Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?

Matthew 10:16

"See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as  serpents and innocent as doves.”

Philippians 1:9-10

“And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight ¹⁰ to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless”

Sermon:

          As many of you know, I’ve been preaching about the Church over the course of this summer. I’ve addressed topics like how we can be better neighbors, how we can better answer the questions our non-Christian friends might have, and a number of cultural objections that people sometimes have about Christianity. All of this has come from a concern that we, as believers, should be better at making disciples of Jesus; and that sometimes we lose sight of that and get lost in our own traditions and worldviews.

          Today is the last sermon that I am going to preach as a part of this series. In some ways, perhaps, it could be considered a conclusion. This morning I want us to reflect not only on how society is changing, but upon what kind of opportunities exist in that change. I want us to try and think about how the glass can be half-full, rather than half-empty. I want you to reflect on the question of faith. What is faith and how might we have missed it in the past? Hebrews 11:1 tells us that, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” I think that this is an important thing to note because I believe that it’s something that postmodernism can remind of us – we can be reminded that faith is a lot like closing our eyes and stepping out in the trust that God will not only catch us, but guide us too.

          I am sure that many of you are not really sure what the word ‘postmodern’ really means. It’s really only been used heavily since around the 1980’s. So I want to provide a bit of clarification. First and foremost, the word ‘postmodern’ or ‘postmodernity’ refers to an issue of time in the history of ideas. Although we often refer to “modern times” when we’re speaking about contemporary moments, that term actually refers to an era that Rene Descartes heralded in the 1600’s. Modernity is actually a period of time and thought that begins with Descartes and ends sometime in the 19^th century.[1] It’s an era when Europeans built systems and ideas so all-encompassing and grandiose, that many could almost be said to resemble the Tower of Babel. Many of this era hoped to transcend our problems through the creation of better ways of thinking. It’s an era of certainty, conviction, and quite often a lot of pride.

          Postmodernity is a term that refers to the things that come after modernity. It’s a movement that challenges the certainty and presuppositions of Modernity. More than anything else, it challenges the notion that there is an objective logic that can be separated from who we are – our emotions, our self-interest, our fallibility. It doesn’t reject logic or truth, but instead focusing in on its contingency and contextuality. In the 20^th century science even moved to places that challenged modernity’s notion that everything could be explained materially. Einstein showed us that matter is in fact energy and Kurt Gödel showed us that even basic arithmetic is contingent – there is in fact more to 2+2=4 than what we might first assume.

          All of this is, in my opinion, actually a good thing. You see, modernity was really centered on trying to prove things, including faith. When you see billboards or books claiming to prove that God exists what you’re seeing is modernity’s influence on Christianity. Modernity demands certainty. It leaves little room for doubt or mystery because it presupposes that the human mind is capable of fully comprehending truth in an objective way. In other words, it demands us to only believe that which can be proven. This is why I believe that it is a bit idolatrous. This pride doesn’t leave room for faith which is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” In my opinion, the shift in worldview we’ve seen, in the generations here this morning, can actually help us not only better understand our world, but also point our neighbors and friends to Jesus more effectively. But all of that requires a movement on our parts – a movement into more faith and less dogmatism.

Visual Illustration:

What is Postmodernism and what can we learn from it?

“There is nothing outside the text.”

~ Jacques Derrida

Postmodernity is “incredulity toward metanarratives.”

~ Jean-François Lyotard

“Power is knowledge.”

~Michel Foucault

Together these claims can be both surprising and frightening.

Taken out of context they can be mythologized such that, it can seem that

the devil may in fact come from Paris!

But I believe that such a conclusion is wrong.
Instead, something good can come out of Paris.

          But for our sake, and for the sake of our evangelistic efforts, I hope that we can come to a better understanding of how our faith can relate to these claims in a positive way. Early this past summer I preached on Paul’s sermon to the Athenians in Acts chapter 17. In that sermon, Paul illustrates for us what is means to be a good missionary to people who think differently from us. Rather than picking apart what the Athenians believed, Paul found common ground with them and built his message of Good News around the philosophical and religious assumptions that the Athenians already had.

          Christianity has a very old analogy used to describe the benefit Christians could get from other people’s ideas. Figures like Augustine, John Calvin, and Abraham Kuyper all suggested that Christians could follow the Hebrews and “make off with Egyptian loot.” The point that they all made was that,

“just as the Hebrews left Egypt with Egyptian gold to be put to use in the worship of Yahweh (even if they misdirected its use at times), so Christians can find resources in non-Christian thought […] that can be put to work for the glory of God and the furtherance of the kingdom.”[2]

Much of our aversion to the claims that we just heard lies not at the heart of our faith, but in the thoughts we have because of the time of our birth and upbringing.

