Some Perspectives on Evangelical Thought in Postmodern Times
Presented at the Society for the Integration of Faith and Thought, May 1997.
Let me open with three quotes:
"Postmodern thinking has invaded our Bible studies. Home Bible study groups used to be places where you used a technique to work out exactly what the Bible was saying, ... today the aim is to find out merely what each group member thinks."
"Postmodernism, in its arrogance, far from safeguarding our liberties, is becoming one of the most tyrannical controllers of thoughts and culture and speech and discourse that has walked this planet since the dawning of the Reformation."
"I thought Star Trek was pretty harmless, but when I sat down to watch the new series with my children, I couldn't believe my eyes. It was the same sort of plots worked over, souped up technology, a bit more splashy. But the epistemology had fundamentally changed. Program after program pushed or assumed postmodernism. My kids couldn't see any problem, but my jaw was dropping."
Can we be satisfied with this level of analysis of postmodern thought? I shall return to this question shortly, but I want to begin our discussion by affirming that we have a responsibility to engage with our culture and the significant world views of every generation. That it is within the evangelical tradition to want to understand God's world and our place in it.
Too often, though, this engagement has lacked depth, or the sophistication that would demonstrate a real commitment to struggle with the wondrous complexity of God's creation. In fact this "engagement" could not fairly be described as anything more than a stand-off with the "secular" world - a world not only to be shunned, but to be denounced in black and white terms. The creation/evolution dichotomy is an obvious example. Others might include euthanasia, abortion, censorious attitudes to literature and film, feminism, etc.
Withdrawal from an "evil" society has been a feature of certain evangelical traditions. In fact the roots of twentieth century evangelicalism are in a nineteenth century fundamentalism characterised by a fear of acknowledging any ideas developed by unbelievers lest the faith be compromised. Christians who wanted to uphold the Scriptures as the inspired word of God were given no encouragement to see that there was the possibility of learning from those who had no regard for God. An unbiblical sacred/secular divide has been perpetuated. Retreat behind walls of fear is a trait of fundamentalist communities. And in Alister McGrath's view, outlined in A Passion for Truth, evangelicalism today "seems to have yet to recover fully from the lingering influence of the fundamentalist insistence that it was exempt on religious grounds from any kind of thinking or cultural engagement". I think this insistence also revealed a fear that engagement might somehow be seen to be attempting to build the Kingdom of God on earth, a project associated clearly in many minds with liberalism.
I began my Christian experience within such a culture of fear. I can, however, put down my conversion from gatedness to integratedness to a particular point in time. And that was being introduced during my university days to a book All Truth is God's Truth by the Christian philosopher, Arthur Holmes. It's really all in the title - the profound revelation that the world's learning, even without God at its foundation is something to be embraced where it exposes truth about God himself and his creation. The Bible clearly reveals God to the extent necessary for our salvation. But the creation itself clearly speaks to us of God in all his richness. As it is his creation, all truth about everything is his. This does not require us to affirm that everything the world takes to be true is God's truth. But by wrestling with the Scriptures and with the world's learning we will grow in discernment. Putting our God-given intellectual faculties to work will enable us to love God with all our mind, to glorify God by working out how better to live as Christians in the confident knowledge that the earth and all that is in it belong to God.
The university evangelical Christian organisations, as you might expect, have been at the forefront of affirming this outlook, viewing intellectual endeavour as an important objective for their members. For example, the Sydney University Evangelical Union has since its beginnings understood statements included in its aims like encouraging Christians "to submit every aspect of their lives to the Lordship of Jesus Christ" and "ensuring students are aware of the nature, needs and challenge of Christian service at home and abroad", as incorporating an integrative focus.
The organisation of the large campus group has traditionally been based on faculties reflecting not only pragmatism but commitment to engaging with the ideas of the particular disciplines. Out of this movement, the Inter-Varsity Fellowships, or the Fellowships of Evangelical Students, has come the professional groupings like the Christian Medical and Dental Fellowship, the Australian Teachers' Christian Fellowship, Sydney Christian Economists Group, and many others. The United States IVCF identifies in its vision statement a commitment to Vocational Stewardship - "challenging Christians to acknowledge the stewardship of personal skills and vocational opportunity so as to bring honour to God through our work in the college community, in the home or in the marketplace."
