On Postmodernism, or THE WAY WE THINK TODAY: Part 1, Why Many Cannot Make Sense of Church

Many people today cannot make sense of church because the way we think today is not the way we used to think.  Many churches, most churches, still think in one way; more and more people today think in another way.  Many, many churches – including our own heritage, the Churches of Christ – grew their structures and forged their creedal identities in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century thought world of Newton, Locke, Voltaire and Hume:

committed to the pursuit of timeless, abstract, universal truths that are true for all people in all times, regardless of context or circumstance;

enthralled by science and accepting as true only those “facts” that are scientifically verifiable; and

in quest of certitude and consequently having little patience with mystery or diversity. 

All this has been rigorously challenged in the past fifty years by a kind of thought called Postmodernism. 

“Postmodernism” means – drum roll, please – that that which comes after modernism.  The world of, say, 1950 prided itself on being modern.  And there was some reason for pride.  Much had been learned from modern thought.  There was a sense of having arrived, of having arrived at ultimate truth.  But a number of thinkers kept thinking.  They thought of a world that had just survived two World Wars and the monstrous ethnic-cleansing of the Holocaust, and was now split down Cold War lines and threatened by nuclear annihilation.  (Good grief!  Back in that day in school little kids like me were being drilled in “duck and cover.”)  And they wondered if all this horrifying conflict might not in some ways be explained by the modern pursuit of timeless, abstract, universal truths; a purified Master Race, for instance, is just such a concept, clinically rational, deadly wrong.  Maybe all the conflict, the turmoil, the violence, arose out of  the very quest for certitude, the worship of science and technology, and the disregard for context, circumstance, diversity and the truths that are known best by the heart. 

When Postmodernism crashed against the denominational citadels of Christianity, it was largely seen as bad news.  It created consternation.  Churches molded by modernism sensed the real threat in Postmodernism.  Their institutions were being scrutinized, as were many of their theological certitudes.  And many church leaders circled their wagons and took aim at Postmodernism which drove them deeper into decline. 

But why?  What if God were offering us through new thought a fresh wind of the Spirit bringing life back 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 what if this might make possible all people one day coming together in faith?