“At Pentecost an alternative to the imperial unity of Babel is created … Whereas the tower seeks to make people ‘not see’ and ‘not speak’ and sucks the energies out of the margins in order to stabilize and aggrandize the center, the Spirit pours energies into the margins, opens the eyes of small people to see what no one has seen before, puts the creative words of prophecy in their mouths, and empowers them to be the agents of God’s reign.”
Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon Press, 1996), 228.

I have some questions, which I am raising, especially to our Old Testament and Bible scholars, on a unique translation and consequent reading of the Babel story (Genesis 11). This is a translation, which I think may give greater clarity towards the “postcolonial reading” of Pentecost as the fulfilling of God’s aim towards human diversity, which He earlier pronounced at Babel. In a famous essay titled, “Des Tours de Babel,” Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida, while recognising the meaning of the term “Babel” (Bavel) in the Babel story (Genesis 11), as “confusion” (it was not Derrida who suggested translating Babel as “confusion,” that was another’s translation that he chose to use), famously interpreted its usage within the tower of Babel story-line, as referring to Yahweh. Derrida relies on the following translation:

“Let us confound their lips, man will no longer understand the lip of his neighbour.”
YHWH disperses them from here over the face of the earth.

They cease to build the city.

Over which he proclaims his name Babel, Confusion,

For there, YHWH confounds the lip of all the earth.

Following is a rough sketch of Derrida’s reflection on the text. Like many similar readings, he understands God’s destruction of the tower of Babel as His judgement against human imperialistic and hence, homogenization endeavours. Hence, Derrida suggests that by implementing the “multiplicity of tongues, God imposes limits to translation.”

The uniqueness of Derrida’s reflection is how he uses the term “Babel” as a proper name for God. God thus “imposes His name” on that initial grand human enterprise—“Babel,” meaning “Confusion.” Derrida does not mean that God is confusion. Rather, what he stressed is that God is beyond human comprehension. He is thus correlating the term “Babel” with the divine name, Yahweh, which is untranslatable. However, Derrida infers that there is a mission thereby placed on humanity: “God weeps over His name,” and “He pleads for a translator.”

I want to add to this discussion, the thinking of an earlier Jewish philosopher who shaped Derrida’s thinking: Emmanuel Lévinas. Lévinas and Derrida are both known for their ethics of hospitality. Yet I find Lévinas expressing a more resolute sense of moral imperative. Lévinas also evokes a more pietistic faith. He appreciates as a central theme of the Torah, the belief that we know God’s presence through a right posture to our neighbour. A key phrase to Lévinas’ ethic is our proximity before the “face of the Other.” God is wholly other than us—but we see His “trace” in our neighbour’s “face.” Therefore, what the Torah summons us to, is concern for our neighbour, whom Lévinas regularly parallels to the fourfold descriptive, “the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan.”

Editor Introduction: Postmodernism, The Church, and The Future

Can postmodernism tell us something about how the church is to function, how we tell the story of Jesus, and how the Spirit works in our lives?

Postmodernism, The Church, and The Future
A Pneuma Review discussion about how the church should respond to postmodernism

The wind (pneuma) blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit (pneuma).
John 3: 8

Can Jacques Derrida, a Jewish philosopher who confesses that he “rightly passes for an atheist,” possibly make any meaningful contribution to the understanding of Christian proclamation in the postmodern context?¹ After all, is Derrida not the prophet of humanistic relativism or, worse, the Antichrist of textual meaninglessness? He most certainly approaches texts with the genuine suspicion that they are not always as objectively transparent as conservative readers may take them to be. He insists that a close reading of texts will always disclose places where they deconstruct themselves by calling into question their own assertions.² Furthermore, he contends that every attempt to interpret the meaning of a text results in yet another instance of hermeneutics, which is to say, that interpretation always begets more interpretation. Of course, the authorized keepers of orthodoxy, those who defend religious certainty and objective biblical knowledge, fear that if one never escapes hermeneutics, but endlessly struggles with multiple interpretations without ever discovering the stability of cold, hard facts, then theology succumbs to only relativism and intellectual chaos. Certainly such Derridean suspicion should find no place in Christianity, in a religion predicated upon Jesus’ Great Commission to go forth and proclaim the truth of divine salvation. Consequently, Derrida’s “atheistic” philosophy must represent all that is religiously reprehensible in postmodern culture and cannot but be the enemy of Christian faith and proclamation.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004).
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Yet the depiction of Derrida specifically and of postmodernism generally as merely the most recent expressions of secular relativism and anti-religious pluralism might well be a misinformed caricature. I personally believe that to be the case. I disagree quite strongly with those who identify Derrida’s approach as destructive of Christian faith, hope, and love and as dismissive of the potentiality of language to communicate divine grace and theological knowledge. Indeed, nothing in his philosophy of language prescribes a rejection of God, truth, or meaning. As John Caputo, one of Derrida’s most careful and creative readers, states it, his postmodern perspectives display an “armed neutrality” toward personal faith and religious sensitivity.³ Derrida remains neutral with reference to the content of belief, neither affirming nor denying specific doctrines, while maintaining an armed diligence toward every human pretension to final and certain knowledge, toward the pretentiousness of becoming doctrinaire. That is to say, Derrida reminds us that we are finite creatures constantly seeking to comprehend existence from within the limited structures of that existence and, therefore, should constantly remain open to different interpretations and alternative experiences. Caputo goes so far as to label Derrida’s position as “religion without religion,” that is, as a genuinely religious position but not one reduced to a particular organized religion.⁴ It might well surprise his detractors when they discover that Derrida himself writes about a personal religion of which no one truly knows.⁵ He calls himself a person of prayer,⁶ argues for the necessity of faith,⁷ writes beautiful essays on forgiveness,⁸ speaks of the possibility of divine grace,⁹ and establishes much of his critical philosophy on close and respectful readings of both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.¹⁰

Proclaiming and Naming an Unnamable God

In many of his major works, Derrida carefully examines various biblical passages ranging from Genesis 22 (the sacrifice of Isaac) to Revelation 22 (the significance of Jesus’ second coming) and contends that one encounters a constant struggle in the Bible with the limitations of words and the impossibility of ever exhaustively explaining who God is and how God works in reality.¹¹ The variety of biblical texts indicate for Derrida that theology, that is, words (logos) about God (theos) that seek to define God in appropriate ways, can never confine God within the restrictions of human concepts or rational principles. His position closely tracks that of Paul Ricoeur who notes that Scripture names God in multiple ways.¹² For example, consider God’s own revelation of the divine name to Moses in Ex. 3:14. God responds to Moses’ request for the divine name by calling himself “Yahweh,” which means “I am that I am.” But this “name” is not a noun but a verb; it is a name that is no name, a “name” that leaves God nameless, as beyond the signifying power of any one sign. If this is the covenant name for God, the personal or proper name for God, then God’s name, Yahweh, means “the one who cannot be named.” One must confess, therefore, that every profession of God inherently speaks about God as the Unspeakable One and seeks to name God as the Un­namable One.¹³