Despite this, there is significant dissatisfaction within the US evangelical community about its lack of social engagement with the world of learning. The book "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" by Mark Noll has had a profound impact on the American scene. Published in 1995, Noll opens with the provocative statement that "the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind". He puts this down to the fundamentalist legacy of the nineteenth century reflected in creationism, biblical literalism, fascination with end-times prophecies, separationist piety, and pentecostal influences, all directions that have influenced the evangelical movement in the US and which through its "self-confident Biblicism and populist political mobilisation" has seen evangelicals largely removed from the intellectual battles of the twentieth century. Noll identifies only the areas of philosophy, and to some extent that of theology, where some intellectual progress has been made, but notes that these areas are generally considered "safe" because of their distance from the concerns of everyday life. Other areas of study are associated more with "life" issues or with what we might teach our children, and are therefore viewed as too sensitive for shades of grey to be allowed to exist in debate.
Noll's great challenge to the evangelical community is to view the search for a Christian perspective on all of life - family, work, leisure, study etc, - as not just an academic exercise. "The effort to think like a Christian is rather the effort to take seriously the sovereignty of God over the world he created, the Lordship of Christ over the world he died to redeem, and the power of the Holy Spirit over the world he sustains each and every moment." Alister McGrath, although seeing some of these issues as peculiar to the United States, supports much of what Noll has to say and, in particular, identifies evangelicalism's pragmatic criteria for success and elitist concerns about academic endeavour as contributing to a troubling anti-intellectualism.
What of the situation in Australia? In Sydney today? Well, I don't think the extremes of the North American situation are as obvious to us in this country. But has this led to a better and more encouraging environment for the life of the mind?
There is certainly a fundamentalist inheritance in Australia: the Creation Science movement based in Queensland, the Festival of Light based in Sydney, the Foundation Genesis group, there is the uneasiness with the feminist movement, there have been evangelical campus groups that show little interest in the intellectual life of their institution. Likewise, the evangelical strength in Australia, and particularly in Sydney, lies in gospel preaching and evangelistic commitment, rather than in intellectual engagement, perhaps also reflecting our pragmatic and intellectually suspicious culture. I've encountered preaching in Sydney that demonstrated the standard fundamentalist line that it is in those outside the church where all evil resides and we must be careful not to sully our pure existence with such experience. Those who are sinful in God's eyes according to this preacher were "pornographers, teenage druggies, 'arty' types, anti-wowsers, communists, and people who live in Newtown"! Even allowing for a bit of excess in delivery, the spirit of gatedness was evident in that sermon and, I fear, in other sermons preached from evangelical pulpits around Sydney.
Bishop Paul Barnett in the April Southern Cross newspaper under the heading "Warning: fundamentalism breeds 'liberals'" says that Sydney Anglicans "place a high value on sound scholarship. We are not fundamentalist. We believe in sound methods of Bible reading and scholarship." He calls on evangelicals, in the face of challenges to the gospel, to not "panic, lose our heads and react ideologically and unreflectively, that is, become fundamentalist."
I find, however, our Archbishop more persuasive on this question who when asked in a recent television interview what was wrong with evangelicals stated that sometimes we could be brash and think we've got all the answers.
There are a few attempts at integration: Interchange (virtually defunct), Zadok, Kategoria, the Society for the Study of Early Christianity, the Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity, the Evangelical History Association, the various Graduate Groups that I have mentioned, some putting out journals and articles wrestling with their respective professions from a framework of faith. The story is, however, one of small circulations and limited impact.
SIFT exists to seek to rectify this situation. Each of us in the core group is motivated by a passion for truth lived out in all aspects of our lives including our minds. And in some respects motivated by the uneasiness one is made to feel when one wants to ask the difficult questions.
SIFT is about facing the questions, and providing both comfort and challenge - that is, a safe environment in which to ask our difficult questions, to help reduce the fear of questioning, of sifting, but using that environment to issue challenges: to ourselves, to the church, to all the various communities we function in at home, at work, at study, at play. And we believe in doing this in community where ideas can be tested, questions posed, love conveyed through our handling of each others' dodgy thinking. Comfortable with a multiplicity of views, challenged by the uncertainty that we will walk away with, refreshed in our faith and our thought.
