What is the Emerging Church? Postmodernity

Good stuff - very helpful & well written.

I appreciate your emphasis on truth as relation. Growing up, I often mistook Christianity as a religion of elaborate doctrinal and symbolic identifications. Though evangelicalism stresses the believers personal relationship with God, its spirituality often individualistic and rationalistic: i.e., the individual must assent to certain rational propositions in order to be saved. As a result, evangelical piety can easily become a narcissistic psycho-drama (and I speak here from personal experience). Everything revolves around the individual believer. God is becomes a benevolent, but disappointed Father who is watching our every move. Salvation, in turn, is about what the individual soul has to do or believe to get back to God (and gain a heavenly reward). Even ideas about sin can easily become narcissistic, focusing less on God's judgment than on the idea that we have personally offended God. "I have hurt God so much." "I am so impure." "Jesus died for MY sins." As a result, the mystical body of Christ is obscured. Sin loses its social, relational dimension. Faith is reduced to a decontextualized inner drama, divorced from history and the world. This stands in stark contrast to Jesus' dynamic notion of the kingdom of God. It also stands in contrast to an orthodox emphasis on charity.

My main question is this: does the emergent church need to invoke "postmodernism" to revive this orthodox idea of the relational nature of truth and the kingdom of God? Isn't there already something incredibly uncanny about the gospels and God's love--something that breaks through our social and ideological lies and create the possibility for non-rivalrous relationships? If the gospel seems at times postmodern, is it not also possible to trust the good news of the gospel as a critique of postmodern culture? I ask these questions for two reasons. 1) Many academics believe that postmodernism (at least as a philosophical movement) has been dead since the mid 1990s; increasingly, philosophers have come to see "postmodernism" as the perfect ideology of consumer capitalism. 2) The postmodern idea of narrative seems to me somewhat fuzzy and feel-good--i.e., everyone is entitled to their own "story." Is there not a danger here of reducing the gospel message to a warm, pragmatic spiritualism. "Whatever works for you..." Interestingly enough, several philosophers (R. Girard, S. Zizek) have come to see Job, Isaiah, and the gospels as among the most powerful critiques of ideology ever written. These books read us more than we read them. From this perspective it is not simply that the gospel is one among many narratives around which we can orient our lives. Rather, the gospel has an uncanny power to judge and interpret our actions; and to open up new dimensions of human relationship.

Scot, outstanding summary, this one goes on permanent record.

I've had to recently confess that I have misunderstood some classic Augustianian positions.. but then, I was reading Augustine when I was 22 years old and I later depended too much on his interpreters.

Matt, perhaps we do indeed have to invoke postmodernism because within that frame we have acquired tools to help us move beyond the limits of the old modern frame. Or maybe we invoke pm because "the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line." SOmetimes the only route to simplicity is complexity :)

"There is nothing that should be more welcome to orthodox Christian theology than the contention that meta-narratives cannot be established on the basis of some kind of universal reason independent of faith."

yes, yes, yes, yes.

[[Only God is Absolute Truth and only God can genuinely know Absolute Truth. All our knowledge is tinged. To assign Absolute Truth to God alone does not ruin our confidence, it just means that our confidence is in God.]]

That beautifully summarizes what I was driving at in my series on “A Christian Response to Postmodernism” over at my blog. Oh, if we could get people to understand that Jesus said he was the truth. Not some propositions about Jesus…the person of JESUS is the truth!

[[the Emerging Movement form of postmodernity operates with a “proper confidence” (Lesslie Newbigin) or a chastened epistemology]]

It is interesting, isn’t it, that evangelicals who will be very critical of emergent-types are the same ones who applauded Newbegin’s ideas. I guess they are not making the connection that Newbegin is a huge influence within the movement.

[[the Emerging Movement operates with a praxis and orthodoxy model rather than an orthodoxy model…this is a needed challenge to the orthodoxy model that too often (not always) slips into credo as the only definition of the Christian faith]]

This is the point of my current series on an “Emmanuel Apologetic.” The apologia of praxis speaks louder and clearer than an apologetic of a propositionally reasoned argument. The modern church has defined our witness by what we believe; the Bible defines our witness by how we live before an unbelieving world.

Human dialogue may become theologically conversational if the persons in the covanental circle of words are humbly interdependent and mutually self-emptying. Herein, the ideas of Trinity and Suffering are intrinsic.

Anselm's 11th Century ontological (being is foundational to rationality) Augustinian/Benedictine dictum... "believing in order to understand."

Someone (Mary Curie?) said that nothing is to be feared, it is only to be understood. What if it is beyond understanding? And in walks faith...

Is there a 'synthesis' for what is emerging and that which is being emerged from? Or do we settle for both/and... What I don't understand is where all the anxiety comes from. What is it that is driving this argument so fiercely.

