What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (The Church and Postmodern Culture): The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church

but something going on in names or things, and it is that special something that commands the particular attention of deconstruction.

the world but by the church.

where the Messiah never actually shows up, where the Messiah is the name of the pure structure of hope and expectation. In that understanding, if the Messiah did show up he would ruin everything, for then there would be no future, which is a way of saying that history would be over.

In short, were Jesus to return in the flesh, he would be executed again, not by

The name of “Jesus” is too often a mirror in which we behold our own image, and it has always been easy to spot the sliver in the eye of the other and miss the two-by-four in our own.

When we speak of something (say the United States) being “worthy of the name” (say, democracy), we are speaking of the event that name contains.

but a “how,” a way of holding a position, of being under way or being on a path. It is an affirmation without being a self-certain and positive position.

a theo-poetics—as opposed to a “theo-logic,”

a possibility that inhabits the name, what that name is trying to express while never quite succeeding, something that the name recalls but never quite remembers, promises but never quite delivers.