The Peril of Postmodernism

"The peril of postmodernity is that of losing the capacity to be informed and transformed by God's Word; the promise of postmodernity is that of rediscovering aspects of God's Word that enable us to get wisdom rather than mere information." K Vanhoozer

Discuss

Pomo V

Last time we established the golden trilogy of popular postmodernism: authenticity, community and justice.

Authenticity
Like Christianity, postmodernism challenged the dangerous arrogance of the modernist worldview in imagining that human reason was supreme (the authority of the mind). Instead of authority, the ideal of authenticity should be pursued. It is the pursuit of identity and the search for self. It is life lived authentically to who you really are. According to Michael Jensen, people "want to live according to the truth of themselves as beings. This longing is partly in response to a sense that cultural conditions - technology, urbanisation, mass immigration - have made discovery of authenticity in life much harder, because our freedom has been so restricted."

It is in the respect that pomo can be described as relativist. What is authentic for me may be totally divergent to what is authentic for you, but that is OK in postmodernism as long as we're being 'true to ourselves.' There are issues with this (which I'll come back to later), but it is a response to so much in modern life that is manufactured and carefully spun (think of our politicians or the advertising industry). You'll find this value reflected in many new social mediums, particularly YouTube. The success in YouTube is that the content is real; the videos are not manufactured. Via YouTube I can show the authentic me to the whole world.

The ideal of authenticity is something that the church must come to terms with so that it can go forward in it's life and mission. What is up for grabs is the question of identity. Whilst postmodernism has raised this question, it doesn't provide easy answers. Michael Jensen has in fact observed several paradoxes in postmodern identity amongst 'Gen Y': biology vs dignity (am I just another animal, or do I have a special place as a human); narcissism vs self-loathing; self-discovery vs self-disappearance (the Internet allows us to disappear, to be anonymous); individualism vs. loneliness (the desire to be on or own can be seen in the growth of one bedroom flats. But it also comes at a time when people are more disconnected than ever before); consumption vs labour (Gen Y is relatively prosperous, and buys what it wants when they want to. They are also working longer hours than ever before); freedom vs intolerance (of moral choices); choice vs change anxiety; tradition vs. novelty (old is cool, sometimes. But so is the latest product from Apple); and global vs local.

With these tensions, pomo is still trying to answer the question 'Who am I?'. The church has exciting opportunity to articulate that my identity is found in Christ. The quest to find 'self' is achieved in denying ourselves and following Jesus: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it." He is the authentic human and what he offers to those who would come after him is human life that is recovered (from evil and sin) and renewed. What he offers his disciples is the only way to know thy self.

Pomo IV

Evangelical Christianity benefited greatly from modernism. Both arose out of the 18th century. Modernity was decidedly anti-Christian in it's praxis, yet evangelicalism shared many common features with it. In particular they shared an epistemological outlook that was "scientific" and rational: authority.

For two hundred and fifty years Evangelicals have benefited from a culture that talked in terms familiar to us. So the focus of much of our attention has been the authority and reliability of the scriptures. Postmodernism, however, is not as interested in authority. It understands such claims as a nasty meta narrative - a powerplay.

What do we as the church do. It is a very easy temptation to forget about the reliability and authority of the bible. This would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater (we don't believe in biblical authority because of cultural convenience). But rather than shouting "I am the way, the truth and the life" louder and louder at post moderns, there is a trilogy of ideas central to contemporary postmodernism that also important in Christianity: authenticity, justice and community. It's these three ideas that we shall explore next.

Pomo III

Pomo usefulness 'a' - Modernism

Can anything useful come from postmodernism? This highly skeptical, highly relative ideology - doesn't it seek to destroy the very fabric of our society? These are charges that you may have heard about postmodernism. The fear behind them lies in the power of the necessary critique postmodernism has given to modernity. In preparation for this post, I've found it hard to find a concrete definition of what modernism actually is. The simplest definition that I can come up with is this: the narrative of progress.

Modernism told a great story of progress, enlightenment, and development, and insisted that this story — in which, of course, the Western world of the eighteenth century and subsequently was the hero — be imposed on the rest of the world, in a secular version of the Christian missionary enterprise that was burgeoning at exactly that time. It is the belief that a scientific approach and the authority of reason can solve all problems. In fact, modernism argues that the major problem in the world isn't evil or sin, but ignorance (a malaise solved be education). The world will keep getting better and better, as long as we continue our pursuit of economic wealth and the secularization of society.

The West's idolization of modern secular democracy saw the centralization of society under the nation states. In a country like France which had a rich heritage of several regional cultures this had severe repercussions including the death of such cultural diversity. And many far flung lands where brought to heel under Western commercial and imperial ambitions - all in the name of progress, of course. Modernity implied a narrative about the way the world was. It was essentially an eschatological story. World history had been steadily moving toward, or at least eagerly awaiting, the point at which the industrial revolution and the philosophical enlightenment would burst upon the world bringing a new era of blessing for all. This narrative did bring benefits and improvements. But it has been conclusively shown to be an oppressive, imperialist, and self-serving construct. It has brought untold misery to millions in the industrialized West, and to billions in the rest of the world, where cheap labor and raw materials have been ruthlessly exploited. It is a story that serves the interest of Western industrial capitalism.

