On Postmodernism, or THE WAY WE THINK TODAY: Part 4, Back to our Beginnings

Postmodernism is thought by some to be avant-garde, perhaps dangerously so.  But, in fact, it takes us, as Christians, back to our beginnings.  I think of Paul writing to the cerebral, brilliant, sophisticated, highly educated, worldly wise Greeks in Corinth in 1 Corinthians 2:1-5.  He’s already written: “Where is the wise man?  Where is the scholar? … God choose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.  God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”  He sounds Postmodernist, and this is no surprise.  Postmodernism goes way back, long before Modernism.  It seeks origins in their context.  It seeks to go back to beginnings.  Then in 1 Corinthians 2:1-5, Paul writes, “When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.  For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling.  My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.”  Exactly.  Instead of a God preached and argued about, we offer a God who became human and who lived amongst us and now lives in us! 

For us, truth is to be incarnate not intellectualized, lived not argued.  We offer not definitive, unarguable answers but transformed life lived in conscious awareness of the Spirit of God.  We own up to our own premises – that all this is by faith – but we also  recognize, as all Postmodernists do, that all thought systems are based on faith commitments.  What we ask is that everyone get their presuppositions on the table, and then we narrate the story of Christian faith.  It’s a reasonable story.  It makes sense.  It answers life’s biggest questions.  How do we best account for life as it is?  What works?  What offers hope?  Down on street level and out in real life, what are the real human needs?  And how are they best satisfied?  How do we best make sense of human experience as a whole?  But this story is not so much intellectual as it is spiritual.  This story is not so much about building institutions as building community.  It’s a story to be lived not argued.

We know that context matters.  Circumstance matters.  Yes, people will interpret in different ways.  What matters most is what we do with our differences, how we treat those who are different and think differently than us.  We know that many of life’s deepest truths do not lend themselves to scientific verification.  And inspired by Jesus, and open to his Spirit in our lives, we know that there is much to be learned from the stories of others, especially the marginalized, the powerless, the widows and orphans, the previously silenced and unheard.  These are all things Jesus knew and taught.  And now this thing called Postmodernism leads us back home to what we once knew.  For too long now, modern men and women have lived in a spiritual desert, a dry and dusty place, filled with argument and conflict over whose little goodness is most good, over whose little rightness is most right.  And we are so thirsty.

But God offers us a fresh wind of the Spirit bringing life back again to the dry bones of the church, a world open to mystery, to awe and wonder, to miracle, a world gloriously re-enchanted, life open to the sacred all around us, minds surrounded by grace and with this consciousness being able to see so much more than we ever could before.  And this one thing more.  Now it just might be possible that all people might one day come together in love and understanding.

So, really, to whom is Postmodernism a threat?  Well, other than to those who don’t like any of the above?