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Terms like
“postmodernism” are difficult to define, since part of the
essence of postmodernism is the desire to avoid all forms of totalization
(complete definition). Yet, if we are going to talk about things like
“postmodern evangelism, we have to at least come up with a working
understanding of our terms. So, please take the following as one
guy’s perspective on postmodernism, with implications for evangelism
to follow.
For the purposes of
discussion, I think it very helpful to distinguish between
“postmodernism” and “postmodernists” on the one
hand, and “postmodernity” and “postmoderns” on the
other.[1]
Postmodernism
(Academic)
Postmodernism, for me,
refers to the academic changes that have taken place to replace the
philosophical values of Modernism (whether in the form of Rationalism[2]
or Romanticism[3]).
Whereas modernism located truth within the self, to be discovered either
through rational thought (rationalism, the enlightenment) or through
emotion (romanticism), postmodernism has given up on the pursuit of truth
in favor of constructing a “truth” that works for the
individual.[4]
Postmodernism’s
“Center”
The scholar often
referred to as the father of postmodernism is a guy named Jacque
Derrida. It’s impossible to describe his thought succinctly
without oversimplification, but here goes. Derrida’s
hermeneutic is called deconstructionism. He claims that all language
is made up of signs—words that refer to concepts in our minds.
We use these signs to refer to objects, actions or ideals in reality.
However, how do we ever define these signs? Ultimately, he says, we
only define them by differences with other signs. There’s no
way to define signs by anything outside the sign system, and so actual
meaning is deferred. There’s no center (God, rationality, etc.)
that can anchor meaning in language. Derrida calls this differánce
(a play on difference and defer)—meaning is endlessly deferred by
they differences between signs. Consequently, seeking objective
meaning in any text (text is broadened to include any form of human
communication, including conversation) is futile. Instead, the
interpreter must simply “play” with texts and use them as he
sees fit. All we have are texts; we have nothing to anchor their
meaning.[5]
There are two other
authors comomonly spoken about with respect to postmodernism,
Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, but I won’t go into much detail
here. Suffice it to say that in Stanley Fish’s radical
readers’ response theory, interpretation ultimately has nothing to do
with the texts themselves, but rather what the reader brings to the text in
the context of the interpretive community of which he is a part. [6]
All these guys are considered “post-structural” (that is, in
critique of the structuralism of late modernism, see Saussure), but are not
all are saying the same thing.
“Conservative”
Postmodernism[7]
I think it's important
for evangelicals to note that not all “postmodernists” are
quite so radical. In fact, there are other forms of post-structural
thinking that do not resort to deconstructionism or radical readers’
response theory. Some have called these thinkers “conservative
readers’ response critics.” Many evangelicals (Kevin
Vanhoozer, Anthony Thistleton, Richard Pratt, Tremper Longman, etc.) have
found these guys quite helpful in developing their own hermeneutic.
These critics are Paul Riceour, Hans Georg Gadamer and J. L. Austin.
These scholars are perhaps the strongest critics of Derrida and Fish, and
while there are things here with which evangelicals will disagree, much of
what they say is quite helpful. In fact, Anthony Thistleton has (I
think rightly) argued that Gadamer and Riceour provide for us a
more thoroughgoing postmodernism than that provided by Derrida or Fish, and
have done so in a far more constructive manner. In fact, this kind of
postmodernism would even challenge the "definition" I gave above
regarding truth being simply a useful and pragmatic construction.[8]
Stated briefly, Austin argues that language is not just an endless play
of sign differences. Language is also made up of speech acts. In
other words, in a sentence like “I apologize for writing too much in
this email,” I am not just stringing together signs in the hopes that
meaning will be understood. I am also performing the act of
apologizing.[9]
Riceour and Gadamer have argued that while we can never transcend our own
interpretive “horizon” to fully embrace the
“horizon” of the author, we can still make legitimate claims
about the texts that we read. There may be no absolute distinction
between “interpretation” and “application,” but we
can recognize some very illegitimate applications of texts.[10]
Meaning, however, is not “objective.” It is subjective,
relative to the life and culture of the interpreter. This is not a
bad thing, however. It allows texts to be broadly applied.
Summary
If I may
summarize generally with the language of Kevin Vanhoozer, within
postmodernism, the scientist and the philosopher have been dethroned and
replaced with the literary critic.[11]
Systematic theology and philosophy have been dethroned and replaced with
the narrative and the story. Truth has been replaced with
conversation.[12]
If we are to continue to do theology in a postmodern world, therefore, the
theological method of Charles Hodge has to go out the window.
Theology is not the task of organizing jumbled data in the Bible into an
Aristotelian system of thought, as Hodge would have us think.[13]
It is the task of understanding the Biblical narrative as it is. We
may still find a “system” to our theology, but the hermeneutic
we embrace will be narrative, not scientific.
