Who's Afraid of Relativism? (The Church and Postmodern Culture)

Community, Contingency, and Creaturehood

Smith, James K. A.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441245762
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

Following his successful Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? leading Christian philosopher JamesK. A. Smith introduces the philosophical sources behind postliberal theology. Offering a provocative analysis of relativism, Smith provides an introduction to the key voices of pragmatism: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom. Many Christians view relativism as the antithesis of absolute truth and take it to be the antithesis of the gospel. Smith argues that this reaction is a symptom of a deeper theological problem: an inability to honor the contingency and dependence of our creaturehood. Appreciating our created finitude as the condition under which we know (and were made to know) should compel us to appreciate the contingency of our knowledge without sliding into arbitrariness. Saying "It depends" is not the equivalent of saying "It's not true" or "I don't know." It is simply to recognize the conditions of our knowledge as finite, created, social beings. Pragmatism, says Smith, helps us recover a fundamental Christian appreciation of the contingency of creaturehood. This addition to an acclaimed series engages key thinkers in modern philosophy with a view to ministry and addresses the challenge of relativism in a creative, original way.

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“It Depends”

Creation, Contingency, and the Specter of Relativism

The Specter of Relativism

If there is any clear and present danger in our postmodern world, surely it is “relativism.” Identified as the enemy by everyone from youth pastors to university presidents, relativism is both a universal threat and common rallying cry. It is the monster that will make away with our children while at the same time eroding the very foundations of American society (apparently relativism is going to be very busy!).

In fact, for some Christian commentators, postmodernism just is relativism. J. P. Moreland, for example, claims that postmodernism “represents a form of cultural relativism about such things as reality, truth, reason, value, linguistic meaning, the self and other notions. On a postmodern view, there is no such thing as objective reality, truth, value, reason, and so forth. All these are social constructions, creations of linguistic practices, and as such are relative not to individuals but to social groups that share a narrative.”1 In a similar vein, D. A. Carson shares Moreland’s worry and succinctly assesses the situation: “From the perspective of the Bible,” he concludes, “relativism is treason against God and his word.”2

This isn’t just an evangelical worry either. In a homily just before the conclave that elected him pope, Joseph Ratzinger decried what he described as the “dictatorship of relativism”: “Today,” he noted, “having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be ‘tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine,’ seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”3

We seem to have an ecumenical consensus here: relativism is the very antithesis of the “absolute truth” (Absolute Truth) we proclaim in the gospel. Relativism is something we should be worried about, even afraid of. So who in their right mind would sign up to defend such a monster?

Well, I’d like to give it a shot. Or, at least, I would like to introduce some nuance into our reactionary dismissals and caricatured fear-mongering—particularly because I’m concerned with what is offered as an antidote: claims to “absolute” truth. In some ways, the medicine might be worse for faith than the disease. Should we be afraid of relativism? Perhaps. But should we be equally afraid of the “absolutism” that is trotted out as a defense? I think so. And not because it violates the dictates of liberal toleration, but because it harbors a theological impulse that might just be heretical. The Christian reaction to relativism betrays a kind of theological tic that characterizes contemporary North American Christianity—namely, an evasion of contingency and a suppression of creaturehood. In this respect, I think “postmodern relativism” (a term that would only ever be uttered by critics, with a dripping sneer) often appreciates aspects of our finite creaturehood better than the Christian defenses that seem to inflate our creaturehood to Creator-hood. In other words, I think relativists might have something to teach us about what it means to be a creature.

But “relativism” is a pretty hazy figure, and there is nothing like a unified “school” of “relativist thought” (despite how some critics might talk).4 So to focus our target, and thus avoid throwing misguided haymakers at a vague sparring partner, I’m going to consider a specific case: the philosophical school of thought described as “pragmatism.” My reasoning is simple: whenever critics begin to decry “postmodern relativism” (say it out loud, with a gravelly scowl), inevitably we know whose name is going to come up: Richard Rorty, whipping boy of middlebrow Christian intellectuals and analytic philosophers everywhere, the byword for everything that is wrong with postmodernism and academia. The Rorty scare is like the red menace, giving license to philosophical McCarthyism and rallying the troops in defense.

Now, I think many of these critics should be worried by Rorty. He calls into question some of our most cherished shibboleths and clichés, pulling out the rug from beneath some of our most fundamental philosophical assumptions. I’m not out to show that Rorty is no threat, nor is my goal to disclose the “real” Rorty who will turn out to be a tame friend of the philosophical status quo. To the contrary, Rorty’s pragmatism does have all the features of the “relativism” Christians love to castigate and fume against. That’s why, when Christian scholars are looking for a foil, Rorty inevitably appears.

