Postmodern freedom and the growth of fundamentalism: Was the Grand Inquisitor right?

Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 35-49

  Smith, James K a ^a   Cudney, Shane R ^a  

^a Institute for Christian Studies   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84997967558     PISSN: 00084298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/000842989602500104     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Mark Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 6.
2. “God Is Alive,” Maclean's, 106, 15 (April 12, 1993): 32–50. This study, purported to be the “most comprehensive examination yet of faith in Canada” (p. 32), was conducted in co-operation with historian George Rawlyk of Queen's University.
3. “God Is Alive,” p. 34, 45, 35.
4. For an encyclopedic account of religious fundamentalism in traditions outside of Christianity, see Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms Observed, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). This is part of a six-volume Fundamentalism Project which was funded by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
5. For some, the term “postmodern” has become an overused and much-abused term, one that is “causing more trouble than it is worth” (see Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], Vol. 2, p. 1). As a heuristic term, it does, however, help to describe a growing sense of suspicion and dis-ease in Western culture. It is becoming increasingly evident that the Enlightenment myth of progress is fast losing its ability to inspire enthusiasm and generate faith among its advocates, the spirit of which the term nicely “captures.”
6. See Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, The Fundamentalism Project, 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). By “quasi-religions” we mean any and all belief systems that reflect a (largely unexamined) dogmatism typically associated with traditional religious belief.
7. Pauline C. Westerman, “The Modernity of Fundamentalism,” The Journal of Religion, 74, 1 (1994): 79.
8. Nor is it possible, we would also argue, for anyone to be “neutral” regarding religious commitments. For a discussion along these lines see Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991). The ideals of objectivity and neutrality are the central foci of the postmodern critique.
9. Westerman seems to think that the very label “fundamentalism” would be an affront to fundamentalists in general (p. 79). The way Marty and Appleby use the word, in terms of comparing different religions, she is probably correct. But there are certainly many fundamentalists who proudly claim the title. R. A. Torrey, ed., The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (Los Angeles: Bible Institute of Los Angeles, 1917), is a good example of the Truth to which fundamentalists adhere.
10. George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).
11. E. J. Carnell, The Case for Orthodox Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1959), p. 113–26. While we would agree with Carnell that fundamentalism is a distorted, hyperbolic orthodoxy, we would not in turn endorse an orthodoxy per se. The notion of orthodoxy itself seems to betray a vestige of fundamentalism, but for our purposes we must bracket such an exploration.
12. Jack Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 77.
13. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 3–4, 51–54 (emphasis added).
14. Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 11, 14, 17, 299–339.
15. Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1992).
16. See Virginia Lieson Brereton, Training God's Army: The American Bible School, 1880–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
17. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (New York: Scribner's, 1872–73), p. 10.
18. Westerman, “Modernity,” p. 81.
19. Most evangelicals—Francis Schaeffer, Norman Geisler and R. C. Sproul, to name only a few—tend to intellectualize and/or theologize the term “world view,” failing to see the significance of the more nuanced historical use of the term. For such a treatment see Al Wolters, “On the Idea of Worldview and Its Relation to Philosophy,” in P. Marshall, S. Griffioen and R. Mouw, eds., Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science, Christian Studies Today Series (Lanham, md: University Press of America, 1989), p. 14–25.
20. Brian J. Walsh, “Worldviews, Modernity and the Task of Christian College Education,” Faculty Dialogue, 18 (Fall, 1992): 17.
21. James H. Olthuis, “On Worldviews,” Christian Scholar's Review, 14 (1985): 156.
22. See also William Young, The World's Religions: Worldviews and Contemporary Issues (Englewood Cliffs, nj: Prentice Hall, 1995).
23. In his discussion of world views and science, Thomas Kuhn seems to have missed this obvious implication. Throughout his book Kuhn uses the language of faith, such as, “conversion” (p. 19), “belief” (p. 17, 113) and “commitment” (p. 7, 25) without recognizing the religious nature of world views. See T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
24. Walsh, “Worldviews,” p. 19.
25. Langdon Gilkey, Nature, Reality, and the Sacred: The Nexus of Science and Religion (Minneapolis, mn: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 183.
26. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), sec. 217.
27. Olthuis, “Worldviews,” p. 157.
28. Paul Ricoeur, “Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Culture,” in Don Ihde, ed., The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston, il: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 148–49.
29. Louis Dupré, “Postmodernity or Late Modernity?: Ambiguities in Richard Rorty's Thought,” Review of Metaphysics, 47 (1993): 277. Dupré, following Rorty, labels these philosophers as “post-Nietzschean” rather than postmodern in order to highlight the continuity of their thinking in relation to modernity, rather than a radical discontinuity.
30. Cf. Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, p. 62–91.
31. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 99.
32. J. Rifkin with T. Howard, The Emerging Order: God in the Age of Scarcity (New York: Putnam's, 1979), p. 212.
33. Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 3, 86.
34. James H. Olthuis, “Crossing the Threshold: Sojourning Together in the Wild Spaces of Love,” Toronto Journal of Theology, 11 (1995): 39–57.
35. Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 34.
36. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by David Magarshack (Baltimore: Penguin, 1958), Vol. 1, p. 292. Subsequent references will be contained in the text, referred to as gi. The previous paragraphs are a retelling of gi, p. 290–92.
37. There is certainly a sense in which this legend also says what Dostoyevsky himself had been thinking for many years. The Brothers Karamazov was a much-anticipated book that Dostoyevsky considered his definitive work. For a discussion of the importance to him of the novel and “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” see
38. Ellis Sandoz, “Faith and the Nature of Man,” in Political Apocalypse (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), p. 40–43.
39. Taylor, Erring, p. 32.
40. John D. Caputo, “How to Avoid Speaking of God: The Violence of Natural Theology,” in Eugene Thomas Long, ed., Prospects for Natural Theology (Washington, dc: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992), p. 129–30.
41. See also Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, translated by G. Bennington and I. Macleod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 326–27.
42. See Walter Brueggemann, “A Shape for Old Testament Theology i: Structure Legitimation,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 47 (1985): 28–46, and
43. Walter Brueggeman, “A Shape for Old Testament Theology ii: Embrace of Pain,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 47 (1985): 395–415.
44. Taylor, Erring, p. 4.
45. Walsh, “Worldviews,” p. 25.
46. J. H. Olthuis, “God with Us: Toward a Relational Psychotherapy,” Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 13 (1994): 218.
47. This was the dream of Jean Jacques Rousseau, dreamt again by Lévi-Strauss and criticized by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology, translated by G. C. Spivak (Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 101–40.
48. Here we employ the term as it “falls” within the context of Heidegger's notion of fallenness (Zug), which involves “a pull from the center of Dasein toward dispersal and dissipation” (see John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], p. 62).
49. See also Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 152–62, 359.
50. See J. H. Olthuis, “Be(com)ing: Humankind as Gift and Call,” Philosophia Reformata, 58 (1993): 153–72, for his unique contribution to a biblically attuned anthropology.