The Cross is Folly: The Wisdom of Postmodernism

June 21, 2016

Drew Dixon

I first encountered the term postmodernism in high school when my English teacher simply

said, It is new and strange! He then paused for a moment, staring into the upper left corner at the

back of the classroom, and continued teaching. That moment embedded a deep curiosity about

postmodernism and the general theory of different ages of thought.

I learned the theory that there are major shifts in thought every five hundred years or so from

Antiquity to the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages to the Modern Era to today. If this theory holds true,

then the past several decades we have witnessed the shifting of ideological tectonic plates. This shifting

is what we have come to call postmodernism. In this essay, I will explore the phenomenon of

postmodernism by asking the questions, What is it?, Where did it come from?, and What does

it means for us?.

What is postmodernism?
The first thing to be noticed about postmodernism, or poststructuralism or deconstructionism

which are also associated with it, is that none of these is something in and of itself. Each is a prefix

tagged on to something else. Postmodernism is hardly an after-modernism phenomenon so much

as it is a reaction against modernism. Perhaps, if using Greek prefixes, it would be better understood

as kata-modernism or even better dia-modernism. For, in order to arrive at postmodernism, one must

first move through modernism.

In his book on the movement of cultural theory, Terry Eagleton describes modernism as

having a many-sided ambitiousness while todays cultural theory is somewhat more modest. It

dislikes the idea of depth, and is embarrassed by fundamentals. It shudders at the notion of the

universal, and disapproves of ambitious overviews. By and large, it can see such overviews only as

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oppressive. It believes in the local, the pragmatic, the particular.1 While modernism attempted to

systematically understand everything, postmodernism saw this understanding as necessarily

controlling and therefore oppressive. Postmodernism is the pushback against this oppression. If it

were not for all of the systems and structures that the modernists built, then the postmodernists would

not have had anything to take apart.

Yet, postmodernism is not so simple as this. It is not a systematic taking apart of a structure

or even a careless bulldozing of it. Jacques Derrida writes, describing deconstruction, Far from being

a methodical technique, a possible or necessary procedure, unrolling the law of a program and applying

rules, that is, unfolding possibilities, deconstruction has often been defined as the very experience of

the (impossible) possibility of the impossible.2 In other words, postmodernism, or deconstruction in

this case, is not a method or procedure, but rather an experience. As Carl Raschke declared, You

dont do deconstruction, deconstruction is done to you!3 All of this confirms that postmodernism

is not something in and of itself, but rather a different experience of something which had already

existed, namely modernism.

So, postmodernism is not a structure, but an experience. It is not an experience (singular),

however. Rather, it is experienced (plural) by as many as experience it.

Where did postmodernism come from?

The eighteenth and nineteenth century marked a major shift in the world. As an American, I

immediately think of the American Revolution, in which the American colonists overturned the British

power structure in order to govern themselves. Ironically, the American colonists ended up imposing

1 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 72.

2 Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and Ian McLeod

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 43.

3 Carl Raschke, Derrida (Lecture, The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, Seattle, WA, June 9,
2016).

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a similar power structure upon the native people. Simultaneously, in Europe, the French Revolution

was raging. These revolutions are the political events that, over the next couple hundred years, would

make room for the kind of ideological revolution which would eventually become postmodernism.

It was during this time that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born. Hegel and, soon after,

Kierkegaard would do some of their own ideological overturning in the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries. Each one has works that specifically wrestled with, and reinterpreted, Biblical

passages. Hegel reinterpreted Jesus Sermon on the Mount and Kierkegaard wrestled with the story of

Abraham sacrificing Isaac. In each of their readings, they overturned what was traditional and

commonplace understandings of their time. But no one did this more obviously than Nietzsche, who

came after.

Nietzsche is famous for his declaration, God is dead! He was not overturning political power

or biblical interpretation, but ratherit would seemoverturning God himself. Perhaps more subtle

than his divine eulogy, however, is his moral reframing: The concept of good and evil has a twofold

prehistory: firstly in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes Then in the soul of the subjected, the

powerless.4 In this, Nietzsche reframes the question of morality into a question of socio-economic

class. Good and evil is not determined from on high so much as it is the outworking of social

competition. Nietzsche concludes, Our present morality has grown up in the soil of the ruling tribes

and castes.5

The reframing and subsequent undoing of ideological certainty which Nietzsche effected

would lead to the outright ideological revolution that is postmodernism. When Nietzsche uprooted

morality from an innate universal human understanding, he displaced the oppressive power structures

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 72-73.

5 Ibid., 73.

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which had loomed overhead. Nietzsche described it, The concept God has hitherto been the

greatest objection to existence We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing

that do we redeem the world. 6

What does postmodernism mean for us?

The initial Christian response to this sort of talk is likely defensiveness. And such it has been

for much of the twentieth century, with the rapid development of apologetics which seek to prove

God and reassert their power over Nietzsche and the like. The problem is that this sort of response

reveals that they never really listened to Nietzsches critique to begin with. After all, it was not God

himself who opposed existence, but rather God the concept. Perhaps this God-concept is the

oppressive nature of the totalitarian modernist movement. Maybe it could better be understood as a

God-complex. What the Church can learn from Nietzsche and postmodernism as it has come to be

is that the Church is not God.

Now we make our way back to our postmodern friend, Derrida, who writes about negative

theology, The apophasis is a declaration, an explanation, a response that, taking on the subject of God

a negative or interrogative form, at times so resembles a profession of atheism as to be mistaken for

it.7 The negative theology of which Derrida writes is actually similar to an ancient approach to God

as mystery. We can only know God by putting into words that which can cannot know of God. It is

by entering into doubt and mystery that God becomes more alive to us.

In this way, maybe Nietzsches claim was not an annunciation of the reign of atheism, but

rather an invitation for our conceptions of God die away so that the real God might come alive again.

It may just be that life is only possible by way of death. But the way of the cross has always seemed

foolish, perhaps even too foolish for the Church. (Word Count: 1247)

6 Ibid., 212.

7 Derrida, On the Name, 35.

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 Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. On the Name. Edited by Thomas Dutoit. Translated by David Wood, John P.
Leavey Jr., and Ian McLeod. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003.

Hegel, G. W. F. Early Theological Writings. Translated by T. M. Knox and Richard Kroner.

Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Books,
1985.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. A Nietzsche Reader. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books,

1977.

Raschke, Carl. Derrida. Lecture, The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, Seattle, WA,
June 9, 2016.