Book Review: Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?

I found myself at Grace's library the other day with time on my hands and none of the books I intended to read available. So I did a search for books on postmodernism and picked one at random. I'm glad I picked James K A Smith's Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?.

Subtitled "Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church", this book begins with a very purposeful Schaefferian premise: to understand postmodernity, we must understand the philosophical underpinnings, not just the observed behaviour. As such, Smith critiques Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault in hopes of gleaning from these French philosophers something useful to the mission of Christianity...

Derrida: by showing that everything is an interpretation, he created a need for his notion of deconstruction. But this is not a bad thing, says Smith, for as Christians we need to be humble enough to recognize our own interpretations as such. Moreover, there is no real contradiction between "there is nothing outside of the text" and a belief in absolute truth - so long as it's revealed truth (a point Smith does not make until much later in his book).

Lyotard: "postmodernism is incredulity toward metanarrative" sounds like just the opposite of postmodernism on the surface. But Smith shows that Lyotard did not mean metanarrative in the generalized way we often do today. He meant that systems of belief which claim authority from some "self evident" principle (usually "reason") are no less "religious" than religion. In other words, no system of belief is self-validating. Modernistic "science" requires as much faith in its founding stories as does any religion. Smith notes that this has levelled the playing field in the marketplace of ideas - a very good thing for Christian faith.

Foucault: "power is knowledge" sounds wholly incompatible with Christian faith, and much of Foucault's philosophy is. But Smith points to Foucault's axiom as another reason for humility on the part of our churches, and the need to return to a catholic (but not Roman) tradition. By grounding ourselves in the traditions and creeds of the historic church, we can identify with them and learn from them. We can thereby harness the power of Foucault's theory to become "incarnational" in our approach to worship and ministry. If this sounds awfully deep, trust me - it's not an easy read. What I took from his analysis of Foucault had primarily to do with this: churches must realize the enormous power of systems - whether prison, school, hospital or church - and tap that power to help create incarnational Christians. It is time, he says, to shift our focus from building Christians that "know the truth" to those that "live the truth", and using the systems of the catholic faith we can better accomplish this.

He rolls all of this together at the end of his book, and here is where he lost some of my appreciation. What had been a carefully constructed analysis quickly became little more than an appeal to do things the way he liked them. I understand that I'm biased against his vision of postmodern church function - I didn't care for the backhanded attack on Dispensationalism or the swipe he takes at "primitivists" (a term he seems to use too loosely). Perhaps I'm therefore missing something in his argument, but he seemed ultimately to be saying: postmodern church should downplay the (almost uniquely Western) "individual" and embrace community ... the way I think community should be embraced.

All considered, I would highly recommend Smith for his detailed analysis of this "unholy Trinity" of French philosophers who bear so much of the responsibility for the popularization of postmodernity. But as a critique, I found his solutions to be wanting and inconsistent.

Like so many others, this is a book that will require a discerning ability to separate wheat from chaff.

Hatushili