What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church

In this well-written work, John Caputo makes a good case for applying key concepts and strategies of deconstructive theory to the biblical narrative. However, in a heroic attempt at explication, his definitions transform the gale-force winds of deconstruction to a breeze suitable for flying kites. This is a aporia inherent in deconstruction; to define it is, in some sense, to effectively "stop the play" and render it lifeless. To his credit Caputo himself makes mention of this, and continues the attempt to forge a "hermanuetics of the Kingdom" in the firey furnaces of postmodernity. He is to be commended; this work is very readable and serves as a good introduction to that most strange of juxtapositions: Christianity and the work of (primarily) Jacques Derrida. That both Christianity and Derrida lose something in the telling is probably unavoidable; Caputo minimizes the losses on both sides.

This was a fascinating and enjoyable book. John D Caputo's writing style was always engaging and the book was very easy to read for a philosophy book on a fairly complex subject. He looks at Charles Sheldon's book 'In His Steps', published in 1896, alongside works by Jacques Derrida on deconstruction, weaving these two together to get a handle on how Jesus might deconstruct the church - not demolishing it in a negative way but drawing out peace and righteousness and the kingdom of God from two millennia of post-Jesus church building. Caputo writes very much from his personal opinion and I enjoyed many of his amusing asides. He talks incisively about many of the failings of the religious Right, although also has things to say about the weakness and ineptness of the Left. I felt that the book was rather weighed down by its series preface/foreword/acknowledgements/introduction before it began, and that the real meat of the content didn't appear until fairly late on in the short book at chapter 5. That chapter was a brilliant read, however, deconstructing the church through the lens of the Sermon on the Mount, and was worth the price of the book alone. This is an excellent read for those interested in a different angle in the postmodern debate and explains enough that those unfamiliar with deconstruction should understand it.

This book is a `gift' in the rigorous Derridian sense. Given time, Caputo's work will do some good work loosing up the rusty sprockets in that old, underused relic known as the Evangelical imagination. With characteristic style, Jack Caputo gives Evangelicaland a smart introduction to `deconstruction.' As fun a read as any other Caputo tablet, it shares with those tables many - by now conventional - performative devices: `the very idea!,' and so forth. Stylistics aside, Caputo's book will perform a hygienic function for those readers who risk thinking beyond Evangelical theo-theorems that always add up to Same, sloganesque dogmas. Yet, as one might expect, Caputo tends to understate - or merely hint and wink - at the double movement of his `pharmikos.' And it is this understatement I find interesting. Anyone familiar with Derrida's rigorous theoretical work knows that `deconstruction and Christianity' is an impossible conjuncture of terms. Derrida makes a lot of hay with the `impossible,' and amongst his enthusiastic disciples, Caputo could justly be designated as Derrida's `apostle of the impossible.' The impossibility I refer to, however, is good ol' fashion impossibility, i.e. formally inconsistent and `substantively' incommensurable. On the one hand, Christianity could express the ineluctable metaphysical moment in the double-movement of deconstruction's textual operation, and Caputo's book attends to those repressed traces that make Christianity tremble, open it up, etc. That Jesus becomes, amazingly, an archetype of this subversive gesture is surely foul play in two senses. First, it allows Jesus to be reappropriated after a pomo fashion, i.e. allows us Evangelicals to associate Jesus with `deconstruction,' to receive Jesus back repackaged for our pomo consumption. Jesus practiced deconstruction? Derrida, then, or at least the inscrutable, buzzing textuality he gives us must be equivalent to YAHWEH! Second, Jesus announced that he is coming again in a purifying Last Judgment that will inaugurate a utopian golden age: for the Christian wagers that his promise will be FULFILLED. Derrida and his consistent diatribe against the possibility of `redemption,' would politely poke at this as a piece of nostalgic and resentful fantasy. Hence, when Caputo invokes Metz's "dangerous memory" and claims this as what Derrida has in mind with his logic of the trace, he is playing tricks. Caputo well knows that this analogy is strained. For Metz - who follows Benjamin and Adorno - this memory irrupts within a historical and normative horizon: Christ's eschatological coming (M) and an emancipatory overcoming of capitalism (B & A). Derrida not only problematizes normativity and historical materialism, his version of the `promise' is completely formal: the `to come' is nothing but the latest atelic irruptions the textual totality are SURE to produce. When deployed in a context of substantive belief and practice, deconstruction has some value; taken in stark

