Rorty and the Religious, Christian Engagements with a Secular Philosopher ed. by Jacob L. Goodson and Brad Elliott Stone (review)

Rorty and the Religious: Christian Engagements with a Secular Philosopher brings together twelve essays discussing Rorty’s philosophy from a theological point of view. These essays, tackling Rorty’s epistemology, moral views, and social vision, carry out “constructive and serious” engagement with his work (xvii). The writers even declare they find “promising nuggets” in Rorty’s work for addressing particular questions within philosophy and theology (xvii).

Why would Christian theologians bother to engage in this manner with a philosopher whose epistemological and moral thought has centered on the notion of conversation and yet has declared religion a “conversation stopper?”¹ Calling himself “religiously unmusical,” Rorty maintained that “one can be tone-deaf when it comes to religion.”² He also announced that the Communist Manifesto and the words of the Gospels “may have provided equal quantities of courage and inspiration” in the battle for alleviating human suffering. Still, Rorty preferred the materialism of the Manifesto because, he proclaimed, the New Testament is “morally flawed by its otherworldliness.”³

So why should Christian thinkers “engage” with such a thinker? The reason given by Stanley Hauerwas is that Rorty has captured the spirit of our contemporary visions and intuitions, providing “the best account available for the way we now live” (x). The insistence of “engaging,” rather than “responding,” to Rorty is a tribute both to Rorty’s aforementioned demand of continued conversation and his interlocutors’ willingness to face challenges to their beliefs with honesty. The approach in this collection is distinguished from classic employment of philosophy in theological works. Classical theologians employ philosophical tools in order to reject conceptual frameworks competing with religion. In contrast, the philosophers “engaging” with Rorty accept many of Rorty’s suppositions. Markedly, they recognize the provisional nature of their own religious “final vocabulary.” But at the same time, they refuse to turn their backs on their deeply rooted religious identity. Somehow, they feel, their religious beliefs should be rendered more than mere language; their truth should be valued beyond their context-ridden existence. This tension motivates several of the writers in this book to draw a bridge between Rorty’s thinking and their beliefs. They do so by pointing to logical and moral-political difficulties in Rorty’s work that can be rectified by introducing a “third term.” This term functions as a bridge between Rortyan epistemology and social vision and Christian beliefs. Thus, the writers correct, rather than reject, Rorty’s thought.

In the section dedicated to Rorty’s epistemology, Donald Wester claims that Rorty’s notion of the contingency of the self is at odds with his promotion of solidarity in the public arena. If there is no continuity between the private and the public, the idiosyncratic language of self can never apply to public concerns. Wester rejects the necessity, and even the possibility, of such a complete split. He evokes Gary Snyder’s poetic indigenousness and his notion of “the primitive” to make his point: “A language is, holistically, connected to the world” (13). “The primitive,” a fusion between human existence and nature evoked poetically, indicates a continuum between the self and its environment. This term allows Wester to accept the value of self-creation to individual freedom while overcoming the Rortyan rift between private and public.

Roger Ward uses the same strategy when he accuses both Rorty and William James of using the apocalyptic language of religion while arguing for an anti-metaphysical notion of moral obligation. Their apocalyptic language unsettles “the otherwise steady ground of a personal conception of ourselves” (20), but they obliterate the past without providing a notion of renewal. Ward claims that without a reestablished transcendence, an eschaton, there is no path emerging from the apocalyptic “storm” (21). Without some idea of an end, “even...