A wise little green man once said (Yoda), "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."

Narrative vs Proposition is as simple as Jewish vs Greek. That's what makes John's Revelation so incredible. Using the strength of one to magnify the other.

The emerging arguments, statements, defences, creeds, and ideas, are revealing that there is something emerging in the whole world... beyond the western Church... there is a convergance of history. It's as difficult to explain as the perils of global economics, which coincidentally seems to be a much larger and dangerous issue than global warming.

From Miroslav Volf's 'After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity':

"The Spirit present in all Christians 'opens' each of them to all others. It starts them on the way to creative mutual giving and receiving, in whihc each grows in his or her own unique way and all have joy in one another."

Well wouldn't that be a grace-filled surprise!

this is an excellent post on an issue that so many are turned off by just at the mention of the word, "postmodern." last year i had a sacraments class and one of my presentations was on "Postmodern Sacramentality," a book by Keenan Osborne and a fine read. many of my classmates really didn't listen to the propositions of the book because they couldn't get past their distrust of all things postmodern.

i am especially greatful for the way you discuss "hard" postmodernists. i think the Emerging Church is trying to formulate an answer and an approach to those in our society who are postmoderns, rather than becoming embracing the philosiphies of Derrida and others. i was lucky enough to take a weekend class from Tony Jones at North Park entitled, Postmodern Youth Ministry. Jones is currently doing his dissertation at Yale in the area of Postmodernism and has a book by the same name as the course he taught. it's a big topic and i'm very pleased to see someone as well-respected in the North Park community as yourself willing to engage in the ongoing discussion...

if you don't mind me asking, what conversation do you see going on at North Park on this topic? where do most stand?

I would like to try to post-again. Some how I thought you were going to define post-modern philosophy or post-modernity. But, didn't feel like we got that. I was wondering if you could provide a short historical trajectory of how we arrived at post-modernity. I think this is important for understanding what postmodern philosophy.

I've been trying to tell my friends for years that Christians should have to read Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions. It has radical implications, not only for scientists, but all knowers, be they theologians or work a day christians. Why don't you all talk about Kuhn Habermas, Derrida, Benjamin, Latour etc?

Also, I like your effort to define terms and engage in these ideas, but your writing seems somewhat contentious and defensive. I can understand why? But, I think a better approach is to simply state what you think the emergent church is or isn't. Then, debate later.

I like what Bill has written:

"I like you call for humility and a chastened epistemology but I am still puzzled as to why the same people who champion epistemic humility regarding doctrinal beliefs are so confident when it comes to how we should understand and apply Jesus social ethics. Does anybody really sees things as clearly as some of the folks who blog on your site and dogmatically champion the postmodern perspective."

The EM and PM calls for humility, but there seems to be quite a bit of hubris. There also seems to be a lot of disciplining of the community in a manner that seems like indoctrination, which seems to be at cross purposes with this whole open ended approach.

Finally, as a small percentage of the world has a college education, I wonder how people are going to access this movement. You almost have to be a PhD, as most people I hear talking do, to participate. It seems as though one has to be a historian, philosopher and theologian to fully appreciate the emergent conception of the faith. I think that if one were to pull all these things together, then we would find that there is nothing new under the sun.

Your friend, Milo

Chad,
There isn't really an official conversation at NPU about this. It just infiltrates certain professors courses.

Scott,
thanks for the great post. It really helped me to see the connections between what folks are saying about postmodernism and what the emergent church is saying about christianity in this pomo context. But I wonder if this discussion misses what Fredric Jameson's important work on POSTMODERNISM, OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM (1991)--and that is, postmodernism is the ideology of capitalism come of age. As he writes, "Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good." For Jameson (and Hardt an Negri), our 'postmodern' age is the realization of the capitalist internalization of the world (political, economic, social, etc). There is no longer an outside to the world market. It's so interesting me that all the discussion of something called 'postmodernism' in the Christian camps doesn't take into account Jameson or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Those figures make what seems to me an important link between the material, embodied context from which all this 'postmodern' ideology flows. Most of the time I hear my emergent frieds talk about 'postmodernism' it is wholly ideological, completely severed from material causation. I am interested to hear if you know of any christian pomo folk who take seriously these voices. It seems like their (Jameson, Hardt, Negri) account of postmodernism as the capitalist meta-narrative that sees every difference as a new market may put a serious question mark behind emerging forms of church--what if we are riding on the waves of something like Weber's Spirit than the Holy Spirit?

"Finally, as a small percentage of the world has a college education, I wonder how people are going to access this movement. You almost have to be a PhD, as most people I hear talking do, to participate. It seems as though one has to be a historian, philosopher and theologian to fully appreciate the emergent conception of the faith."

