Postmodernity: Christian Identity in a Fragmented Age. - book reviews

Paul Lakeland, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997. xiv+133pp. $14.00 (paper).

What is postmodernity? In this timely, compact study, Paul Lakeland responds with a detailed and multidimensional philosophical-theological analysis. His book should help readers assess major issues that arise in contemporary discussions of philosophy, ethics, religion, and Christian apologetics.

To describe the consciousness of the age that succeeds the modern period is a complex undertaking. The problem is that postmodernity lacks its own identity. It is usually explained in terms of modernity, as something passing from one cluster of worldviews and cultural values to another. Lakeland shows both humor and feeling for the cultural context in which we live, while relating postmodernism to new architectural uses of space, technological advances, and popular media. He also emphasizes three different viewpoints among postmodern thinkers: the late moderns who believe the modernity project is unfinished; the true postmoderns who want to press the discussion "toward a . . . radical historicism"; and the countermoderns who "celebrate the demise of modernity as an opportunity to return to the securities of an earlier age" (12).

Lakeland begins with enlightenment, subjectivity, relativism, and otherness, as understood by major authors who represent variations of these viewpoints. Foucault, Derrida, Bataille, Rorty, Kristeva, and Irigaray represent the radical postmodern historicist view. In place of the subject as a center and reason as a foundation, they offer projects of "power relations or desire" (16), in terms of an author's individual perspective and situation. Heidegger, A. Bloom, Adorno, and Bell are the countermoderns, whose neoconservative distaste for philosophical modernism figures "a postmodernism of nostalgia." Habermas, Lyotard, and Charles Taylor are the "late modernists," who see the modernity project as unfinished. They still find significance and real relationships among free subjects as knowers. Indeed, Habermas believes that a postmodern "rise of public violence" stems partly from the triumph of instrumental reason over communicative reason and advocates a rediscovery of the "intersubjective process of communicative action" (23).

The author's informed judgment discerns a variety of ethical perspectives among current philosophers. For a nostalgic modern like Alasdair MacIntyre, "relativism" refers to the loss of moral authority. Rorty, a neopragmatist, argues for the freedom to invent oneself while seeking "to make our institutions and practices more just and less cruel" (25). Jeffrey Stout argues for a modest pragmatic ethics of consensus without appeal to utopian principles or truths. David Hiley exposes the "extent to which Foucault's ethics remain linked to the Kantian orientation to autonomy." For Lakeland, such an ethics is an "existentialism . . .without the guilt . . . at the service of aesthetics" (27).

Lakeland underlines the danger of political inertia and indifference in the agenda of Derrida, balanced against the risk of forgetting the other in much of late-modern discourse. Charles Taylor is praised for an approach to otherness, which calls for "attention," "careful scrutiny," and "respect for what is there," while maintaining one's sense of a fragile, threatened subject, "enmeshed in its own historicity and open to failure" (35). Taylor is hopeful about the movement between modern and postmodern worldviews, in part because he believes that the future has a role for religious faith.

Lakeland then describes how late-modern, radical postmodern, and countermodern authors treat God, community, and Christ. All three topics are framed by "decentering" - God in relation to the decentered person, the church in a decentered world, and a decentered Christ in a theology of world religions. He deals extensively with the work of James Gustafson, Gordon Kaufman, Sallie McFague, Peter Hodgson, George Lindbeck, and John Milbank in terms of five common threads: the Bible and modern critical methods, the role of human agency in revelation, suspicion of exclusivist salvation histories, the need for a theology of mediation, and the rebellion against a Barthian standard of neo-orthodoxy.

Through the categories exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist, Lakeland addresses postmodern versions of Christology. If a theologian accepts Christ as the only redeemer, can (s)he be engaged in real encounter with non-Christian religions? He focuses the debate on remarks by the Catholic DiNoia and the Protestant Kaufman as representative of different but amenable sides of the theological issues. The issue cannot be resolved in terms of systematic theology, but encounters with non-Christians can help Christians get beyond absolutist formulas regarding God, Christ, and Christian life by means of a dialectic of similarities and differences. Lakeland points to Panikkar's use of water metaphors to illustrate religious pluralism: the spirituality of the world's religions is like the natural atmosphere which ascends and descends for all people. Christ is a center for Christians, Panikkar suggests, as "a vision of the universal, not a universal vision" (81).