SIFT is committed not only to engagement with our culture and its learning, but to doing it with faith. A significant portion of our lack of critical engagement with the ideas and values of our discipline or our profession is a result of a timidity with our theology. We need to be thinking about our God and his purposes in order to understand and sift the world's learning. So you will notice that a theological contribution will be an intentional feature of our times together, to help sharpen our understanding of our faith so that we can more readily face the questions without dispensing with the faith that leads us to such engagement in the first place. To quote McGrath again: "an essential pre-condition for a renewed evangelical engagement with intellectual life is confidence in its own coherence and credibility".
At SIFT we want to mitigate the censorious stance towards contemporary intellectual challenges that has characterised so much of evangelical interaction with the world. It has been put well in an IVCF (US) publication: "The issues go beyond being gracious with co-workers and fair with employees. .......in each profession Christians can find something that is inherently Godly about the work itself and bring to bear values based on their faith. Economists need to have their economic formulas take into account the person on the street, nuclear physicists to wrestle with the moral issues behind Star Wars defense, bankers to ensure they don't discriminate radically in lending money."
And I would add, artists and writers to enlighten creative fields mesmorised by despair and cynicism; engineers and architects to design and build with both the individual and the community in mind. You could each keep such a list going.
Without doubt, the challenge facing our thinking in almost all areas of life at present is postmodernism. That is, after modernism, or against modernism, or as some authors argue, the exhaustion that comes after the failure of the modernist project. But what does all this mean? Merrick Russell's talk and slide show at the inaugural SIFT conference gave us insight into some aspects of this issue particularly as it related to design and architecture. Indeed architecture is considered one of the embryonic and continuing homes for postmodern influence - the attempt earlier this century to impose an international, or universal, style on building was rejected by some architects and social critics as impersonal, severely structured, repetitive and undecorative. For example, the skyscrapered city or the old Housing Commission boxes of flats. Postmodern architecture has sought firstly to overturn this "dehumanising" design philosophy and then to replace it. Postmodern architecture seeks to be true to a particular place, to affirm the unique environment, to borrow from many styles or traditions in order to create something in harmony with the site and its uses. To add a bit of decoration or pastiche for its own sake would also be an aspect.
But before delving too deeply, let me try to articulate the two key concepts here. Fundamentally, postmodernism is an elusive term - still in its infancy historically speaking, perhaps by its very nature, not wanting to be pinned down. The easiest way is to first understand what modernism refers to. The attempt to understand God's world took significant steps at the beginning of the "modernist" period (considered by some to be as early as the beginning of the Renaissance, i.e. 1450, but more generally to have begun with the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century). These attempts were characterised by a desire to escape from the mysticism and unknowingness of the dark ages, its war-ravaged, superstitious and fateful path for humanity. The quest of people like Descartes and Newton was to emancipate the world from this uncertainty, to apply the newly acquired tools of science and rationalism to build a better world. Initially a project under God, the gradual "secularisation" of life throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the modernist or enlightenment project transform into a humanist progress led by Marx, Darwin and others in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the utopian dream somehow persisted through two world wars and a depression to leave the Western world thinking that it could still build a better world and find universal truth through the application of reason, of scientific method, of observing the world from the pure standpoint of the enlightened mind.
The movement from Providence to Progress, is the great mark of the modernist period. Many eras have thought themselves to be modern including our own today. But the advent of "postmodernism" as the primary descriptor of the late twentieth century has forced a boundary to be put around modernism so as to know what we are supposed to be following, or tearing down!
The chief characteristic of modernism is the attempt to take command of humanity's destiny and this world in the interest of moving towards a utopia of some sort. Whether it was the sailors of the 15th and 16th centuries who went on voyages of discovery for the new world, or the overthrow of divine rights of monarchs in favour of the enlightened democratic state, or the gradual and continuing Darwinian evolution of the human species into an evermore superior being, or the inevitable triumph of the proletariat in a Marxist revolution, the overriding goal was to dispel mystery and uncertainty about this world and to place the individual and his/her concerns at the centre of all endeavour.
The industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries followed by rapid technological advance and the rise of economic rationalism in the twentieth century provided the seemingly inexhaustible means by which man's domain could be mastered and all needs could be satisfied.
