Yong paper for ETS 2002 - all rights reserved - p. 17
coherentism, and avowed atheistic secularism and naturalism, among other issues. Can a pragmatic
theology succeed given these presuppositions? Granted that Rorty does not insist on the incompatibility
of pragmatism and theism.
39
Yet he is also clear that in his view, there is nothing deep down inside us
except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a
practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation
that is not obedience to our own conventions.
40
He explicitly says that his own project is an effort to
see what happens if we (in Sartre`s phrase) attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently
atheistic position`.
41
If this is the case, then it is not so much the question of what right we have to usurp
Rorty`s neo-pragmatism for theological purposes, but rather the question of whether a pragmatism that is
shot through with atheistic presupposition would sabotage the pragmatic-theological enterprise at its
roots. Why render theology vulnerable to a counterattack from within the ranks of a post-Rortyean
framework? Why even begin to consort with the enemy when we have been forewarned about being
unequally yoked?
My only response at this point is that the preceding ruminations take off from Rorty`s method
as much as than they do from the content of his neo-pragmatism. Of course, on Rortyean premises, there
is no strict dualism between scheme and content on the one hand, nor is there an essence to his neo-
pragmatism which renders it immune to being kidnapped and used illegitimately for theological purposes.
My license for proceeding therefore comes with that least that warning from Rorty. Yet this thought-
experiment with Rorty`s neo-pragmatism occurs within the larger project of exploring the possibility of a
pragmatic theology for our (post/modern) times. And the result, for purposes at hand, are the five theses
39
In Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance (Philosophy and Social Hope, 148-67),
Rorty writes: ...pragmatist theists are not anthropocentrists, in the sense of believing that God is a mere posit`.
They believe that God is as real as sense impressions, tables, quarks and human rights. But, they add, stories about
our relations to God do not necessarily run athwart the stories of our relations to these other things (156). Cf. also
Rorty`s sympathetic comparison of Dewey and Tillich in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 69-71, and his
Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism, in Morris Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social
Thought, Law, and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 21-36.
40
Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xlii.
41
Rorty, Truth and Progress, 48-49.