Pragmati(ci)sm and Theology in a Post/Modern World
Paper presented to the Postmodernism and Evangelical Theology Study Group
Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Toronto, Canada, 20-22 November 2002
Amos Yong
Associate Professor of Theology
Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, 55112
Introduction
Pragmatism, even if limited to its specifically North American and philosophical trajectories, is
quite diverse.
1
Not only are pragmatist philosophers working in various areas--e.g., philosophy of
science, linguistics, logic, social theory--but they are also debating issues of validity and legitimacy
regarding developments within the tradition itself. Certainly it is inevitable that the classical pragmatism
of Peirce, Royce, and James would have inspired a wide spectrum of philosophical projects, and that
these would have been compounded by the legacy of middle pragmatists such as Dewey, G. H. Mead,
C. I. Lewis, and the Chicago School.
2
Even so, pragmatism was eclipsed during the middle of the
twentieth century by logical positivism and analytic philosophy, only to be revived as a viable
philosophical position in recent years by the emergence of neo-pragmatists like Hilary Putnam, Jeffrey
Stout, and Richard Rorty.
3
But this last form of the movement has drawn vigorous responses, including
1
H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism (Indianapolis and New York: The
Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1968), discusses both European influences on the development of American
pragmatism and British and Italian versions of pragmatism which developed during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Thayer`s focus on the philosophical traditions of pragmatism means that he says little, if
anything, about the forms of pragmatism that have emerged in the fields of communications, literature, politics,
education, and law. Some of these areas are covered in Edward C. Moore, American Pragmatism: Peirce, James,
and Dewey (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961), and John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of
Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
2
See Darnell Rucker, The Chicago Pragmatists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969). The
nomenclature of middle pragmatism is drawn from Randall Auxier, The Decline of Evolutionary Naturalism in
Later Pragmatism, in Robert Hollinger and David Depew, eds., Pragmatism: From Progressivism to
Postmodernism (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1995), 180-207.
3
See, e.g., Jon Avery, Three Types of American Neo-Pragmatism, Journal of Philosophical Research 18
(1993): 1-13, Giles Gunn, Thinking across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Russell B. Goodman, ed., Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader