John H Armstrong

The Rise of the "So Whats"

Several recent surveys reveal that an increasing number of Americans are not atheists or agnostics so much as they are people who simply don't care about religion or faith at all. Here are a few examples.

A 2011 Baylor University survey found that 44% spend no time seeking "eternal wisdom" and 19% said, "It's useless to search for meaning." 46% told a LifeWay Research (SBC) survey that they never wonder whether or not they will go to heaven. (I find what seems to be a majority of people, churched and unchurched, who assume some form of life after death but who have no interest in exploring what this means or why they believe it.) 28% told LifeWay, "It's not a major priority in my life to find my deeper purpose." And 18% scoffed at the idea that God had a purpose or plan for everyone. (Do you see why beginning a conversation with most young people by asserting, "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life" will not cut it?) The number of totally "secular" people who have no concern for knowing about God or a higher power is nearing 7%. I believe the much greater problem is beneath the surface of this still small number. Hemant Mehta, who blogs at "The Friendly Atheist," calls this rising number of people the "apatheists." 

Marian Edgar Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., calls these religiously apathetic folks "honest." A 27-year old said, "I would just like to see more people admit that don't believe. The only thing I'm pushy about is that I don't want to be pushed. I don't want to change others, and I don't want to debate my views." 

Christian writer and researcher David Kinnaman says most "So Whats" are like the statement made by the 27-woman I just quoted. Kinnaman says if you strip "the hipster factor" away then he thinks 7 in 10 young adults would say they don't see much influence of God or religion in their lives at all. Cathy Lynn Grossman says, "This trend may have been leaving subtle tracks for years."

I have written about the "Nones" the last few years. It seems that while the category of the "Nones" is growing by 0.5% per year the "So Whats" appear to be an even larger subset of that category. There are, in other words, layers within these layers. This is why the various attempts to say that we should be humanly optimistic about the future of most churches in America is misguided. It could be that as many as half of all young adults are "Nones" and/or "So Whats." The number is growing every day. Meanwhile few churches have a clue about how to live faithfully in a culture that is fast becoming a post-Christendom society in its understanding and practice. 

One thing I do know. If we are not authentic, whole and healthy in our faith (personally and corporately) then all the "attractional" programs that we can throw at this demographic group will do very little to bring them into the kingdom of God. These are not "baby-boomers" and will not fill mega-churches in the next twenty years unless something dramatic happens. Before long it might actually dawn on us that our "cool factor" stuff just doesn't work anymore. We might then actually go back to more ancient paradigms that are also clearly focused on the future, or to what might be rightly called an already/not yet kind of faith that is deeply biblical and profoundly confessional. This calls for missional-ecumenism, which few conservatives are willing to embrace so long as they keep depending on their human programs to attract young adults. 

A Theology of Negation

In the fourth century three eminent Greek theologians, called the Cappadocian Fathers, gave birth to a theology that has remained in the church through the centuries. I am quite persuaded that a recovery of this theology is underway among some Christians in the West. Let me explain.

Two brothers, Basil of Caesarea (icon at left) and Gregory of Nyssa, together with their close friend Gregory of Nazianzus, began to stress the incomprehensibility of God. This emphasis, which was later called apophatic theology (from the Greek for negation), reached a climax by the end of the fifth century in the divine darkness of Dionysius. It was Dionysius who introduced into theology the terminology of mysticism. For Dionysius the word theology meant wisdom, indeed theology was the highest form of wisdom. Theology was not an end in itself but a wisdom that should be used to serve and love God. The word mystical is thus derived from the word mystery. In mystery there is a hidden, dark and ineffable sense to knowing God, thus mystical theology. This cannot be expressed in clear-cut images and concepts thus it will always be rejected by people who crave rational and purely logical theology.

Dionysius is himself a controversial figure. His identity and orthodoxy have both been questioned. All we know for sure is that someone in the ancient world affixed to his writings the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the disciple of St. Paul (Acts 17:34). Though questions of authenticity remain the Dionysian writings became extremely influential in the Eastern world. They were eventually translated into Latin in the ninth century and greeted with considerable enthusiasm in the West. Bonaventura called Dionysius the prince of mystics and Thomas Aquinas quoted him some 1,700 times. The theology of Dionysius influenced Western writers like Tauler and Eckhart to St. John of the Cross. These writings are read to this day and their popularity has recently surged. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing made a free translation of Dionysius.

Both Erasmus and the Reformers raised questions about the writings of Dionysius but most scholars now conjecture that he was a Syrian monk, a Christian neo-Platonist. He seems clearly to have possessed a deep commitment to Jesus and a profound religious experience.

