Burning Bridges (Post-Modernity)
Descarte and John Caputo
Scriptures:
Matthew 5:1-11 and 1 Corinthians 1:18-31
What does blessing mean, if it is for
the poor? How can mourners and those who are persecuted be blessed? Happy are
those, in the most unhappy of plights?
What is
wisdom, if it does not see God in the world? What is strength, if it is only
used to slam a boot on the messiah’s shoulder? What too is folly or weakness,
if it lays flat all that this world holds dear? How does all political and
religious might stack up to God on a cross?
Both of
these texts short-circuit expectations and give such nuance to words like
wisdom and blessed that they make language weird. If you think you have power,
you don’t have power. If you think you understand blessing, you don’t
understand blessing. The prevailing stories of political might and religious
holiness—that the crucified are criminal and those that die upon a cross
cursed—aren’t true or God ordained, in light of the God who is revealed to us
on the cross.
Likewise, the post-modern project
seeks to weird language, and short-circuit unreflective expectations; it
punctures big stories societies tell themselves and looks at the world from its
underside.
Legos a
Metaphor:
Legos are amazing. On one hand, they
are a really neat way to make a model, be it an airplane or fire house, castle
or pirate ship. On the other hand, they are an amazing way to let your
imagination go wild, the pieces of a pirate ship can be rearranged and made
into an RV or multiple little boats or a cave. For that matter, the firehouse
and the castle can be combined in ways that don’t look anything like what’s on
the box.
And those two ways we play with Legos,
as model kits and as building blocks for the imagination, are a good way to
think about modernity and post-modernity. Modernity would say the building
blocks of life fit in a particular way, Post-Modernity would say, “The
connection between things is not clear.”
Just to build out from that model:
-Modernity
would say, “I think, therefore I am.” Reality can be ascertained by an
individual mind looking at the world and gathering data. Observation is how we
build knowledge.
Post-modernity
would say, “There are eyes and minds that you can not know.” It would question
and “deconstruct” the observations of Modernity.
-Modernity
sees Truth as universal and objective.
Post-modernity
sees truths as relative and subjective.
-Modernity
tries to tell a grand narrative, a big story about the world.
Post-modernity
declares, as I stated before and I’ll state again, “The connection between
things is not clear,” and so telling a larger story about them is an act of
power and will.
Descartes:
Rene
Descartes lived during the brutal wars of religion in Europe. He wondered,
quite sincerely, which Dogma that people are killing one another over, is true?
How do you ascertain truth at all?
Eventually
he came to a novel solution. Truth comes from an individual mind observing the
world. “I think, therefore I am.” Our observations of the world are the
starting place for finding truth.
It is
from this set of assumptions that the modern world is born. With enough
observational power big stories can be told, grand narratives that are
universal in scope. The surety of dogma can be replaced with the surety of
observation and measurement.
Caputo:
John Caputo is a post-modern
theologian who sees the post-modern rallying cry, “The connection between
things is not clear!” as one deeply in line with the Christian faith.
In fact,
for Caputo, deconstruction—taking apart the Lego model and wondering if the
pieces could be put together differently; noticing the ways that the choices
that went into the construction were not done in a dispassionate and objective
manner, but indeed were filled with biases and passions—is an act of idol
smashing. Any story, Caputo would say, that is big enough to be totalizing, is
also big enough to be an act of idolatry.
Caputo’s
ultimate example of deconstruction is the cross. God is executed by our big
totalizing ideas. God is executed, and when you realize that’s the case,
everything else in this world, the way we’ve fashioned the world that allows
for our killing of God incarnate, is suspect, is fair game to be questioned, called
out as subjective and relative, unmasked as acts of power and will. If the
powers of observation can’t see God at work in the world, perhaps they can’t
apprehend a universal truth as well as they would claim.
Conclusion:
There is a chasm between
the modern world and the post-modern world. It seems that once you cross that
chasm you can not help but burn the bridge behind you. The act of
deconstructing big stories and protestations of objectivity are alienating. Yet
it is worth noticing that both modernity and post-modernity can come out of
faithful longings. Descartes desired a way to know truth in the face of an
explosion of dogmas, and Caputo wields deconstruction against the many idols of
the modern age.
