Postmodernism and Christianity (Part 3)

Q: How do I know postmodernism when I see it? What are its distinctives?

I don’t think the full answer to that question fits on a one-page blog, but something can still be said. Here is description of a few things in the postmodern family tree:

Authority:
Jerram Barrs said, “The most widely held view on anything in the United States is that ‘I have the RIGHT to control my own destiny; to think what I want to think.’” There is deep value in our culture for independence. It is one of the glories of our culture. However, the flip side of that coin is a deep cynicism of authority and a fierce defense of our independence, even when it is harmful to us.
Authority is a dirty word in a postmodern culture. It is a coin that has a diminishing value. The individual has a transcendent power; he is an authority to himself. The idea that the individual is bounded by things greater than himself is an idea that, at best, our generation does not understand, and, at worst, infuriates a postmodern culture.
I was watching a Mizzou football game recently (Nebraska was getting trounced, so the announcers started filling up the air time with some interesting banter) and the announcer told a story about how the coaching strategy of Mizzou has changed in recent years to involve students more in coaching decisions. He said something like “Gone are the days of ‘Yes, sir’ ‘No, sir’. Now the students want to be involved.” This should not be a surprise to anyone who knows the culture they live in. The football players, like the rest of us, are products of a culture which does not bow easily.

Truth:
Modernism understood truth as black and white; something which, ultimately, could be clearly understood. It believed in the power of reason to have access to those truths… not that it would always be easy, but it was possible. Or to put it in an image: imagine there are two ropes, one that represents truth and the other that represents our ability to know. Modernism tied those two ropes together. Postmodernism, however, has tried to untie that knot and throw the two ropes as far away from each other as it can.
Postmodernism says that we are too shaped by subjective factors (where we grew up, what our parents taught us, our own biases and tastes and agendas) to be able to see things clearly. It is like smearing mud on a window and then expecting to be able to see out through it. We cannot escape this subjectivity ever; it is part of the human condition. Thus there is always, in everything we try to know, interference involved in the process to the degree that postmodernism says we cannot know anything with certainty.

Morality:
What postmodernism has concluded about morality flows out of its conclusions about authority and truth. If there is nothing above us, then morality is up for grabs. If we cannot understand things with certainty even if there was an authority above us, then we must run on our best moral guesses, and one person’s guess does not have authority over anyone else’s. Morality is a matter of personal choice. Morally, each person is an island.
I remember a conversation with a friend in which he said that he would correct his children’s choices about their lives while they lived in his house, but he would never dream of doing that with another person. It was a horrifying thought to him to think that he could look at another person’s life and say what in it was good and what was bad. It was the most unloving thing you could do.
Judgment and condemnation are dirty words in a postmodern culture. The great evil is not falsehood, but judgment. The great good is not truth, but harmony.

This is by no means a complete rendering of postmodernism. I chose these three things because they are three places where our culture contrasts sharply with Christianity. I don’t want to paint the picture of postmodernism as being all bad, however. There is both good and bad in every one of us and so it follows that the cultures we create are streaked with both light and dark also. In the next post I hope to point out some of these strengths of postmodernism as well as talk about how Christianity must respond to those places where postmodernism runs false.

Veritas

Found this in an article about graphic design, and thought you folks might find it interesting. Apparently (according to the slideshow in the article) it ran in The New York Times last year.

Postmodernism & Christianity (Part 2)

About four years ago I was sitting in a Bible study on postmodernism, wondering why I was there. The leader of the Bible study was trying to help us understand what postmodernism was and how it affected our culture. I wrote a note on a piece of paper and passed it to the guy sitting next to me (I was very mature at the time…). Of course the leader saw it and called on the guy sitting next to me to read the note out loud so everyone else could hear what I had to say. The note said something like this: “I think we all agree that postmodernism does not exist. Why are we here?” The ironic things about that comment are: 1. I was very wrong and it took a couple years to really understand what we were talking about that night and 2. It was a very postmodern thing to write.
My problem was this: I didn’t understand what postmodernism meant and I didn’t understand how deeply affected by it our culture (and therefore myself too, as I am a product of my culture) is. My guess is there were some people who read the last post and had a similar reaction to the one I had that night four years ago, so this post is an attempt to begin to shed some light on the issue. (Disclaimer: the emphasis here is on the word begin…like a Reader’s Digest version of postmodernism.)

