Redeeming critique: Resignations to the cultural turn in Christian theology and ethics

Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 89-113

  Smith, Ted A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 70450028923     PISSN: 15407942     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: 10.5840/jsce20042427     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. I borrow the language of a "cultural turn" from Fredric Jameson. I believe Jameson's clear articulation of the swollen importance of the cultural sphere (or, better, cultural spheres) amounted to a significant breakthrough. His structuralist assumptíons, however, forced that realization into a singular, monolithic account of "postmodernity" that could not account for the tension, variety, and vitality that close empirical studies suggest. Cf. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), esp. ix-xxii. Kathryn Tanner neatly parsed and problematized what I am calling the cultural turn in theology in Theories of Culture (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997)
2. Another good general discussion of the cultural turn in theology appears in Sheila Greve Davaney, "Theology and the Turn to Cultural Analysis," in Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism, ed. Dehvin Brown, Sheila Greve Davaney, and Kathryn Tanner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3-16
3. See George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984). Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004) shows how a cultural turn could sustain liberalism as well as postliberalism. Stout offered a breakthrough defense of democracy by turning not to something like the ontology of individual consciousness but to the complex cultural traditions of the United States. Womanist theologians Joan M. Martin, in More Than Chains and Toil: A Christian Work Ethic of Enslaved Women (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000)
4. and Traci C. West, in Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics (New York: New York University Press, 1999), also made the cultural turn in directions that could sustain liberal politics. Both Martin and West added substantial empirical dimensions to their cultural turns. Although there are important differences between womanist and mujerista theologies, they share at least this renewed attention to the lives of particular communities. A good example is Ada María Isasi-Diaz, En La Lucha (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993)
5. Liberation theologians from Africa and Latin America were among the first to make the turn I am trying to describe. See, for instance, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Hearing and Knowing: Theological Reflections on Christianity in Africa (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1986)
6. Radically orthodox theologian John Milbank made what I am calling a turn to church culture - and made explicit the Hegelian affinities of this turn - when he called for theology as a kind of Sittlichkeit of the church. See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), 381 and passim. Catherine Pickstock sought to ground meaning in the particular cultural practice of the Roman Mass in After Writing: On the Liturgical Consumniation of Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998)
7. For a precise statement of this line of questioning, see Jeffrey Stout, Ethics after Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 281ff
8. It is worth noting that if the visible church is holy, it stands above critique. It certainly could not be critiqued from "outside," by the world whose ways are not its ways. Moreover, because of Hauerwas's conception of the church as a "tradition" in Alasdair MacIntyre's sense, it also could not be critiqued from "below." A tradition has resources proper to it that could be used for internal critique, but those resources could not be invoked without interpretation - and the "masters of the guild," the visible hierarchy of the visible church, offer definitive interpretation. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985), 204-25
9. Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Mary-knoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993), xi, 202
10. For a pithy definition of moral bricolage, see Stout, Ethics after Babel, 294. Stout surely was right that contemporary criticism tends to become bricolage in spite of its own self-understandings, and in describing Hauerwas and Williams as bricoleurs I am following Stout's example of defining the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, James Gustafson, and Alan Donagan as bricolage. That so much contemporary criticism appears, on closer inspection, as bricolage suggests not that cultures of bricolage should be above critique but that they must be inhabited with especially critical self-consciousness. For Stout's revelation of different thinkers as bricoleurs, see Ethics After Babel, 126 (Donagan), 173 (Gustafson), and 211 (MacIntyre)
11. Two important and distinct cases for critique as the product of collective learning and problem solving appear in Jeffrey Stout, The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Press, 1981)
12. and Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel Der Öffentlichkeit (Darmstadt, Germany: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1962), translated into English as Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Boston: MIT Press, 1989). I read both Habermas and Stout as trying to offer some kind of critique of the critical perspective. Both look for ways to keep the project of modernity (in Habermas's words) "unfinished." I am describing a project of modernity that is in fact unfinished, in spite of itself, and therefore still open to the possibility of redemption
13. A wide variety of thinkers have identified something like this nearly hegemonic culture of critique, but I am especially indebted to two accounts: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik Der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfun am Main: Fischer, 1969), translated as Dialectic of Enlightenment by John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 2000)
14. and John W. Meyer, "Self and Life Course: Institutionalization and Its Effects," in Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1987)
15. Talk of "enclaves" comes from John Milbank, who, despite his strong accent on the visible, material church, slipped into defining his ideal counterculture in just this way. See John Milbank, "Enclaves, or Where Is the Church?" New Blackfriars 73, no. 861 (1992): 341-52
16. For a more thorough account of alternative ways of construing "culture," see Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997)
17. MacIntyre introduced a stronger dose of the self-consciousness I am calling for in his definition of "tradition." He acknowledged that the description of a tradition involved the construction (not merely the discovery) of a contentious, restrospective narrative joining several disparate elements. See, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., 1988), 11
18. On the rise of storytelling in American sermons, see David S. Reynolds, "From Doctrine to Narrative: The Rise of Pulpit Storytelling in America," American Quarterly 32, no. 5 (1980): 479-98
19. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72; emphasis in original
20. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften [G.S.], ed. Theodor W. Adorno et al., 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Surhkamp, 1972), vol. 6, 539
21. for English translation, see Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1973), 121
22. Compare Seamus Heaney's talk of a "rhyme" between hope and history: "History says, Don't hope / On this side of the grave. / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / of justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme." Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes (New York: The Noonday Press, 1991), 77
23. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels, in Benjamin, G.S., vol. 1:1, 203-430
24. In English: Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977)
25. Origin, 165. Distinctions between allegory and symbol have been worked over in many different contexts, so the two terms have acquired a wide semantic range. I start with Benjamin's definitions and then transpose them into a key for Christian eschatological memory. Starting with Benjamin's definitions opens up a way of thinking that is closed off by discussions of allegory and symbol that carry forward Goethe's strong preference for symbol as the only truly poetic mode. Coleridge picked up on Goethe's evaluations, emphasizing that the difference between symbol and allegory was one of participation. The crucial work of this essay, however, may be to reverse Coleridge's evaluation of the theological adequacy of the two terms. Faithful allegory, for Benjamin, participated in without becoming identical to that w hich it represented. For a classic (if Anglocentric) survey of theories of allegory, see Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964), esp. 1-23
26. Again, I follow Benjamin in borrowing language from Bertolt Brecht, who said, "There can't be any doubt about it any longer. The struggle against ideology has become itself a kind of ideology." Quoted in Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 119
27. Benjamin, G.S., vol. 5:1, 574
28. See also the English translation: Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 460
29. Translated as "A Small History of Photography" in Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1979), 254-55
30. This mortification entirely from felt contact anticipated strategies such as Paul de Man's "analytic reading," in which the reader attended so closely to the text as to break up the holistic integrity by which the text seemed to acquire its meaning. See Paul de Man, "Forward," in The Dissimulating Harmony. The Image of Interpretation in Nietzsche, Rilke, Artaud, and Benjamin, ed. Carol Jacobs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)
31. On ruins see the very helpful discussion in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 159ff
32. See also Charles Rosen, "The Ruins of Walter Benjamin," in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Reflections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 129-75
33. Jürgen Habermas, "Bewußtmachende Oder Rettende Kritik - Die Aktualität Walter Benjamins," in Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamin: Aus Anlaß Des 80. Geburtstags Von Walter Benjamin, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1972), 186. The translation is mine. The essay appears in English as Jürgen Habermas, "Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique," in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Reflections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 90-128
34. Adorno, letter of 2 August 1935, in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence,1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (New York: Polity Press, 1999), 108
35. The definitive discussion of the Adorno-Benjamin debates remains Susan Buck-AIorss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), chaps. 9-11