However, I also think it is important to situate Rorty within a philosophical lineage—and that lineage is what he describes as “pragmatism,” a school of thought he (rather idiosyncratically) saw stemming from the triumvirate of Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Dewey, and Martin Heidegger.5 We might think of pragmatism as postmodernism with an American accent: a little more straightforward and a little less mercurial than French theory, but still a radical critique of the modern philosophical project.6 Inspired by the later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is a stark but serious articulation of “relativism.”7 And the work of Rorty’s student Robert Brandom has extended this “pragmatist” project even while also offering a critique of both Wittgenstein and Rorty.

So if we want to take relativism seriously, we can’t rail against a chimera of our own making, congratulating ourselves for having knocked down a straw man. To avoid this, I’m suggesting that we engage this pragmatist stream in Anglo-American philosophy as a serious articulation of “relativism.” This will make us accountable to a body of literature and not let us get away with vague caricatures. So my procedure is to offer substantive expositions of works by Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Brandom, which are not often provided by their critics who love to pluck quotes out of context in order to scandalize (or terrify) the masses. We will see how their arguments unfold, why they reach the conclusions they do, and then assess how we ought to think about it all from a Christian perspective. As I’ve already hinted, I actually think there is something for us to learn from these philosophers—that pragmatism can be a catalyst for Christians to remember theological convictions that we have forgotten in modernity. Granted, none of these pragmatists have any interest in defending orthodox Christianity; I won’t pretend otherwise. But I will suggest that taking them seriously might actually be an impetus for us to recover a more orthodox Christian faith—a faith more catholic than the modernist faith of their evangelical despisers.

Let me clarify from the outset: I can pretty much guarantee I’m one of the most conservative people in the room, so to speak. So please don’t think I’m trotting this out as a prelude to offering you a “progressive” Christianity. Indeed, I will argue that if pragmatism helps us understand the conditions of finitude, then our trajectory should be “catholic.”8 The end of my project is not an eviscerated, liberal Christianity but, in fact, a catholic conservatism.

The Kids Are Not All Right: Relativism, Social Constructionism, and Anti-Realism

In order to motivate our immersion in Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Brandom, I would like to try to concretize this “specter” of relativism a bit more seriously—though that’s a bit like trying to catch a ghost. To do so, I will engage two sober, scholarly critics of relativism: sociologist Christian Smith and philosopher Alvin Plantinga. Both exemplary Christian scholars, they share a common critique of the bogeyman of postmodernism as a form of relativism. So rather than trotting out easy targets that could be easily dismissed, I want you to hear critiques of relativism characterized by both scholarly rigor and Christian concern.

Christian Smith on Social Constructionism

Relativism traffics under other names and mutates into different forms. One of those is “social constructionism” (or “constructivism”): the notion that we somehow make our world. Rather than being a collection of brute facts that we bump up against, social constructionism emphasizes that “the world” is an environment of our making. So rather than being accountable to a “real” world that imposes itself on our concepts and categories, in fact our concepts create “reality.” Christian Smith is concerned with its strongest9 form, which claims something like the following:

Reality itself for humans is a human, social construction, constituted by human mental categories, discursive practices, definitions of situations, and symbolic exchanges that are sustained as “real” through ongoing social interactions that are in turn shaped by particular interests, perspectives, and, usually, imbalances of power—our knowledge about reality is therefore entirely culturally relative, since no human has access to reality “as it really is” . . . because we can never escape our human epistemological and linguistic limits to verify whether our beliefs about reality correspond with externally objective reality.10

Now that does sound like something to be worried about. Social constructionism, you might say, is the scholarly rendition of relativism that Smith sets out to critique. Notice its features: it begins with the assumption that humans constitute our “reality”; that this act of “making” our world is inevitably social and thus depends on a community or society or “people”; that our knowledge of reality is therefore relative to the categories and concepts that our community gives us; and that this means we can never “know” whether our beliefs correspond to reality because there would be no way to step outside a community to check whether our categories “match” an external reality.

In this description you can also hear Smith’s worry: if social constructionism were true, then there are no checks and balances, no “o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Preface
• 1. “It Depends”
• 2. Community as Context
• 3. Who’s Afraid of Contingency?
• 4. Reasons to Believe
• 5. The (Inferential) Nature of Doctrine
• Epilogue
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover