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edges of the world, or a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith” by which the incommensurability between discourse and the divine is radically upheld.

      2. The Death of God “the Transcendental Signified.” Deconstructionists generally agree that the word “God” has no straightforward referent and that the Nietzschean phrase “God is dead” means the dissolution of this referent—or what Derrida terms “the transcendental signified.” Deconstructionism is part and parcel of a linguistic paradigm whereby “meaning” stems not from an act of denotation or connotation, but from the displacement of one grammatical element by the next. This displacement in deconstructionist parlance is known as the “moment of difference.” If displacement, or “differencing,” constitutes the act of meaning, then the word “God” cannot refer to any object, state, or condition, but it must reveal instead a profound absence where language itself in its unfolding had created the illusion of presence. This disclosure of absence encapsulates what is shadowed in the notion of “God’s death.”

      3. The Disseminated Word. For Taylor, “Incarnation is understood as Inscription.” In other words, the death of God as “the transcendental signified” brings with it the pure manifestation of the divine word as writing, or as text. Derrida himself rejects every ontology of the “revealed word”—whether that word be divine speech, sacred scripture, or even the Platonic metaphysics of heavenly forms. Instead he advances the supposition that meaning as “presence” is not to be discovered beyond the text, but wholly within the “texture” of the text itself. Such a standpoint has been called “Talmudic,” and it does expose the rabbinic backdrop to much of Derrida’s philosophy. For certain theological deconstructionists, however, it represents a consummate reading of the Johannine legacy of the “Word made flesh.” For Taylor especially, the embodiment of the word as text corresponds to the primeval murder and sacrifice of the Father, which Freud described in Totem and Taboo. Textuality is the dismemberment and “dissemination” of the word of the death God.

      4. Holy Nomadism. Theology, according to Taylor, is a “wandering,” an errancy, a nomadism. “The erring nomad,” he says, “neither looks back to an absolute beginning nor ahead to an ultimate end.” In other words, a deconstructed theology, or an a/theology, amounts to a kind of vagrant writing, “a tissue woven of threads that are produced by endless spinning.” Eschatology becomes what Derrida calls “grammatology”—inscription that endlessly replaces inscription. The world does not end by fire; it merely hangs on the hook of a semicolon. Raschke, however, in Theological Thinking uses the same motif of nomadism to argue that the deconstruction of texts must lead to a radical “faith” in the One who encounters the writer as the “depths of Spirit.”

      5. “History as Apocalypse.” Even though Altizer, the originator of the phrase, cannot be identified as a deconstructionist per se, such a thought embraces the underlying “eschatology,” or what Taylor dubs “an/eschatology,” of the strictly Derridean theologians. Altizer understands deconstruction “as a contemporary expression of demythologizing.” This demythologizing, in turn, eventuates in the recognition that past and present are “indistinguishable,” and that “God is the name of that center which is everywhere.” For deconstructionism, history itself is God’s unveiling, which is at the same time God’s death.

       CARL RASCHKE

      Bibliography

      Thomas J. J. Altizer, Total Presence.

      Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.

      Carl Raschke, ed., Deconstruction and Theology.

      Robert P. Scharlemann, The Being of God: Theology and the Experience of Truth.

      Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology.

      Cross-Reference: Death of God Theology, Hermeneutics, Postmodern Theology, Silence.

      DISPENSATIONALISM

      Dispensationalism is an approach to theology and the Bible that is based on dividing history into “dispensations” or “economies,” which are seen as different phases of God’s progressive revelation. The word comes from the Greek oikonomeo and its derivatives, which are found about twenty times in the New Testament and refer to the management or regulation of a household. When used of God, the word means God’s sovereign plan for the world (see Luke 16:1-2; Eph. 1:10, 3:2, 9; and Col. 1:25).

      According to C. I. Scofield, a leading spokesperson for dispensationalism in the early twentieth century, a dispensation is

      a period of time during which man is tested in respect of obedience to some specific revelation of the will of God. . . . These periods are marked off in Scripture by some change in God’s method of dealing with mankind, in respect to two questions: of sin, and of man’s responsibility. Each of the dispensations may be regarded as a new test of the natural man, and each ends in judgment—marking the utter failure in every dispensation.

      Scofield counted seven such economies: innocence (before the Fall), conscience (the Fall to Noah), human government (Noah to Abraham), promise (Abraham to Moses), law (Moses to Christ), grace or the church age (the period between Christ’s two comings), and the millennial kingdom (after Christ’s return).

      John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), an early leader of the Plymouth Brethren in Great Britain, was the first to articulate a complete dispensational theological system. Darby’s dispensationalism grew out of his eschatological views. As a premillennialist, Darby believed that the biblical prophecies of the “last days” were still to be fulfilled and that Christ’s second coming will occur before the beginning of the millennium. Using a strict literalistic hermeneutic, Darby detected in the Bible two distinctly different programs operating in history: one for an earthly people (Israel) and the other for a heavenly people (the church). The key to Darby’s system was keeping these two plans and their respective prophecies completely separate.

      In Darby’s view God’s plan for Israel became clear through a series of covenants (with, in sequence, Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David) that promised redemption through a messiah and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. When Jesus was claimed as Messiah, however, the Jews’ rejection of him forced God to postpone the kingdom, turn away from Israel, and raise up a new people from the Gentiles, the church. According to this “postponement theory,” God will not deal again with the Jews until the church is complete and Jesus takes it to heaven in the “rapture” (the “catching up” of believers described in I Thess. 4:17). When this occurs, the “great parenthesis” in prophetic time will end and events of the “last days” will unfold: the great tribulation, the rise of Antichrist, the battle of Armageddon, the second coming, the binding of Satan, and the establishment of the millennial kingdom. This scenario comes from a complicated interpretation of certain apocalyptic prophecies in Ezekiel 37–39, Daniel 7–9, Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21, I Thessalonians 4, II Thessalonians 2, and Revelation. Characteristics of dispensational theology include a firm commitment to biblical inerrancy, a speculative interest in the “signs of the end-time,” and a deep concern for the Jews, who are expected to play an important role in end-time events.

      During a number of visits to America in the 1870s, Darby persuaded some prominent evangelical pastors and teachers (including James H. Brookes, William E. Blackstone, James M. Gray, and Scofield) to affirm his theology. Dispensational views spread quickly in conservative evangelicalism through Bible and prophetic conferences, Bible institutes, influential religious journals, and the Scofield Reference Bible (1909, rev. 1967), whose notes explained the biblical texts from a dispensational perspective. Ironically, at the same time that higher critics began to undercut traditional confidence in the Bible, dispensationalists managed to maintain older views of biblical inspiration while arguing that the Bible was incomprehensible apart from a dispensational perspective. By the late-1920s and 1930s, thanks to teachers like Harry Ironside, Arno Gaebelein, and Lewis Sperry Chafer—the movement’s most influential theologian—dispensationalism became almost synonymous with fundamentalism. In the 1970s dispensationalism reached a

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