This story has also played havoc with the church. Under the guises of liberalism and Marxism (Marxism is the story of progress from aristocrats to the bourgeois and ultimately the dictatorship of the proletariat), Christianity was excluded from the public space. Irrational, irrelevant and out of date. Instead of these superstitions, we should be rationally lead by reason and logic. Science - the great herald of progress - became the greatest virtue of all. God was banished from the public discourse - the humans were no in charge and through their intellect nothing was impossible. The result being modernism has simply removed Christians who stood in stood in it's way, either by killing them or by attacking they're credibility and treating them like a cult.

In this instance, the enemy of our enemy is our friend. Postmodernism declares that all such large stories — “metanarratives” — are destructive and enslaving, and must be deconstructed. The pomo attack the gospel denying modernism is useful for us. Postmodernism is a necessary critique of modernity. But the current problem is that though the postmodern turn in philosophy and culture has sneered at the great modernist imperial dream, it hasn’t been able to shake it. We live in a time where modernity and postmodernity refer not so much to a datable chronological period but more to two different moods and controlling narratives. Our world is both modern and postmodern. And I don't see this changing for sometime. We can not go back to being just modern. And could postmodernism survive without the thing is it critiquing? The two ideas have become utterly dependent on each other.

It is into this 'vacuum' that Christianity must step in and be a light to the world. Like Paul, we must be ready to give a good account of our faith. The story he tells certainly is a grand overarching narrative, beginning with Israel and reaching out to embrace the world, but it is a story that leaves no human being, organization, or ethnic group in a position of power over others. It is the Jewish story, but it is not the typical Jew who says, “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” This is the story precisely of how those who were kept as second-class citizens are now welcomed in on equal terms. This is a metanarrative like no other.

Pomo II

Tell me a Story...

I've been working on my pomo series, which will be continuing soon. As I've been working on it, I've been reminded again about the power of narrative. This has become a well laboured point in recent years. So it's important not to forget juts how much power stories have, especially in a culture that reduces everything to a narrative (and a power play). I hope to blog on this more fully, and I've enjoyed reading about from the likes of Wright, Bauckham and Vanhoozer. Here is Tom Wright making the case again:

“Stories are, actually, peculiarly good at modifying or subverting other stories and their worldviews. Where head-on attack would certainly fail, the parable hides the wisdom of the serpent behind the innocence of the dove, gaining entrance and favour which can then be used to change assumptions which the hearer would otherwise keep hidden away for safety. Nathan tells David a story about a rich man, a poor man, and a little lamb; David is enraged; and Nathan springs the trap. Tell someone to do something, and you change their life-for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life. Stories, in having this effect, function as complex metaphors. Metaphor consists in bringing two set of ideas close together, close enough for a spark to jump, but not too close, so that the spark, in jumping, illuminates for a moment the whole area around, changing perceptions as it does so. Even so, the subversive story comes close enough to the story already believed by the hearer for a spark to jump between them; and nothing will ever be quite the same again” (NTPG, p. 40).

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life-for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life. Taking the time to find the right story takes time and patience and creativity and - dare I say it - faith. But engaging with someone through story and allowing them to make the connections for themselves is the kind of thing that shapes people for life.

Pomo

Postmodernism. The word is enough to send shivers down some peoples spines. For others it's not so much a shiver but a long groan. And for others there is nothing sweeter or better than post modernity. I've believe the same attitudes are alive in the church. Same people will tell you that the greatest danger facing the church today is the rise of postmodernism - it is the great evil of the age. Others will tell you that the hope and future of the church lies down the path of the postmodernists.

Being a good Anglican, I want to avoid both extremities. I think that postmodernism has some helpful ideas that the church should grapple and engage with - the quest for justice, community and authenticity for starters. And I think that there are some things within post modernity that the church must hold fast on and say no, such as the apathy and ambiguity ingrained into today's pomo culture. And when this is all said and down, there are some valuable things that the could church to pick up- narrative, and an ally against that great enemy of the church: modernism.

There is an urgency in all this. It's very easy to dismiss pomo, and even claim that we've moved on - we're post post modern - which I think is such a post modern thing to say. What I have think has happened is that post modernism started off as an academic critique of modernism in literature, history, justice etc in the mid 20th century. From that time it has slowly worked it's way through our culture and society until today - where it now is part of our social conscience.

And the urgency is that this is no more true than in today's 'gen y' and 'gen z'. These are generations where post modernism has been ingrained into their very fibre. So over he coming weeks I'm planning to post about some helpful things in post modernism, some not so helpful things, and how the church should respond to this. And I'm keen to hear what you have to say about all this - so feel free to comment.