This much we know. After the Cappadocians and Dionysius the theology of negation flowed into the mainstream of Christian thought and practice. The Fourth Lateran Council, held in November 1215, declared that “between creator and creature no similarity can be noted without a greater dissimilarity being noted.” Please read that again. We are like God, in some ways. But our likeness must always remind us of just how unlike God we really are when all is said and done. Vatican I (1869-70) added that “the divine mysteries so exceed the created intellect that, even when given in revelation and received by faith, they remain covered over by the veil of faith itself.” This is, in my understanding, good theology! Faith reveals truth to us, mostly by revealing Truth. But faith leads us to see that there is much more we do not see than we ever understood before we knew Christ.

Mystical theology has assumed an even greater role in the church today for several reasons. First, postmodernism has rightly challenged what we know and how we know it. The whole idea of certitude is being challenged, in many cases for good reasons. Second, this theology of negation will become more important as the Christian faith encounters other religions and thus different ways of expressing the mystery of the divine nature. This is especially true when you deal with Asian and Indian religions.

Don’t let these developments frighten you. Paul himself said “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). This text is placed into a context where the apostle is talking about the wisdom of God which transcends all human ability to comprehend. Paul says we understand these things because “we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16b). So there is paradox here if I read this correctly. We have “the mind of Christ” but we do not comprehend as God comprehends and we must confess this as well as the positive.

Mystical theology has its own unique and practical ways of speaking about negation. It insists that God is not this, not this and then not this! It urges all who believe to live in a cloud of unknowing, forgetting things seen in this world in order to enter into a silent mystery of God. Does this have dangers? You bet. But it also has huge potential in an age like ours, driven by science and efficiency.

Apophatic theology has a role in modern Christian faith and practice. It has served me in some rather wonderful ways over recent years.  But it must always have this role with an equal and proper emphasis upon cataphatic theology, or a theology of affirmation. The Cappadocian Fathers avoided the dangers of mystical theology by giving us a solid model of spiritual life that emphasized both the role of negation and affirmation. They were, pre-eminently theologians of the Trinity. Gregory of Nyssa said that the believer who ascends into the divine darkness also enters into the mystery of Christ. (Gregory was about all being Christocentric).When this happens God then speaks to the believer “face-to-face” because the Christian is God’s friend, as Moses was on the mountain. So the Cappadocians blended this negative theology of what God was not with a positive theology of what God was as he was revealed in Jesus Christ. This resulted in them believing there was a single paradoxical experience! This paradoxical experience is what I have found so helpful in understanding my growing relationship with God.

Our Perception of Reality

Author James P. Danaher writes, in his excellent book, Eyes That See, Ears That Hear: Perceiving Jesus in a Postmodern Context (Liguori, 2006):

Our perception of reality is changing. We are rapidly moving beyond the modern world to which we had become so accustomed over the last three hundred years. What is the blessing God has for us in these changes? God always has a blessing, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear (see Romans 11:8). So how are we to perceive this changing world order that we do not miss God’s blessing? (xiii).

Many have labeled this changing new reality as postmodernism. The problem with this label is that few bother to explain what they mean when they use it. For some this word is a 2 x 4 with which to club anyone who raises serious questions about how we believe the gospel in the 21st century. I rather think the word is a “scare” word and should be avoided in most contexts.

The facts are clear, however. People today are searching for answers that do not fit with the reigning paradigms of math and science. There is room for a kind of knowing that is objective but not in the sense that philosophers and scientists have argued since the Enlightenment.

Modernity promised a kind of Utopia and the 20th century proved this to be a failure. Science seems unable to save us and truth has never been understood only in mathematical formulas. Truth is found in beauty and story and postmodern young people know this and hunger for more of it.

A personal relationship with God is based on knowing Jesus Christ as risen and ascended. It is not based on the methods of scientific theory but on a knowing that transcends such categories. This does not mean that Christian faith is irrational but that it transcends rationality. The truth the Enlightenment gave us created modern technology but the truth and meaning of the Christian life existed before technology and will never be limited to it. Knowing a living person cannot be reduced to knowing propositions about life.

The gospel involves deep commitment to a truth that cannot be understood apart from seeing and knowing. Soren Kierkegaard understood this before modernity became so totally dominant in the West. Modernity gave us certitude, confidence that we knew precisely what was true. But “the gospel leads us to an understanding founded upon a divine beauty that we behold in humble awe” (Danaher, xv). The truth of the gospel gets hold of us, it changes us and it shapes us into loving and forgiving beings who are empowered to establish and develop relationships with God and one another. This is the greatest evidence we have for the truth of the gospel according to the apostle John (cf. 1 John 2: 3-11; 3:16-24; 4:7-21).

James Danaher, whose book I wrote about some months ago on this site, concludes:

Fortunately, we now know that the scientific reasoning that modernity insisted upon is not the universal form of right reason it had claimed to be but merely represents one form of reason. With that understanding, we are now free to pursue forms of rationality more compatible with a gospel that is personal and mysteriously beautiful rather than objective and mathematically precise (xv).

After I last mentioned this book, Eyes That See, Ears That Hear, I wrote Professor Danaher with the intention of getting to know him personally. We exchanged emails and finally, last week, spent an hour on the telephone. I sent him my book, Your Church Is Too Small, and he read it and liked it too. I fully expected that Dr. Danaher was a young man but he is actually a year older than me. I was pleased to learn this since it reminded me that I am not alone in my generation of evangelicals in wanting to show people with a teachable spirit what is profoundly wrong with modernity as a way of relating to Jesus and the gospel. James Danaher is professor and chair of the department of philosophy at Nyack College in Nyack, New York. His areas of academic expertise include 17th and 18th century British Empiricism. He has also written and taught extensively on postmodern hermeneutics and philosophical theology. 

For those who do not know Nyack is a small Christian Missionary Alliance college in a small town. It is not a place known for liberal thought or for people who engage in conversation about postmodernism as Dr. Danaher does. I wanted to understand why Dr. Danaher wrote this book. In short, the answer he gave me did not surprise me. He said he had so many students who rejected modernism but wanted to continue to believe the gospel and follow Jesus that he felt compelled to provide a way to do this with meaning and purpose. The result is the finest primer on this subject I have ever read, period. If you asked me, “John, what is the one book you would recommend I read to grasp this whole modern/postmodern split and how a Christian should understand it?” I would tell you to read Eyes That See, Ears That Hear.

Danaher concludes his preface by writing (xv):

Contrary to what some have led us to believe, a postmodern world is not one in which all order, meaning, and truth is lost. Rather, all that is lost is the kind of order, meaning, and truth that modernity insisted upon. The good news of the postmodern gospel is that, with the end of modernity, we now have an ever-greater opportunity to order our lives, not based on an understanding of some universal, objective truth, but rather on an intimate understanding of a truth that is personal—indeed, a truth that is a person (John 14:6).

If you have listened to various arguments about postmodernism and faith and are confused then please read Danaher. If you are a student, or a 20 or 30-something who wonders if you can remain a Christian based upon how you were taught to perceive the world, then read Danaher. If you are an older guy like me and just want to get this whole debate about postmodernism and Christianity clear in your mind and heart then read Danaher. Honestly, everyone who ever uses this term postmodernism ought to read this book. You have heard famous preachers tell you how bad postmodernism is for the Christian faith, equating the word with liberalism, denial of Christ and rejection of biblical authority. Question that premise with all your mind and heart and read Danaher to understand what they have not told you and why it matters to faith today. If you simply want to better understand how to present the faith in a world that no longer is impressed with a scientific argument then read this book. I read it twice last year. I will read it again in 2011. It has become one of the most important books in my library. I cannot encourage you too strongly to get this book.

What Can We Do About the Young Leavers?

When you study why young doubters are leaving the church moral or doctrinal compromise is not the major reason. (It does play a part but not in the way most conservatives generally think!) Some who leave, for example, have distinctly postmodern misgivings. When one young adult left his father learned of his decision to leave the faith and rushed his son a copy of Mere Christianity, hoping the book would bring him back. But C. S. Lewis's logical style left his son cold. "All that rationality comes from the Western philosophical tradition," he told an interviewer. "I don't think that's the only way to find truth." I find this response very common myself.

Drew Dyck says that he has met many leavers who felt Christianity failed to measure up intellectually. Shane, a 27-year-old father of three (to use one example), was swept away by the tide of New Atheist literature. He described growing up a "sheltered Lutheran" who was "into Jesus" and active in youth group. Now he spoke slowly and deliberately, as if testifying in court. "I'm an atheist and an empiricist. I don't believe religion or psychics or astrology or anything supernatural."

Others have been hurt by Christians. Katie, a former believer in her early 30s, had been molested by two members of her childhood church. Her mother occasionally still drags her to church. Once, one of her mother's friends approached Katie with an intense look of concern. She grabbed Katie by the shoulders: "Katie, you've become so hard," she said.

Katie's voice faltered as she recalled the encounter to an interviewer. "That affected me," she said. "I Love Is an Orientation: Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community don't want to be hard." She paused to regain her poise. "But you have to be hard, or else life will hurt you." This is the primary reason why gays and lesbians leave the church according to Andrew Marin’s quite amazing book (which I will review soon): (InterVarsity, 2009).

A sizable minority of leavers have adopted alternative spiritualities. A popular choice is Wicca. Dyck writes about Morninghawk Apollo (who renamed himself as is common in Wiccan practice) discussed his rejection of Christianity with candor. "Ultimately why I left is that the Christian God demands that you submit to his will. In Wicca, it's just the other way around. Your will is paramount. We believe in gods and goddesses, but the deities we choose to serve are based on our wills." That Morninghawk had a Christian past was hardly unique among his friends. "It is rare to meet a new Wiccan who wasn't raised in the church," he told me.

Dyck says that in his own interviews he was struck by the diversity of the stories—one can hardly lump them together and chalk up all departures to "youthful rebellion." Yet there were commonalities. Many de-conversions were precipitated by what happened inside rather than outside the church. Even those who adopted materialist worldviews or voguish spiritualities traced their departures back to what happened in church.

What pushed these de-converts out of the church? Though the reasons for departing in each case are unique, Dyck says he realized that most leavers had been exposed to a superficial form of Christianity that effectively inoculated them against authentic faith. When sociologist Christian Smith and his fellow researchers examined the spiritual lives of American teenagers, they found most teens practicing a religion best called "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism," which casts God as a distant Creator who blesses people who are "good, nice, and fair." Its central goal is to help believers "be happy and feel good about oneself." Couple this with the sense of judgmentalism that many young adults felt during their sojourn inside the church and you have the two reasons I have seen as most common.

Christianity Today blogger Drew Dyck asks what we should make of the large numbers of young adults who are now leaving the Christian church? Many are not only no longer attending church but have given up the faith altogether. What do we do about this and how do we even begin to do it, except perhaps in small ways that involve intense personal friendships with people who have given up on the faith.

Where did teenagers learn this faith? Unfortunately, it's one taught, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, at every age level in many mainline, Catholic and evangelical churches. It's in the very air that many churchgoers breathe, from seeker-friendly worship services to low-commitment small groups. When a naive and utilitarian view of God crashes on the hard rocks of reality, Dyck believes we shouldn't be surprised to see people of any age walk away.

The reasons that 20- and 30-somethings are leaving are both varied and complex. A significant part of leaving has to do with the new culture we live in, and there is only so much to be done about that. But leaders in the church have control over at least one part of this equation: how we choose to respond. This is again why Andrew Marin’s book, Love Is an Orientation, is so very important. He charts a way to minister to the LGBT community by showing real love not rejection and hostility.

While we feel rightly perplexed by this large exodus we should not let grief carry us away when it touches our own loved ones personally. Dyck provides a typical conversation that I have had as well.

I talked with one parent who was despondent over his grown son’s loss of faith. He said his son was “into satanic stuff.” After a little probing, I found that the son was really a garden variety pluralist. He loved Jesus but saw him as one figure in a pantheon of spiritual luminaries. This is a far cry from his father’s assessment. I cringed inwardly when I imagined them discussing matters of faith.

He adds, “Christians often have one of two opposite and equally harmful reactions when they talk with someone who has left the faith: they go on the offensive, delivering a homespun, judgmental sermon, or they freeze in a defensive crouch and fail to engage at all.” This is precisely why we must learn to do humble apologetics that does not rely on epistemological certitude as its primary appeal.

Another of Drew Dyck’s reflections is again something that I have also experienced.

Another unsettling pattern emerged during my interviews. Almost to a person, the leavers with whom I spoke recalled that, before leaving the faith, they were regularly shut down when they expressed doubts. Some were ridiculed in front of peers for asking “insolent questions.” Others reported receiving trite answers to vexing questions and being scolded for not accepting them. One was slapped across the face, literally.

Most de-converts report "sharing their burgeoning doubts with a Christian friend or family member only to receive trite, unhelpful answers." The role of good apologetics is still important but we must realize that the kind of arguments that impressed some of us forty years ago will simply not work today. What we are must become truly consistent with what we proclaim or no one will be listening at all before long. We must build bridges and these bridges must be built by a love that becomes deeply involved with people one-on-one. Taking people to mass meetings and mega-churches might still work in some cases but in most there has to be an Andrew relationship before there is a real conversion.

All of this underscores the obvious point our Lord made time and time again: We must love if we are to truly preach the gospel. We may be speaking but few under thirty are listening any more. Will churches and leaders honestly face this question? I do not know. I commit myself to doing something about this on a daily basis and urge you to join me in this effort.

Changing Education Paradigms

For over 250 years the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress.  Their approach is multi-disciplinary, politically independent and combines cutting edge research and policy development with practical action.

I discovered this particular web-based learning resource a few days ago, via a friend’s link to it on his facebook page. Of course I do not agree with everything in this presentation, who would? What fun is it if you simply agree with everything you see and hear? If I already know something and agree with it then the sole reason for reading it will very often be to buttress my present view not to think at all. I encourage real thinking so I read and watch things that help me do that and then seek to make every thought captive to Christ.

This cleverly animated program is so relevant to our time. And it is completely apropos to training in discipleship and mission thus I believe it is extremely important for most of you to see it.

 

 

How Does a Postmodern Understanding of Faith Relate to a Premodern Understanding?

All my early life I heard that premodern Christianity was intolerant and ignorant in comparison with the great teachers of the Protestant Reformation. This is simply not true. One illustration will suffice. Theologians such as John Duns Scotus (1270-1308) and William of Ockham (1288-1348) developed new ideas, often quite very different ideas, but they never started new churches or got excommunicated. Different ways of understanding the faith were not only tolerated in premodern time but they were, in so many ways, celebrated. The reason for this breadth in theology is clear. Truth was not thought of as narrow and precise like mathematics.

