What Would Jesus Deconstruct?
The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church
Series: The Church and Postmodern Culture
by John D. Caputo
Baker Academic

John Caputo's newest book, the second in a multi-author series called The Church and Post-modern Culture, is an attempt to deconstruct the underpinnings of emerging Protestantism in the United States, namely Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism. The book is fashioned not so much as a book about postmodernism and deconstruction as a postmodern and deconstructive book itself. Caputo places this book within the oeuvre of postmodern theory and criticism, his book is built upon a pun, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? is a very different rendering of WWJD, the popular acronym for "What Would Jesus Do?" The popular Evangelical phrase is the subtitle to the book Caputo sees as the catalyst of the modernism within Evangelicalism and the Religious Right, William Sheldon's In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? Using this century old morality tale as the founding narrative of the Christian Right (which will henceforth be used as the umbrella term for Evangelicalism, Fundamentalism, the Religious Right and Conservative Protestantism as Caputo does in his text), Caputo sets out to deconstruct "What Would Jesus Do?" by asking, "What Would Jesus Deconstruct?"

Caputo takes several stabs and jabs at the Religious Right in a cynical and enlightened humor that is necessary within a text that seeks to bring postmodern philosophy and criticism to lay persons. Within this 138 page book the terse barrage of philosophy needs some comic relief in order to keep the lay reader from blowing a fuse. Caputo casts deconstruction as a journey, for "deconstruction is adventure, is risky business, as is life. So life and deconstruction go hand and hand" (53). The traditional viewpoint of deconstruction, as it is referenced in pop culture, is the obliteration of meaning, which is not exactly true, no matter what Chuck Colson or John McArthur tells you. Caputo deconstructs this amateur notion of deconstruction, and places his own spin on things, branding deconstruction as "the hermeneutics of the kingdom of God," what Derrida has coined the gift of the possible from the impossible. (58) Caputo spends much of his time in the book making a thought out attempt to align postmodernity and deconstruction as a radical, prophetic hermeneutic of the coming kingdom against the behemoth of the modernity-steeped, Enlightenment-drunk Christian Right and its lowest common denominator "What Would Jesus Do?" which is so vague it is rendered meaningless. Caputo makes his case that What Jesus Would Deconstruct is not a hypothetical, it is right in the text: he has come to uproot the powers that be, to banish the status quo, to make the powerless have power, the poor become rich, the needy become clothed, all in such a radical spiritual act of love that the whole thing seems impossible, and that is really what deconstruction is about, the impossible being possible, the kingdom of God making a heaven on earth out of a hell on earth.

Caputo places his hermeneutic of the kingdom of God as opposite to the earthly church, which Caputo (rightly) states needs to be deconstructed as well. The church has far too often been the arbiter of power and a rod of injustice against the innocent, which can be seen in the usual parade of Crusades, papal misconduct, and religious wars. Caputo pushes farther, and calls the church "Plan B," making the case that when Jesus ascended into heaven and said the kingdom of God would come soon, the apostles didn't know what to do after waiting so long and ended up starting the church. Postmodernists love to be radical and push the envelope, and Caputo hardly argues to disband the church and have spiritual anarchy, but what Caputo constructs as a "Plan B" reeks of some postmodern dispensationalism where the church is a stepping stone of mediocrity until Christ returns. I doubt Caputo genuinely believes this, yet he does not offer much explanation concerning his harsh terminology.

Moving beyond the pragmatism of "What Would Jesus Do?" and its meaningless hypotheticals (What Would Jesus Drink? What Would Jesus Drive? What Would Jesus use to clean his bathtub?) is the call to become Christ in totality, to be a co-deconstructor with Christ, for

That is why we require hermeneutics. It is our responsibility to breathe with the spirit of Jesus, to implement, to invent, to convert this poetics into a praxis, which means to make the political order resonate with the radicality of someone whose vision was not precisely political. We need hermeneutics, which means understanding linked to historical context, and deconstruction, which means an interpretive theory that is mad about justice, in order to make this translation. (95)

Deconstruction, in Caputo's text, is the means in which the kingdom of God comes forth, for deconstruction is the way we rip apart the injustice, violence, and political power of our world in (and through) Christ. Caputo meanders his way through some of the touchy, flashpoint issues in the culture wars, and shows how deconstruction breaks down the majority narrative and, when wielded as the hermeneutics of God, introduces radical justice, hospitality, and love where it is most impossible and most sacrificial, the gift of impossibility through the impossible God-man, who died and came back in the impossible resurrection.

Interestingly enough, Caputo takes what is now the classically liberal view on homosexuality in the Church, that we should let radical love supersede notions of sin. As a practicing deconstructionist, Caputo misses a grand opportunity to deconstruct the West's very notion of homosexuality itself, that, as Foucault showed in his History of Sexuality, that homosexuality as a lifestyle is a social construct of the West that is scarcely one hundred years old (for some great proof make your way to the Oxford English Dictionary, which shows the first use of the word homosexual was 1892). Caputo does not deconstruct the Christian Right's view of homosexuality, he merely regurgitates Christian and secular liberalism.

Caputo ends his treatise with a thrilling, if not a tad scary, contemplation of how deconstruction re-inserts doubt into the Christian life, and that within the Church is a remnant of people who live the deconstructive lifestyle of radical love and hospitality amongst the majority Church which is about hierarchy, power, and comfort. The role of doubt in the midst of faith, as the reason for faith, and even as that which is beyond faith is a kind of postmodern negative theology, an acceptance that we cannot prove God, prove Christ, prove our faith beyond a shadow of a doubt---and once we accept this we are then capable of living like Christ for we know longer cling to comfortable legalism or "What Would Jesus Do?" mentalities. Only in a postmodern world does doubt lead to freedom to realize our impossibility which is only answered in the wondrous mess of impossibility which is the church, our faith, Christ, the Spirit, the Father, and the coming kingdom of God.