From Babel to Pentecost: Proclamation, Translation, and the Risk of the Spirit
Now I do not intend to offend anyone’s religious experience or to dismiss any genuine movement of God’s Spirit. I simply want to be honest regarding a postmodern affirmation of the Holy Spirit. That affirmation grounds a serious caution to us as children of the Spirit not to underestimate the necessity of interpretation and the risks and potential for error and deception that accompany it. Postmodern thought can ensure that we always remain allergic to the definite article, never reducing God’s Word or the Spirit’s Work to a “the,” as in “the” truth, “the” interpretation, or “the” sign of divine influence. By avoiding the myopia of the “the,” we can be attracted to plurality and difference, to the spiritual excitement that comes from expecting the unexpected fullness of God, the gracious extravagance of the Spirit’s gifts, and the brilliance of Christ’s light as it is refracted through the multiple prisms of different people and different perspectives. Finally, postmodernism can feed a much-needed addiction to spiritual humility by enabling us to embrace the risk inherent in faith and hope.47 It reminds us that we proclaim God’s Word as finite, sinful creatures, devoid of omniscience, storing God’s precious treasures of grace and forgiveness in “earthen vessels” so as to keep us reliant upon the divine power and not our own (2 Cor. 4:7). It prohibits us from quenching the Spirit by forcing him to fit inside our limited expectations, by reducing him to our frail theologies, and by imprisoning him in the conceptual structures of our own intellectual attempts to make a name for ourselves. In other words, postmodern piety can keep us walking and proclaiming between Babel and Pentecost, and always doing both in the power of the Spirit.
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Notes
1 Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession: Fifty-nine Periods and Paraphrases,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 156.
2 Jacques Derrida, Points . . .Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 82.
3 John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 12-19.
4 Ibid., pp. 194-96.
5 Derrida, “Circumfession,” p. 156.
6 Ibid., p. 188.
7 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, eds. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 18.
8 Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 25-60.
9 John D. Caputo, Kevin Hart, and Yvonne Sherwood, “Epoché and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, eds. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 39.
10 John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 21.
11 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wells (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 58-81; Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: SUNY press, 1992), pp. 50-67.
12 Paul Ricoeur, “Naming God,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), pp. 227-28.
13 Cf. Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 22-24.
14 Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 48-49, 69; Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, p. 74.
15 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 8-10; Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 8-9.
16 Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 104.
17 Ibid., pp. 105-108. Jamie Smith concurs that God judges the Semites for rejecting plurality and difference by striving to maintain a rebellious unity, which goes against the divine plan for creation. See The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), p. 33.
18 Ibid., pp. 108-109.
19 Ibid., p. 110.
20 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 57.
Category: Ministry, Summer 2007
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