What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture)

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 160 pages
• Published by: Baker Academic November 1, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0801031362
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0801031366
• Book Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Weighs: 7.2 ounces

Product Description
This provocative addition to The Church and Postmodern Culture series offers a lively rereading of Charles Sheldon's In His Steps as a constructive way forward. John D. Caputo introduces the notion of why the church requirements deconstruction, positively defines deconstruction's role in renewal, deconstructs idols of the church, and imagines the future of the church in addressing the practical implications of this for the church's life through liturgy, worship, preaching, and teaching. Students of philosophy, theology, religion, and ministry, as well as others interested in engaging postmodernism and the emerging church phenomenon, will welcome this provocative, non-technical work.

Back Cover Copy
Many in the church who are wrestling with ministry in a postmodern era view deconstruction as a negative aspect of the postmodern movement. But John Caputo, one of the leading philosophers of religion in America and a leading voice on religion and postmodernism, sees it differently. In this lively and provocative analysis, he argues that in his own way Jesus himself was a deconstructionist and that applying deconstruction to the church can be a positive move toward renewal.

"Caputo brilliantly manages to bring thought to life and life to thought. He wears his learning and scholarship so lightly that one has the impression of returning to a flesh-and-blood world where Jesus deconstructs and reconstructs our lives. Challenging, compassionate, witty, and wise. This book is compulsory reading for anyone concerned about the future of Christianity." --Richard Kearney, Charles Seelig Professor in Philosophy, Boston College

"Let this book settle the debate once and for all: postmodern philosophy does not preclude true Christian faith. In fact, taken rightly, postmodernism leads not to nihilistic relativism but to a robust faith in the Savior, who himself was bent on deconstruction. Caputo is a sheep in wolf's clothing." --Tony Jones, national coordinator of Emergent Village, author of The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier

"This is a marvelous little book. It enables readers to understand deconstruction as the hermeneutics of the kingdom of God and provides a glimpse of what this concept might look like in the hands of Jesus as applied to the church. This will be difficult therapy, and many of us will be inclined to resist. However, let us remember that while discipline is painful in the moment, it produces a harvest of peace and righteousness in the long run. May the church learn from the wisdom found in these pages." --John R. Franke, professor of theology, Biblical Seminary

Reader Reviews
This book is a `gift' in the rigorous Derridian sense. Given time, Caputo's work will do some good work loosing up the rusty sprockets in that old, underused relic known as the Evangelical imagination. With characteristic style, Jack Caputo gives Evangelicaland a smart introduction to `deconstruction.' As fun a read as any other Caputo tablet, it shares with those tables many - by now conventional - performative devices: `the very idea!,' and so forth. Stylistics aside, Caputo's book will perform a hygienic function for those readers who risk thinking beyond Evangelical theo-theorems that always add up to Same, sloganesque dogmas. Yet, as one might expect, Caputo tends to understate - or merely hint and wink - at the double movement of his `pharmikos.' And it is this understatement I find interesting. Anyone familiar with Derrida's rigorous theoretical work knows that `deconstruction and Christianity' is an impossible conjuncture of terms. Derrida makes a lot of hay with the `impossible,' and amongst his enthusiastic disciples, Caputo could justly be designated as Derrida's `apostle of the impossible.' The impossibility I refer to, however, is good ol' fashion impossibility, i.e. formally inconsistent and `substantively' incommensurable. On the one hand, Christianity could express the ineluctable metaphysical moment in the double-movement of deconstruction's textual operation, and Caputo's book attends to those repressed traces that make Christianity tremble, open it up, etc. That Jesus becomes, amazingly, an archetype of this subversive gesture is surely foul play in two senses. First, it allows Jesus to be reappropriated after a pomo fashion, i.e. allows us Evangelicals to associate Jesus with `deconstruction,' to receive Jesus back repackaged for our pomo consumption. Jesus practiced deconstruction? Derrida, then, or at least the inscrutable, buzzing textuality he gives us must be equivalent to YAHWEH! Second, Jesus announced that he is coming again in a purifying Last Judgment that will inaugurate a utopian golden age: for the Christian wagers that his promise will be FULFILLED. Derrida and his consistent diatribe against the possibility of `redemption,' would politely poke at this as a piece of nostalgic and resentful fantasy. Hence, when Caputo invokes Metz's "dangerous memory" and claims this as what Derrida has in mind with his logic of the trace, he is playing tricks. Caputo well knows that this analogy is strained. For Metz - who follows Benjamin and Adorno - this memory irrupts within a historical and normative horizon: Christ's eschatological coming (M) and an emancipatory overcoming of capitalism (B&A). Derrida not only problematizes normativity and historical materialism, his version of the `promise' is completely formal: the `to come' is nothing but the latest atelic irruptions the textual totality are SURE to produce. When deployed in a context of substantive belief and practice, deconstruction has some value; taken in stark terms, its formalistic antinomianism. I have learned a lot from Caputo and Derrida. Yet after tarrying with deconstruction, I have learned that deconstruction is nothing but a `metaphysics of metaphysics.' As Derrida determines it, the necessity of metaphysics and the attendant `atelic' necessity of the trace makes deconstruction - quite like the ego-cogito it eternally dismembers - as unassailable as it is formal. I'm no fan of John Searle, but he was surely correct when he characterizes the game Derrida plays as "heads I win, tails you lose." Deconstruction can one-up or go-one-deeper than any discourse it works over. Hence Caputo - and I mean this sincerely - can do very interesting and inspiring work in the philosophy of religion, while at the same time style himself as a Nietzschean hero (see Against Ethics). Hence, Derrida can style himself as a radical subversive when addressing a Marxist audience, while championing the virtues of liberal-democracy before humanist audiences, etc. In any case, Caputo's book is worth the read. He is surely right that Jesus was subversive, even if in ways not completely obedient to deconstructive orthodoxy. One hopes that thinking Christians will go on and read Derrida's rigorous early work to get a full dose of what deconstruction is about. One may even notice that the `general text' and its bellicose Laws uncannily resemble the enforced anarchy of Global Capital. The unmitigated and unnecessary suffering unleashed by this hegemony refuses to be reduced to a cipher for the irrepresentable trace, and it is the memory of this suffering - and the hopes and desires of the repressed - that is dangerous: it bears witness to the POSSIBILITY of overcoming our horrific history in the irruption of a Judgment the will not be outstripped, of a Peace and Justice that may come and endure.