The pursuit of these goals was accompanied by the notion of there being one right way of doing things, of there being one true explanation of why things were the way they were. This truth was to be found by the application of the human mind's ability to reason, to observe, assess, categorise and conclude. These conclusions were not those of the village community, the dominant religions, or the monarch. Authority was no longer to be found in traditional imposed structures, but in the objective foundations of science, economic growth, democracy and, in particular, the individual.
In the twentieth century, this modernism can be found in:
During its ascendancy, modernism was not without its critics. The attacks of romantics and spiritualists on economic reductionism in the latter part of the nineteenth century previewed the postmodern assault in their attempts to expose what they saw as the irony of modernist claims that technology and material pursuit would set humanity free from poverty and drudgery. But these attacks remained within the modernist paradigm of autonomous man and the notion of progress.
A definition of the postmodern turn as I mentioned is extremely elusive. There are a multitude of facets that I won't even be able to touch upon. It is clear, however, that there is no going back to the certainties of the universalist project of modernism. It was modernism that told us it was okay to cut large swathes through our natural and built environment in the name of technological progress; to restrict the opportunities for women, and particularly married women in our society; to separate and institutionalise those who are different like the mentally ill, the disabled, the migrant. Postmodernism allows us to question these truths, but itself is not monolithic - the attempt at definition is confused by its habitual desire to subvert so that it continually seeks to subvert even its own promoters' efforts!
Some try juxtaposed lists to attempt to give flavour to the term, but in some ways this perpetuates the bipolar approach of modernism that would seek to reduce the term to manageable dimensions. It also suggests opposition rather than that of following on, and although there are oppositional forces within the postmodern turn, structuring the debate tends to play into the hands of those who oppose the changes.
Charles Jencks provides a helpful lead-in to the term: his key point being that postmodernism is not anti-modern, because for the most part it accepts many modernist achievements in science, medicine and industrial technology. It is rather a complex amalgam of continuation and transcendence of modernism at the same time, a package of both negative and positive tendencies.
Jencks, further, in wanting to enable a grasp of the complexity we find ourselves in, outlines a seven-stage schema to illustrate the development of the idea and the use of the term, as well as its growing conceptual maturity. Of course these stages overlap and cannot be considered neat packages, but they give some handle on the history of the term.
1. Prehistory (1870s to 1950s)
2. Postmodern seen as Modernism in decline (1950s to 1970s)
3. Postmodern as the counter culture of the 1960s
4. Postmodern as pluralist politics and eclectic style (1970s and early 1980s)
5. Postmodern classicism, a public language (1979 to the present)
6. Critical reactions to the condition of postmodernity (1980 to the present)
7. Critical summaries of the Postmodern paradigm (1988 to the present)
Let me outline four key pointers for the rest of our discussion.
Boundaries
The modernist quest to describe, and categorise and segregate like a nineteenth century naturalist, is rejected. Boundaries between disciplines and between nation-states are seen as hindrances to appropriate communication. The nation-state is seen as the cause of the violence of this century and as less relevant in a time of global migration, money and information. Segregation between the sexes in terms of proper work, and hobbies, is also disputed. Each discipline needs the learning of other disciplines to enable greater integration of understanding. The rise of central controlling government agencies like The Cabinet Office, where I work, is a product of gradual perceptions that greater cross-agency co-ordination is required in contemporary government to deal with just about any major issue.
Otherness
Postmodernism also rejects the notion of one prevailing objective viewpoint. It introduces the seemingly obvious perspectival nature of our beliefs, our conclusions, our preferences. The idea that we are likely to be informed by our culture, both in time and place, before reaching conclusions seems obvious to us today. Its consequences are eclecticism - a willingness to borrow ideas from many sources both within and across disciplines - and pluralisation - a willingness to recognise the value of all positions and a reluctance to favour one. These consequences are sometimes subsumed within the idea of relativism.
Interpretation
Related to otherness is the affirmation of interpretation. The "death of the author" is the key slogan here. Instead of trying to identify the one true meaning of a text, a novel, a film, all interpretations have value based in the experience of the reader or viewer. Barbara Kingsolver, an American author, says "When I've written a book, it's half done. When a reader takes it, reads it, forms the picture in his or her own mind and has an emotional response to it, that's the moment of art. That's when it's finished." The demise of the professional critic is related. So is the breaking down of the distinction between "high" culture (opera, literature, ballet and theatre) and "low" culture (film, TV, popular music, and Mills & Boon novels). The debate over canon arises in this context.
Metanarrative
A technical term I am sorry, but a key concept in the debate. Lyotard's famous definition of postmodernism is "incredulity towards metanarratives". That is, a disbelief that there is one grand or totalising story (like the idea of progress, or more specifically religious utopias, Marxist states, etc) that shapes and explains the past as well as the future. The approach is driven largely by the violence of the Nazi operation and the Hiroshima destruction of World War II, and the colonial impulse of the major Western powers being viewed as illustrative of the failure of modernist metanarratives. Instead other forgotten stories are given focus alongside the traditional histories, the aspirations and interests of minorities are given equal place with the power elite. The capitalist drive to tame nature in the interest of growth and consumerism is displaced by a concern for preserving a disappearing environment.
Each of these ideas clearly overlaps and informs the others - typically postmodern that there is no three point explanation. And perhaps you sensed some scary issues coming to it from a Christian perspective - relativism, rejection of religious metanarratives, lack of clear interpretation of texts, lack of certainty about almost anything.
Practically speaking, what does postmodernism actually look like? What change is being wrought in various fields by the challenge of postmodern thought?
As we have intimated in architecture, it is represented by a move from gridlike structure and impersonal form to playful, place-specific construction. In history, the modernist mission to find the truth of the past is exposed as one story of the powerful and the decision-makers that excluded the narratives of everyday folk and oppressed groups, like ethnic and religious minorities, and of women.
In art, the extreme modernist dispelling of passion into cubism and technical formalism metamorphosed into collage and stylistic clash pointing to a dark soul-less abyss. Science has learnt to accept chaos into once rigid and practicable formulae. Novelists are no longer restrained by linearity in telling their story but are enticed to playfully juxtapose, to confuse, to remain inconclusive. The reader, likewise, is invited to participate in determining meaning rather than seeking the author's intentions. The canon of what constitutes study material in the liberal arts is widened to be without boundary.
Professional or expert consultants no longer tell you what to do but manage and guide a process of consultation for you. Politics is no longer bipolar and ideological but enmeshed in murky tribal conflicts and global terrorism. Musical taste and consumption is eclectic in a choice-laden radio-dial. Religious traditions become blurred as what is right for one person is not seen as paradigmatic for others in this "new age" society. In philosophy, tired attempts to eliminate the mind or soul from the brain, or God from everything, are cast aside in favour of relativism. Engineers and urban planners seek to enhance a person's or a community's sense of place and belonging. Health care offers a range of alternative medicine. Economics? Well the study of economics seems currently impervious to the postmodern critique of rationality and reductionism with its hegemonic model of economic rationalism somehow parasitically wedded to the consumer aspects of postmodernity. But wrestling with this perhaps isolated conundrum is for another day and another speaker.
The Enlightenment was designed to eliminate uncertainty, to emancipate humanity from tradition and mysticism. Postmodernism has resurrected uncertainty, however. The very success of modernism in some ways has driven us towards rampant consumerism where choice and freedom are paramount. The great modernist product television has become in postmodern times, the principal tool of the consumer culture reinforcing the centrality of consumption and the decentring of the individual and once-sacred values. Consumerism infects what have normally been non-consumer areas. For example, the church, as one of the traditional authorities in our community now the victim of decentring, finds itself "competing" in the marketplace. Without overarching frameworks anxiety and doubt become the price of choice. Joe Jackson sings "It's all too much for me to bear, what kind of shampoo suits my hair, two hundred brands of cookies, 87 kinds of chocolate chip, they say that choice is freedom, I'm so free it drives me to despair". Modernism is uncomfortable with the uncertainty that accompanies choice. As Woody Allen wrote in A Speech to Graduates: "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
I believe, however, that this is not the same uncertainty that modernism sought to dispel. Postmodern uncertainty, although with its upsides and its downsides, is not subject to the notions of superstitious abdication of responsibility to providence or fate, or that of fear before an all-powerful church and state. Rather it is a subversion of the totalising modernist paradigm which arrogantly supposed an objective, God's eye view of knowledge of this world. Contemporary thinking does not disregard the insights of modernism itself, for it would be equally arrogant to do so. However, with the maturing understanding of the insights of postmodernism, we should recognise postmodern uncertainty as a humbling reminder of our finite, fallen struggle to make sense of God's world.