          So just as I listed each of these claims, so too do I hope to offer a suggestion for how we can learn from them and appropriate them for our own understanding of faith and Christianity.[3]

          First of all, Derrida’s claim that there is “nothing outside the text” can be taken as “a radical translation of the Reformation principle sola scriptura” which translates as, “by scripture alone.”[4] This Christian claim suggests that scriptures have more authority than other church authorities, like pastors or traditions. So if we run with this parallel between Derrida and people like Martin Luther, then we can be reminded we should recover these following convictions:

(1) The scriptures should help mediate how we understand the world.

(2) The scriptures were formed in communities and they are best understood in community.

          Secondly, Lyotard’s assertion that postmodernity is “incredulity toward metanarratives” is something that we can actually embrace. In many ways, this turn away from Modernism actually returns us to a more Ancient way of understanding the world. It’s not entirely unfair to say that postmodern thought is a bit vintage!

          That means that we can actually recover and embrace the narrative character of Christian faith, and the confessional and liturgical nature of our Good News in the midst of a pluralistic society that has many competing claims that all say that they are the truth. Although we’ve drifted away from it since the 1600’s, Christianity has almost always been rooted in a sense of faith in God, coupled with humility and self-sacrificing passion, rather than prideful certainty. The early church was far more concerned with bringing people the story of the Gospel, than a list of requirements and checklists that people had to sign off on.

          Finally, Foucault’s claim that “power is knowledge” can push us to realize what advertisers on Madison Avenue learned long ago:

(1) There’s a lot of power in cultural formation and discipline. There’s so much, that it can eve shape our ideas about truth, what we want, and how we should live.

(2) The Church needs to use counterformation by counterdisciplines. In other words, we need to think about   discipleship! Part of discipleship is following Christ’s values.

Some of you might be wondering what this really means for us. You might be wondering, “How does this relate to the Church or how we minister to other people?” That’s a question you should be asking! So let me get to the point. Christianity is about the Gospel of Jesus Christ – a story that requires “eyes to see and ears to hear.” The Church’s responsibility is not to just speak about this story, but to live into it.

          Many Christians have a hard time explaining what the church is apart from a place to worship with other believers, precisely because they’ve lost sight of many of the lessons that these postmoderns and ancients can teach us. Conceiving of Christian faith as a private affair between an individual and God is not enough. That just leads to a room full of individuals who gather around a set of ideas, rather than gathering as a living community which embodies its head.

          “Modern Christianity tends to think of the church either as a place where individuals come to find answers to their questions or as one more stop where individuals can try to satisfy their consumerist desires. As such, Christianity becomes intellectualized rather than incarnate, commodified rather than the site of genuine community.”[5]

          If we really think about the fact that Jesus is the head of the Church, then we can reclaim a religious life that’s centered around faith, rather than self-sufficiency, and in so doing capture that thing we were seeking all along. We are people shaped by context and if we do not submit ourselves in faith to Jesus, then we will be shaped by the contexts of the world (Foucault). If we do not gather as a community that confesses under Christ’s name, we fall into the trap of thinking that we are better than people who hold other beliefs, rather than recognizing that we are a people redeemed and saved not by our own actions but by God’s (Lyotard). And finally, no matter what we do we will always exist in relationship with other people. Every texts and community is continuously shaped by its relationship with others. As Christians we need the scriptures to help us understand our world, but we also need the Body of Christ to help us understand them both in their application to our lives and in their intended meaning to their original audiences in the past. The lesson in all of this is that we need each other because Christianity is a practice of faith.

“The church does not exist for me; my salvation is not primarily a matter of intellectual mastery or emotional satisfaction. The church is the site where God renews and transforms us – a place where the practices of being the body of Christ form us into the image of the Son [Jesus]. What I, a sinner saved by grace, need is not so much answers as reformation of my will and heart. [The church is a place where we learn to be more like Jesus through   practice – growing in our spiritual gifts] The fruit of the Spirit emerge in our lives from the seeds planted by the practices of being the church; and when the church begins to exhibit the fruit of the Spirit, it becomes a witness to a postmodern world (John 17). Nothing is more countercultural than a community serving the Suffering Servant [Jesus] in a world devoted to consumption and violence.”[6]

If we let it, postmodernity can call us back to the essence of what we claim – Faith. Let us strive to grow more together in its practice. Amen.

---

[1] I tend to believe that Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard put the final nails in that coffin.

[2] James K.A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006), pp. 22-23.

[3] Each of the following three prescriptions is taken from Smith’s analysis.

[4] Ibid, p. 23.

[5] Ibid, p. 29.

[6] Ibid, p. 30.