Who's afraid of James KA Smith?

                St Luke Evangelical Lutheran Church, Pittsburgh, PA

To be fair to James KA Smith and Who’s afraid of Postmodernism?

 

(if he cares what one fellow philosopher/ thinker at a small seminary thinks)

 

I wrote many notes on the first chapter about Derrida.  I disagreed fundamentally.  I guess I belong with the “BIOLA school.” I am an evidentialist.  I believe some certainty; a reasonable certainty is possible.

 

I think he was too generous to Derrida and too critical of his opponents.  We should be afraid of “interpretation all the way down.” “Interpretation of interpretation” means we don’t have any way to know whose interpretation is right.  He doesn’t care, but I don’t see how we can prefer Christianity, except as our emotional, subjective choice, if we have no true historical accounts of Jesus and the Apostles.  He thinks having “faith” or being illumined by the Holy Spirit is enough, but what makes him different than Quakers or Montanists?

 

Concerning the second chapter on Lyotard, again I think he was too generous.  Lyotard means “grand narratives,” just like Christianity.  To my mind there is no Christianity without a commitment to theism.  Theism is a grand narrative.  There is no knowledge of “truth” without a commitment to “objective” (not apodictic) certainty.

 

I think Smith is a sort of fideist.  He claims to be presuppositional, but I think van Til would reject this claim.  What is true for him is true for him; that’t all.  There is no sort of apologetic, even Schaeffers’, despite his protestations to the contrary. We can only offer our version, our story.

 

Concerning the third chapter about Foucault I made fewer notes. He is right that we need discipline and that discipline forms us.  We need Christian discipline.  Evangelical churches need to recover proper discipline.  However, if Derrida is “right”, there is no “proper” discipline.

 

The final chapter is taking Postmodernism to church.  Smith grew up in a Plymouth Brethren church.  I have some experience of the Plymouth Brethren church.  They are disciplinarians.  They are not sacramental in, say, an Episcopal or Anglican sense.  They are opposed to images (stained glass or otherwise).  They do sing, but they have long and sometimes several sermons.  Sunday was kids sitting with mom on the left side of the church.  They are austere

 

OK, things need to improve.  However, as someone raised in a liturgical church (Evangelical Lutheran) I see pluses and minuses to “liturgical” worship.  First, it can become rote repetition.  One person I knew considered that the Public Confession was enough to absolve him of his adultery, which went on for years.

 

Again, to be fair we had good Sunday School teachers and sincere members.  We had some restrained, but beautiful stained glass.  We had a wooden altar with small shields of the Apostles. We had a great big Reformation type pulpit.  We used the Lectionary.  We read Psalms, an Old Testament reading, an Epistle and the Gospel each Sunday. The minister wore robes and a stole.  We had an organ and a choir.  Many of these things are what Luther called adiaphora, things we can be preferences but not required.  Luther and Calvin had a lot to say against the Roman Catholic church and its practices.  Smith is not in the Reformation tradition.

 

However, there were problems in our little Lutheran church.  When my wife and I attended Catechetical classes (discipline) for two years, many of our friends from school (with German last names) attended too. The day after we were confirmed all but four of us (out of about twelve) stopped coming to Sunday School or youth group, and most did not even attend church.  Sacraments: infant baptism and the Eucharist were not magic to keep people in the church.  I personally did not accept Christ until three years later.

 

Another thing I dislike, as far as can tell, is that Smith wants Liturgy, Sacraments, Tradition, etc. but he wants them in a very individualistic and modern way. He seems to pick and choose the elements of liturgical churches and worship he wants (“catholic”) but submits to no one.  Liturgical churches have bishops.  The Roman Catholic Church has bishops and a Pope.  The Orthodox churches have Patriarchs.  He seems to have a “have your cake and eat it too” approach.  He may take what he likes from these Traditions, which are “catholic,” meaning anything he likes, and he can reject (as an individual what he dislikes).

 

I understand Pete Gilquist and Jon Braun becoming eventually Antiochian Orthodox.  They bought into Orthodoxy and submitted.  They wanted this Eastern Tradition and they owned it.  Thomas Elliot and John Henry Newman wanted the Magisterium to solve their hermeneutical problems.  They wanted Tradition.  They submitted to Rome.  But to whom does Smith submit?

 

Smith is correct to take aim at independent Evangelical churches in some respects.  They likewise seem to submit to no one.  They tend to bend the Gospel to reach people, to compromise.

But as quick as he is to shoot at them, I think of our home church in Pittsburgh, PA, North Way Christian Community.  Church Growth is not a be all and end all, but North Way is evangelizing and they are forming campuses (local churches) in tough neighborhoods, as well as the suburbs. Smith seems to hate suburbia.  I don’t know where he lives.

 

He is right to take issue with the emerging church and the emergent church.  However, where he agrees with them I tend to disagree.  Brian McLaren has accepted too much Postmodern indeterminacy in my view.

 

I see in Smith, I believe, something I have seen in some of the others I have mentioned above.  In my lifetime I have been at different times connected to Evangelical Anglicans and Romans Catholics, as well as some who have converted to Orthodoxy. I have lived in an Eastern Orthodox country.  For many who have grown up in a boring, plain Baptist church they seem to crave something more. I became a Baptist by choice (Millard Erickson’s denomination).

 

I know the good things about liturgical churches. We worship in a Church of England church while we have lived in the Netherlands. We have many friends from my wife’s seminary, Trinity [Episcopal] School for Ministry, who are Anglicans (and some Orthodox now and some Roman Catholic).  I attended a Roman Catholic university (Louvain in Belgium).  I have many Roman Catholic friends. I may disagree with them, but I appreciate them. However, I am not ready to give up a sure foundation in the Bible for sacraments of any church or to give up reasonable certainty in the historical reliability of the Gospels for a fideistic embrace of sacramentalism, especially when it is “catholic” and not grounded anywhere.