What Is Postmodern Theology?
I recall once going into an automotive store, having been told to buy a can of Wolfshead motor oil. I was immediately confused by the host of similar-looking products on the shelves. For Wolfshead could barely be located in the midst of all its copycat competitors. There, for instance, was Foxhead brand. Whoever invented Foxhead was hoping for customers just like me: people with only a vague knowledge of what they were supposed to be looking for. I think it is the same in the case of what is called Postmodern Theology. There are available today several different theologies that all carry the "Postmodern" or "Postliberal" label, and you have to look closely at the list of ingredients on the side to make sure you are getting what you want.
First, I hasten to write off one option as deceptive advertising pure and simple. This is the position of Thomas C. Oden, first set forth in his 1979 manifesto, Agenda for Theology (later revised as After Modernity, What?). Oden had previously been, from the later standpoint of this book, the worst kind of bandwagon-hopping, trend-chasing Liberal theologian, writing a raft of books bringing the ill-defined Liberal gospel into line with everything from psychology and existentialism, to ecology and parapsychology. And now he had "come to himself" like the Prodigal Son, munching the loathsome husks of Modernity in a foreign land, and hastened to journey back to the cozy homestead of traditional orthodoxy. His theology was "postmodern" only in the autobiographical sense, it seems to me. He had decided Modernity was a mistake and leap-frogged it backwards to arrive back at an essentially pre-modern pre-critical theology. I call it a theology of the failure of nerve.
Another candidate for which I will not be voting in this primary is Whiteheadian Process Theology. A year or so ago, I heard John Cobb say he had always understood Process Theology to be post-modern in character, offering an alternative to traditional Liberal theology. David Ray Griffin has recently edited a book called Varieties of Postmodern Theology, in which Process thought figures significantly. He himself had written important books of Process Theology such as his lucid A Process Christology. In what sense is Process thought postmodern? I suppose it has something to do with its claim to break the impasse between the anthropomorphic God-language of biblical narrative and the abstracting "Ground of Being" theologies of Tillich et. al. Process theism proposed a God who changed and was a force of change, a "lure of creative transformation" (as Cobb [Christ in a Pluralistic Age] put it in the human potential jargon of the 70s when this theology seems to have reached its peak of popularity). But the substitution of a Process ontology for one of static substance categories, earth-shaking as it might as first seem, actually did nothing more than to substitute a fluid abstraction for a frozen one. There was no real retreat from the God of the philosophers to that of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, only a switch to the God of Whitehead. And besides, especially in terms of Christology, the much-vaunted conceptuality of the Process theologians did not help them move an inch beyond the Christology of Schleiermacher. John A.T. Robinson said (in The Human Face of God) that Process theologians were not trying to jettison the categories of the ancient theology, the combination of divinity and humanity in Christ, for example); they were only trying to say the same thing plugging in the terms of a new philosophical vocabulary. Yet if one looked closely, one readily saw that instead, it was the accents of Schleiermacher and Ritschl, not Athanasius and the Cappadocians, that they were trying to ape. Conservative theologian Kenneth Hamilton was right to dub them "Schleiermacher's modern sons." So this theology, in my reckoning, is simply one more modernism.
Another contender for the Postmodern title weighed twenty years ago. George A. Lindbeck, with his concise book The Nature of Doctrine, Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (1984). I recall seeing my beloved mentor Robert F. Streetman clutching a copy of Lindbeck's book as he stood on the threshold of his maelstrom of an office. As if to eulogize the work before it left his hand and became lost forever in the abyss of books and papers, Streetman proclaimed that Lindbeck had perhaps marked out the way theology was to follow in the next generation. I am sorry to have to disagree with him. Theology cannot follow Lindbeck into the future for two reasons. First, his clarion call is too equivocal; as 1 Corinthians 14:8 says, "If the bugle gives forth an uncertain sound, who will prepare for battle?" Second, Lindbeck is a poor guide into the future since it is back into the Liberal theological past that he leads us.
