IRISC

International Research Institute into Spirituality and Change

Response to John Reader’s "Democratising Religion : an agenda for IRISC"

John’s paper - and this seminar itself - represent an attempt to lay out the directions and scope for a journey of exploration. And if I use the language of movement whilst hinting at the same time at a vocabulary of boundaries, you see at once that, like John, I’m talking about a state of affairs that’s hard to pin down. The Heisenberg principle tells us that you can’t simultaneously measure the movement of something and talk about where it is located - and the whole debate about modernity/postmodernity, the Enlightenment and whatever follows it, often feels as if it is caught on that dilemma. On the one hand we know we are in a time of transition, but we also seek some sense of definition about where we are. And it’s not easy.

To bring the matter back to this moment here in Bangor, what is it possible to say? It is possible to say that there is a group of people (I won’t say "we", because "we" is a slippery word that too easily co-opts others) for whom words beginning "post-" are not quite enough. A group which recognises that nostalgic returns to past positions - real or imagined - are not possible, but which is interested in exploring the nature of change in the conceptual matrix where thought, life and endeavour go on. Change may be radical - a sudden severing of links to former ways - or it may be gradual and evolutionary, turning the world upside down by stealth. John’s paper suggests an agenda for this group which is not committed to one view of change over another. What is at the heart of the commitment, though, is the desire to consider the impact of change on theology, and of theology on perceptions of change. Theology, after all, has notoriously been suspicious of change in the sense of shifting world-views, and yet has historically been incalculably influential in the construction and sustenance of successive world views over two millennia.

So I believe the task which has brought this group together might be described as exploring the nature of "post" - postmodernity, post-foundationalism etc. - and seeking a more substantive description of where we are which doesn’t depend so heavily on an analysis of where we’ve been. And doing that in the context of, and with the tools of theology.

And I am quite clear that this is the agenda which John is setting out in his paper. This response, therefore, must be understood not as a counter-argument or a rebuttal or anything like that but as another view of the questions at issue.

First, though, there is much in John’s paper that I want to affirm very strongly - not least, the way he starts with the problems posed by our context to practice. The significance of change in the human condition - change in the possibilities of social relationships - is that for innumerable people (including some of the most conservatively inclined) it is manifestly not possible to go on being the kind of people we were. The nature of the discourses that surround us has changed and so the coherence and even the intelligibility of the discourses that generate identity are called into question. when it seems impossible to be the people we are used to being, then the problems of practice demand conceptual adjustment. (I have slipped back into using "we" because the alternatives are cumbersome, but I haven’t forgotten that the uncertain nature of "we" - any "we" - is part of the problem.)

So practice presents us with a problematic. And the problems of practice suggest that there is a real rift between the past we were used to and the present we inhabit. John’s analysis is quite right - that what seems to have been lost is the confidence in the foundational narratives which underpin being, reasoning and conversing. I believe that the loss of confidence in foundational narratives is observably true. The question remains, however, whether this loss of confidence represents a real and irremediable absence or only the perception of absence. In other words, is the rift with the Enlightenment project of modernity one from which we can recover nothing - afloat on a sea of relativism - or is it a less drastic parting of company in which the fabric which binds people, communities, traditions one to another is frayed, holed, flimsy and unreliable, but not yet wholly severed?

The first point I want to make is that there are, of course, theologians and thinkers in other disciplines who place themselves firmly on one side or other of the question. Some maintain the integrity of the modernist project and will not allow that we are living through any major fracturing. Others are so convinced of the depth of the fracture that they allow no possibility of recovering shared foundations of any kind. (Plenty of others, of course, live in both worlds.) Thus, for instance, Ronald Preston stands resolutely for the enduring persuasiveness of modernist coherence. "Pluralism", he reminds us, "is not the same as fissiparousness".¹. Andrew Shanks also rejects the idea of the end of modernity - instead of post-modernity he interprets the times as a new phase of modernity in which a grand narrative, formerly carried by agencies within secular political society and before that by scripture-based religious movements, are now carried by alliances within cosmopolitan civil society. On the other side of the fence, John Milbank’s theology embraces post-modernity’s fundamental rupturing of the Enlightenment narratives and exploits that rupture in order to assert a triumphal (or potentially triumphal) narrative of Christendom.² Ian Markham (to whose work I will return) has a much ‘thicker’, more profound understanding of plurality than Preston, but wants to stop short of the post-modern position that all reason is tradition-constituted.

My point, though, is that the position where people locate themselves in this debate must be understood in terms of their overall project. Where we locate ourselves, the assumptions from which we argue, are chosen not just to reflect our final conclusions but to have a case built upon them. So whilst some, like Milbank, embrace post-modernism because it takes them to where they want to be, others like Boeve,³ adopt a similar ‘thick’ definition of post-modernity in order to define a position he wants to move away from. Shanks, on the other hand, resists the terminology of post-modernity because his project is about resisting the self-fulfilling nature of arguments which assert fragmentation⁴. So Boeve and Shanks appear on different sides of the definitional question although sharing a similar project whilst Boeve and Milbank share a vocabulary in order to underpin their very different purposes.

