Erring:

...Following Derrida's double gesture of deconstruction, in the first part of his text, "Deconstructing Theology," Commonweal: 56 he demonstrates the inner contradictions in the traditional understanding of these concepts in order to show how they subvert themselves...

...The book of Scripture records the beginning, middle, and end of this history...

...In Erring Taylor focuses on the implications of Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction for the interpretation of traditional Western theism...

...On the contrary, it led to the realization that no sign can be tied down and that all meanings and human purposes are a result of an infinite play of signs...

...missing the mark...

...Taylor defines the word "erring" from his title as a "wandering, roaming...

...One margin Taylor along with Derrida misses is the one between Hegel and Marx that leads into the thick of the sociopolitical dimensions of postmodernism and crosses the lines of the marginal theologies written by those who have experienced modernity's most intense dominations...

...This monotheistic God creates the world through the logos and providentially guides it to its end through saving acts in history...

...Put over-simply, for deconstruction, the model for truth ceases to be the spoken word, which claims to fully represent thought as the presence of pure intention, and becomes writing, a mark, which is also an absence and an error...

...But the study of language or systems of Man's created cultural signs did not yield the certainty of a basic structure or an a priori beyond the temporal, relative, and material nature of signs...

...This Man is the autonomous and atheistic humanity of modernity which, alone, without a transcendent creator God, was believed to both shape and be shaped by the world...

...For example, staying very close to Hegel's treatment of the dialectic of master and slave and his analyses of sense perception and force in the Phenomenology, Taylor writes especially fascinating and significant chapters on the concept of the self...

...Marilyn Chapin Massey ERRING, A POSTMODERN A/THEOLOGY is an interesting and clear introduction of the philosophy of deconstruction into the field of Christian theology...

...Clearly there are profound implications because the premises of Western theism are, in fact, the objects of decon-struction's criticism of philosophy...

...The new religious imagination that Taylor finds made possible by deconstruction displaces the traditional Western theological system in the direction of what has been thought of as an Eastern spirituality, a willing loss of the self in a maze or infinitely fluid network of possibilities...

...This is a fine philosophical work and it can only be faulted (as a true deconstruc-tionists would want it to be) for the margins it did not trace...

...Here God becomes writing, self becomes trace, history becomes erring, and book becomes text...

...tion to the dualities that characterize the Western philosophical tradition...

...Nonetheless, Erring is more lucid than many treatments of deconstruction because Taylor explains it in terms of the philosophy of Hegel with which many contemporary American theologians are familiar...

...In the second part, "Deconstructive A/theology" he attempts to reformulate these concepts in the terminology of deconstruction...

...Taylor forms what he calls his a/theology, one written between belief and unbelief on the margin of theology, around a deconstructive interpretation of four interrelated concepts of classical theism—God, self, history, and book...

...Along with Derrida, he charts the Hegelian course through Nietzsche and even broadens this course through his own deep understanding of Kierkegaard...

...All of these terms in different ways refer to the infinite play of signs...

...deviating from the right or intended course...

...Most important is the subversion or death of God effected by the rise of his opposite, Man, to claim the power to create the world...

...The tenet of postmodern is: Man is dead...

...The term "postmodern" in the title refers to the multifaceted European intellectual movement that criticizes the belief in the Man of modern humanism and the sociopolitical results of that belief...

...A brief rehearsal of the intellectual path to postmodernism can set the context for Erring...

...Like signified and sign, dualities (above all, presence and absence) are shown to be terms necessary to and implicated in one another and not simple opposites...

...Deconstruction, a postmodern philosophical movement led by Jacques Derrida, attacks the Man of modern humanism by questioning the classical Western philosophical conception of truth that bequeathed the illusion of self-identity and logocentric creation to him in the first place...

...It revealed that Man had no stable structure, no logos, no center, no self-identity...

...In the course of this examination, language emerged as the paradigm of the sought-after structure...

...Taylor shows that deconstruction's transcendental signified is the one self-conscious God of traditional Western belief...

...De-construction attacks the assumption that truth and meaning are guaranteed by the existence beyond all the signs of language of that which is signified...

...25 January 1985 :57...

...By showing that this purportedly transcendental signified is never without its sign, deconstruction gives a fresh interpret...

...In fact, it proved that Man, like God before him, is dead...

...In order to discover the fundamental structures of historical existence by which and through which Man could be the creator, modern humanity engaged in a searing self-examination, principally in the social sciences...