The evangelical Christian response to the postmodern turn takes a number of forms from fear and dismissal, to humility and embracement. I want to illustrate this by looking at an example of each of two different approaches acknowledging that they are part of the spectrum of belief and insight on this matter as with any issue of debate: The Death of Truth edited by Dennis McCallum and Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be by Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh.
It is clear where The Death of Truth is coming from: it confidently claims on its front cover to identify "What's Wrong with Multiculturalism, the Rejection of Reason and the New Postmodern Diversity". Middleton and Walsh, more circumspectly perhaps, merely subtitle with "Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age."
McCallum et al identify helpfully the easy rejoinders to a hard postmodernism. That in stating there is no absolute truth it is making its own metanarrative or overriding truth claim. That by removing language's connection with reality it removes its own ability to dialogue. That there is exaggeration of some positions within the postmodern creed like the difficulty of objectivity, or our culture-bound understandings. That its understanding of power is simplistic. However, The Death of Truth's own language in pursuit of these and other claims betrays I think, a desire to address rather than engage. For example, "even if we admit postmodern scholars have demonstrated some valid points, we dare not become confused..." and "should never compromise with postmodernism" or "Postmodern calls for humility are phony".
It is appropriate that the authors take the challenge of postmodernism as fundamental in our time. The shift in Western thought is seen as dramatic and earth-shaking. But there needs to be care that in critiquing postmodernism the modernist paradigm is not bought. According to McCallum only the liberals sold out to modernism. But in my view (à la Noll and McGrath) so have fundamentalists and evangelicals who perpetuate separatist attitudes to society and culture. Typical of such approaches, The Death of Truth is a reminder to me of the fear of "secular" learning that was mine pre-Holmes. There is a stridency about its "address" to the world: "No book can take you more quickly and painlessly into the heart of the new postmodern outlook than The Death of Truth. You will feel the lights going on time after time as you read this easy to understand volume."
Interestingly, there is a Death of Truth website which amongst the "latest in cutting edge apologetics materials and instruction" has a feature "Postmodern experience of the week" where you are invited to contribute an experience of your own that typifies our postmodern age with the incentive of winning a free book! However, I don't know how many contributions they are receiving: the example that is given has been there for many months now, but it is an enlightening one in regard to The Death of Truth approach. It criticises the architect of the Wexner Centre for the Performing Arts on the campus of Ohio State University which has a pillar hanging from the ceiling but not anchored to the floor. Acknowledging the intention to subvert our culturally defined sense of engineering, the authors cannot help themselves from making a dig at the architect "wondering why he didn't design all the pillars to be suspended from the ceiling!"
I feel, however, that this dismissive dig at postmodernism lacks insight into the sense of play, the desire of postmodernism to respect the practical tools of modernism without subscribing to its ideology. In fact the success of postmodernism is in subverting our unthinking perceptions of reality as a means of getting us to question our assumptions. I would like to submit, albeit cheekily, that perhaps even The Death of Truth has been unwittingly infused with the delightful ambiguity of postmodern thought when it states, ostensibly in keeping with its strident tone, that the challenge of postmodernism is "the death of truth as we know it"!
If you're thinking this book has been an easy target then let me mention that the quotes with which I opened are those of Don Carson and appear in a praiseworthy review in The Briefing of Carson's book The Gagging of God and a series of lectures given in Sydney. Affectionately referred to in The Briefing as "The Don", Carson has earnt deserved respect and credibility in Sydney for his teaching. Unfortunately, I don't think this same respect can be extended to his treatment of postmodernism. Once again, acknowledgment is made that there is truth in postmodern thought, but Carson's notion of engagement is then to tackle it as though these "truths" don't matter and postmodernism becomes a monolithic threat to the gospel. Classic overstatement is used liberally to demonise postmodern thought.
Let us turn to another approach. Again, acknowledging this postmodern time as one of crisis and tragedy, the co-authors of Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be have, however, sought to engage deeply with postmodern thinking, eliciting from it some pointers to "exciting dimensions of the biblical text of which we were previously unaware."
As we have noted much of the drive for postmodernist thinking has sprung from World War II viewed as the ultimate collapse of the modernist paradigm. Middleton and Walsh use the consequent notion of suffering and powerlessness to creatively retell the biblical story as that of Jesus identifying with our plight in a profound, self-sacrificial way that liberates us from captivity to continue to live out in our community of faith the narrative of empowerment and liberation in everyday life. They seek to use the tools of postmodernism to describe the gospel as a metanarrative of redemption.
