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Postmodernism and the ‘Trinity’: How to be postmodern and post‐Barthian too

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Ross Thompson
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The trouble with post-modern theology is that it tends to be pre-Barthian. Indeed, two main strands of English theology that have attempted to write from a postmodern perspective—the ‘Sea of Faith’ school surrounding Don Cupitt, and the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ school surrounding John Milbank, Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock— share very little else but their postmodernism and different kinds of pre-Barthianism. I suspect the arguments of this article could be applied equally to the American ‘post-liberal’ school surrounding George Lindbeck, but space forbids treatment of too many variants.

For a definition of postmodernism I follow Milbank:

The end of modernity, which is not yet accomplished, but continues to arrive, means the end of a single system of truth based on universal reason, which tells us what reality is like.

Modernism then represents faith in three things:

  1. 1 Deductivism: the idea that all meaningful language forms a single deductive system, wherein the truth value of any proposition can be calculated;

  2. 1 Foundationalism: the idea that this system can be securely based on universally accepted premises

  3. 1 Correspondence theory: the idea that statements exist to express truth, which consists in the correspondence between what they assert and what is the case.

Modernism hopes one day to get at a text that is consistent with itself, demonstrable to all reasonable people, and adequate to the world. Of course, there is a lot out there in the world that is currently ‘outside the text’, but one day we will expand the text to fit the world exactly, like a glove.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 83 , Issue 974 , April 2002 , pp. 173 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 ‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A short summa in Forty‐two Responses to Unasked Questions’, in Ward, Graham, ed., The Postmodern God, a theological Reader, Blackwell 1997, p. 265Google Scholar.

2 Reno, R. R., 'The Radical Orthodoxy Project’, in First Things 100 (2000), p.40Google Scholar.

3 ‘The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ’, in Radical Orthodoxy, eds. Milbank, John, Pickstock, Catherine and Ward, Graham, Routledge 1999, p. 177CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 ‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’, op. cit., p.271.

5 ‘The Incarnate One’.

6 Metaphysical Horror, Penguin 2001, p.55.

7 Graham Ward, Introduction to Radical Orthodoxy, op. cit., p. 1.

8 Cf Catherine Pickstock, ‘Music: Soul, City and Cosmos after Augustine’, in ibid., pp.243 ff.

9 The Revelation of Being, SCM 1998, p.23.

10 op. cit. p.21.

11 op. cit. p.69.

12 Creation out of Nothing, SCM 1990, p. 129.

13 ibid., p. x.

14 I have described these three forms of relativism in greater detail in my article, ‘What kind of Relativism?’, New Blackfriars, April 1989. Roughly, ontological relativism relates to ‘strong thesis postmodernism’, and epistemological relativism to ‘weak thesis postmodernism’, in Sue Patterson's Realist Christian Theology in a Postmodern Age, Cambridge University Press 1999. Patterson deals with an almost entirely different set of writers, but her aims seem to be similar to mine.

15 The terms derive, of course, from Wittgenstein, who was probably an epistemological relativist. Cf Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, SPCK 1997, Chapter 6: Assurances of Realism.

16 Faith beyond Resentment, DLT 2001.

17 Cf e.g. Dogmatics in Outline, SCM 1949, pp.35–6.

18 Barth himself later corrected some of these tendencies in his beautiful booklet, The Humanity of God.

19 Don Cupitt, The Revelation of Being, op. cit., p.94.

20 Shadows of the Mind, Oxford University Press 1994, pp. 413–4.

21 Some modern cosmologies actually make observation by human consciousness constitutive of cosmic reality, without denying consciousness as something that has evolved within the cosmos. This creates a similar kind of circle.

22 Cf Jean‐Luc Marion, ‘Metaphysics and Phenomenology: a Summary for Theologians’, in Radical Orthodoxy, op. cit., pp.279 ff.

23 It is on this basis that one might take issue with Lindbeck's post‐liberalism. Cf Rowan Williams, ‘The Judgement of the World’, in On Christian Theology, Blackwell 2000, pp. 29 ff.