Summer Book Report #1

As we gear up for another semester of loving the law, I want to commend to the wider world three very helpful books that I read this summer.  In the first, Who's Afraid of Post-Modernism?, James Smith, a philosophy prof at Calvin College, explains why Christians should not presume that postmodern thought is a threat to the faith.  By way of (woefully) cursory summary, he argues that:

Derrida's insight that there is "nothing outside the text" should push us to "recover two key emphases of the church: (a) the centrality of Scripture for mediating our understanding of the world as a whole and (b) the role of community in the interpretation of Scripture."

Lyotard's assertion that postmodernity is "incredulity toward metanarratives" is "ultimately a claim to be affirmed by the church, pushing us to recover (a) the narrative character of Christian faith, rather than understanding it as a collection of ideas, and (b) the confessional nature of our narrative and the way in which we find ourselvesin a world of competing narratives."

Foucault's claim that "power is knowledge" should "push us to realize . . . (a) the cultural power of formation and discipline, and hence (b) the necessity of the church to enact counterformation by counterdisciplines.  In other words, we need to think about discipline as a creational structure that needs proper direction.  Foucault has something to tell us about what it means to be a disciple."

Smith, writing as an evangelical, concludes that postmodern theology will be "much more hospitable to both dogmatic theology and the institutional church," and that the postmodern church "must be radically incarnational," affirming the incarnation's scandalous "particularlity with respect to both space and time."  This requires, in turn, "a healthy sense of being constituted by our traditions as we look forward to an eschatological hope in the future."

A fascinating read, due in part to the fact that the postmodern evangelical church, as prescribed by Smith, looks quite Catholic.

Rob