A primary reason for this premodern flexible approach to interpretation is that Christians argued that Scripture was the root of all truth but the Scripture did not have a single, univocal meaning. Listen to how St. Augustine, one of the greatest orthodox minds in the Western Church, put this regarding the church’s reading of Genesis:

Although I hear people say “Moses meant this” or “Moses mean that,” I think it more truly religious to say “Why should he not have both meanings in mind, if both are true? And if others see in the same words a third, or a fourth, or any number of true meaning,s why should we not believe that Moses saw them all? There is only one God, who caused Moses to write the Holy Scripture in the way best suited to the minds of great numbers of men who would all see truths in them, though not the same truths in the each case.”

For my part I declare resolutely and with all my heart that if I were called upon to write a book which was to be vested with the highest authority, I should prefer to write it in such a way that a reader could find re-echoed in my words whatever truths he was able to apprehend. I would rather write in this way than impose a single true meaning so explicitly that it would exclude all others (The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Edward B. Pusey, 1962, 308).

The first time I read St. Augustine words above I realized how very different my approach to Scripture was from his. What I did not know was why. I sought out evangelical teachers to help me understand this problem and the answers I got were that God had one thing in mind and by good, historical, grammatical, exegetical hermeneutics we could see this one truth clearly. The problem with this answer, a problem that I later came to clearly see, was that it was not historically Christian. Furthermore, it was rooted in Enlightenment reason not in biblical realities.

The irony is that St. Augustine’s premodern reading of the Bible is a lot closer to a postmodern reading than a modern one. Augustine responds to those who think they know the exact and precise meaning of the Scripture in this way:

[They do so] not because they are men of God or because they have seen in the heart of Moses, your servants, that their explanation is the right one, but simply because they are proud. They have no knowledge of the thoughts in his mind, but they are in love with their own opinions, not because they are true, but because they are their own (Confessions, 301).

So St. Augustine, not John Armstrong, says that pride, and a sense of personal ownership, are the basis for so many dogmatic claims to truth. And St. Augustine is saying, at this very point, precisely what a chaste and teachable postmodern is trying to say. If the Cartesian worldview is not biblical, and it is clearly not, then the desire to master the text (of the Bible in this case) is rooted in sin. Try teaching this to many of your older Christian friends raised in a conservative Protestant context and see just how far you get.

The postmodern Christian sees the modern desire for truth as a desire to possess and control. If truth is precise, narrow and easily understood, through a proper teaching of the Bible, then the interpreter is in control, By this means they seek to control both themselves and those who disagree with them. But if truth is less easily possessed and more broad, and a lot less certain to the human mind, then we do not possess it but it captures us and it changes us into humble worshipers of the living Christ.

I am now becoming rooted in premodern Christianity by reading the Church Fathers. I am thankful for some parts of modern Christianity, especially the insights of sixteenth century Reformers who broke with the scholastic method that developed in the centuries just prior to 1500. And I am increasingly grateful for how postmodernity is helping people move away from the kind of certitude that fills them with pride and the desire to control Christ as if he was a truth commodity that belonged to them in their private opinions.

How Shall We Respond to Our Postmodern Context?

Postmodernism teaches us that human concepts are not God-given. Many postmodernists believe that some forms of understanding “may” be innate to our humanness but most are clearly the products of human conventions that were formed within particular cultures and historical events. This whole new way of thinking calls into question the very way that we use language. But if language no longer communicates objective reality then how can we rely on words themselves to faithfully communicate the truth of the gospel? Is this not a short cut to religious and moral relativism?

It would be helpful to define relativism at this point. It is the philosophical doctrine that all criteria of judgment are relative to the individuals and situations involved. It is the theory, especially as it is used in ethics or aesthetics, that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but only relative. The term, especially when it is employed by Christians, refers to idea that there are no absolute truths; i.e. truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as language or culture. This then leads to moral relativism where there are no moral laws thus we decide what to do, or not do, based upon our (personal) way of thinking about it.

It is plainly true that a growing number of people believe there are no absolute truths. Of those under 35 years of age the percentage is very high. Every poll known to mankind reveals this to be a fact. And if this is true then the common (modern) basis for belief in God is seriously undermined, to say the least. But Christian philosopher Merold E. Westphal rightly concludes:

It seems to me that the postmodern arguments are about the limits of human understanding and that they support the claim that we do not have access to the Truth. But what is different from this claim that there is no Truth, which would be true only if there were no other subject or subjects capable of Truth (Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith, 86).

I would thus suggest that a proper use of the postmodern contribution is to be found by embracing a kind of skepticism that is suspicious about our personal (easy) access to the truth. If we are Christians we should plainly refuse the idea that there is no absolute truth (such as God). Christians who want to use postmodern thought do not argue that we have no access to the truth but rather that we do not have the kind of access that modernity offered to us. What they are saying is that we do not have a certainty that can be framed by a very human system and then spoken about as if this was the truth in ways that fit nicely into the scientific model. When we do theology in this way we make theology more like mathematics than like art or poetry. I believe a good theological method can still chastely use some elements of the old model but it desperately needs the insights of the new to return Christian thinking to its proper place.