Q: What is culture?

There are many ways to define culture, but for our purposes it can be defined as a people’s view of reality. People of a similar culture will have similar answers to questions like: What is right and wrong? What is taboo and what is praiseworthy? What is the good life? What is the meaning of life? What offends me about the world? The questions cover every inch of life, not just the big picture ones I listed here. Culture affects everything from your view of God to what you will eat on Mondays
Think of questions like: Why do people in the south dress up for football games? Why are iPods so popular? Why do people who hunt watch more Nascar than people who drink lattes? Why will you lose your license for going 15 over in Scandinavia and speeding is almost expected in America? Why don’t the French use ice in their drinks? All these are questions about culture.

Q: So what is postmodernism?

Culture changes; it is not fixed. There are movements in culture. Imagine you are sitting in a stadium and 70,000 people are chanting something, then one loud section of fans starts chanting something else and that new chant spreads until the whole stadium has now taken it up. Culture is like that, except instead of a chant the thing that is spreading is a worldview
Sometimes a worldview is so thoroughly spread through a culture it has definable boundaries; it gets a name, an “ism”. You can say things about it like “Modernism is such and such a way” or “Those people are Modernists and so they probably believe such and such a thing”.
Sometimes the new chant that arises is a reaction to the one that it is replacing. Modernism becomes postmodernism. For example: where modernism sought certainty in a black and white world, postmodernism is more comfortable with mystery and paints a picture of a grey world, in which black and white certainties are not so easy to find. Where modernism was largely overly optimistic, postmodernisms answers are streaked with pessimism.

Q: How do I know postmodernism when I see it? What are its distinctives?

Stay tuned…

Postmodernism and Christianity

I read a book recently called "by demonstration: God" by Wade Bradshaw. In it, Bradshaw writes about the way our culture has become increasingly postmodern as reflected in the students who come to L'abri. A little background might be helpful here as to what L'abri is. Suffice it to say that it is a study center where students can come from every corner of the world and stay from a day to the whole of a three month term, studying whatever they choose and seeking the answers to their questions in the truth of Christianity. Because of this, at any given time there is a random sampling of the questions the culture is asking represented in the students who come to L'abri. L’abri, therefore, often has its finger on the pulse of the ever-changing landscape of our culture, making Bradshaw’s insights carry a lot of weight as he talks about his many years at L’abri and how postmodernism has affected the students.

Let me give an example from the book. Bradshaw has seen a shift in what students want to talk about in conversations; where once conversations would center around “ideas” now they are much more likely to center on “experience”. There is a distrust of knowledge that is seen as abstract, theoretical, or heady. Students are not interested in ideas that do not seem directly connected to their actual experience of life. On the other hand, knowledge which is personal, experiential, or rises out of their own or others’ stories finds fertile ground and eager ears. For example, the question “What do you think about how Christianity should interact with the culture it is in?” (…the question I want to begin to raise in this post) might lead to dead, awkward silence around the lunch table. Whereas, the question, “Who is a hero of yours and why are they heroic?” might lead to a conversation that runs for hours and the lunch table has to be set for dinner before everyone is done talking.

One of the themes of the book is that idea that as the culture of the students coming to L’abri changes, so too must L’abri change to continue to hold out the truth of Christianity to the culture it finds itself in. Think of it this way: if a missionary was sent overseas to a country with a radically different culture than his own, wouldn’t his first task be to learn about that culture he finds himself in? What is its language? What does it love? What are its taboos? How does it think? What does it fear and hate? What do its people want most deeply and what do they treasure most highly? What pieces of the truth does it retains, and what pieces has it abandoned? That is the challenge that Bradshaw writes about: how to hold out the ancient, beautiful truths of Christianity to a generation that is quite different than the one before it?

This is not a challenge unique only to L’abri; it is one that faces us all. Anyone who would speak of the truth of the gospel today speaks to a radically postmodern audience. That culture has affected what they value, as well as how they think, communicate, converse, love, believe, and trust. Just like a missionary freshly arrived in a new country, we must learn the culture of the people we are speaking to. What does it mean to be a part of a postmodern culture? We must find the answer to that question and call people to belief in the gospel in a language they can understand, and in a way that challenges their own unique ways they are tempted to turn away from the truth. If we do not we will be as effective as a missionary walking around rural China speaking English.