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17 Postmodern Scripture Gerard Loughlin Postmodernism—the arrival of the “future now”—is already past. It is history . The postmodern may be what comes after (post) the present, the now (modus), but people are already seeking what comes after the postmodern, while others who once used the term have given up on it because it is so unhelpful. At one level, of course, talk of the postmodern was just a way of indicating the “up to date,” the newer than new. But at a more serious level it indicated something about modern times, about those characteristics of modernity that have become so intense that they seem to have imploded— becoming hypermodern black holes that now, somehow, give off dark light. Information travels so fast that it seems to arrive before it leaves—the results of modern elections are known before the polls close and the votes are counted. The“postmodern” catches the sense that in an accelerated culture such as that of “late” capitalism, many of the old, seemingly firm distinctions have been swept away—above all, the distinctions between reality and illusion, the given and the made. It is in this latter sense that the postmodern has entered theology, as a term either of abuse or of approbation. In truth, much of what passes as postmodernism is not really interested in breaking down the distinctions between reality and illusion, fact and fiction, as it is in valorizing one term over the other, in finding that what had been thought fact is really fiction, that what was once reality is really illusion, and that the fictional and illusory are reality. This kind of postmodernism is little more than the intensification of certain aspects of modernism. Don Cupitt may be a postmodern theologian, but it is not new to be told that religion is made up by its believers. Karl Marx told us as much, as indeed did Ludwig Feuerbach before him. However, a more interesting form of postmodernism does not reverse the order of reality to illusion, but rather unsettles the distinction on 300 which that order is built, so that both terms are interpolated within one another. It is this kind of postmodernism that this chapter explores in relation to scripture. We will begin with a brief sketch of modernism, followed by one of postmodernism, before turning to consider scripture as it is understood in postmodern narrative theology. Here the focus will be on the breakdown or deconstruction of a number of distinctions—between event and text, text and reader, fact and fiction. Deconstruction is a better term than breakdown because in unsettling these distinctions, postmodern narrative theology does not do away with them. Event, text, and reading community may be interpolated within one another, but they are still identifiable as such, even if we must now think of them as merely the effects of folding reality in a certain way, so that not everything is visible at once. The chapter will also explore what happens to such ideas as scriptural “inspiration” and “truth” in a postmodern context, and will suggest that while postmodernism insists on the textuality of the world, it must also allow for what comes to us from beyond and between the texts we inhabit, as well as from within them. It is precisely because we are within textuality that we can see beyond it. The Modern Accounts of the modern and its cult, modernism, are various. For some the modern world arrived in the eighteenth century with the industrial revolution , while for others it began in the seventeenth century with the scientific revolution occasioned by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Some trace it further back, to the sixteenth century and the Protestant Reformation , to the religious revolution that, according to Max Weber, inaugurated the capitalist ethic. If we think of the modern as not so much a period but a mode of cultural sensibility, we may trace its emergence to St. Augustine and his Confessions, to what many see as the birth of the modern “self” in Augustine’s interrogation of his own actions and character. The modern is the idea that humanity is the maker of its own destiny, of progress toward technological and social utopia. Newton produced the idea of constructing clear and powerful models of the world’s working. He provided a paradigm for scientific precision and success. Everyone who came after him wanted to be the Newton of his or her own chosen field. He modeled the...

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