Lindbeck sets forth an alternative to the previously regnant models of understanding doctrines. The first of these is traditional conservative supernaturalism, whether Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox Christian, Islamic, or Orthodox Jewish. It is what Lindbeck calls the "cognitivist" approach. That is, it understands the creedal affirmations of a religion as propositions which are true in the sense that they correspond to an independent, objective reality outside the believer and outside the believer's religious language. For the "cognitivist" Christian to affirm, for instance, that "Jesus is the Messiah" means that Jesus of Nazareth was the one God had in mind when he inspired the biblical writers to speak and write their Messianic prophecies, that Jesus was born to fulfil those prophecies, and that no one else, e.g., David Koresh or Rabbi Schneerson, should they claim to be the Messiah, could be correct. It is difficult to see how ecumenical discussion between Jews and Christians could proceed very far as long as cognitivist Christians and Jews stuck to their guns on this issue. Similarly, it is hard to see how the proposition "God is a Trinity of persons sharing a divine essence in common" would be compatible with the Qur'anic statement that Jesus cannot be made a partner with Allah.
The alternative view, that of Liberalism, which would at first sight seem to show a way beyond the impasse, is that doctrines are merely diverse pictorial or poetic expressions of certain remarkable experiences shared in common by all the religions. This Lindbeck calls the "experiential-expressivist" model. Here, if one can imagine it, in some far-off ecumenical never-never-land, Jerry Falwell and Pema Chödrön might be able to agree that they were both experiencing the same "core religious experience" beneath all the divisive theology. "We both receive the numinous Word of God, only you call it Jesus Christ, and we call it the Buddha Nature. You say to-may-to and I say to-mah-to, but let's call the whole thing on!"
It seems, by the end of the book, that Lindbeck wants to come to a similar amicability with his imagined dialogue partners, so what makes the experiential expressivist model unsatisfactory to him? I will argue in a moment that it is not at all unsatisfactory to him, and that he is in fact simply one more exponent of this position without admitting it. But for now it is enough to note that he thinks he rejects it because of two unfounded liberal assumptions.
The first is that there is some common core experience underlying all the religions. Rudolph Otto argued that there was a primal experience of the Holy, the Numinous, a bipolar experience both of the Mysterium Tremendum and the Mysterium Fascinans, and that this dual encounter with the wrath/love of the Holy, of fascination and fear for one's soul, was the pre-rational base from which all rituals, myths, and doctrines had grown once the rational and mythopoeic faculties of different cultures had filtered it. Lindbeck contests this claim. All religions may in fact share certain types of feelings, he admits, but their religious experiences are too closely intertwined with their doctrinal, ritual, and ethical frameworks to be understandable or even recognizable as bare "religious experiences." Religious experiences are not identical pearls that different religions have merely placed in different decorative arrangements.(Perhaps slightly more to the point is Richard Rorty's demonstration that, despite certain similarities in description, it is impossible to get inside the heads of other experiencers and to verify that their experiences are the same as ours even when they use similar terms to describe them (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature).
Why are the experiences of Christian, Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist and Reform Jew so different? Here is Lindbeck's second objection: the experiences are not simple expressions of a universal religious experience, but rather different experiences of different things--or at least produced by different things. The experiences are functions of the various religious life-matrices which spawned them, in which the various religious believers were shaped, and which simultaneously facilitated and dictated the shape and color of the experiences. The experiences are no more interchangeable than the religious systems in which they occur.
Against both previous models, Lindbeck proposes what he calls the "cultural-linguistic" understanding of doctrine. His model is a hybrid spawn of Wittgenstein's language games and Peter Berger's plausibility structures. In his view doctrines are not so much descriptive of extra-linguistic entities as they are prescriptive of practice and experience within particular religious communities. Contra Liberal understandings, he says, doctrines are prior to religious experiences, since it is the former which produce and shape the latter. But contra conservative cognitivism, for Lindbeck doctrines embody "intrasystemic truth," not necessarily objective, "out-there" truth. A doctrine could only be said to be true to the Christian faith or true to the logic of Christianity. The nature of doctrine would not allow us to go further and say that Christian claims are true as judged by conformity to some external yardstick.