Rightly understood,
therefore, postmodernism can be seen as a tremendous opportunity for the
church. The scientist and the philosopher have fallen off their
pedestals; the literary critic has ascended to the throne. Protestant
Christianity, therefore, which places such a high emphasis on the Bible as
God’s Word, may find effective avenues of Biblical evangelism if
we adopt the perspective of literary critic, rather than the scientific or
philosophical totalizer. We can share the drama of redemption (the
gospel) by seeking to understand another person’s story and connect
that person’s story to the story of redemption. We can show how
our own stories have been grafted in as well. When proclaim the
gospel in terms of narrative, story and drama, we may there by God’s
Spirit find an audience yearning for a grander story of their own to give
meaning to the lifeless existence they experience in today’s world.
Postmodernity
(Cultural)
Postmodernity, as we are
defining it, is far more broad a term than postmodernism. It refers
not only to what people are thinking in the academic world, but to how
actual people are living in the actual world. It is descriptive of
contemporary culture and the patterns of thinking that people have
(consistently or inconsistently with postmodernism). Likewise,
postmoderns are people who live in postmodernity, whether or not
they’ve heard of Derrida. Some of these people may well have
embraced major tenants of postmodernism, perhaps without even knowing
it. Others perhaps are simply dissatisfied with the structures of
modernity.
It is here that Peter
Berger becomes very helpful. He argues that people interpret life
based on how their minds have been structured to think by their culture.[14]
He calls these “plausibility structures.” Certain ideas seem
plausible to us based on the cultural structures of our minds. Thus,
within any culture, there is a climate of plausibility—a climate that
suggests some things will seem plausibly true and others won’t.[15]
With the shift from modernity to postmodernity, the climate of plausibility
in our culture has changed. For instance, within modernity, people
trusted scientists as philosophers of life. Within postmodernity,
that trust is gone. Nietzsche, for instance, claims that science is a
rape of mother nature, robbing her of all of her mystery and beauty.[16]
People are not nearly as interested today in making sure they have the
right theological system as they are in understanding a story.
Preaching that focuses on narrative and the drama of redemption will fit
the climate of plausibility of a postmodern culture far more readily than a
systematic sermon. Preachers ought not to seek invisibility in their
sermons either—we don’t want to disappear so that Christ will
appear in our words. On the contrary, preaching ought to reveal
“Christ in us”—the story of redemption preached to the
hearts of sinful people, bringing redemption to their life stories and
testimony to how His story has brought redemption to the preacher’s
life story.
It is important to note
that postmoderns are not demographically definable. They are not an
age group or a socio-economic status. Postmoderns are professors like
Derrida and sixth grade students in a Christian school. They are rich
and they are poor. They have good home lives and poor home
lives. They are simply people of all walks of life who no longer find
modernity plausible. And as our culture becomes increasingly
postmodern, more and more people will find modernity very, very strange.
Conclusion: Relation
to Evangelism
Not every author/expert
on postmodernity is going to make these same distinctions between
postmodernism and postmodernity, but I think it is a helpful one to make
for our purposes. I don’t think it proper at all for us to
embrace postmodernism any more than I think it proper for the church to
embrace modernism. At the same time, there is a tremendous amount
that we can learn from postmodernism and postmodernists. At the very
least, they aid us in a critique modernism (which the evangelical church
has bought into hook and line, if not sinker). They teach us not to
take our selves too seriously and place too much emphasis on our own
rational (or emotional) abilities. The Reformed church has
fallen captive to this. For example, see Hodge’s description of
systematic theology for how modernism has turned theology into a scientific
study of God. Postmodernism permits us to embrace a mysterious faith
in which not all questions are answered.
Our task is to be in the
world and not of it. We need to be in the world, and this is a
postmodern world. Therefore, if we are going to evangelize in this
world, we need to do postmodern evangelism to postmodern people.
However, we are not to be of the world—we are not to throw out the
gospel for the sake of postmodernism. In other words, we need to
preach a postmodern gospel without preaching a postmodernistic
gospel. As you may be able to see above, Derrida’s
postmodernism would remove the possibility of genuine conversation taking
place. We can never truly understand another person’s story,
since his story is just a string of signs in which meaning
is endlessly deferred. True communication ends, and God becomes
a silent victim of language. That’s not what we want. Nor
do we want Fish’s “what works for you”
Christianity. We want the gospel to be communicated clearly by
God’s Holy Spirit to the sinful hearts of people.