Keep in mind again that postmodernity is not only hard to define but many Christians have been taught that it is nothing more than a positive evil. When this has been done they will hear little or no explanation of what postmodernity actually is and thus easily equate it with moral relativism and then condemn it. The fact is that postmodernity is still in its infancy. Remember, the dominant way to understand postmodernism is to see it as a rejection of the principles upon which modernity was founded. It is, at least right now, a reaction against the past. Postmodernists are rejecting Enlightenment (modernist) beliefs, attitudes and methods. Even science now admits that “knowledge as a human endeavor, though never certain, can be overwhelmingly probable” (Kenell Touryan, “Are Truth Claims in Science Socially Constructed,” in Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith, June, 1999, 103). Christians can admit the same in a chaste and humble manner.

In theology the problem is quite obvious, at least to an increasingly large number of thinkers and teachers. Modernists, who are often very conservative in their theological conclusions, embrace a theology that equates their knowledge of a theological system with faithfulness, or real certainty. Many times it sounds like these conservative Christians are actually equating their conclusions with God’s mind. They seem quite sure that they have a one-for-one correspondence between their thoughts and God’s thoughts. Not all such modernists respond in the same way but this kind of certitude very often feeds pride and leads to endless fights about the truth. These modernist approaches helped fuel religious wars in the post-Reformation age, have created numerous Christian schisms since and have resulted in so many denominations and “truth” wars that one is left gasping for air in the face of this sad reality.

If the postmodern shift has done anything positive for Christians I think we find a reason here. The developing postmodern critique has helped more and more Christians become aware of a simple fact: God knows the truth in a way that we humans do not. The right use of postmodern suspicion is to employ it to combat the notion that we have easy access to the truth. When conservative pastors tell their people that solid exposition and Bible study will make them into mature disciples then they get very close to this danger! (This is not an attack on study and Bible exposition so read the statement carefully.)

A secular postmodernist deduces that there is no absolute truth. The reason for this is that the person has not yet met the one who is the truth in Jesus Christ. But no postmodern Christian, who knows the one who is the truth, will ever claim that there is no absolute truth since they have a personal relationship with the one who incarnates the absolute truth.

What Happened to Modernity?

Yesterday I suggested that the words postmodern and postmodernity are being widely used by Christians these days. They are quite often used in pejorative and unhelpful ways. When I am asked if I am sympathetic to postmodernism I am not sure how to answer since I have no idea at all what the questioner means?

If the person asking me the question means, “Do you reject truth claims and moral absolutes and embrace relativism?” then my answer is unashamedly negative. But if the person means, “Do you believe Christianity is entering a new time in history when the way that we do theology, mission and ministry will change rather dramatically because the methods we will use to discover truth are changing?” then my answer is an unashamedly positive.

To understand this we need a working, but very simple, grasp of modernism itself. Modernity refers to the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was the world in which belief in enlightenment through science arose. This way of thinking taught us that the world was an orderly place and this orderliness followed laws. These laws were precise and could be studied and formulated into postulates or propositions that were a lot like mathematics. This new science could study the evidence, all the data, and then form a statement that was (in itself) the truth. Over time this approach became the way people in all areas of thought conceived of the world that God had made. (Of course many scientists and philosophers began to question if God had even made the world.) But the point here is important. Theists brought the same approach to thinking about the world to theology. Eventually Christian theists did the same, both liberal ones and conservative ones. According to science this new method should be used so we would get closer and closer to utopia. Progressive Christians joined this idea with their social gospel message, minus a lot of important biblical material, and then conceived of the twentieth century as the ultimate goal of human progress. Conservative Christians reacted against all this but they used the exact same method to form this reaction. They argued against the liberal agenda and reasoned that if you used the Bible correctly, studying the text of Holy Writ with a proper (scientific) method, then you would get the very mind of God about every thing that you could discover in this treasure house of divine (inerrant) revelation. The whole debate about Scripture, both its use and its nature, shifted into this scientific form. Various postulates were set forth, debated, shaped and reshaped. In time we had a Bible that we could use like a deep mine shaft. What we needed were experts who could take us down into the mind shaft so that we could see the gold for ourselves. Some theologians even began to argue that we could know God’s mind precisely and perfectly if we could form a perfect theology. Some believed they got very close. (I’m not making this up, though I am intentionally not quoting the noted scholars who argued this way because it is not important to my point.)

What brought this confidence in modernism to an end in my lifetime? In short, the events of the twentieth century killed all dreams of utopia and precise certitude. The difference for conservative Christians was that they had already embraced the fruit of modernity in their schools and texts and married all of this to a type of millennialism that saw the future in terms of catastrophe and escape. Then after this project failed they turned to power and politics in the last part of the 20th century. 