One might observe that, of the four theologians just mentioned, Preston and Shanks could enter into dialogue on the grounds of their shared location within the narratives of modernity. Boeve can (at least potentially) engage with Milbank because both share a ‘thick’ vocabulary of post-modernity. Preston and Shanks could be said to share a project. Boeve and Milbank emphatically do not. But whilst Shank’s analysis of modernity may just be quirky enough to establish a little common ground with Milbank it is quite clear that Preston and Milbank in conversation would be ships passing in the night.

The point of all this is to say that the shape of our project will, to an extent, be moulded by the case we believe ourselves to be arguing against. And because I believe that our agenda is one of exploration rather than pre-commitment to a position, I suspect that our starting position may be seen as more extreme than it really is. If we are to explore the possibility of some kind of foundational position it may well be necessary to argue from the assumption that no foundations remain. But I do not believe it is open to us to start from a position that the collapse of foundational narratives has not happened - if we start from such assumptions there can be no dialogue with the Milbanks and no influence on their position either. In order to engage with these loud voices in contemporary theology we need, as Boeve does, to argue from the assumptions of post-modernity whilst making it clear that our ‘project’ is seeking a critique which will inform practice.

The problem then is that our starting position may be taken for our attitude. That is, that by starting with certain assumptions we may be seen as celebrating them rather than critiquing them. It is said that it doesn’t take any social workers to change a light bulb - they just run a workshop on ‘coping with darkness’. Our project might be regarded as seeking to adapt to greater darkness whilst looking around for reusable candle-ends which might or might not be there. The direction of the project, then, is as important as the analysis of the starting point.

My second point in response to John’s paper is to edge back rather from his use of ideas like post-foundationalism. Partly this is for reasons I’ve just outlined - it places us too closely alongside those like Don Cupitt who celebrate the absence of foundations and seek to cut loose on a sea of faith, whereas our project is, I believe, not committed to that analysis of our condition. Much of the early part of John’s paper does indeed imply in a very Cupittean way, that God is only a human construct. I want to be wary of this. John rightly notes that the consequences of removing God from a foundational location puts us in as bad a predicament as leaving him in place. But if we start with a position called post-foundationalism it is hard to see how exploring the possibility of any kind of foundation can actually happen. We need a flag to rally round which leaves that possibility open - and so we need a name for the project which expresses its direction as well as its starting point. For me, post-foundationalism is fine as long as it implies only a critical approach to foundational positions - but it also needs, I think, to express a critique of non-foundationalism too.

John rightly questions, in his paper, the idea of hard dichotomies between authoritarian foundationalism and sheer anarchy; between reduction and chaos. I like the point that the dismissal of all foundations becomes itself another foundation. I like the genealogical approach - a "scepticism towards an earlier scepticism". These points, but most of all John’s commitment to a "plurality of fallible foundations7’, convince me that we are involved in a shared project. So I want to say a little more about why I don’t believe that the project is essentially one of post-foundationalism and then to say something about why I think it is an essentially theological project.

The reasons I am reluctant to make the issue one that is primarily about foundations is because I think the idea of grand foundational narratives at one end of the scale raises rather different questions from a more limited position which holds that there are some foundational grounds for intelligibility between traditions. In other words, foundationalism is not one thing, although its different manifestations are related, and, as John says, a sharp dichotomy between foundationalism and anti-foundationalism isn’t helpful. For me, the implication of this is that foundations themselves are not the issue, rather it is about the way foundational positions are used.

Here I want to try to distinguish questions of process from questions of content. John points out that today even Anthony Giddens recognises the necessity of tradition. As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued so influentially, we live by narratives which are inescapably rooted in the traditions of communities. The narratives that constitute tradition embrace the foundational positions of the community which embodies that tradition. If you are a Milbankean, you recognise that there are other narratives, other traditions, but you believe yours is the most comprehensive, sublime and effective. But if you are a Milbankean you also believe that there is no un-traditioned rationality that offers a foundation for dialogue between traditions - the encounter with otherness is essentially about proclamation, enactment and out-narration by the superior tradition. So there is a foundationalism of content - the kind of foundationalism which, as John quotes Van Huyssteen saying is essentially grounded in revelation, is incommunicable in terms of content and forecloses on conversation. And there is the other sort of foundationalism which seeks common grounds for conversation between traditions. Essentially, of course, this is the foundationalism of the Liberal Enlightenment which sought to transcend the particularity of tradition. But (and this is debatable but widely held) that liberal project has failed to understand its own nature as a tradition. Attempting to overcome the content-foundationalism of tradition, it has imposed instead a foundationalism of process. The question which exercises me (and I think John too) is whether the recognition of liberal, tradition-transcendent rationality as a tradition itself means that there are no trans- traditional foundations at all for conversation between traditions.

