Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion <i>with</i> Religion

Reply 2. Perhaps Still a Bit Farther Off Than We Think — Engaging Bruce Ellis Benson

235 Chapter5,Reply2 Perhaps Still a Bit Farther Off Than We Think —Engaging Bruce Ellis Benson J.AaronSimmons “The person who turns one of his ears to the prophetic unmasking word of the gospel and the other to the cries of those who suffer deprivation and oppression is not likely to suffer from the illusion that he is engaged in pure theory when in fact he is working to shore up his own position of privilege.” —Nicholas Wolterstorff, ReasonwithintheBoundsofReligion rivilege is a funny thing in that it is most problematic when it is most invisible. Much of continental philosophy has been a sustained attempt to unmask the unacknowledged privilege that operates (often invisibly) in philosophical discourse, political theory, and historical social praxis. So, when Nietzsche describes the “prejudice of philosophers” he does so with an eye toward challenging the dominance of objectivity and neutrality so prominent in much of Western philosophy. This challenge is most vividly and powerfully expressed in a simple question at the beginning of Beyond Good and P 236 J. Aaron Simmons Evil: “Suppose that truth were a woman—and why not?”1 Nietzsche ’s question anticipates various trajectories in twentieth century philosophy including the work of such feminist thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Iris Marion Young, and Martha Nussbaum, the race theory of Cornel West, Frantz Fanon, and Houston Baker, and also the queer theory of Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, and Judith Butler. Despite the fact that these thinkers come from a variety of philosophical traditions (Anglo-American analytic, American pragmatism , French existentialism, poststructuralism, etc.), what they all share is a commitment to giving voice to those individuals and groups who have been historically marginalized by those who would claim epistemic certainty, absolute truth, or theological absolutism, even when such claims are offered internal to philosophy itself. We might say that all of these thinkers contest philosophy’s traditional privilege to be unreflective about the privilege that sometimes functions in its own theoretical discourse and professional practice. Perhaps no movement in twentieth century philosophy is more deeply defined by the task of unmasking and disruption than the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida. Ironically, perhaps, it is for this reason that Bruce Ellis Benson sees Derrida as a resource for Christian philosophy/theology. According to Benson, a Derridian appreciation of the Christian Gospel leads to the recognition that the “Gospel message does not merely contain but is essentially composed of tensions and complexities at its very heart.” As such, a close reading of the words of Jesus leads Benson to claim, “Jesus is not in the business of making the Christian life simple.” Now, even if this is true—that is, that the Gospel has been traditionally misread (or, as Benson claims, there has been a silent “Prozac hermeneutic” operative in much of Christian history)—it might seem that this disruptive reading of the sayings of Jesus is a far cry from the type of disruption one finds in the feminism of Irigaray or in the queer theory of Butler, say. Yet Benson demonstrates that once the Gospel is not seen as a static (and simple) account of “how to be saved,” the supposed privilege that underlies much of Christian triumphalism is radically contested. The result, Benson contends, is that Christian existence is itself disrupted because it becomes impossible to claim the status of having achieved or “arrived” at the “kingdom of God.” In this Perhaps Still a Bit Farther Off 237 sense, Benson’s essay implicitly asks a version of Nietzsche’s question : Suppose that Jesus’ words disrupt much of what is recognized as “Christianity”—and why not? Asking this question leads Benson to put forth three basic theses: (1) Jesus is disruptive, (2) Certainty about “having arrived” is problematic internal to Christianity, (3) There is no soteriological “formula” for Christian life found in Jesus’ own words. In an attempt to engage Benson (or better, think with him), I will investigate how his theses might stand in relation to contemporary continental philosophy of religion and political theory. One of the main limitations of continental philosophy is that the task of “unmasking” privilege is often taken to be an end in itself. If unmasking is, by itself, enough, then it is unclear how one would even argue that such unmasking is something that one “ought” to do. For would one not need to unmask the privilege of those engaged in the task of unmasking...