ABSTRACT
Jean-François Lyotard attributed ‘postmodern’ to the fundamental condition of twentieth-century thinking in a manner which made the pre x stick. The Postmodern Condition is known to have been prophetic in calling forth ‘an incredulity towards metanarratives’ which applies equally to all of the sciences as forms of knowledge (Lyotard 1979: xxvi). As a result, no account of any kind of knowledge could have a de nite beginning, development, and ending. Systematic theology suffers a serious blow from a general recognition of this postmodern condition. Yet certain theologians and some philosophers of religion continue with ambitious narratives about orthodox Christianity (Milbank 1992; Milbank et al. 1999; Plantinga 2000). Postmodern theologians will agree that the metanarrative of modern philosophy as consistently rational progress has failed. As the Enlightenment narrative goes, the world is rational insofar as it is shaped by a particular sense of reason. This sense renders an agreement of both the secular and the religious sciences as long as they remain consistent with the norms of reason: each human character has been given a rational faculty with which the subjects of this story will eventually achieve universal certainty, peace, and prosperity. This grand story portrays a march of progress which has become incredible in light of the global reality of our lives today. The story’s picture of reality is no longer compatible with either secular or religious views of the world as we understand the present, past, or future. Lyotard seems right about knowledge, but also about moral progress. There is no universally recognized narrative about progress toward peace; at a minimum, the moral development of humanity is not linear. So, the grand narrative of Enlightenment history and rational self-development would appear to be false. One reading of this condition restricts ‘the postmodern’ to the end of Enlightenment hope. Yet another reading intends to hold on to a strong thread of hope for making sense of things. Reason, history, and metaphysics – including metaphysical accounts of the self and of God – are the central casualties of a failure of twentieth-century progress. Metaphorical description of ‘the death’ of these victims is, at times, thought premature. If postmodern theology refers to a condition at the end of the twentieth
century, then are we moving toward new life in post-postmodernism with signi cant stories about God? There is little concrete evidence that either theologians or philosophers have begun with a new Enlightenment narrative. Skeptics continue to employ the attribute ‘postmodern.’ In the late 1970s the ‘post’ before ‘modern’ might have been thought to herald an ending to one grand story with a view to another story. Today both academic and non-academic writers appear stuck with no end, no new start, and no progressive change. The use of the pre x ‘post’- persists not only before modern, but before Christian: a theologian can avowedly be ‘post-Christian’ (see Hampson 1996). Instead of an end or a new start, post-Christian implies a loss of belief in a Christian God. We live after what has been, but is no longer fully, trusted as rational and certain. To clarify earlier comments Lyotard claims, ‘Postmodernism . . . is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’ (2001: 369). It is fair to say that postmodern theology remains in a state out of which various movements emerge. But is every movement of theology to be called postmodern? If so, how is the distinctiveness of the postmodern de ned? A distinctive quality of the postmodern state of theology could be its formative nature as multiple, partial stories about God. Another characteristic of the postmodern condition seems to distinguish itself as a pursuit of a general story in which faith as the condition for truth still shapes human corporate living, acting, and thinking. Well before Lyotard, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) ushered in twentiethcentury atheism from a critical standpoint at the end of the nineteenth-century. Nietzsche’s aphorisms have been profoundly prophetic. His words from The Gay Science retain a clear ring of truthfulness: ‘even we devotees of knowledge today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, still take our re too from the ame which a faith thousands of years old has kindled: that Christian faith, which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine’ (Nietzsche 2001: 201, sect. 344). The most extreme atheists, the most anti-metaphysical of thinkers, including postmodern theologians – who, if not explicitly ‘anti-metaphysical,’ are often ‘antirealist’ – still take their cognitive and conative inspiration from the ame of a faith that God is truth. In a book whose title resonates with the postmodern in articulating themes and variations on an Enlightenment philosopher, Noble in Reason, Infi nite in Faculty: Themes and Variations on Kant’s Moral and Religious Philosophy (2003), A. W. Moore captures the spirit of Nietzsche’s re and of Lyotard’s incredulity. His postKantian account is compelling:
It is frequently urged nowadays that there is no ‘metanarrative.’ . . . there is no preordained story about the human condition to which all our own individual stories must be subordinated: things, to that extent, do not make sense. Perhaps not. But we must hope that there is whatever enables us to make sense of things. We must hope that there is whatever enables us to carry on telling our own individual stories. (Moore 2003: 195-6)
The ame of faith continues in active hope. This is alive in postmodern philosophers who want to believe that God’s existence is either certain or possible and in those who literally believe in the impossible when it comes to God. Theological activity is bound to be weak at times. Nevertheless, its spark survives after a century haunted by a confusing array of postmodern polemics. Nietzsche’s ‘ ame which a faith thousands of years old has kindled’ remains the bottom line for both metaphysicians and antimetaphysicians in the twenty- rst century.
