When I was in graduate school in the eighties, negative theology was all the rage because it seemed like such a blessing. What better form could a theologian give to the confounding perplexities of deconstruction and the metaphysical obfuscations of postmodernism? Not willing to admit that radical theology was merely reactive, I wrote my dissertation on Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans to show that Barth was Derrida avant la lettre. I have since repented of such foolishness. Evangelism is the best retort to questions about our ability to speak about God. As St. Paul said, “I believed, and so I spoke” (2. Cor. 4:13). In the act of witnessing, ambivalence and indecision melt into air.
I still puzzle at why so many theologians back then were eager to embrace one form or another of postfoundationalism in philosophy. That philosophy has no foundation follows from and reinforces Paul’s insistence that “no one can lay any foundation other than” Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 3:11). Postfoundationalism can be a prelude, but never a substitute for the theological grounding of all the transcendental properties of being. I suspect that our reluctance to be metaphysically confident had more to do with the Christological weaknesses of our theology than the content of our philosophical arguments. We knew too much to base the unknowability of God on an analysis of the limits of our knowing, since knowing a limit constitutes its surpassing. No, we made unknowability one of God’s attributes, which we quite smartly, we thought, accepted by faith. Such were our intellectual efforts, when it would have been so much simpler to believe in Jesus!
