Yong paper for ETS 2002 - all rights reserved - p. 14
From all of this, I would proceed further to say that a neo-pragmatic theology enables us to give
more specific and theologically substantive meaning to the notion of language`s irreducible centrality,
especially its narrative structure (thesis 4). Here, I am referring not only to Rorty`s claim that there is no
getting behind language to any non-linguistic reality, and that its language all the way down.
31
In
addition, however, a neo-pragmatic theology`s hermeneutics of suspicion against the (essentialistic,
dualistic, and foundationalistic) discourses of modernity sustains the recovery of language as set within a
narrative framework as a (if not the) primary medium of engagement. Here, Rorty`s strategic deployment
of narrative redescription is paralleled by the turn to narrative in theology during the past generation.
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Abstract rationalism is hereby replaced with teleological story and personal testimony which is better
able to recontextualize the biblical genres. Rorty`s notion of strong misreading can itself be understood
as the means through which the redemptive reconstitution of human lives and communities is
accomplished. The biblical message is nothing if not the good news that our own stories, traditions, and
memories are not what we have made them out to be, and that because they are given new significance in
the story of Jesus Christ.
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While I would agree with those who see this as an opportunity for Christians
to re-assert their rightful place in the (post/modern) public square alongside other (communal and
personal) narratives, this does raise the question of what Rorty calls ethnocentrism for a neo-pragmatic
theology.
Given the interconnectedness (theological and otherwise) sketched here between narrative saying
and doing, the immediate corollary to this for a neo-pragmatist theology is that Christian belief should be
grounded and judged not by its propositional claims but by its social and communal praxis (thesis 5).
This reflects two related neo-pragmatist convictions. First, we should change the question from how
31
Most clearly elaborated in The World Well Lost, in Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 3-18.
32
Beginning with James William McClendon, Jr., Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can Remake
Today's Theology (Nashville and New York: Abingdon Press, 1974), and Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical
Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
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Here, I agree with James K. A. Smith that the biblical story avoids the postmodern critique of
metanarratives because the latter are founded upon the (modern) confidence in reason while the former are