turning down process thought? Indeed, why are both process and deconstruction so out of touch with the church?"

Back in the days when Chou En-Lai and Mao Zedong were battling for control of China, Archduke Otto von Habsburg, pretender to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, asked Chou En-Lai: "What do you think of the French Revolution?" Chou En-Lai was silent for a moment, but finally answered with conviction: "It's too soon to tell."

If it is too soon to tell about the French Revolution upon its two hundreth anniversary, it is much too soon to tell about postmodernism. Yet that should not, and has not, stopped scholars from talking about it and working on it.

With all the allusions to postmodernism, one would expect the topic to have been defined to death by now. Precisely the opposite is the case. The need for clarifying perspectives and definitional discussions that can dispel postmodernism's conceptual dimness is greater than ever before. John Cobb's essay, in this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY, tense with nothing that has not been carefully thought through, dense with everything that could be unraveled separately in chapter-length form, is a welcome and splendid contribution to this constructive task.

Is the postmodern category more than an academically fashionable prognostication? Is postmodernism merely a topical allusion, perhaps even an optical illusion? People genuinely seem to feel themselves between a curtain-change in the human consciousness. The uncertainty seems to be whether we are witnessing the end of something old, a

Leonard I. Sweet is President and Professor of Church History at the United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio. He has served as the minister of the United Methodist Church in Geneseo, N.Y. and as Provost of Colgate Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall/Crozer Theological Seminary. He is the author of New Life in the Spirit (1982), The Minister's Wife: Her Role in Nineteenth Century American Evangelicalism (1983), and editor of The Evangelical Tradition in America (1984).

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sentiment that has given rise to the phenomenon of "endism" (a la Francis Fukuyama) and "unprecedentism" (á la George Will), or whether we are a part of the beginning of something radically new. But the conviction is widespread, and growing, that our feet are already moving in some emerging postmodern world even if our hearts are left far behind, still stuck in the deracinated and disconnected forms of modernism's passing epoch.

Where is the church in all this? Unseemly preoccupied with the small-change issues of religion? The church is, as Cobb forcefully points out, moving imitatively rather than innovatively under radically changing conditions. No wonder mainline churches are treated by the culture like many modern families treat their elderly-allowing them to have their say from time to time but deeming it unnecessary to actually listen to them. No wonder denominations are serviced by an ancien regime of divinity schools, more at home in the stone and steel corridors of Cambridge and Paris than in the electronic, economic world of the Pacific Rim.

Cobb seems to think that process theology, with a deconstructive moment to kick things off, could be changing all this if only the church were more receptive to the wider intellectual world. His borderline despair at the end of his article bespeaks a deep disappointment at the fate of process theology in the wider culture. But process theology has been on all good liberal pastors' bookshelves for decades. It has been in many evangelical libraries for at least a decade.¹ Process theologians have been among the best and brightest teaching stars at America's most prestigious, pace-setting seminaries. Indeed, the theological movement known as process has gained almost as preeminent a place in America's seminaries as the intellectual movement known as deconstruction has gained in America's universities.

Why has what Cobb positions as the two basic forms of postmodern theology, process and deconstruction, made so little impact on theological education, to say nothing of grasping the imagination and loyalty of either the church's faithful or its disaffected? Why has process theology not lived up to its potential within the church, which has devoured "group process" (and been devoured by it) while turning down process thought? Indeed, why are both process and deconstruction so out of touch with the church? Why has theological education been taking its cues from everyone else, with no significant voice to speak for itself, no equivalent to what religious studies' departments and scholars have in the American Academy of Religion? Why, indeed, does a religious studies piety, not a church piety, dominate the theological scene? In short, why has process theology failed to make the old story new?

¹ For an overview of the varied responses to process theology by evangelicals see Randall Basinger, "Evangelicals and Process Theism: Seeking a Middle Ground," Christian Scholar's Review 15 (1985-86), pp. 157-167. See especially Thomas Tracy's middleground approach to process theology in God, Action and Embodiment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982).

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In the first place, in spite of all the anti-foundationalist critiques of reason and the barbarism of rationalism, process theologians prove to be some of the staunchest defenders and practitioners of the agnostic, agonistic nature of the scientific method. If postmodernists ought to have anything in common, it is a discounting, if not discarding, of the rules, edicts, and precepts of modernism-especially its scientistic sentiments and formulations of objective scholarship. Cobb himself has been a leading figure in calling for non-disciplinary organizations of knowledge, holistic modes of inquiry which are disciplined, albeit not disciplinary. He has co-authored one of the most revolutionary critiques of theological curricula in its advocacy for dismantling the traditional disciplines of scholarly research and customary curricular fields.²

But process thought generally has been more enamored of the modernist, rationalist side of Whitehead than in the mystical, aesthetic origins of his thought in Henri Bergson and William James. As theologian Tyron Inbody notes in a series of important articles, spinning out the implications of the introduction to Process and Reality (1929), Whitehead's equivocations set two forces in motion: a modernist wave, dominated by idealistic and rationalistic methodologies that has swept theologians off their feet and an undeveloped empirical, aesthetic motion that gives rise to a postmodern realism and mysticism.³

The degree to which process theology has been carved ineffaceably by the motions of the modernist mind-set is evident in the degree to which process theologians have become some of the most devoted disciples of reason in the academic profession. Willing to pursue knowledge at whatever price, willing to follow the modernist premise of logic wherever it leads, process philosophers are in the main unwilling to admit other access points to ultimate reality than the conceptual faculties of the mind. Any radical commitment to transpersonal identities and global generalities is being continually sacrificed to process' perverse acquiescence in orthodox, fragmented educational processes that return us to the Western classical canon supported so eloquently by "the killer Bs"-Allan Bloom and William Bennett. The traditional or "core curriculum," which has made such a recent comeback in American theological education, consists too often of teaching students how to distance themselves in significant ways from what they already know

² Joseph C. Hough, Jr. and John B. Cobb, Jr., Christian Identity and Theological Education (Decatur, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1985).
³ See Tyron Inbody, "Bernard Meland: 'A Rebel Among Process Theologians'," American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 5 (May and September 1983), pp. 43-71; "How Empirical is Wieman's Theology?" Zygon 22 (March 1987), pp. 49-56; "Meland's Post-Liberal Empirical Method in Theology," God, Values, and Empiricism, ed. Creighton Peden (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1990), pp. 99-108; and "Essays in Constructive Theology, Bernard Meland: a Review," Process Studies, forthcoming. Inbody shows how an out-of-step Bernard Meland followed the directions and implications of the aesthetic, empirical path for theological method and construction, while almost everyone else followed Hartshorne down the science or reason road.

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and are being taught to know. Learning may be knowledge transmission. But wisdom is knowledge transaction-which is less knowledge than acknowledgment.

II

Second, process theology has grounded itself in modern science and other useful arts rather than in the re-emergence of aesthetic modalities. The modern movement, as any look around of postwar architectural construction in Europe or America can testify, was characterized by a lack of style. Anyone who has ever read process texts, to say nothing of Jacques Derrida (with a few key exceptions like Cobb), can testify to just how obtuse, graceless, and unornamented these writings can be. Theological education needs to reorient itself and focus its attention, not simply on how the old gets transmitted, but how the new gets created. Harvard theologian Gordon Kaufman made precisely this point at a recent symposium on theological education and the arts. Creative endeavors are artistic endeavors. If ministry is an art form, theological education must be seen as much an art as a science. The medium of style is absolutely essential to communicating the gospel to an acoustic culture like postmodernism. Color photographer Eliot Porter, whose photographic estate was recently bequeathed to the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art in Fort Worth, Texas, summarizes these first and second points with his observation that "a true work of art is the creation of love, love for the subject first and for the medium second.⁴

III

Third, a hermetic elitism characterizes process ways of doing theology. What Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley found in the philosophy and science of their day was a language they could use to speak to the masses. The dominant worldview has tremendous power to influence the way we think on a host of theological and philosophical issues. It is the challenge of theology to build bridges to the dominant worldview so that the gospel can cross the surging tides of time without being swept away or aside. Process theologians have proven themselves too close to their subject, too infatuated with their script, too wrapped up in their logocentric language code, to present their thought in a form for strangers. Worship and devotion, tradition and revelation, constitute the womb in which theology is created and takes shape. Unfortunately, these are untenable in the fashionable intellectual circles where Cobb's two postmodern theologies circulate. There, the higher up one goes, the less one expects any but wrong-headed dunderheads to hold a church faith. Process theology has not been sufficiently nourished by the devotional culture of the church.