This book pulls together almost everything Caputo's written on deconstruction related to Christianity. I loved it especially after having ploughed through Caputo's 'Prayers & Tears of Jacques Derrida' and his 'More Radical Hermeneutics', and aching for more clarity. Caputo writes like his mentor and model, Derrida. Full of -isms, weird sentences, twists and turns, aphorisms, puns, etc. WWJD follows suit but in much less intensive manner. And, yes, even a newbie to postmodernism would enjoy the book, if one gives it a fair presentation. Caputo puts forth deconstruction at the method/approach of the hermeneutics of the kingdom of God, a tool of God's theo-poetic reign. This is a way of treating the interpretation of Scripture as a fresh/new kind of 'poetry', where language takes on a life of its own and resists our rigid categories, presuppositions and the overall human desire to draw absolute conclusions. Deconstruction is God's way of hermeneutically breaking-in into our world and its prejudices, fossilisation and comfort zones. This shakes the faith, laughs at our certainties and mocks our pride - and in so doing seeks to return faith back to faith. Caputo then takes nice humourous shots at the Bush administration and many not-so-nice ones at the 'Christian Right' of USA. He then gives his take on abortion, homosexuality, poverty and some other politically hot (American)issues. The central thrust of Caputo's form of deconstruction (which is a much more fun and vibrant kind, much more than, say, the deconstruction of Mark C. Taylor whose works usually stem from the 'death of God') is the event, the advent, of the Other. The Other is the voices we want to silence, the powerless we want to keep in their place, the cries we ignore, the (always emerging) future horizon of possibilites. It's almost like the heavenly utopia of perfect justice and forgiveness we will never attain but which keeps us striving. The book is a good introduction to deconstruction (if one is unfamiliar with the term used in a Christian context) and an essential part of an on-going conversation which (curious, interested, hooked) readers would do well to continue in their own faith-communities.

In this short, accessible, and often humorous book, Jacques Derrida scholar John D. Caputo introduces introduces Christians to deconstruction using Charles Sheldon's In His Steps and the gospels' portraits of Jesus. Countrary to what most conservative Christians assume, Caputo argues (and succeeds, in my opinion), that deconstruction is not anti-thetical to Christianity. Indeed, Caputo suggests that we find a model deconstructor in Jesus himself, who regularly challenged the received hierarchies and human regulations of the day insofar as they inhibited the love of God and neighbor (much as Derrideans deconstruct human laws in the name of the undeconstructible goal of justice). This six-chapter book is divided into two parts, with the first three chapters explaining the theory behind deconstruction and the last three applying that theory to contemporary Christianity (focusing especially on the Religious Right). The first half of the book is excellent, the most lucid, inspiring explication of Derrida I've read to date. The second half is good, though chapter 5 is quite mediocre. Earlier in the book, Caputo denigrates the Christian Right for using the question "What Would Jesus Do?" as a weapon to attack those who disagree with them; the answer often given is effectively, "Jesus would endorse what we do and challenge all those who do things differently." The question becomes a veiled assertion of power, in the same way personal interpretations of the Bible are prefaced with "the Bible says" to grant them legitimacy. Caputo warns us of this danger, but, in my opinion, he never adequately works out how can answer that question in a way that avoids simply using it to endorse our perspective. This becomes especially problematic in Chapter 5 (titled "What Would Jesus Deconstruct?), which is essentially answered with a rant against the Christian Right, somewhat disconnected from the rest of the book. I actually agree with most of his political conclusions in that section (the Religious Right certainly needs to be demolished), but disagree with his implication that he is simply being a "conduit and a witness" (as James K.A. Smith puts it in his intro), objectively informing us of "what Jesus would deconstruct." The problem seems to be that any answer to that question (including Caputo's) is inevitably someone's answer to it. I think deconstruction can and should be used to challenged the Religious Right. I do not think Caputo presents us with a compelling model of what that might look like. Nevertheless, this is a very informative, often exilirating read, and I highly recommend it to students, scholars, and pastors interested in exploring the ways in which postmodern philosophy and Christianity may mutually inform each other. A great second installment in Baker's "Church and Postmodern Culture" series.