The Christian Historian

This is a bit long, but i think it is worth reading:

Church history is a moral matter but…it becomes fully so only within a wider theological context. The Christian engaging with the past has even stronger reasons for doing so as part of a maturation in critical and self-aware perception than the secular student, though there are important analogies even within the secular framework. A central aspect of where the Christian begins, the sense of identity that is there at the start of any storytelling enterprise, is the belief that the modern believer is involved with and in a community of believers extended in time and space, whose relation to each other is significantly more than just one of vague geographical connection and temporal succession. In theological shorthand, the modern believer sees herself of himself as a member of the Body of Christ.

Who I am as a Christian is something which, in theological terms, I could only answer fully in the impossible supposition that I could see and grasp how all other Christian lives had shaped mine and, more specifically, shaped it towards the likeness of Christ. I don’t and can’t know the dimensions of this; but if I have read St Paul in I Corinthians carefully I should at least be thinking of my identity as a believer in terms of a whole immeasurable exchange of gifts, known and unknown, by which particular lives are built up, an exchange no less vital and important for being frequently an exchange between living and dead. There are no hermetic seals between who I am as a Christian and the life of a believer in, say, twelfth century Iraq – any more than between myself and a believer in twenty-first-century Congo, Arkansas, or Vanuatu. I do not know, theologically speaking, where my debts begin and end. What any one believing life makes possible for others (and for which particular others) is not there for inspection. How my progress towards the specific and unique likeness of Christ that is my calling is assisted by any other Christian life is always going to be obscure.

…Despite the popular postmodernist talk about how we are ‘spoken by’ language rather than speaking it, we worry about our boundaries; we do not like having them unpatrolled in the way that a robust theology of Christ’s Body might suggest. But the truth is that, for anything resembling Orthodox Christian belief, any believer’s identity will be bound up with just this incalculable assortment of strangers and their various strangenesses.

Hence the Christian believer approaching the Christian past does so first in the consciousness that he or she is engaging with fellow participants in prayer and Eucharist, fellow readers of the same Scripture; people in whom the same activity is going on, the activity of sanctifying grace. This is not in itself the conclusion (they are so much like us that they must be the same really), but the implication of the Christian’s basic belief that we are called into a fellowship held together not by human bonds but by association with Christ. Particular bits of historical research may make it harder or easier to put flesh on this fundamental conviction, but the only thing that could simply unseat it is a refusal of the underlying theology of the Church to which we are committed by practicing the sacraments and reading the Bible. If you see Christianity simply as an enterprise if the human spirit within history, the challenge of understanding the past is going to be difficult, less radical. For the historian who has theological convictions, that challenge is to discern as last something of what is truly known of Christ in the agents of the past.

- Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? 2005.

No Sense of Community

"Evangelicals have nothing to say about community." This is what I was told in a seminar on the rise and fall of liberal theology that I attended last week. Evangelicals are so concerned about the atonement, that they have nothing to add to current debates about community. If you were to classify all the great Christian doctrines, they would fit into three categories: 1. The doctrine of God; 2. The doctrine of Salvation; and 3. The doctrine of the church. And I was told that evangelicals, for the sake of being able to get along with each other, neglect the first and third doctrines and concentrate solely on the second category. (With the effect that the first category has become the domain of Romans and Greeks, and the third category is becoming the domain Pentecostals).

Why is this a problem? Well, with the decline of liberalism and modernity (and it's quest for epistemology) post modern concerns are becoming more and more prevalent. These concerns are not so much about authority (as modernism has been), but a desire for justice, authenticity, and community. And evangelicalism, as a cultural and historical product of modernism, has little to say to these postmodern concerns.

Part of our problem, as I see it, as the way we think of church. In reaction against high churchman-ship, and in order to support fellow evangelicals from variant ecclesiology, we are willing to label almost anything as a church if it has more than one person and a bible involved. I can be sitting in a cafe with a friend, one of us pulls out a bible and - BAM - we've turned into church. It is just too reductionist.

I've felt the solid boot to the head from this reductionism this week as debate as swirled around about the up coming CMS Summer School (start here, then go here).* You see, for two nights there will be a speaker with over 30 of mission experience giving talks on the current state of world mission. Although the bible may be refereed to - these aren't bible talks, John Woodhouse will be giving those in he mornings. The problem of course is that the speaker is female, and if you reduce everything to church, then heaven forbid that you should have a women teaching in a mixed congregation.

From what I understand, CMS, Summer School, Eu et al aren't churches in and of themselves. Although they may have the same essence as a Church (presence of our Lord Jesus Christ through the ministry of Word and Spirit), they have a different purpose. And may I add, that it would be a pretty lousy church that met only once a year. no, there is much more that could be said about this. What I want to know is can evangelicalism have something to say about authenticity community and justice? I would have thought that a biblically robust doctrine of the atonement would have something to say ie welcome one another as Christ welcomed you etc. Or is evangelicalism as the cultural and historical movement that has existed for the past two centuries doomed to die with the great beast of modernism. I for one, certainly hope not.**


* These link from Craig's blog are only intended to be an example of the type of debate that is currently happening, and are not a comment on Craig himself, who has received several personal attacks over his views this week.

**Although I have to admit that I would like to see reform in several areas of evangelicalism - hence this post.