Posted on January 6, 2010 - by David
The “Postmodern” Emergent Church
Going off a suggestion given in one of the comments to my post Is Postmodernity a Reality?, I began looking at what “postmodernism” means to Christians in America. A quick youtube search revealed a surprising number of videos related to Christianity.
In this short video, professors from various Christian colleges attempt to define postmodernism.
If modernism, which involves the exaltation of human reason and elevation of science over faith, is the “tower of babel trying to reach up and replace God,” then postmodernism is “the babel that came after that when people lost the ability to communicate because there’s no common language or presuppositions” says Angus Menuge, chair of philosophy at Concordia University. “So you get fragmentation, people pulled in different directions, even the same person pulled in different directions.”
I believe this “fragmentation” he refers to is likely related to the anomie which Greenfeld considers to be a built-in feature of modernity. But the main concern here seems to be relativism and “suspicion of truth claims,” or to use the phrase of French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard which they refer to, “incredulity towards metanarratives.” The Evangelical leaders in this next video are worried about the same thing. The first speaker, Al Mohler, says that the meat of postmodernism is the belief that truth is socially constructed and therefore relative, it is not knowable, and cannot be transmitted through language. “All the rest of it’s really decoration.”
It’s obvious that these men have a real problem with some of the prevailing attitudes of secular culture, but the real “danger” they are railing against here is a particular brand of Christianity – the “emerging” or “emergent” church – which they see embracing the secular “postmodern” culture. This clip from a PBS documentary gives a snapshot of this movement and some of the objections to it.
It is not surprising to me that this version of church is gaining popularity. I think for many Americans it may seem more relevant because it operates on the principle of egalitarianism which is already an essential part of our national identity. Everyone’s opinion matters, everyone can participate. Furthermore, the focus is clearly shifted off of eternity, (questions of heaven and hell ), to how life on earth can be improved. As Brian McLaren states in the PBS documentary, “if we have a version of the Christian faith that does not make us the kind of people that make this a better world, we really want no part in it.” This shift in focus seems to line up pretty closely with the secular and humanistic consciousness of modern culture as defined by Liah Greenfeld. While the emergent church keeps God in the picture, life on earth is considered “ultimately meaningful,” and “within this world the most significant element is the people who populate it.”
In this sense, the emergent movement does involve a kind of embrace of the so-called “postmodern” culture, so it’s not surprising that the more fundamental evangelical leaders consider it a threat. In their eyes, it is eliminating many of the crucial aspects of the Christian identity to blend in with the secular culture surrounding it.
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January 8, 2010
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Michael Lo Stracco said:
“If I insist on giving you my truth, and never stop to receive your truth in return, then there can be no truth between us.”- Thomas Merton (The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, p. 383)
The man who wrote these words was a Catholic monk in the Trappist tradition who, in my opinion, came to such an understanding and experience of the contemplative life that he transcended our often quite pedestrian notions of “faith” and “religion.” Incidentally, from what I have read and understand, he has been embraced in such emergent circles, most notably the New-Monasticism movement (check out Shane Claiborne and the Simple Way, both based out of Philly), much to the ire of conservative Evangelicalism, the same brand of Christianity the men in the second clip posted represent, precisely because he advocates the subjective and ultimately socially-constructed nature of truth, and especially how it pertains to God; or, rather, to qualify that, the God of the Abrahamic traditions. But let not my own extremely long-winded statement distract us from what really is being discussed here, which is essentially perspectives on Truth and how they relate to this on-going discussion regarding the (ir)relevance of the term Postmodernism and how it relates to Modernism and the mind.
What Merton seems to be getting at in the above quote is the essentiality of the social-negotiation of meaning, and the fissure between traditional Evangelicalism and the emergent church ultimately comes down to the varying levels of acceptance of this phenomenon; similar lines have been drawn and sides taken in our current culture wars and even in the discussion of Modernism and Postmodernism.
To get to the bare bones of this whole messy debate is about is to start at the beginning: Truth. What is it? How do we define it? Is it knowable? Why is it important? For the sake brevity, and to resist the urge to deviate tangentially off-topic, let’s go with the slightly more rotund gentleman’s statement that the New Testament version of Truth is “that which describes real states of affairs.” In other words, Reality. He then goes on to claim, in making a distinction between his belief system/ world-view and that of Postmodernism, that “Postmodernism doesn’t believe in a real state of affairs.” Curious as that sounds, because he is on the defensive (one can smell the fear through the utter disdain of his words), I think he has a point: in many ways the emergent church and their anti-dogmatic “Postmodern” beliefs do reject “real states of affairs”- HIS real states of affairs, “doctrinal assertions” being ultimate, unchanging, ineluctable Truths. What he does fail to miss, though, is that they are still working with the same text and fundamentally within the same boundaries. When one does peel back the stinging layers of the onion, the Truth that the pastors in this clip are speaking of is one of a formalist, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible as the definitive, unerring word of God. Not only that, but I believe that they themselves hold slightly differing interpretations of the Bible (the rotund gentleman I’m referring to is himself a Calvinist; Zacharias, a main-line Evangelical, not so sure about the middle guy…) and what they are lamenting is the evolution of a belief system as it reacts with (or adapts to) a wider secular culture- the same evolutionary chain of thought that ultimately led to the emergence of systems they now embrace. What is more, they seem to paint the emergent movement as a “brand,” somehow trying to demean it with such slander while ignoring the same mercantile distortions that have driven American Evangelicalism as a business model for decades (see: church-planting, use of logos other than the Cross, unconventional worship spaces, etc.…), the high-water mark being the election of a certain cowboy president in the not-so-distant past.
When I watched the first and second clips posted here, my immediate impression was: threat. Threat levels among the leaders of the Evangelical church are in the red because they see the emergent church as a threat to their own power and control, and dare I say, their exploitation of the sincere faiths and fears of those who, either by choice, genuine state-experience, or cultural exposure/perspective, follow the interpretation of the gospel they preach. So much so in fact that the impassioned- and alarming- statements about Truth being too important to let die in the streets for the sake of peace (!), followed by anti-homosexual remarks and the thunderous applause that followed that (!!!)- all had a call-to-arms fervor about it that says to me that such believers really do view this as a culture WAR. So, these leaders then focus on that which they think is the root of this corruption: Postmodernism. They see it as Tribal warfare, and sadly, they have all the money and guns (both literally and figuratively!).
Personally, I am interested as an outside (but far from objective) observer because such tribes contribute to our national identity and because such ideas as Postmodernism have found expression in the tension between stages of this kind of cultural development. Ultimately, I agree with the assessment that the emergent church in many ways is following a path of development or adopting a perspective analogous to that which we call Postmodern* culture, but I do not see it as a threat; I believe such a development is encouraging and perhaps is the maturation of American Christianity. And while this still may be a white, middle-class phenomenon (as the third video points out), the movement’s general focus on community, service, communication, and “love-in-action” gives me hope that perhaps a substantial shift in the perspectives of a large number of America’s faithful is under way.
[*When speaking of Postmodernism, I am working with the understanding of such attributes as: the democratization and de-centralization of information, meaning, and experience; the acknowledgement of value in a pluralism of worldviews; the reconciliation of interdependence and the inexorable nature of one’s own subjectivity; and, finally, the embrace and emphasis on personal experience and expression. Please let me know your thoughts on these defining characteristics.]