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sound an alarm since the growing irrelevance of Christian thinking could be due to the fact that Christian

communities are increasingly secularized.

I am thinking, for example, of our reliance on medicine

rather than on divine healing; our dependence on technology rather than on prayer; our scientific

rationality rather than pervasive God-consciousness and piety or transformative action. This being the

case, the loss of faith is just as much, if not more, a matter of social and communal praxis as it is a matter

of maintaining intellectual integrity in our (post/modern) world. In fact, cognitive dissonance is precisely

the result of the failure of the practices of the Church to mediate genuinely liberating engagements with

the divine. In short, what Christian theism needs is to revision how our social practices might enable us

to re-experience God in authentic ways such that our behaviors re-vitalize theistic language in our time

instead of our persisting with such language uncritically, sentimentally, and mechanically.

At this point, it will be clear that I have accomplished a strong(!) misreading of Rorty`s neo-

pragmatism by bringing it into dialogue with especially recent developments in Christian theology. By so

doing, I can be said to have either baptized neo-pragmatism for theological purposes or re-contextualized

theology within a neo-pragmatic framework (or both). I have previously justified such a strategy as

imitating to Rorty`s own procedure of ad hoc narrative redescription. The five theses proposed are not in

any particular order of importance or significance, and are not designed as an argument either against

Rorty or toward achieving any particular goal, except to explore the question: what would theology in

our post/modern world look like in dialogue with American pragmatism?

The result, however, raises the question of whether or not a genuine dialogue can take place in

this way. Can strong misreadings of Rorty`s neo-pragmatism be respectable hermeneutically or retain the

integrity of theology? This is an important question especially in light of Rorty`s antirealism,

project, see Yong, The Baptist Vision` of James William McClendon, Jr.: A Wesleyan-Pentecostal Response,
Wesleyan Theological Journal 37:2 (2002): 32-57.

I am indebted to J. Wesley Robbins, Does Belief in God Need Proof? Faith and Philosophy 2:3

(1985): 272-86, for the general point I am making in this paragraph.

See Bruce L. Gordon, Holism, Pragmatism and Religious Experience: Critical Reflections on the

Religious Epistemology of John Frame, unpublished paper presented to the Midwest Evangelical Theological
Society Conference, 22 March 1991. In this paper, Gordon identifies himself as an evangelical neo-pragmatist.