Following my earlier argument, I think we have to start with a position that is sceptical about the possibility of tradition-transcendent foundations - then we can more clearly see if any exist. By-passing several steps in the argument here, I turn back to Ian Markham who is prepared to allow a rather vestigial and attenuated foundation in the basic laws of logic⁵. He argues that, while MacIntyre and others argue that all reason is tradition-constituted, the basic laws of logic (non-contradiction, excluded middle and so on) are universal - not even God can work outside them. Whilst it may be true that practical reason is essentially traditioned, there are foundations of reason which are not. And on this small be important foundation, Markham constructs a case for dialogue between traditions (grounded in a natural theology).

(In parentheses I would add that I think Markham’s reading of Maclntyre is too absolute. Where Maclntyre describes an encounter between traditions - an epistemological crisis - he talks of the possibility of a replacement narrative or an extended narrative. From this I conclude that Maclntyre is prepared to allow that traditions can develop new insights from encounter with others and that there are thus some tradition-transcendent grounds for encounter to be possible).

So I want to hold onto the kind of attenuated foundations Markham uses whilst rejecting the revealed foundations which lock a tradition into a dialogue only with itself I think we are struggling here with a vocabulary of post-, non- and residual- foundationalism so I am loathe to call our project by any title which implies a position.

But it is not my intention here to provoke a debate about titles. Instead let me outline briefly why I see ours as an essentially theological project and see if that tells us anything about the content, direction and starting place for an explanation.

I think it is no coincidence that both John and many of the sources he quotes set out the problem in terms of negotiating a dichotomy the discernment of false dilemmas and extreme positions. The term ‘third way’ is now unusable by sensitive people so I avoid it, but I think the task is neither to deny the extensive collapse of foundations nor to celebrate their disappearance but to explore what is retrievable from the deluge that has engulfed modernity and which might constitute a kind of "raft of the Medusa" to ensure survival and a rediscovery of identity and relatedness.

And I believe that the theological key to this is in the concept of the interim - the period between Pentecost and the parousia. The era of the Kingdom of God inaugurated but not yet realised. The era in which glory is glimpsed but sin and finitude persist. The age the early church thought would be quite brief but which has gone on rather a long time and for which there is no convincing evidence that the end will be soon.

In the interim, we are citizens of two cities - ineluctably citizens of the compromised finite world as well as of the City of God. I am not an expert on Augustine’s City of God and he is subject to many interpretations, but I think the concept of the interim is more Augustinian than Milbank’s post-modern Augustinianism allows. The interim locates us, to use Nicholas Lash’s expression on "both sides of the cross"⁶ living at once with the rationality of abundance and grace and the rationality of finitude and sin. The Christian faith, it seems to me, consists very largely in dialogue between those two almost irreconcilable rationalities..

It may be that Markham is right that there are vestigial foundations in logic which facilitate that dialogue, but my point is that we have, in Christian theology, a tradition-constituted case for dialogue that transcends distinct rationalities. The point is not whether elements of the Christian narratives are foundational so much as that every foundation explored by the Christian is tested against the paradoxical standards of two rationalities. The problems come when one Kingdom, one rationality overwhelms the other as when Milbank offers us a theology located "on the other side of the cross", or when the possibility of transcendence is ruled out from, as it were, this side of the cross.

So, like John, I treat as central words like ‘negotiable’, ‘fallible’, ‘conversation’ and ‘dialogue’. I would add ‘paradox’ and ‘ambiguity’ as words that are vital to a theology of the interim. This is not a matter of tricks with mirrors - there is no switching between Kingdoms at will. But, as Markham’s natural theology argues from minimal, but real, foundations to the necessity of God, so I believe a theology of the interim allows us to move from scepticism about foundations to the negotiated and fallible foundations of which John speaks, and so to a practice for a church of all its members. This would reflect the possibility (but only that) that our processes of negotiation may generate sufficient foundations to live by in an age which is substantially changed from anything we have yet known.

1 R Preston in (ed) Brown and Sedgwick Putting Theology to Work CCBI and WTF, 1998. p.38.

2 J Milbank Theology and Social Theory. Blackwell 1990.

3 L Boeve ‘Market and Religion in Postmodern Culture’ in Theology Vo. CII No.805 Jan, Feb 1999 pp.28-36.

4 A Shanks ‘A Theological context for Urban Industrial Mission’, unpublished paper, 1996 See also: Civil Society: Civil Religion. Blackwell, 1995.

5 I Markham Truth and the Reality of God, T & T Clark, 1998.

6 N Lash ‘Not Exactly Politics or Power?’ in Modern Theology Vol.8 No.4. 1992 pp.353-364.

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