Deconstructionist theologian Don Cupitt urges the church to trade in its traditional reliance on western metaphysics, the view that “behind the flux of experience there had to be something Real, one, intelligible to us, and perfect” with a radical rethinking of Christian faith based on a kind of post-Derridean anti-realism:

We used to assume that we were presented with a ready-made world, with a built-in order that we were predesigned to be able to grasp. But since Kant, and especially through the philosophies of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, the old western metaphysics has now been radically destabilised, deconstructed. The old west has gone.

It’s not at all clear what this post-metaphysical Christianity would look like but Cupitt alludes to a faith that “cannot now be more than a practical orientation of our attention, our affections, our life towards One who is hoped for and believed in, but is not actually known.”

I have three questions for Cupitt here. First, is he essentially attacking a straw man? The classical western theological tradition has never simply held to “a belief in one ready-made truth of things out there, waiting to be copied into our language.” There has always been a kind of dialectic between “negative” and “positive” theology and an awareness of the limits of our thinking to grasp the divine, balanced with the firm conviction that knowledge of God is possible.

Second, he assumes the cogency of Derridean deconstruction with a kind of “everybody knows this” tone without anything by way of argument or evidence. What reason do we have to accept this? Not only is such a move far from universally accepted among theologians and philosophers (to put it mildly), it’s not clear what a cogent argument for anti-realism would even look like since, according to anti-realism, there’s no one way the world is, including, presumably, the way of being such that there’s no one way it is! (Or, more modestly, we know that the world is such that it’s impossible to know what the world is like.)

Finally, what would be the point of a Christianity stripped of any reference to an extra-mental reality? And how would we go about practically orienting our lives toward a god about whom we know nothing? For all we know, selfishness and cruelty might be just as fitting a response as benevolence to a reality that is utterly denuded of knowable qualities.

This isn’t to say that Cupitt hasn’t pointed out a real problem, namely the question of religious authority in a pluralistic “post-modern” world. But the proposed cure here seems worse than the disease.

Of course, if Cupitt is simply exhorting us to a kind of epistemic humility (“One who is hoped for and believed in, but is not actually known”) then I don’t find that particularly objectionable. But, again, I think those resources are already there in the tradition. Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding” implies that we don’t know but believe, and that belief can lead to greater understanding (though only in the next life will faith become sight). But neither does this preclude having true beliefs about God or making a fitting response to the divine reality. There is a wide middle ground between Cartesian certainty and postmodern nihilism.

(Link via Thinking Anglicans.)