The point is this---the Enlightenment project failed. People began, in the second half of the last century, to search for answers to the way that we could live today and reject the scientific method of the past. They still want to use the benefits of science, and scholars still do hard science, but people have increasingly rejected the scientific worldview, at least as a meta-narrative that can explain life and give us meaning. They know one thing: science does not hold all the answers! With this conclusion people no longer “believe that knowledge must be objective and mathematically or scientifically precise” (Eyes That See, Ears That Hear, Danaher, xiv).

What does this mean for us as Christians? I think this is more good news than bad. But this is where the Christian is left in confusion by the present debate and the way postmodernism is being presented by so many. Why do I say this?

Simply put, a Christian knowledge of God rests not on precise understanding or biblical equations but on personal knowing. We come to God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, based upon a personal relationship with the risen and reigning Christ. Yes, we hear the good news and our minds are involved in processing what we here. But by hearing we “see” and receive good news. God cannot be discovered through the methods of science, the very methods that produced most of what we call systematic theology since the Enlightenment. God is not revealed to those who possess great knowledge or great intellect but rather to the weak, to those who hear by faith. Paul says, “So where does this leave the philosopher, the scholars, and the world’s brilliant debaters? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish. Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never know him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save those who believe” (1 Cor. 1:20-21, NLT).

God cannot be discovered, nor his purposes personally known, through the scientific method. This is true even if the method is used to serve theology as some kind of special academic discipline.

James Danaher concludes:

The Enlightenment gave us the science and technology that runs our contemporary society, but it is not capable of leading us to the kind of truth and meaning that lie at the base of Christian life. It certainly is not an appropriate model for intimately knowing a personal God, for it tells us that we should rid ourselves of all bias in order to discover an objective truth untainted by our own prejudice (Danaher, xiv).

You may still say, “What’s so wrong with using this method to study the Bible and arrange theology?” And some will add, “God is, after all, logical and consistent and operates according to his own laws.” Well, yes and no. God is not illogical nor does he exist in any form of contradiction. But, and this is hugely important, the gospel tells us that we are to bring “the prejudice of faith to every circumstance” (xv).

Modernity gave us confidence in our method. It told us that we could have precise understanding about every mystery that we encountered in the revelation of God. But the gospel calls us to place our total confidence in Christ, not in a system. Our understanding is founded upon “divine beauty” and held in “humble awe” (xv). In modernity we figure something out and get hold of it. In the gospel someone gets hold of us and reveals himself to us. This truth moves us from confidence in ourselves to total confidence in the person of Jesus Christ. And this person is a loving, reconciling, forgiving Savior.

Scientific reasoning is not all wrong. It simply cannot represent the universal form of reason. If we grasp this then we are free to be rational but to pursue a rationality that is in conformity with the gospel, a truth that is more personal and mysteriously beautiful than objective and mathematically precise (Danaher, xv).

So the present postmodern shift does not mean that everything will come down and all truth will be lost to relativism. No, what this actually means is that a crack has now become a fault line in the modern world. This means that a new opportunity lies ahead of us. We are more free to explore meaning, to seek order and to retain both beauty and mystery. I believe with Danaher that “with the end of modernity, we now have an ever-greater opportunity to order our lives, not based on an understanding of some universal, objective truth, but rather on an intimate understanding of a truth that is personal---indeed, a truth that is a person (John 14:6)” (xv).

Now you know why I find all the hand-wringing by Christians about the rise of postmodernity ill-advised, if not positively wrong-headed.

Tomorrow: How shall we respond to this postmodern context?

Defining the Most Misused Word in Modern Christian Conversation

If you’ve heard the word once then you’ve likely heard it hundreds, if not thousands, of times: postmodern. It is used to describe the current cultural and social context of the West by many writers. It is used in college classes in philosophy and literature (which is where it seems to have originated actually). And it is now used in pulpits and Christian conversations almost every day. One can safely conclude that this postmodern discussion, pro and con, is nearly ubiquitous these days.

I picked up a publicity card in a Christian bookstore (there are less and less such stores these days) that promoted a new book from a very conservative evangelical publishing company. The card employed all the appropriate marketing ideas to try to get me to visit a web site, read excerpts from the new book and get acquainted with the author’s thought so I would buy his book. The exact same process was used by Zondervan to market my book, Your Church Is Too Small. This was not what caught my attention.

My question about this particular book was about how the ideas of the author were presented. The card, and book’s title, ask a very important missional question: “Why is an entire generation leaving the church"?” And, “What can we do about this exodus?” The author believes that there are several types of young adults in our culture and it is important that the reader understand each of these basic types. He proposes to give insights and practical helps for pastors, parents and peers so they can reach these prodigals. The idea is very good. But what struck me immediately was the various categories, or types, of young people and how these are explained. I will not list them here but the first one was “postmodernists.” The definition was straightforward and simple: “Postmodernists reject Christianity’s exclusive claims and moral absolutes. They care about the poor and oppressed but feel the Christian faith is too narrow.” In contrast modernists are defined as those “who completely reject supernatural claims. God is a delusion. Any truth beyond the reach of science is dismissed as superstition.”

