Yong paper for ETS 2002 - all rights reserved - p. 2
some who have gone so far as to suggest that the neglect of Peirce and the purposeful misreading of
James and, especially, Dewey by individuals like Rorty places neo-pragmatic thinkers outside the
pragmatist tradition altogether.
After the heated discussions at last year`s annual meeting of the ETS about the boundaries of
Evangelicalism, I was initially tempted to take up the question regarding the boundaries of pragmatism.
Yet I was invited to this panel with the specific assignment of exploring the potential contributions of
American pragmatism to Christian theology in the postmodern world. Within this broader framework,
then, we have not one but three heavily contested concepts or categories: pragmatism, post/modernism,
and Christian theology.
4
How then should we proceed? [reword this paragraph for publication]
My strategy (which details will be defended along the way) will be to begin by taking up the neo-
pragmatist challenge to Christian theology in our (post/modern) times, and do so by focusing our initial
reflections on the work of Rorty, especially his polemic against philosophic method (§1). From this, a
sketch of a post-Rortyean--the equivalent of a post-neo-pragmatic--theology will emerge which can be
seen to dovetail nicely with post/modernist intuitions (§2). What this leaves us with, however, are two
distinctive redescriptions of our contemporary situation: one Rortyean and atheological, and the other
post-Rortyean and theological. I suggest that one way of adjudicating these issues is by returning to the
pragmati(ci)sm of Peirce, the unanimously acknowledged founder of American pragmatism. My hope is
that so doing will also purchase for us the means to address the theological problematic attached to our
times precisely by providing an understanding and enabling the overcoming of post/modernity (§3).
I.
Toward the Neo-Pragmatist Vision of Richard Rorty
On first thought, engaging the work of Richard Rorty with its naturalistic and atheistic
(New York and London: Routledge, 1995). My focus in this paper will be on American neo-pragmatism, rather than
the work of Continental thinkers like Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel.
4
On Christianity--and, by extension, Christian theology--as a heavily contested concept, see Stephen W.
Sykes, The Identity of Christianity: Theologians and the Essence of Christianity from Schleiermacher to Barth
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984). In one sense, everybody recognizes what we all mean by postmodernism. In
other senses, however, postmodernism as a technical term is still under negotiation. I call attention to this debate