A comprehensive scheme or story used to structure all dimensions of existence is not primarily a set of propositions to be believed, but it is rather the medium in which one moves, a set of skills one employs in living one's life. Its vocabulary and its syntax may be used for many purposes, only one of which is the formulation of statements about reality. Thus while a religion's truth claims are often of the utmost importance to it (as in the case of Christianity), it is, nevertheless, the conceptual vocabulary and the syntax or inner logic which determine the kinds of truth claims the religion can make. The cognitive aspect, while often important, is not primary. (Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 35)
A good example of the regulative function envisioned by Lindbeck might be the case of Arianism. What was at stake in this pivotal early Christological controversy? Was it simply a point of speculative theology? No, as Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh (Early Arianism, A View of Salvation) make clear, the issue was one of both soteriology and salvation. A close scrutiny of the writings of both sides shows that each side was championing a distinctive way of religious life. For the Arians the way of salvation was an ascetical ascent to spiritual perfection. Accordingly, their Christology modeled a Christ who was a mutable creature who only won through to honorary godhood and to adoptive divine perfection through his own arduous efforts. He was the redeemed redeemer who showed his followers how to work out their own salvation. By contrast, for Athanasius salvation was more a matter of receiving the grace of theosis (divinization) through the sacramental life of the church. For this model Christ had to be a divine dispenser of divine grace, not a changeable creature in need of it himself. He gave the true bread of heaven, and to do the works of God is simply to believe in the one whom he has sent, himself one with the Father's incorruptible essence. Sure enough, in this debate, the issue is how doctrine shall govern the style and shape of the spiritual life, its means and goals.
But all this is nothing new. Insofar as the "theological syntax" model may be judged a new one, the patent must be awarded to the Lundensian theologians, including Anders Nygren, who beat Linbeck to the punch by a good 20 years. Here is Nels Ferre's summary of the Lundensian agenda. He starts by quoting Nygren:
religion is a completely independent and unique form of experience that develops according to its own autonomous principles and must be judged from its own center." Theology is thus a special form of religious history with a special working hypothesis, according to which it accomplishes its systematic task, namely the discovery and the systematic exposition of each religion in accordance with its organic distinctiveness. (Swedish Contributions to Modern Theology, 58-59)
the task of Christian theology is to analyze the historic forms with a view to their inner meaning, and then to test them as to their compatibility with the distinctiveness of Christian faith. (Ibid., 67)
But the novelty of the approach is really neither here nor there. Let us examine the difficulties in Lindbeck's version of it. While Lindbeck often seems to make his "cultural-linguistic" model compatible in theory with either a propositionalist or a non-propositionalist position, it at length becomes abundantly clear that only the latter really fits in:
There is nothing in the cultural-linguistic approach that requires the rejection (or the acceptance) of the epistemological realism and correspondence theory of truth... Nevertheless, the conditions under which propositions can be uttered are very different in cognitivist and cultural-linguistic approaches; they are located on quite different linguistic strata. For the cognitivist, it is chiefly technical theology and doctrine which are propositional, while on the alternate model, propositional truth and falsity characterize ordinary religious language when it is used to mold lives through prayer, praise, preaching, and exhortation. It is only on this level that human beings exhibit their truth or falsity, their correspondence or lack of correspondence to the Ultimate Mystery. (The Nature of Doctrine, 69)
It is right at this point that D.Z. Phillips (Faith After Foundationalism) levels an important criticism at Lindbeck. Lindbeck claims to be applying the insight of Wittgenstein that theology is a kind of grammar. And indeed Lindbeck has profited much from Wittgenstein. But, for better or worse, he seems to have imported a kind of reductionism unintended and not implied by Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, as Phillips reads him, meant to deny that religious assertions are making merely factual, and therefore dubious and provisional, assertions. Belief in God as held fast by religious believers is primordial and fundamental to religious discourse in such a way that the belief is not the subject of debate, as it is among philosophers of religion and apologists. Doctrines start from such presuppositions and, within the space marked out by them, seek to regulate religious life in the manner of a grammar.
What Lindbeck, however, has done is to make the bare bones of Wittgenstein's understanding of the function of doctrine into a doctrine. Lindbeck comes close to saying that doctrines are simply facilitators and regulators of spiritual life/experience, and he seemingly proceeds to strip them of the ideational, propositional content which gave them their facilitating power to begin with. He finally stands exposed as one more Liberal demythologizer whose only theology is that, strictly speaking, there needn't be any.
This tension between two different ways of reading Wittgenstein is reflected, as I read him, in the essays of D.Z. Phillips himself. Sometimes ("Religious Beliefs and Language Games" in Faith and Philosophical Enquiry) he seems to be saying that, rightly understood, religious utterances are performative and expressive utterances, and that factual references are imported into them against their natural intent. Most times, though, he seems more in accord with Wittgenstein's concern to safeguard religious claims from reduction to mere factual claims. This also seems to be Bultmann's intent, independent of Wittgenstein, when he seeks to prevent the mythic "objectification" of language about God.
