Always already arriving
WHAT WOULD JESUS DECONSTRUCT?
The Good News of Post-modernism for the Church
By John D. Caputo
160 pp. Baker Academic paperback $19.99
Reviewed by Elizabeth McCullough
It’s everywhere—on bumper stickers, bracelets, hats, t-shirts. At the stoplight, in line at McDonald’s, you’re faced with the question, What Would Jesus Do? Would He make fun of a classmate, gossip about a friend, take that last slice of pie? Would He do what you’re just about to do?
Some people think they know exactly what Jesus would do. He would do, conveniently enough, something very like what they would do in any given situation. These confident souls are the target of John Caputo’s latest work. Caputo is a professor of religion and humanities and of philosophy at Syracuse University and the author of several books on religion and post-modernist thought. He is a Christian thoroughly out of temper with the Religious Right and the direction in which it is leading the United States.
What Would Jesus Deconstruct? begins with an overview of the book that sparked the “What Would Jesus Do?” campaign: In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?, written by Charles Sheldon and first published in 1896. It is still in print and to date has sold more than 30 million copies. In His Steps is the story of a congregation whose self-satisfaction is shattered when a desperate, rejected man stumbles into their Sunday morning service and confronts them with the question, “But what would Jesus do?” This simple question turns its hearers inside out, transforming them in the truest sense of New Testament metanoia.
Caputo traces “the call for radical social justice” of In His Steps through the liberation gospel movement to today’s Sojourners and emergent church movements. He bypasses the more powerful fundamentalist and evangelical movements by promoting a hermeneutics of deconstruction. This is where things get complicated. Caputo discourses on the possibilities inherent in the intersection of deconstructionism and Christianity with great playfulness and passion, but readers who are used to a more literal reading of the Gospels and unfamiliar with deconstructionism may not be persuaded by abstractions. Helpfully, Caputo provides two concrete examples of what the post-modernist, deconstructed gospel might look like in action.
The first example is the pastorate of John McNamee, author of Diary of a City Priest, who serves a North Philadelphia parish of unspeakable poverty with “uncompromising compassion.” McNamee is a Christ-like figure, not in his perfection, but in his willingness to continue giving out of his emptiness, in the tenacity of his faith in the midst of despair, and in his radical hospitality. McNamee is purely orthodox in his doctrine, fully committed to his Church. Yet he does not place the Gospel’s call to righteousness above its call for justice. Caputo marks the irony that McNamee and others like him can do their work only “in marginal Christian communities, out of power and out of the limelight, where the task of inscribing the mark of Jesus on the world is carried out quietly and without a lot of fanfare.”
Caputo’s second example is Ikon, an emergent church in Northern Ireland described in Peter Rollin’s How (Not) to Speak of God. There is nothing about Ikon that is recognizable as “church” in the traditional sense. It meets in a pub, its liturgy consists of dramatic performance pieces, there is no clergy. Its Gospel is a living word that must be grappled with daily, not a dead text. These examples as presented in What Would Jesus Deconstruct? illustrate the working out of the principles of deconstruction as applied to the Gospel. They illustrate what Christianity might look like if it were organized around such a reading of the New Testament.
So what, in the abstract, is this reading? Deconstruction is a philosophy of reversals, of paradoxes, and of finding possibilities in impossibility. No figure in the New Testament better personifies these principles than Jesus, whose most famous sermon deals entirely with reversals of power and place:
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
In his example and his teaching, Jesus of Nazareth deconstructed the principles of hospitality, atonement, and forgiveness by finding the possible within the impossible: welcoming the unwelcome, paying the ultimate price, forgiving the unforgiveable. This is Caputo’s theme: “Loving the unlovable, the possibility of the impossible, that is the central symmetry that leads me to treat deconstruction as the hermeneutics of the kingdom of God.” What would Jesus do? He would turn power on its head. What would Jesus deconstruct? Simply everything.
Caputo finds little to satisfy and much to disgust him in modern-day fundamentalists’ and Evangelicals’ reading of the Gospels. Too often their reading purports to find the answer to every question in the Scriptures, as though it had been buried there 2,000 years ago like a pirate’s treasure, and they alone possess the map. They wage war against homosexuality and abortion in the name of righteousness, he writes, but forget the better part, which is love and compassion. The “good news” of the Religious Right translates into public policies that perpetuate economic injustice and oppression. Caputo argues that a politics based on the hermeneutical principle of empowering the weak would look “in almost every respect the opposite of the politics that presently passes itself off under the name of Jesus.”
A telling example is that of Alabama governor Bob Riley, a Republican who, in his first year in office, had an idea of “messianic madness”: to reform Alabama’s regressive tax structure in order to relieve the burden on the poor and strengthen the public education system. Riley’s proposal failed due to opposition from powerful special-interest groups, including the Christian Coalition of Alabama. Ironically, Riley’s predecessor, Democrat Don Siegelman, also tried to increase public school funding, via a state lottery. His proposal was shot down with the slogan, “The Lottery - What Would Jesus Do?”
Caputo admits, “We cannot know what Jesus would do in such an entirely different world as ours,” but he does propose that “he would deconstruct a very great deal of what people do in the name of Jesus, starting with the people who wield this question like a hammer to beat their enemies. My hypothesis is that the first thing that Jesus would deconstruct is WWJD itself, the whole ‘industry,’ the whole commercial operation of spiritual and very real money-making Christian capitalists.”
We are “haunted,” Caputo says, “by the unnerving prospect that one day Jesus will drop by, unannounced.” And yet he does drop by, is always arriving, or in deconstructionist terms, “always already arriving”:
From time to time the figure of Jesus, or fragments of his figure, appear here or there in individual lives, showing up sometimes in people who burn with a prophetic passion, sometimes in people of inordinate compassion and forgiveness. When this happens, we are likely to mistake such people as mad or weak, which in a sense they are—mad with the folly of the cross, weak with the weakness of God.
Elizabeth McCullough is a freelance writer living in beautiful Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband and two children. Visit her at http://cvillewords.com.
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