With the value placed
within postmodernism on narrative and story, it is important for our
evangelistic approaches to conceive of our “outlines” in that
manner. The gospel is not a collection of true data; it is the
life-story of the Son of God. That life story is the climax of the
story of God’s people, the people Israel. It is also the turning point to
history. Not only that, but we get to be caught up in a drama that is
still taking place. The Biblical “D-day” (the cross) has
occurred, but “VE day” (second coming) has not yet happened.[17]
Christ is for us our advocate during this time between the
“already” and the “not yet.”[18]
We grieve and mourn because of the pain that we feel, but we have been
given hope of a future glory (Rom. 8). This is a real drama that is
centered on Christ, and Christians all participate in that story. Our
gospel presentation ought to reflect this understanding of the gospel.
The first step to
constructing a postmodern gospel presentation is to embrace the postmodern
reality that “the medium is the message”—the medium by
which we communicate also communicates our message (and sometimes
contradicts and distracts from it). We need to evaluate every aspect
of our gospel presentation to see if our method is consistent with the
Bible and communicative to a postmodern audience. What good is it to
proclaim a thoroughly Biblical gospel only to have the message lost in
modern rhetoric? What happens if we craft our medium, our method, for
a postmodern audience only to proclaim plainly a message that still does
not communicate to the plausibility structures of our society? All
elements of evangelism ought to be thoroughly evaluated, both in terms of
its medium and message, to ensure that we are communicating Biblical truth
to a postmodern audience.
The issue here is not
finding a method that will achieve results (more postmodern
converts). The issue is it is finding an approach that will
Biblically communicate the gospel, both in medium and message. It is
possible that a more thoroughgoing postmodern gospel presentation will make
postmoderns more uncomfortable, since the offence of the gospel will be
proclaimed all the more clearly. Yet the potential for ministry to
them in that context will also go up exponentially, since the gospel will
be applied to their sinful hearts in ways in which their hearts are
actually sinful. And that’s all we can do ourselves in any
evangelistic encounter. The rest is up to God’s Spirit.
[1] This distinction comes from
Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1996), 12.
[2] The “Rationalism”
to which I’m referring began with the Enlightenment in the late 16th
century. It focused on the abilty of reason to ascertain truth.
Along with that principle came the desire to reduce God to a being who
could be rationally comprehended—hence “deism.” The
value on progress led to industrialism. Descartes’ emphasis on
originality (self-fathering) led to an abandonment as premodern traditions
as valid sources for truth. Far more could be said.
[3] Romanticism was a reaction
against rationalism which insisted that truth could only be understood
through emotion. Rationality leads inevitably to the kind of
dogmatism that killed Christ (Emerson). Industrialism and science
lead inevitably to a rape of mother nature (Nietzsche). Nature was
understood somewhat pantheistically, as an organism, rather than a machine
(hence the rise of Liberalism). The teachings of many romantics
anticipate postmodernism, particularly the emphasis on poetry and art as
more valid sources of truth.
[4] For a good contrast of
modernism with postmodernism, see Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Postmodern
Times: A Contemporary Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture (Wheaton,
IL: Crossway books, 1994), 27-90
[5] Tremper Longman III, Literary
Approaches to Biblical Interpretation, published in Foundations of
Contemporary Interpretation, ed. Moises Silva (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
1987), 120-123
[6] D. A. Carson, The Gagging of
God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996),
75-6.
[7] This probably not the best term
to use, but it works for our discussion.
[8] Roger Lundin, Clarence Walhout,
Anthony Thistleton, The Promise of Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1999).
[9] Anthony Thistleton,
“Communicative Action and Promise in Hermeneutics” in The
Promise of Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 114-150.
[10] Anthony Thistleton, New
Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical
Reading (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 44-6.
[11]In
fact, since the time of Thomas Kuhn, even scientists have adopted methods
of literary criticism in the scientific method.
[12] Kevin Vanhoozer, Is there
Meaning in This Text? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998).
[13] Hodge writes, “Theology,
therefore, is the exhibition of the facts of scripture in their proper
order and relation, with the principles or general truths involved in
the facts themselves, and which pervade and harmonize the whole”
(emphasis mine). From Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Wm.
B. Eerdmans, 1952), I, 19, cited in John Frame, Doctrine of the
Knowledge of God: A Theology of Lordship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R,
1987), 77.
[14]See Acts 14 for an example of
this. Their minds were structured to think polytheistically, so they
interpreted Paul’s actions in that way.
[15] Peter L. Berger and Thomas
Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology
of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1966).
[16] Nietsche writes, One should
have more respect for the bashfulness of nature as it hides behind riddles
and iridescent uncertainties.” From The Gay Science,
cited in Richard Pratt’s lecture notes on the Introduction to
Theological Studies.
[17] I believe these terms come from
Oscar Cullman.
[18] What Christ has already done at
the cross and what he has not yet done at his second coming.
SJS
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