Postmodern theology and the tradition-innovation dialectic

Postmodern theology: actually one more aspect of the tradition-innovation dialectic. But one that is quite different, insofar as one tendency in it tends to eschew the notion of truth taken for granted in earlier theology. This itself is qualified by the fact that Radical Orthodoxy, post-liberal theology, post-secular theology, and post-postliberal theology perhaps do retain the traditional notion of truth.

The varieties of postmodernism

Certainly one of the gains of recent reading is the realization that there are more varieties of postmodernism that I have been given to understand.

Perhaps I - we - have been under the impression that postmodernism means only people like Derrida and Rorty, and Caputo following Derrida, and of course Lyotard, Foucault, Irigaray, Vattimo...

But there are some other, perhaps unwelcome, bedfellows: the recent discovery is of Radical Orthodoxy, with John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, Gerard Loughlin; the postliberalism of Lindbeck and Frei; the post-postliberalism of Stanley Hauerwas and Kevin Vanhoozer; Alasdair MacIntyre. Then also the willingness of the RO people to include Balthasar as one of their inspirations.

RO and the post-postliberals, for example - and here they have common cause with Caputo - mount a vicious attack on secularism. (I wonder whether Hauerwas' remarks on capitalism are echoes of Milbank.) But, where RO is anti-authoritarianism and anti-pope, including anti-John Paul II (I think), Hauerwas is clearly pro-John Paul II, and is even accused of being too Catholic. But he remains unfazed.