Milo,

I agree with your thought here. This reminds me of an brief essay written by African american scholar bell hooks titled "Postmodern Blackness". It normally comes up first if you google it. She talks about the fact that even though much of postmodernist discourse appears to be liberative and open-ended on the surface when you get down deep it perpetuates the same socio-economic and ethnic exclusivity as much as modernity.

I am pretty much in agreement with the late theologian James Wm. McClendon that much of postmodern discourse is more like a later phase of modernity or what some are calling a late phase of capitalism.

With that said I still see some potential in this discourse.

Ant

Ant,

So can you go a little further and explaining the universal benefit of the post-modern discourse?

Milo

Quoting Bell Hooks in response to Anthony.

“This is especially the case with works that go on and on about the way in which postmodernist discourse has opened up a theoretical terrain where "difference and otherness" can be considered legitimate issues in the academy. Confronting both the lack of recognition of black female presence that much postmodernist theory reinscribes and the resistance on the part of most black folks to hearing about real connections between postmodernism and black experience, I enter a discourse, a practice, where there may be no ready audience for my words, no clear listener, uncertain, then, that my voice can or will be heard.”

Bell Hook says black folks, but what about white folks and all other folks? Are they resistant or receptive or watching Monday night football? In other words, who is the audience? Can we be honest about that limited market this movement can reach? The emerging church is outside of the US and not postmodern.

“It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter. Third-world scholars, especially elites, and white critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory and practice.” B. Hooks

Amen. We need a radical critique of our epistemological commitments and not just on paper.

A couple of things:
On one hand, my gut sense is that this movement is a modified form of imperialism, but the terrain is the mind and the spirit, which the parts of our humanity that allow us to apprehend the Divine. Postmodern scholarship is a tool for activist. These days in the academy all scholarship is instrumental in purpose. So, if postmodern religion takes men’s mind captive then their spirits are enslaved. But, where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

On the other hand, I’m concerned about this elevation of reason that is consistent with and not a break from modernity. It seems to elevate reason even higher than modernity did/does. I’m not saying we need to get rid of reason, but we have to interrogate the dominant role of reason in our religious experiences and theology—in the academic sense or in the Sunday morning worship. In others words, I will appreciate the post-modern faith movement, when I see it’s leaders submit to the teaching of people with a totally different orientation towards the things of God. And truly enter in to their worship experiences. Can your leaders hang out with people in the faith or prosperity movement and try to get your heads and hearts around what they are doing? That would be truly postmodern.

There are lots of responses going on here... here are few thoughts.

Bill,
I think I'm discussing Jamie's view of the meaning of postmodernity; I do think grace is needed for noetic enlightenment; that doesn't make me Calvinist; others beside the Calvinists (Augustine) have argued this and I think it is biblical.

On Absolute Truth, I think we agree. I'm nervous about claiming too much about too much on our part. Our knowledge is always limited -- always. Adequate; yes, we can know truth; truth, however, is more than the rational it is deeply embedded in relation since it is not just "what" we know but "Whom" we know. You and I agree here, probably.

Sorry I could not be more complete.

Scot,

I agree with you. Meta-narrative will be appropriated by different people for different reasons. We can re-title it meganarrative all we want, but if we are grounded in particular epistemological habits re-naming one's 'grand-story' as a meganarrative won't help.

Milo,

The main thing, for me atleast, about postmodernity is that this is a moment in Western culture where it can become more suspicious of its claims on reality. Modernity challenged theological authority, but postmodernity seems to challenge human authority (whatever its guise). Postmodernity gives us the language, in our context, to discern where we have presumed to be 'masters of the universe'.

As I have begun to rethink worldview issues I have come to the conclusion that to say we have a "biblical" worldview might be somewhat of a misnomer. Could it be that we have a modern, or a postmodern worldview that is influenced by how we approach or appropriate the teachings that we find in the Bible? In the above note that I wrote I said that I think like a modernist, not a biblicalist. Could it be that our culture has such influence upon us from our societal conditioning in the public school system that none of us who have gone through it will ever have a pure biblical worldview no matter what?

I guess what I am saying is that we see the world through the lens that we were influenced under and that powerful conditioning is nearly impossible to lay aside without the help of God. I stand as a modernist who looks at the postmodernist with suspicion because he thinks radically differently than I do, and vice-versa. Even my comfortable hermeneutical approach (grammatical-historical) is questioned by him.

Even Derrida (spelling?) had trouble with living consistently within his deconstruction framework. Could it be that we who say that we have a strictly biblical worldview are whistling in the dark?

Bruce

Easy to defend oneself or one's views when one defines terms in a fashion consistent with the perspective being declared and or defended.

It is easy as well to define a conversation like "emergent" because it is amorphous... read one "emergent" and the "conversation" is blue, read another and the "conversation" is pink.

As my "modern" Dad used to say it is a bit like "nailing jell-o to a tree"!