Reviews and Interviews

Abstract

Gschwandtner begins by warning that the two loaded terms found in the title (postmodernism and apologetics) are, for many, incompatible. If apologetics is, as she contends, a militant defense of Christian beliefs (or at least of the existence of a monotheistic God), and postmodernism a militant rejection of any such worldview, how then can the two be reconciled? What's more, of the twelve twentieth-century philosophers covered in the book's thirteen chapters, how many could rightly be characterized as either postmodernists or apologists, let alone both?These are the questions that Gschwandtner opens with. If the reader maintains a second-century view of apologetics and a 1960s view of postmodernism, these questions will remain unanswered. If, however, we stretch our understanding of apologetics to the exploration and justification of faith within contemporary thought, and limit our understanding of postmodernism to skepticism towards metanarratives (and of objective, distantiated truth claims), we see how the two may relate. And, on these terms, they do.Postmodern Apologetics? is a compelling study of how twentieth-century philosophy stemming from the phenomenological tradition has impacted on, and enabled, contemporary trends within philosophy of religion. The book is in three parts: Preparations, Expositions and Appropriations. Part 1 (Preparations) outlines the foundational contributions of three major thinkers: Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida. While often characterized by their ambivalence towards theological questions and concerns within their oeuvres, these three philosophers are seen by Gschwandtner to have set the groundwork for contemporary debates on both religious experience and religious language. Part 2 (Expositions) considers how the phenomenological ideals identified in Part 1 were expounded upon by a variety of contemporary French thinkers, ranging from the late Paul Ricoeur to Emmanuel Falque. Part 3 (Appropriations) tracks how key aspects of twentieth-century continental philosophy have recently been appropriated by three philosophers in the United States for the purpose of formulating a modern Christian apologia.PART 1: PREPARATIONSThe focal point of Part 1 is the commentary of Heidegger in the first chapter. Gschwandtner maintains that various aspects of Heidegger's ontology set the phenomenological context in which all subsequent thinkers operated, even when aspects of his thought were challenged (38).Gschwandtner begins by offering a precis of what she terms Heidegger's phenomenology of religion. Her emphasis is placed on two fundamental concepts which would be seen to impact on the French and American based philosophers discussed in later chapters. The first of these is Heidegger's understanding of onto-theo-logy as derived from his deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition. Here, Heidegger contends that ontology and theology had been problematically conflated from the very origins of metaphysics. By proposing a conceptual distancing of the two modes of thought, Heidegger is seen by Gschwandtner to have opened a different way to speak about the divine (30). This, in turn, has enabled much of the thinking of Marion and a host of other, more religiously motivated, theorists.The second crucial concept, stemming from Heidegger's hermeneutical writings, is his understanding of truth as aletheia (or un-concealment). Truth, in this respect, is seen as distinct from the objective, verifiable truth sought by the natural sciences. Though an often-neglected feature of Heidegger's work, Gschwandtner correctly observes that his existential understanding of truth (and the concept of meditative thinking which follows from it) offers a basis for twentieth-century hermeneutical philosophy. This chapter discusses neither the romantic hermeneutical origins of this line of enquiry, nor how it was later developed by H. Gadamer. It does however convincingly argue that this is perhaps Heidegger's greatest contribution to critical theory, underpinning the critiques of art laid out by Marion and Chretien (33), and heavily informing Ricoeur's conceptual distinction between verification and manifestation (34). …