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Public
Letter to Christianity Today and Chuck Colson from Ron Martoia
RE:
“The Postmodern Crackup”
As
someone who respects the work, reflection, and kingdom good that
Chuck Colson has done, I come to this task with not a little
fear and trepidation. (And I don’t mind saying the church I
lead has adopted 300 families this Christmas through Prison
Fellowship’s Angel Tree program. We not only respect his
work, we deeply support it.) Be that as it may, I still
feel compelled to be part of the evolving discussion as to just
how the church is going to intersect culture. After all,
that IS the main statement of the incarnation; God wanted to
intersect and speak into the culture
As
a pastor of one of the prominent artistic, creative, and
image-using churches referred to at the end of his article
“The Postmodern Crack Up”, and as someone in the fray of
trying to help the church find ways to impact this postmodern
culture we are in, I simply can’t be silent.
I
am afraid, when for reasons of either brevity or simplicity,
category mistakes are made and definitions flattened. I am
afraid, because this may prove to bring more heat than light and
in so doing confuse those who simply don’t have the tooling or
knowledge base to critically reflect on the concepts presented
in this very article.
I
can only assume that Chuck has presented postmodernism this way
because he really feels this is all there is to it, or he simply
wanted to be intentionally reductionistic. Both options
would deserve a response. The implication in the opening
lines is that postmodernism is basically a movement that has to
do with truth claims. The ensuing five paragraphs proceed
to illustrate the sort of shifts being observed in the public
sphere in ethics, abortion, gay rights, and the events of 911.
Whether the observations are correct or incorrect is moot.
The main point is the public’s position on these issues has no
bearing on the life or death of postmodernity. Why?
Because the term postmodern is simply a label for the totality
of where culture currently sits. To isolate it to merely a
few ethical positions is far too simple. The dictionary
definition of culture is “the totality of socially transmitted
behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions and all other
products of human work and thought”. The short
colloquial definition might be “culture is how we relate and
express and the institutions we build to relate and express.”
When those ways of relating and expressing shift at the macro
level and in pervasive ways (hence the word “totality”) we
have a cultural change, and eventually that macro change is
labeled.
This
surfaces a second issue and one seemingly common.
Postmodernism isn’t a sub movement within a larger cultural
context; it is the cultural context. Of course, in a time
of transition, which is what we are in, there are portions of
both worlds/cultures still present. For precisely this
reason Toffler, for instance, prefers to talk of waves of
cultural change instead of eras or ages. If it is not clear
throughout his article that he sees postmodernism as a subset,
surely his last line makes it crystal clear. Just as
modernity is a label for an overarching larger cultural context,
so too postmodernity. The presence of both modern and
postmodern characteristics in our culture only demonstrates the
transitional nature of the cusp we live on.
Unfortunately
this sort of category mistake is what enables some people within
the Christian church to state they don’t want to be
postmodern, just like they don’t want to be pro-gay or
pro-homosexual. I really think someone of Chuck’s
stature understands this, but I am equally sure his article does
not make that clear. And unfortunately it confuses rather than
clarifies the issue for lots of people.
America’s
attitude trends toward abortion or the gay issue are absolutely
no litmus test of the vibrancy of postmodern culture. When
we look at the broad shifts in the role of science and reason in
epistemology, when we note the growing interest in things
spiritual over the last decade (ten years ago I would have
people that didn’t know God ask me to prove he existed; I
haven’t had that question in years; the topic of discussion
now is which god should I believe in), when we look at the
autonomy of the Enlightenment falling on hard times, these
are all indicators that the once coveted trophies of modernity
may, in fact, be coming down off the mantle for closer
examination.
His
usage of “grand metanarrative” unfortunately makes it sound
like its loss is a shame. But what is his alternative?
Certainly not the metanarrative offered by modernity! The death
of the modern metanarrative ought to be welcomed by the
Christian church. And the fact that postmoderns in
postmodern culture think there is no grand narrative to make
sense of their lives is simply opportunity for Jesus, not an
impediment. But this strikes to the heart of what I think
could be so damaging and misleading in this article.
Chuck’s
excitement over an attractive “belief system that is rational
and defensible,” is precisely why the modern church is so
often irrelevant and might I say not remotely biblical.
The modern world and the church of the modern world has imbibed
the rules of modernity and been co-opted into the very system
she is seeking to influence. Systematizing, analyzing and
constructing coherent worldviews is all a product of the modern
rational world. He uses other statements like
“rooted in our own truth system,” and “worldview”.
Every one of those statements is a product of modern,
rationalist enlightenment love affairs. Do we really
believe there is “The Christian Worldview”? Which one
are we willing to agree on … The Predestinarian Calvinist
Worldview or the Wesleyan Free Will Worldview; The Left Behind
Dispensationalist Worldview or the Presbyterian Preterist
Worldview? The reality is we can’t articulate THE
Christian Worldview because we really believe there will be
people in heaven that were preterists, dispensationalist,
consubtantiationists and those who held to the Lord’s Supper
being a memorial a la’ Zwingli. In other words, even in
the Christian camp we may agree on the few things that go into
the “center” or “core”, but there the agreement pretty
quickly stops.
In
all humility, I genuinely believe this mindset is what keeps the
church relegated to the sidelines of the cultural game.
Let me state what seems obvious to me and others attempting to
engage the culture in ways different from the modern church.
Jesus did not come to bring people into a belief system that is
rational and defensible. Jesus seems rather unconcerned
about beliefs. Jesus’ opening retreat on a mountain side
with his new followers had nothing to do with belief systems or
rational defensible worldview constructs. It had
fundamentally to do with character formation and community
building. Jesus used images, metaphors, stories. I
know Chuck would wholeheartedly give amen. But why then
the closing salvo that churches moving toward image and emotion
are moving away from Word? Again, a category mistake in my
mind. If “Word based” means moving away from the
logical, linear, rational, analytical, atomistic, talking head
obsession we have had in modernity, then I say hooray. That
model of ministry, clearly a modern product and not a
prescriptive biblical model, has proven highly ineffective in
making the population of the good old USA any more churched, or
according to Barna and others, any more biblically literate.
It
sounds to me as if Chuck likes this sort of modern talking head
modus. And maybe someone of his age and status can be content
with where things have ended up in the modern world. But I
doubt that he is.
Again,
I know Chuck knows all of this, but what do we honestly do with
a solid three quarters of Christian history that didn’t have
their own copy of the printed Word, and image, icon, stained
glass, wood carving, painting were the primary means of
communicating the biblical story? And why were these the
primary means? Illiterate innumerate societies of the
first 1500 years required it. Certainly we wouldn’t
consider these churches or historical time frames not Word
driven in their message!
One
of the most jarring sayings made by Jesus on this front is in
John 14:7. “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and
no one comes to the Father but through me.” I think this
has huge implications for our epistemology. Jesus is
essentially saying to know him is to know truth. Under
this aegis, knowing truth is relational, not analytical or
rational. That is not to say there aren’t noetic
dimensions to our knowing. We would have to be equally
quick to add, however, that for Jesus it wasn’t exclusively or
even primarily noetic; it was more experiential and relational.
On one front, maybe that messes too much with our neat
rationalist packages. But on the other hand we talk this
way in our churches all the time. We speak of knowing
“about” Jesus (presumably a sort of mental/noetic
knowledge), and we talk of embracing Jesus or knowing him in our
hearts. What are we saying? We are making a
distinction between rational understanding and relational
knowing. The two are different. I would suggest the
modern church has been all about the rational dispensing of
information and has confused information transmission with
transformation. We have been high on the noetic and nearly
absent on the experience. Funny to me how Sinai, the
giving of Israel’s “word,” seemed big on the experiential
and pretty low on the cognitive. Couple that with the Red
Sea event and the previous persuasion plagues, and Israel had
been in immersive experience long before she hardly understood
or knew a thing about the God who was rescuing her.
Apparently in pre-modern society God’s method was that of
experiential immersion with some modicum of post-eventu
cognitive explanation.
The
“image and emotional driven” messages and churches Chuck
refers to are simply engaging a more full orbed epistemology and
therefore engaging a wider range of learning styles and a wider
range of people.
In closing let me restate my concern. The very
effectiveness of the church depends on two things; first, our
clarity about the transitional era in which we live.
People like Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Stan Grenz, Howard
Rheingold and Peter Drucker help us understand we have the
privilege of living in an environment of sea change that few
generations get to experience.
Second,
our clarity about how we intersect culture is also critical.
The dance of being “in” the culture, not ”of” the
culture, but not “out of” the culture will always be a
challenge to navigate. This dance requires not only
careful biblical exegesis but just as careful cultural exegesis.
I
think the dialogue must continue, and that is what it is … a
dialogue; coming to shared meaning as we exchange words.
May the conversation continue.
Dr. Ron Martoia
Lead Pastor Westwinds Community Church
www.velocityculture.com
www.westwinds.org
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