Importantly for our postmodern context, they describe this metanarrative as an anti-totalising and non-violent story. They focus on Jesus' prophetic critique of the religious and political centre on behalf of the excluded other - tax collectors, prostitutes, etc - lovingly including the marginal, and rejecting ideological attempts to overthrow the Roman oppressors; as well as on his own death and resurrection achieving deliverance from suffering for God's own people and his creation. In this way they attempt to subvert Lyotard's conception of all metanarratives as violent and oppressive.
I found the book clever and refreshing, helpfully avoiding modernist traps for Christian apologetics and faithful living that even Carson is prone to. Criticism of Middleton and Walsh has focussed on their supposed sell-out to liberalism, based on their desire to adopt the "narrative" based approach to communicating the gospel - that is, describing the gospel story as the story of a particular group of people (Christians) that informs how they live and their world-view rather than depending on the standard evangelical apologetic of providing evidence for truth claims. And selling-out to postmodernism by dwelling on questions of what is persuasive about the Christian community rather than what is truth, thereby reducing the gospel's ability to stand out in the narrative marketplace.
The concern about truth is a pertinent one for evangelical Christians, but also a defining one in terms of how Christians are to understand and communicate with the postmodern world. We have to accept I believe, that truth, as we know it, is a tired concept because of its alliance with modernism and the totalising experience neither of which is I believe essential for the Christian who wants to uphold the central claims of evangelical Christianity. These claims are understood as true by us as a result of faith, not because they have been proved to us beyond a reasonable doubt say in scientific or evidentiary ways. These claims, which we do believe to be truth, are conveyed by revelation and are not discovered or deduced by the unassisted autonomous "modernist" mind. And we hold to them, despite any opposition or challenge, by faith, and to some degree because they make sense of this world. Middleton and Walsh provide a helpful way of articulating the Christian world-view given the relativistic, postmodern environment in which we live. So I don't feel concerned about this challenge because it perpetuates the propositional, totalising approach which will only further convince the world that entering the Christian community means leaving your mind at the door.
Two further aspects of understanding evangelical faith and postmodern thought are hinted at by Middleton and Walsh. The oft-asked question is "how shall we then live?" The co-authors address this question with at least two other thoughts which have been taken up before and after them but are articulated in a hopeful and inspiring manner in Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be.
In a marketplace of ideas and stories, it is not the propositional or logical presentation of Christianity's claims that will convince. In many ways that opportunity has passed and new, culturally sensitive means are required. According to Middleton and Walsh, it is the consistency and character of the demonstrated Christian life that will reveal its world-view to be making pragmatic sense of this world. This is in fact the continuation of the unfinished story of the gospel. In Tom Wright's terms it is the task of the church to live out the unscripted fifth and penultimate act of God's drama. This task is to be "performed" faithfully in the context of the previous four acts (Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus), consistently and appropriately in accordance with the Bible. We who claim then that our story is a metanarrative, that is a narrative for all humanity, need to show by our own response to it that it has the power to transform. This is of course not only for purposes of persuading others, but also for God's pleasure. Middleton and Walsh conclude that "the charge of totalisation addressed to Christianity can only be answered by the concrete, non-totalising life of actual Christians, the body of Christ, who as living epistles take up and continue the ministry of Jesus to a suffering and broken world".
Secondly, and closely allied to the first, is the need for this praxis to be conducted not in isolated fundamentalism but in community. The postmodern decentring of the individual requires a re-orientation to the notion of life lived out in community. The community of believers not only affirms us in our faith - the comfort of fellowshipping with others who hold similar beliefs - but also enables the testing of our praxis - the challenge to remain humble about our conclusions in regard to the everyday and the profound, and to be accountable for faithfully living out these conclusions. A life of integrity lived out in community is also a reflection of the character of the triune God.
This is an important correction to the humanist individualism which can infuse our Christian thinking and practice. We as evangelicals clearly believe God calls us into a saved community. Postmodernism calls us to acknowledge the unavoidable role played by our culture, our communities, not only in understanding the things we believe, but also providing us with our "transcendent story" that gives us guidance in our values, our traditions.
