The Reluctant Protestant

I promise I am not trying to ride the narrative theology bandwagon, it just keeps happening. Given my last two posts here and a conversation I’m having with a friend about the same topic, some of the little bit of BI I read yesterday really struck me as well-said and useful. Here’s what Hart writes in an introductory explanation preparing the reader for his use of the word “postmodern” (Note that he’s following Derrida here in asserting the metaphysical is necessarily a direction taken by a chain, or in my words, a narrative impulse):

“The notion that behind every speculative, confessional, or mythic story lurks a single governing pathos … repeats the very gesture of [Derrida's use of the term] “metaphysics”: it enacts a retreat from the bewildering world of difference to the secure simplicity of foundations. So long as he persists in reading all more or less “ambitious” tales as embodiments of the same suppressed motion, Derrida need never consider the real differences that distinguish each tale from every other: the difference of fathers from fathers, origins from origins, voices from voices. But … whatever makes Christian theology (for instance) beautiful is the force that is not accounted for by structural taxonomies.” For Hart, that which makes Christian theology beautiful and is invisible to bifurcative structural analysis is its constant reliance on (the historically particular) life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

This is another aspect of Milbank’s argument in Theology and Social Theory that functional explanations of social structures don’t explain anything that interesting since they cease as soon as the question is raised: why that form of that of that social structure in that society? Milbank’s example is something to the effect that, if one wants to argue Christianity functions in some times and places primarily as a means of effecting patriarchal power, then why was Christianity “chosen” in those instances since patriarchy functions in plenty of places without the benefit of the Christian faith. It is precisely here that sociological functionalism can have nothing interesting to say. Its only recourse is to assert another quasi-universal agenda (like, say, agrarianism) was at play along with patriarchy and Christianity happened to meet the needs of both. At this point someone like Milbank simply repeats his argument, this time asserting that there have been many patriarchal and agrarian societies with no need of Christianity and the conversation infinitely regresses in this manner. Until, that is, it becomes clear that the given historically specific expression of Christianity comprehensively gave the best account of reality to the people under discussion. The historical expressions of Christianity are thus legitimate.

To tie this into my neurologist analogy in a previous post: what is really interesting in talking about human mental activity is the actual thinking and behavior of real people (hence the existence and prominence of fields like psychology and psychiatry). In other words, the neurologist lecturing on the anatomy and physiology of the human brain is in precisely the same situation (analogically) as the sociological functionalist. She can tell you everything about human mental substance and activity except for that which everyone wants to know: why do certain people act in certain ways (and these are always “historical” concerns).