William D. Dean

Deconstruction and Process Theology

For empirical theology, the only authority is experience; and all empirical theological construction is a free construction by experience on experience. It is a construction by the present on the past, by the interpretive side of experience on the receptive side of experience. It is free, rather than bound by an unchanging norm, because it is a construction by the present as it reinterprets the past. Yet it is constrained, rather than completely arbitrary, because it is a construction on-based on and limited by-what is inherited from the past. This commentary on construction is elementary, at least for those empirical theologians working out of the process philosophies of William James, John Dewey, and, especially, Alfred North Whitehead. What is not elementary is what, in such a processive context, history is and means. On this question hang the present religious authority and meaning of the Bible, of the historic church, and of recent historic events. Either empirical theology shows how it derives its conclusions from history, or its conclusions are unexplained. It cannot rationally or spiritually intuit a historical order out of some eternal logos or divine will. It must look to the near chaos of history itself and out of this alone ascertain an order; and it must say how that order is religiously meaningful. But most important, it must say how religious order can be generated at all in the ever-moving flow of history. In what follows, I will describe how some of the recent ideas of two persons, a French philosopher and an American physicist, might suggest to empirical theology a relevant notion of how historical orders and meanings are generated. I refer to Jacques Derrida, the founder of

Radical Empiricism and Religious Art

These empiricists-among them, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and their more theological successors, such as Bernard Meland and Bernard Loomer-have contended that the depths of empirical awareness lie well beneath the shallow reports of sensationalist empiricism or the superficial abstractions of rationalism. However, with another part of themselves, these same empiricists have tried to describe the very depths they had declared to be beyond description.3 They have proposed new sensationalist tests, as in one form of pragmatism, or have essayed new abstractions, whether philosophical or theological. But finally, like Saint Thomas, they drew back from their own clarifications.

The Challenge of the New Historicism

In American philosophy and literary criticism a new claim for the ultimacy of historical categories has been made. It constitutes a challenge to late twentieth-century theology, which, despite its Hebrew origins, prefers Hellenistic categories, some of which mask as historicist, some of which are nakedly ahistoricist and ontological. This new American historicism is not entirely new, for variations on it have been stated before by philosophers and literary critics and discussed before in theology. Nevertheless, given its own logic, the current American historicisms challenge to theology is new because it occurs at a new point in history, involves new factors and contexts, and, consequently, is materially different. Among the current philosophers and literary critics issuing the new historicist challenge are Richard Rorty, Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam, Richard Bernstein, and Frank Lentricchia. They have been called neopragmatists, but they are pragmatists who, like William James and John Dewey, are radically empirical and historicist, rather than, like Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce, pragmatists who are epistemological idealists. Rorty, Goodman, Putnam, Bernstein, and Lentricchia have argued that there is not a deeper truth behind or beneath the events of social history, despite the long tradition that says there is. Further, and more explicitly historicist, they have argued that actual truths are entirely historical creatures, conceived within history, directed at history, and grown in a historical chain, as interpretation refers to interpretation refers to interpretation throughout history. Recently, their form of historicism has been introduced within theology by Cornel West and Jeffrey Stout. Unquestionably, theology has been heavily influenced over the past two hundred years by another, an older, historicism. This historicism diverted theology from the nonhistoricist modes of Augustine and Calvin, which treat history as finally a function of divine determina-

Liberal Realism: T. S. Eliot and the Ambiguity of God*

In May of 1901, the American philosopher William James stood at a podium in Edinburgh and began to read lectures he had written the year before, at the dawn of the century. He made reference to his now familiar concept of “healthy-mindedness,” proposing that it was expressed through religious liberalism. Indeed, he claimed, “the advance of liberalism, so called, in Christianity, may fairly be called the victory of healthy-mindedness” over hellfire religious morbidity. This healthy-mindedness affirmed “the idea of a universal evolution” and “a general meliorism and progress.” Later in the lecture, James proposed that “the whole matter may be summed up in the one sentence . . . ‘God is well and so are you.’” In fact, such trust in the goodness of God and the goodness of humanity has anchored most liberal theology, making it a form of optimism, which was, said James, one of two basic “definitions of” or “reactions to the world,” the other being pessimism. James knew that it would be for the coming century to justify or reject that optimism, but he offered his own tentative judgment anyway, saying, “The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work.” But it “breaks down,” showing itself to be “inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s

Liberal Piety: W. H. Auden among the Theologians*

Of the many divisions among American scholars of religion, there is one that is as important as it is neglected, which is to say, very important. It is that division between the small group of religion scholars who believe that piety can enhance critical scholarship and the larger group who believe that it cannot. Many in the larger group fear that piety could subvert the scholar’s work and that it is too subjective or private to play a role in rigorous analysis. ðThis division, incidentally, may reflect one of the significant differences between theological studies and religious studies.Þ I defend here the minority position and conclude that piety can enhance scholarship, partly by elevating the scholars’ own inquiry and partly by enabling them to discern the sensibilities of those they study. In doing this, I adopt James Gustafson’s definition of piety: that it is a settled and enduring sense of “reverence, awe, and respect” enabling one to discern traces of “a powerful Other” in and through nature, history, culture, society, and the self. Specifically, I defend the idea that piety may help renew the once important but now faltering group of American liberal theologians. I do this even as I recognize that liberal theologians may be that group of scholars least sympathetic to piety, most likely to deem “liberal piety” simply an oxymoron, and quick to applaud Langdon Gilkey’s 2001 conclusion that “patterns of personal piety became almost extinct except among conservatives.”