3
Along with a hermeneutic of the death of God comes the elimination of history
as a directed process. There is no pre-determined beginning, middle and end. There is
no "ideal" to which we are headed.
12
History does not end in apocalypse, but with
"deferral."
13
The end of history presupposes the death of a transcendent God and the
notion of a sovereign self. Taylor summarizes this negative eschatology in the following
words:
the denial of utopia can become utopian and the loss of the dream of salvation
can become a salvation. The impossibility of reconciliation means that there is
no resurrexit here or elsewhere, nor in the future.
14
Although Taylor does concede that dramatic features of history are important insofar as
they stage the flight from death.
15
D. The Closed Book
The notion of the "closed book" is a natural outworking of Taylor's
deconstructionist theology.
16
In view of Taylor's deconstruction of God, self, and
history, it follows that there cannot be an authoritative "book" which is prescriptive for
all of life. As Taylor writes, "a text is not a finished product, but is an ongoing
production which continuously emerges in and through the activity of interpretation."
17
Taylor affirms that Christianity is a religion of the book, and the West is a book culture.
But, for Taylor the "closure of the book" is being repeatedly rewritten since it is part of
an unfolding theological network. If the book is regulative, the tendency of theology
will be systematic and scientific -- the direction to which Western theology consistently
leans. The systematic theologian will do his work as a book -- with a beginning, middle
and end. The notion of an omnipresent incarnate logos, Taylor submits, is the center of
the book for the Christian, which structures, defines, and closes.
18
Instead, for Taylor,
writing is always an endless series of traces, cuts and wounds to expose the fact that
traditional limits cannot stand.
19
12
See Griffin, "Postmodern Theology and A/theology," p. 34.
13
Charles E. Winquist, Desiring Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 116.
14
Taylor, Disfiguring, p. 317 as quoted in Tilley, Postmodern Theologies, p. 69.
15
Taylor, Erring, p. 151.
16
As postmodern theologian Charles E. Winquist notes: "[Taylor] sees that the death of God proclaimed by
Nietzsche follows the proclamation of absolute knowledge by Hegel. It is Hegel's proclamation of absolute
knowledge that is both the end of history and the closure of the book." Charles E. Winquist, Desiring Theology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 115.
17
Taylor, "Text as Victim," p. 66.
18
Taylor, Erring, p. 79. Like a novelist who cannot finish novels, we must write and re-write, realizing the book
can never portray things as they really are. (pp. 79-80).
19
Tilley, Postmodern Theologies, p. 64. Also see Mark C. Taylor, Tears, (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1990), p. 231: "To write after the death of God . . . to write beyond the end of theology is to betray nothing