So what’s wrong here? Almost everything. This is not only way too simple but it is profoundly wrong. In fact, it is even dangerous. The author makes the same mistake that loads of “modernist” conservative Christians make about both these words and the innate ideas behind them.

Let’s be entirely clear about one thing: our perception of reality is changing. This is an incontrovertible fact. Anyone who listens to modern people speak and think, especially those under forty years  of age, knows this to be true. We are moving beyond the modern world, in which people like me were nurtured in my faith and thought process, to a new world. The old one lasted for at least 300 years, maybe for as long as 500. But change is coming whether you like it or not and regardless of what you call this change.

This change is now routinely called postmodern or postmodernism. Now I can think of other words that describe what is going on in our lifetime but this one is fine by me. The point here is not the word itself but the truth that it represents. Try getting five Christian thinkers/teachers to agree on what postmodernism is and you will be very lucky. Then mix in ordinary people who hear this discussion and believe what their favorite teacher tells them to believe and you have chaos.

I agree with James Danaher, professor at Nyack College, when he says: “Any attempt at a definition [of postmodernism] would be premature and presumptuous. The situation appears to be very much like a similar transition in worldview that took place in the seventeenth century. . . . As these new views spread, the medieval world was passing away . . . . but it would be awhile before the scientific and philosophical perspectives of the modern world would take shape” (Eyes That See, Ears That Hear: Perceiving Jesus in a Postmodern Context, page xiii).

The modern world, whose dominant narrative was scientific, is passing away. Please understand that the scientific modern world will never come to an end, since we will all use the advances and insights of this age for centuries to come. But the way that we were taught to perceive truth and reality will merge with this old way into various new ways and thus we will find our place in a very different reality. What we can say about the present time, and about young adults in our culture, is that they are rejecting the basic tenets of modernity very openly. Danaher adds, “Postmodernism is, at present, best defined by its suspicion of modernity and its ideals.” He is clearly right.

I will explain this last sentence tomorrow.

Adoration: A Film That Contextualizes Modern Life

Atom Egoyan’s movie “Adoration” is a non-linear, fascinating and deeply suspenseful film noir that gives one of the best of post-9/11, postmodern and Internet-based cultural films I’ve seen. Included in this story are an assortment of pressing and provocative questions—the ethics of terrorism, the deceptiveness of what appears to be outwardly obvious and the numerous ways modern technology adds to dialogue. Perhaps the most interesting question the film poses is the one about dialogue and the Internet.

The story is of a high school boy whose parents were killed in a car accident when he was a pre-teen. He is being raised by his uncle, a not too pleasant character who slowly wins you over. Clearly there has been a breakdown in this family before and after his sister’s tragic death. (The uncle was only 22 when he began to raise his orphaned nephew.) You soon discover through Egoyan’s more postmodern method of story-telling, a method that cycles back and forth into various elements of the past treating it as a mix of this and that, that Simon (the high school boy who is the lead character played by Devon Bostick, see photo below) wants to know more about his deceased father and wonders if he might have actually been a terrorist. This approach tantalizes the viewer as Simon’s story unfolds in the context of a  class in a Toronto public school with an unusual teacher. (Spoiler alert: The teacher is very important to the story line so I will say no more in my review.) In this French  class the teacher is reading a story about a terrorist that Simon turns into a drama which makes him begin to wonder if this story is really about his parents. The twist is that it seems to be so and once he shares this “fiction” via the Internet the story gains a huge response, creating a plethora of anger and outrage. A score of non-professional actors were secured to play the role of the Internet users, young and old alike, who are situated in chat rooms responding to Simon and his story. The viewer gets a strong sense of the power of this medium for good and ill. (There is an twenty minute interview with Egoyan in the DVD features  section that deals with the development of Internet and the writer/producer argues that “real presence” can never be replaced by online chats and relationships. It is worth watching.)

In the Internet chat scenes real people argue back-and-forth about whether martyrdom, in any form, is ever right, or heroic. Others respond to the feelings they have about having been on a plane that should have blown up but was not. Egoyan is clearly concerned with misuses of the Internet thus his film, like several of his previous works, drives this point home powerfully. These scenes shot with non-professionals work quite well I think.

Egoyan is sometimes criticized, if you read various reviews of his films, for being an intellectual, not a dramatist. I find this to be one of the genuinely compelling features of this work. It humanely delves into the story, a story which includes family dysfunction, prejudicial stereotypes and the desire to know who one is and how life became the way it is. All the while this film keeps the viewer guessing about the outcome of the larger meta-narrative itself. The cast is not universally impressive but the film works on a profound level. I loved it and think the film, plus the features on the Internet, are well worth the time of thoughtful movie watchers.

“Adoration” is available on DVD and is a 2008 Sony Pictures release. It is rated R for language.