The hermeneutics of the concept of postmodernity and theology, conditioned by their separate history of origins, limits our scope of possible coinage of these terms to create a new conceptual domain. Postmodernity is a “style of thought” — as Terry Eagleton (1996) would argue, “which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, of the idea of universal progress or emancipation”, and sees the world as “contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable and indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of skepticism about the objectivity of truth, history and norms, the givenness of nations and the coherence of identities” (vii). Theology, on the other hand, when conceptualized as an insider discourse, a stable ontological ground of truth and trust, reflects upon confessional understanding of a particular religious doctrine and ethical stand regarding religious truth.
Modernism and Theology
For both Marx and Nietzsche, the currents of modern history were ironic and dialectical (Berman, 21). Thus, Christian ideals of the soul’s integrity and the will to truth had come to explode Christianity itself. Modernism thus seeks a stable ground of faith, even after reeling from shocking experiences. A modern poet T.S. Eliot (1986) for example, in his poem Ash Wednesday, in the beginning presents a poetical diagnosis of a grave psychological malady, the inability of modern men and women to lead full spiritual life.
Lyotard and the Postmodern Condition
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1994) defines the term modern — “to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative.” His main concern is the role of ‘metanarrative’, a ‘master story’ that dominates over explanation of other stories. Postmodern to him follows a different trajectory. Lyotard defines postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarrative.”
Anti-Foundationalism and Theology
At the center of postmodernism’s negotiation with religion, is their general rejection of foundationalism, a philosophical quest for ‘absolute ground’. For postmodernist thinkers the whole epistemological enterprise begun by Descartes and continued by Kant and various successors in the nineteenth and twentieth century, was a momentous mistake. Postmodernism is seen as a movement which brings in the fore the radical consequence of this anti-foundationalism.
Derrida, Heidegger, and the Divine
Even Jacques Derrida’s criticism of Western philosophical tradition’s privileging of spoken (the sonic) over written language (the graphic), which he calls phonocentrism and the subsequent breaking of the hierarchy by prioritizing writing as a necessary displacement of meaning within language, opens up similar scope of searching new possibilities of realities.
In this regard, Derrida and Heidegger’s engagement with the idea of God — a theological quest which situates them in the forefront of postmodern theology — demands special attention. Both Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida deny the proposition of existence of meta-contextual knowledge of a realm existing beyond our cognizable reality.
Meister Eckhart and Deconstruction
By invoking the living significance of medieval mysticism, Heidegger (1967) makes his first attempt of ‘destruction’ of the tradition — which does not mean to level but to break through the conceptual surface of the western metaphysics, in order to recover and retreat. Even for Meister Eckhart God lives without a “why”. Eckhart’s religious philosophy is based on one impersonal reality that is empty of any form, yet penetrates in every form — the Godhead.
The Messianic Turn
One can locate in this regard a messianic turn in Derrida. Derrida, here distinguishes between messianic and messianism. Where the latter stands for the belief that a particular Messiah has already come, the messianic, by contrast, has to do with what cannot be determined. The messianic is the unforeseeable, the ‘beyond’ that is always desired but never attained.
Conclusion
The process of understanding God by stressing on what God is not, has in it a positive, affirmative character. Instead of being absolutely in negative mode, apophatic deconstruction here opens up a possibility of a religiosity that is neither negative/absent nor positive/presence, but appears in our very moment of involvement with the issue of theology. Deconstruction is neither theistic nor atheistic in any normal sense of the words. Postmodernism’s quasi-deconstructive function vis-a-vis the religious domain, leads to the necessity of polyphonic reading culture with enlightened rationality as tool, by which trans-disciplinary inter-cultural positioning of religious texts facilitate a quality understanding against the hegemony of faith.
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