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theological discourse against Rorty`s atheistic presuppositions on the other. The result, it will be seen,

also holds promise for Christian theology in our post/modern situation.

But beware that the strategy

here is to employ a strong misreading of Rorty`s project for (post/modern) theological purposes. The

reader will need to determine in the process whether such a reading can be fair to Rorty and retain its

theological integrity at the same time. In what follows, then, I delineate a post-Rortyean, post/modern,

and pragmatist theology in five theses, and then raise the question of how such a theological use of

Rorty`s neo-pragmatism can be justified given his atheistic secularism.

The first three theses of a post-Rortyean pragmatic theology derive from his own description of

pragmatism as being non-essentialistic, non-dualistic, and non-foundationalistic.

Briefly, Rorty`s non-

essentialism is the doctrine that things and realities are what they are only in relationship to other things

and realities. More specifically, with regard to human beings, they are what our languages identifies them

to be, keeping in mind always that as our vocabularies change, so also does our understanding of things.

Here, we are at the heart of Rorty`s nominalism and antirealism (or nonrealism).

As already mentioned,

there is no getting behind our languages to the intrinsic essence of things in themselves. Kant`s doctrine

of the noumena was a colossal mistake comprehensible only within the framework of the

Peter Ochs, The Sentiment of Pragmatism: From the Pragmatic Maxim to a Pragmatic Faith, The

Monist 75:4 (1992): 551-68.

A good beginning toward a post-Rortyean and post/modern theology is William N. A. Greenway, Jr.,

Richard Rorty's Revised Pragmatism: Promise for and Challenge to Christian Theology (With Special Reference to
the Philosophy of Charles Taylor) (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary; Ann Arbor, Mich.:
University Microfilms International, 1997). Greenway provides a very sympathetic account of Rorty`s neo-
pragmatism, and suggests ways in which elements of Rorty`s views on truth, language, argument, reason, knowledge,
and tradition could inform Christian understandings. Yet in the end, Greenway finds Rorty`s neo-pragmatism
deficient at key points--e.g., his neo-Sartrean humanism; his problematic modernistic assumptions (despite all of his
diatribes against dualism, his worldview is nevertheless shaped fundamentally by a reaction to/against transcendence,
and imbued with modernist ideals/notions of individualistic self-creation and self-authentification), and his
axiological solipsism which leaves him unable to recognize the other as other and therefore does not have the
capacity to fulfill his vision of human solidarity--and draws from Charles Taylor`s holistic approach which seeks to
sustain rather than collapse the tensions between immanence and transcendence precisely through finding
eschatological hope in the Judeo-Christian faith. I will return to some of Greenway`s criticisms later.

Rorty, Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism, Consequences of Pragmatism, 160-75, esp. 162-66.

See also the three essays in Part II of Philosophy and Social Hope for an elaboration of these features of pragmatism.

Herein lies the roots of Rorty`s nominalism. Following Wittgenstein`s notion of vocabulary as tools,

language is similarly conceived as different sets of tools for different purposes: For we nominalists think that the
realm of possibility expands whenever somebody thinks up a new vocabulary, and thereby discloses (or invents the
difference is beside any relevant point) a new set of possible worlds (Essays on Heidegger and Others, 127).