There is nothing wrong with either position. The trouble is that Lindbeck seems not to know he must choose between them. Often he sounds uncannily close to Don Cupitt in Taking Leave of God, his 1980 manifesto of overt non-realist expressivism. God, Cupitt says, is a meaningful term only within religious language, not outside it, e.g., not in talk about why natural disasters happen, or how the earth was formed. Listen now to Lindbeck:
Just as grammar by itself affirms nothing either true or false regarding the world in which language is used, but only about language, so theology and doctrine... assert nothing either true or false about God and his relation to creatures, but only speak about such assertions. These assertions, in turn, cannot be made except when speaking religiously, i.e., when seeking to align oneself and others performatively with what one takes to be most important in the universe by worshipping, promising, obeying, exhorting, preaching. (69)
Lindbeck is explicit in his espousal of an "epistemological non-realism." He even verges on declaring that all the different religions can coexist quite nicely since they are radically incommensurate language games, so different in fundamental terms from one another that the believer in one can not be considered an unbeliever in another. To be an "unbeliever" implies a rejection of the terms of the game from within the game. The only unbelief would be apostasy from within, not aloofness from without. How this posture would serve Lindbeck's apparent goal of a theological convergence between religions is not clear.
He repudiates Rahner's notion of "anonymous Christians" among other religions on the basis that this would imply a silent commensurability between Christians and others--yet he dares to suggest that Christian missionaries might have as their proper business to go into the field to encourage Buddhists to be, not Christians but better Buddhists! Lindbeck simply cannot seem to rid himself of Christian triumphalism in the very moment he appears to adopting a theology of pure expressivism. But Lindbeck reels back from the expressivist brink and says, like Rahner, that the real problem of ecumenism is whether or not non-Christians may be saved, and his answer is that they may receive a postmortem opportunity to consider the Christian gospel somewhere on the Bardo plane, after which they may be saved or not! (Lindbeck's disciple, William Placher, goes even further toward a traditionalist understanding in his book Unapologetic Theology, almost recapitulating the presuppositionalist apologetics of Cornelius Van Til: our faith is the true one, and thank God and Thomas Kuhn, we're not accountable to prove it to anyone!)
Let me return to my earlier statement that Lindbeck is after all an exponent of the very "experiential-expressivist" model he wants to reject. Lindbeck asks us to jeer at a Liberal theology which makes every individual a free lance with no institutional affiliation, each floating like an atom of spiritual autonomy. Traditional doctrines are shucked off as mere husks for ideal and contentless "religious experiences" which arise within the individual and go no further. Liberal theology, he warns, encourages this atomizing, this erosion of any sense of religious communal identity. And insofar as the religious communities have historically been one of the centripetal forces for social cohesion, the break-up of religious community abets the general social disintegration of our time.
Lindbeck wants us to begin reversing this deleterious trend by understanding that religious communities still have a place, that religious experience must have such a matrix or it will not flourish, will degenerate into mere humanism. And to shore up the walls of the churches, we must arrive at an understanding of doctrines that will not drive away free thinkers (hence the absence of any pesky propositional reference from Lindbeckian doctrines), yet will ensure the preservation of the community's distinctives. Lindbeck's is a Liberalism that could politely hold a heresy trial. You may reconceive Christology, but it had damn well better be a new way of saying what Chalcedon said. I believe we saw exactly such a case of Liberal heresy hunting in the reaction of John Macquarrie and others to the 1977 symposium The Myth of God Incarnate. Real conservatives had for decades charged people like Macquarrie with vitiating the doctrine of the Incarnation by watering it down into Christian existentialism. But here came Michael Goulder, Don Cupitt, John Hick and others saying forthrightly that it was time to jettison talk of the Incarnation as a primitive myth which had outlived its usefulness. Macquarrie could not brook this! Neither, it is safe to say, could Lindbeck. My point is that mainstream Liberal theology has been doing since its inception what Lindbeck now demands as a repudiation of Liberalism. Want proof?
Rudolph Otto never sought to reduce God-talk to religious experience. Indeed, quite the reverse: he argued that the universal experience of the Numinous well-nigh proved the extra-experiential existence of God, else where would the numinous feeling have come from?
Is it news that religious experiences must be mediated by the preaching and the symbols of particular religious communities? Not at all. It was Schleiermacher (and here one is really mystified at Streetman's embrace of Lindbeck) who warned that "natural religion," religion in general, was a phantom, and that God-consciousness was only to be had through the agency of one of the positive religions. Of these he deemed Christianity the best, but apparently so does Lindbeck! Schleiermacher called the Holy Spirit the Spirit of the Christian Community, so little did he deem Christian experience to be separable from the Christian church. It was through the church's preaching of the Redeemer that a religious experience like unto his own might be made available. This motif was shared in turn by Ritschl and his disciples including Wilhelm Herrmann (The Communion of the Christian with God), as well as his great student Paul Tillich, for whom the New Being was communicated through the church via the biblical "picture of Jesus as the Christ." None of these people thought that religious experiences take place in a vacuum.
Lindbeck's talk about the happy incommensurability of religions which prevents us from damning one another sounds much like the "perspectivalism" or "confessionalism" of H. Richard Niebuhr, who in his The Meaning of Revelation ventured that we can only affirm our own experience and interpretation of the divine, not deny those of another, since we can never be sure that our vision of truth is so comprehensive as to rule out the other's.
And we have already seen that virtually every recent attempt to redefine Christological doctrine, from Rahner and Schillebeeckx to Cobb, Griffin, Pittenger, and Robinson, to Boff and Sobrino, to Kung and Macquarrie, is careful to try to preserve the classical categories of Nicea and Chalcedon while filling them with new meaning. In other words, they all recognized quite explicitly the regulative but not substantive character of church doctrines.
On his own definition Lindbeck may not be one of those "experiential-expressivists," but then neither were any of the major liberal theologians since Schleiermacher! We had to wait till real radicals like Fritz Buri and Don Cupitt came along. In fact I am not sure Lindbeck has even them in view. His best targets, though never named, would be the religious humanism of Joseph Campbell and the gurus of the syncretistic New Age movement.
I have dwelt at length on Lindbeck because I have gathered that for some these days he defines Postmodern theology. I will discuss one more type of Postmodernist theology, that
is based on the Deconstructive anti-philosophy of Derrida and de Man. Theologians in this camp would include Mark C. Taylor (Erring, Tears, Deconstructing Theology, Alterity), Thomas J.J. Altizer (The Gospel of Christian Atheism, The Descent into Hell and many others), Charles Winquist (Epiphanies of Darkness), Carl Raschke (The Alchemy of the Word), Robert Scharlemann (The Reason of Following), and the later Don Cupitt (Only Human, The Long-Legged Fly, Creation out of Nothing, and many others). This is my own theological position. With Derrida, having banished any notion of a "transcendental signified," a logos-center or meaning-center external to language, Deconstructive theology proclaims the Nietzschean gospel of the death of God. But it also proclaims the death of Man, of a transcendent consciousness as a mirror reflecting a pure vision of truth. All language is cross-referential, referring only to language. All reality is a textual field, a flat surface with much depth beneath it, a depth of unsuspected meanings, but no height, nothing above it to which it points.
To unpack this a bit, the death of God means, for the theology of Deconstruction, that the divine has been poured out into the human, the profane, the secular, which henceforth is seen to glow with a kind of "trace" or witch-fire radiance of the lost sense of holiness. What once was there to be worshipped is now present only in its conspicuous absence. Religious worship for us is like the singing of the Lamentations of Jeremiah amid the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. Over the debris one can make out the word "Ichabod," "the Glory has departed," and in that absence is the lingering trace of the holy, not a Holy Ghost, but a Ghost of Holiness. The rawness of the profane, which is all that is left to us in a world with no transcendent reference, somehow yet retains the hint, the echo, the trace of the Holy that is gone.
With the death of any transcendent source of meaning or value outside language itself, with the revelation that even concept is only metaphor, that even logical argument is only narrative, there can be no religious authority. No book can be more authoritative than any other, because there is no Word of God. No book can even be kept separate from all the others in the light of which we read it. This is what Jabes called "the death of the Book," i.e., as a self-contained entity, and what Derrida, following him, called "the birth of the [all-encompassing] Text." All texts are an illimitable field, and the name for that cross-fertilization of each text by our knowledge of what the rest of them say is called intertextuality.
No particular reading of any book can be recovered as the true or binding one. All exists simply as text, a field of signifiers. We as readers break a path through the text as we read, but we can never be sure we are doing more than playing a word-search puzzle, imagining chains of signification where none were intended by the writer. Deconstructive theologians and critics thus have new respect for the subversive reading strategies of the Kabbalah, which did not hesitate to read the text backwards, and as acronyms, and as puzzles and by means of puns. Deconstruction abhors logocentrism, the abstraction of some element of the text and its idolatrous erecting as the key to the meaning of the text. The meaning of the text is the text itself.
