Yong paper for ETS 2002 - all rights reserved - p. 15
should we describe them? to what should we do about such intuitions? After all, the achievement of
consensus (a communal language of solidarity), if possible at all, will not be accomplished
philosophically, but practically, by acts of making rather than of finding.
34
Second, however, given our
post-foundationalistic situation, our beliefs and practices are inevitably socially and communally formed
and influenced. Rorty encourages us to embrace this as part of our unavoidable ethnocentrism,
35
the fact
that we possess no ahistoric God`s-eye-view on things. Theory, in short, is borne out in social, communal
and liberative practice.
Amen to this! the neo-pragmatist theologian should say. I would read Rorty`s ethnocentric
turn as participating in the larger reaction to the Cartesian and Kantian turns to the subject. Here, neo-
pragmatism`s way was paved by the earlier Peircean, Roycean, and Meadean turns to the community,
even as it finds expression in contemporary socio-ethical and communitarian theologies. But more
specifically, communities are not only sites of ideas, but also spaces of habits, practices and ways of
being in the world. As such, the beliefs and doctrines of theological communities emerge from and find
their justification and warrant in their liturgies, piety, activities and ethical relationships, rather than the
other way around. In this case, Christian theology in our time needs to be accountable not to some
standard of rationality or set of criteria extrinsic to itself, but rather to the liberative practices and
activities of Christian communities.
36
Yet at the same time, this awareness of the centrality of communal praxis to theology should also
testimonies (of communities) from faith to faith; see Smith, A Little Story About Metanarratives: Lyotard, Religion,
and Postmodernism Revisited, Faith and Philosophy 18 (2001): 261-76.
34
Rorty, Pragmatism and Philosophy, in Consequences of Pragmatism, xxx-xxxi.
35
To be ethnocentric is to divide the human race into the people to whom one must justify one`s belief
and the others. The first group one`s ethnos comprises those who share enough of one`s belief to make fruitful
conversation possible. In this sense, everybody is ethnocentric when engaged in actual debate, no matter how much
realist rhetoric about objectivity he produces in his study (Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 30).
36
Thus the importance here of pietist, experiential, and liberation theologies. In addition, however, mainline
theological reflection is increasingly acknowledging the centrality of social practices to Christian doctrine. See, e.g.,
James J. Buckley and David S. Yeago, eds. Knowing the Triune God: The Work of the Spirit in the Practices of the
Church (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2001); Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass, eds., Practicing
Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); and James William McClendon,
Jr., Systematic Theology, Vol. 1: Ethics (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986). For my own analysis of McClendon`s