I'm well aware that I just lost half of those who read this blog; 1/4 who are Christians thinking that Derrida and postmodernism are the antichrist, and 1/4 who are not familiar with anything in the title.
I will be brief here because too much explanation on a blog can be exhausting and boring and because simple things are often more memorable.
In John D. Caputo's book "What Would Jesus Deconstruct?" (which will help any reader of Brian McLaren understand where the junk he gets it from), Caputo makes several good points and is a great place to start in understanding Derrida and deconstruction (See: "Deconstruction In A Nutshell: A Conversation With Jacques Derrida" by John D. Caputo). The book is helpful in several regards, though one gets the sense that only the Christian right are wrong and the Christian left are rather perfect since he only attacks the former, and quite frequently so. I agree with much of what he says there but it's still annoying. It's like going to a concert of a band that is highly political: sure this stuff informs your music but I didn't come to hear you talk politics; I came to hear music.
In this book Caputo gives an excellent summary of Derrida's commentary on 'gift-giving'. What Derrida points out is that in giving a gift, something is expected in return in some way. A 'thank-you' or some other expression of gratitude is expected. Further, the recipient is now, as we say, 'indebted to their kindness' meaning he will look for ways to repay somehow; not immediately, but in due time--say a birthday or Christmas present--and the gift-giver will in some way expect something in return. Derrida says that this means that a gift is impossible but that we should always give anyway. That is, a true gift is an impossible thing because as we have just seen, an economy arises out of the act of giving and receiving. Economics are not what we consider gift-like. If I see something in a store that my wife would like, I don't bring it to her and expect her to repay me right away. But I might hope she'll do the same the next time she is out and sees something I would like. There is a form of exchange, a form of economy. But we give with the impossible idea of a pure gift in mind because that is what makes the quasi-gift possible to begin with.
This is all good and well but Caputo turns his attention to the atonement, which is the ultimate gift. It is here that his deconstructive theory informs his theology, not Scripture. He counts repentance a form of exchange, which thus makes the atonement not a pure gift, but a form of exchange because repentance is 'expected'. He even uses the example of the prodigal son to make his point: the son returns home and his father does not count loss or demand repentance but warmly receives him. I read further to see if Caputo catches the problem with his assessment but he does not; he forgets what makes that warm welcome possible: the return. The whole idea is that the son actually returns and seeks forgiveness, which is what repentance is. There is no warm welcome without the return.
Caputo might have been better served by the parable of the lost sheep whom the Good Shepherd finds and brings back; but the point of that parable is a different one than the prodigal son. In the prodigal son, the son already has a relationship with his father and is given his inheritance, which should sound very familiar because those who are saved are considered as "co-heirs with Christ", which means we receive our inheritance after we are saved; Caputo would have to make the son out to be a lost person who has received this inheritance in advance somehow. In the parable of the lost sheep, the Shepherd seeks the sheep out to bring him back to the fold where he expects him to stay. He doesn't simply leave him lost. If Caputo is right and forgiveness of sin is just that and no repentance is expected, then why seek the sheep? Just forgive it and leave it lost to do its own thing. Or why did the son come back?
Caputo undermines his own idea of God as something wholly other or impossible that puts us into play and is not mastered by us. He takes the word that God has given (a gift!) and makes an exchange with it by calculating his own loss in accepting the atonement, which limits his own perspective of who should be saved and thus puts his words in God's mouth through Derrida's discussion of the gift, which makes perfect sense in a world populated by people who are incapable of pure gift-giving, but not for a God who is actually capable of pure gift-giving. The impossible may make the possible really possible for us, but if God is the impossible and acting out of His own impossibility, then we have no judgement of that which we literally cannot fathom; we can only act in the possible, which Caputo admits is limited.
None of this is intended to say that we must repent before we are forgiven; rather, Scripture indicates that forgiveness itself means the gift of repentance (Ephesian 2.8-9). Faith (Trust) is a gift, lest we boast. We have nothing to boast of in any exchange; rather, that which is required of us is also given to us (a double-gift!) and that which we use to repay comes from the gift-giver Himself. Not to mention the fact that everything belongs to God and there is nothing we could repay Him with in the first place. This is where a discussion of the economics of the gift break down when we try to apply it to God. As many boxes in which to put God the modernists, Enlightenment thinkers, Platonists, Socratics, and whoever else made, those who react against these projects (or deconstruct them) fall into the same trap because we are all sinners in need of that atonement and repentance outside of forgiveness would certainly be a "filthy rag", which is to say our economics would never work.
Comments (2)
Yeah I think so. That and Derrida is lost and Caputo is following the lost.
Well, Derrida is actually dead now and I don't know that Caputo is necessarily lost, just a bad theologian.Â