It becomes evident that if we for one moment accept the nonconcepts of Deconstruction, as I do, Lindbeck's agenda is ruled out lock, stock and barrel. That one might, for instance, judge one form of Christian theology as more consistent with the central rationale of Christian existence than another presupposes that such a transcendent center of meaning exists. It does not. Lindbeck's concern to maintain the insular integrity of particular doctrinal, religious communities is a futile attempt, utterly out of touch with the manifest condition of cultural intertextuality. I as a Christian pastor conversant with Buddhism and Islam, found that I could no longer read the texts of my own tradition without reading them in the transforming light of these other texts and traditions. My preaching reflected that.
I judge Michael Kogan's proposal for "total dialogue" between the Jewish and Christian houses of faith to be a coming to grips with the intertextualism of the two traditions. Christians have never been able to understand the New Testament without reference to the Tanak, and now Kogan finds it impossible to understand the Tanak without reference to the New Testament, though he might better call it a "Post-Testament." The death of the (self-contained) Book means that the Tanak and the New Testament must remain open at both ends and on every side. Both must come into dialogue with the Qur'an as well. They already are, though they may not know it. And so with the Gita and the Lotus Sutra.
Lindbeck's Yale colleague Hans Frei in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative urged that we stop trying to use the narrative of scripture, in what I would call a logocentric manner, as evidence for something else, not as indirect evidence for primordial (thus prototypical) Christianity or a normative "historical Jesus." Nor as a quarry for true theological statements which might then be worked into a definitive system. He wanted us to take the text as text, as narrative. This is good Deconstruction, too. We salute him. He also rightly saw that there is no clean boundary line between reader and text. Deconstruction similarly declares that the reader is both a writer of the text as she reads it, configuring it anew, and a character in the story which requires her pivotal role as observer and interpreter. But here we part company with the Yale theologians and prefer to continue with the Yale critics.
Lindbeck and Placher agree with Frei that we as readers of the biblical narrative must become part of the ongoing biblical epic, enter its narrative world as our own world of experience. Lindbeck also apparently hopes that we may preserve some of the historic tradition of the West by following Frei's advice, since the Bible, as Jerry Falwell likes to remind us, had so much influence on the life and shape of our republic. Deconstruction agrees that since the death of transcendent meaning there is only fiction, but with Lyotard, we recognize that the sovereignty of any traditional master narrative has broken down. Harvey Cox was proclaiming this when he celebrated The Secular City. There is no longer any totalistic understanding that dominates culture. This is partly because of the creative chaos of the textuality of things. Our society is a text which may mean anything and everything precisely because it means nothing in particular.
But the master narrative of the Bible in particular is unacceptable for another reason, as Don Cupitt shows in The Crisis of Moral Authority. It everywhere partakes of phallogocentrism, the violent ideology of a divine despot who is the heavenly rubber-stamp of earthly monopolistic priestcraft. The oppressed and rejected are scattered throughout its pages and illumined in ghastly hues: the women, the pagans, the servants of outlawed Israelite Goddesses, the homosexuals, slaves, Jews frying in the Christian hell.
The very universe is defined in self-exalting male terms when we are told that the world was made through the Logos who was, even before the Incarnation, a male, the Son of a male God. He shall rule the nations with a rod of iron, which sceptre is none other than the phallus of the Logos. Besides, the very notion of a master narrative defining a culture is monopolistic and phallogocentric.
Derrida retains from Levi-Strauss the notion of bricolage, the opportunistic appropriation of tools and techniques that may once have formed part of a system now rejected as a whole. Navigators, for example, still use Ptolemaic astronomy in their calculations. Indeed, bricolage is inevitable once the logos-center is gone. There can be no overarching system that alone could justify a particular method. For Deconstructive theology, this means, "if it seems to work, feel free to use it." Thus particular bits of biblical story or theological language may still have utility as suggestive and empowering fictions (and remember, for us there is nothing available but fiction!).
Rationalistic biblical criticism stills seems to make more sense of the text for us than fundamentalist literalism, but we also like the Kabbalah, and no one's trying to stop the fundies! Let a hundred flowers bloom! Are there spiritual experiences for which our incipient naturalism and reductionism cannot well account? Why not? One thing we don't claim is to have a place for everything. Indeed we would be belying our own claims if we did.
Deconstruction is, in my estimation, the one of our options most appropriately described as Postmodern, though I am quick to admit that the meaning of this, as any, term is in the eye of the beholder.