If Christianity is to remain Christianity, it must preach one thing -Christ. That same incredulous insularity that leads John Cobb and

⁴ Eliot Porter, as quoted in Sierra 76 (1987), p. 13.

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Joseph Hough to "call on Christians to give up Christocentrism"⁵ at the same time they advocate locating theological education wholly within the realm of the church betrays just how remote from the pew process thought has built its bridges to the culture. The only more blatant irrelevance that comes to mind is the march toward Marxism-Leninism by the darlings of the Western church (liberation theologians) and the academic darlings of the Western university (Marxist scholars). This procession is unforgettable. For crossing on the bridge going the other way was another liberation march-the whole geopolitical world of communism in stampede from Marxism-Leninism, led by members of the Eastern church. Marxism has been moribund for years. The last to know it were the Western church and academy.

IV

Fourth, process thought has proved unable to disentangle itself from modernism's penchant for conjunctive theologies, or what Oscar Cullmann called "generic theologies." In spite of all the rhetoric, there has been little movement from conjunctive/generic theologies (and/of liberation, and/of society, and/of hope, and/of sex, and/of economics, and/of feminism, and/of environment) to holistic, integrative, mythic modes of biblical reflection and faith. Radical attacks on reductionism owe little to theological education, where abstract thought, objectivist fastidiousness, obsessive careerism and blinkered specialization continue to occupy the attention of professionals. Judged in terms of its own grand mission and promise, process theology has reached rather unmemorable conclusions in anything other than its aim and conceptual scheme. The very desirability of conceptual schemes, moreover, is one of the key assumptions of modernism rendered suspect by postmodernism. Inbody wonders, in fact, whether the discipline of theology itself may not be one of those conceptual schemes postmodern sensibilities will ultimately humble if not silence.⁶

V

I have focused purposively on process theology for two reasons. First, I agree with David Ray Griffin that deconstruction is actually best described as "ultramodernism," or as I prefer to call it, hypermodernism, not postmodernism. Mark C. Taylor upholding and John D. Caputo notwithstanding,⁷ we have been down this road before, in a different vehicle. The model and make was then known as "death of God" theology. Deconstruction is one of the most blatantly atheistic theologies produced by the modern era.

Second, God only knows what to say about a theology for the church which is dedicated to exposing every mystification and is distinguished

⁵ Hough and Cobb, Christian Identity, p. 30.
⁶ Inbody, "Television as a Medium for Theology," Changing Channels (Dayton: Whaleprints, 1990).
⁷ See John D. Caputo's excellent review article "Derrida and the Study of Religion" in Religious Studies Review 16 (January 1990), pp. 21-25.

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by its beliefs that nothing can be known for certain; that there is nothing outside the text and the text breaks apart in one's hands until one is left holding emptiness; that every "subject" is dead or a bad metaphysical joke; that meaning is undecidable, indecipherable, and indeterminate; and that ideas of religious revelation are ludicrous. Deconstructivist potential as a postmodern theology seems limited to intramural gambits and gamesmanship among intellectuals in university religious studies departments.

The modern era is undergoing collapse and disintegration; its wounds, mortal; its illness, terminal. These are conditions that give rise to desperate, even dangerous endeavors to preserve and maintain previous stabilities and sensibilities. The church's intelligentsia, confused and dispirited, is in no position to do much about these destructive forces. Unfortunately, process theologians, vigorous, enspirited, and attuned to the anxieties and longings of postmodernism's cultural transition, are in no position to do much about them either. Most of them took their leave of the church before really making its acquaintance.