At SIFT we are seeking to establish just such an environment for the life of the mind. A comforting place where ideas and views will be respected, where didacticism will be minimised. For example, a key component of these gatherings is to provide a responder followed by discussion. The challenge is many-fold: to be without fear of truth, or of commitment to it; to be robust and rigorous in our faith so that we may face up to the complexity and depth of this world; to acknowledge the worth of the contributions of others and not seek to dominate or attain power over others; to be humble and self-critical, coming to conclusions cautiously, not triumphantly. I believe that Christians can and do demonstrate well the handling of difference. Paul's constant refrain in his epistles is to look out for the interests of others. At this point, Christianity can show how, in practical ways, the "other" as it is also defined in postmodernism, can be acknowledged and affirmed.
Postmodernism has not thrown out the past. Rather in its maturing state it seeks to affirm aspects of modernism, to acknowledge that rationalism has its part to play in our society, as well as to welcome pre-Modern contributions to the understanding of this world and our self. It seeks to do this, however, by subverting modernist hubris, by introducing contingency and uncertainty.
Zygmunt Bauman says in his Postmodern Ethics: "the postmodern mind does not expect any more to find the all-embracing, total and ultimate formula of life without ambiguity, risk, danger and error, is deeply suspicious of any voice that promises otherwise.... and is reconciled to the idea that the messiness of the human predicament is here to stay. This is, in the broadest of outlines, what can be called postmodern wisdom." I am happy to affirm this insight, for now, we only know in part, a poor reflection as in a mirror. Such a description of our contemporary situation does not leave me uncertain about my faith, rather hoping for the time when imperfection disappears. But it does leave me wiser about the ambiguity and complexity of this life. And the need to be grappling with the issues of this life with wisdom that comes from God.
Postmodernism is not afraid to live with paradox, with holding things in tension. The willingness to promote the pluralism of narrative, and yet for this to be a way of understanding our world in itself, is a tension that its defenders do not seek to rationalise away. For the Christian this should not be difficult. We also live with paradox and things that refuse neat rationalising. In fact as Bruce Russell showed at our first conference, the writer of Ecclesiastes understood the nature of paradox well. To be humble, contingent in our conclusions, open to changing our ways of life or thinking in response to dialogue or new scriptural insight, and yet not paralysed from living faithfully, these are all critical components of Christian character.
The uncontested dominance of the axioms of the Enlightenment, which lie at the foundation of the modern world, is ended. The Enlightenment said there was a light at the end of the tunnel, but in the twentieth century we found out it was a train and it has run us over! In such circumstances, Christians need to beware finding themselves defending modernism. It is not a part of the gospel to communicate it in particular ways nor to specify that Christians live in particular ways to demonstrate the credibility of claiming Christ in our lives. Our commitment should be to Scriptural discernment both personally and in community and to seeking out God's truth wherever it may be found. To dismiss out of hand the contemporary world of thought is to retreat to a ghetto that finds no home for engagement either within the Christian community or outside it.
I believe postmodern insights have reignited amongst Christians, Biblical understandings of character and community which had been lost or silenced under modernist individualism. The failure of the church's modernist project is to leave us thinking that the universal and the scientific are always and everywhere godly. Although there are some, Carson among them, who appear intent on making us feel that exploring postmodern elements of thinking or faith are somehow unChristian, it seems clear that a thoughtful person of faith will today want more than black and white analysis of God's world.
Such an approach would continue to find a place for the robust articulation of the intellectual claims of evangelical Christianity as part of academic debate (as Alister McGrath affirms). Within our own communities, it would also be appropriate to use rational argument to assist in deciding between competing views or Scriptural interpretations, although at the same time, being careful not to insist on there being one evangelical position on particular issues or texts. But it would also seek to engage critically and openly our culture from a framework of faith - in dialogue, in community and with graceful character. In essence, it would be a self-confident and reflective community of faith. SIFT aims to do this, being sensitive to the complexity of the thought and insights of our times.
Evangelicals for various reasons have been both slow and reluctant
to acknowledge the insights of the postmodern turn. But if we
are to honour God's gift to us of thinking, we need to dispel
fear of the unregenerate mind, affirm a humble and robust intellectual
engagement with humanity's attempts to make sense of the world,
and embrace uncertainty.
Copyright © SIFT 1997.