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May
02
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The Church in the Postmodern Era

Postmodern

There seems to be a general feeling in some levels of theological Academia (or at least those represented by the Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine) that the postmodern era has allowed the church to relax against some of the heresies of the enlightenment engendered by its singularly rational mindset - that a postmodern culture is inherently more friendly to the Christian church by virtue of being pluralist or relativist. From what I’ve seen, however, it doesn’t look like the church is in any better shape now than it was during the enlightenment, for several reasons that I’m surprised aren’t more publicized.

The Enlightenment period was by no means a walk in the park for the Church. The World at that point learned what Newt Gingrich calls Framing the Debate: It’s not important to win or lose an argument - what’s important is being the one to define the terms of the debate, and this is what determines the winner and loser. The Church in the Enlightenment era let the World define the terms of religious debate: deductive reasoning as the final authority. In Enlightenment thought, reason was the one absolute truth - what one can perceive and the conclusions one can draw from that. Several prominent theologians of that time even tried to prove the existence of the Christian God through these manners - by personal revelation and feeling, for example, or by natural observation and general revelation. Yet the specifics of the god deduced from these generalities always came up short: for the former, what if one does not “feel” God at a certain moment? And for the latter, deducing a God from science can affirm only the vaguest conception of God. The defining religion of the Enlightenment was in fact Deism, in which God created the world but does not interfere with it at all. These arguments for God may have been logical and may have arrived at the desired conclusion, but by submitting themselves to the World’s terms - by looking at the world and arriving at scripture from that rather than the other way around - they lost the debate before it had even begun.

Postmodernism with its plurality of voices - none necessarily “reasonable” in the Enlightenment sense of the word - then gives the Church the opportunity to frame its own debate, the Cambridge argument goes. Yet below even this seemingly benign concession that reason is not necessarily the end-all-be-all lies exactly the same sort of debate-frame as before in much subtler form: the one rule of postmodern pluralism-relativism is coexistence and coequality of ideas. Any idea, especially religious, (provided it isn’t completely out of the realm of reality, i.e., the Greek pantheon, though the ludicrous is becoming increasingly acceptable: the Flying Spaghetti Monster cult could be considered as much of a satire on religious pluralism as it is on Intelligent Design theory) is not only entitled to respect, it is entitled to be correct in its own domain. While this shields the Church from some degree of outside attack, bringing the Gospel to the world becomes that much more difficult - a trade I’m not sure was entirely advantageous in the long run. The importance of the question of religion has been diminished from a problem of eternal destiny to one of cultural expression or personal choice, even in the minds of believers who begin to doubt the imperative of the Great Commission.

By rising to the challenge of framing the debate itself, the Church opens itself back to renewed attacks from without, a challenge that postmodern pluralism-relativism has left us ill-prepared to accept. Yet if anything, a renewed core of the Christian church would shake off the complacency of those set in a view of religion as inconsequential - something that must happen eventually if there is ever to be mass-affect by the people of God on this Earth again.







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