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Cornel West never tires of directly or indirectly drawing our attention to the importance of postmodern philosophical thought1 on religious discourse and reflection. For example, in "The Politics of American NeoPragmatism," he writes, "Needless to say, this rudimentary demythologizing of the natural sciences [resulting from the work of Thomas S. Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, W V O. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, Nelson Goodman, et al.] is of immense importance for literary critics, artists, and religious thinkers."2 In "The Historicist Turn in Philosophy of Religion," West complains, "Contemporary American philosophy is postanalytic philosophy, with deep debts to pragmatism yet little interest in religious reflections."3 In the same essay, West praises both Richard Rorty's move from a form of confrontational epistemology (where the knower and known or theory and the world are left standing within a chasm of metaphysical problematicity) to a form of social epistemology, and Richard Bernstein's critique of Descartes' either/or disjunction (either epistemological certainty or relativistic nihilisticity). West then writes, "Despite their Kuhnian perspectives regarding the social character of rationality, both focus their philosophical concerns almost exclusively on philosophy of science and say nothing about philosophy of religion."'4
The major task of this paper is to take seriously-and therefore begin to philosophically unpack-West's postmodern, anti-metanarrative historicist philosophy vis-a-vis religious reflection and discourse. More specifically, this paper will involve a delineation of West's brand of postmodern, antimetanarrative historicist philosophy of religion, coupled with an examination of his "A Philosophical View of Easter," which is an essay that makes clear use of postmodern philosophical analyses to support the truth of the Christian resurrection-claim and that clearly confines religious "truth-talk" to specific communities of discourse construction.
In the framework of this philosophical unpacking, I will show that because West's postmodern, anti-metanarrative historicist philosophy eschews the search of Western philosophy for an Archimedean point or metanarrative that transcends idiosyncratic historical processes along with historically and culturally constituted epistemic practices, the truth of the beliefs of a given religious weltbild (to use Wittgenstein's turn of phrase) will be purchased within the very framework of that given religious world-picture. That is, the truth-claims of a particular religion, Christianity in West's view, are forms of discourse specific to a religious community of intelligibility for which there are no extra-communal religious grounds for...