The Postmodern World

This Fall and Winter, mixed in with my comments on issues before the nation and a few more personal reflections, I will be focusing on the church, its history and how it must be reshaped as it addresses the postmodern world. This week I will attempt to define what is meant by postmodernism and how Christianity is being affected by it. A fish cannot define the water in which it is swimming, so it is difficult for any of us to define the nature of our present culture, realizing that it may be far different than the world in which we grew up. But let me give it a try.

Here are just a few characteristics of this cultural reality called postmodernism.
Quantum mechanics offers a radical new understanding as to how the natural world works. Nothing is objectively real until it is observed, and everything stands in active relationship with every other entity.

While there is a new awareness that while we live in a much smaller world neighborhood, there is also a MUCH MUCH larger universe with billions of stars and trillions of planets, no doubt many of them sheltering life. WE are not the center of the cosmos, or even very important.

THIS world’s inhabitants hunger for a spirituality apart from institutions. We long for life to make sence, and seek to find meaning beyond traditional systems.

This side of the holocaust the notion of an absolutely-good all-powerful God is being seriously questioned.

Postmodernism rejects every grand design—including ours—and thus calls into question biblical faith.

While these are only a few examples of the challenges brought by postmodernism, in this column I will discuss only the challenge confronting the grand design at the center of the church and its theology.

Postmodern thought insists that in this newly defined world no theory, institution, book, religion, philosophy or political system that claims to encompass and explain everything, can any longer be taken serious. This includes religious, philosophical, political, literary or even scientific theories These grand notions are called “meta narratives,” and while they may have meaning within their parochial context, outside those narrow boundaries they are to be discounted.

Post--modernism suggests that no institution can claim to possess absolute truth. So what then can we make of the Christian faith and its claim for certainy? Must Christianity bow before this postmodern attack, and humbly accept its declaration that every system that believes it alone holds the ultimate truth is mistaken? I think not. We have a compelling story to tell, a world we are called to reshape, a healing message to proclaim, a Christ to follow and an ethic to celebrate.

On the other hand, we must realize that our story may not be the only story and our truth, like all truth may be conditioned by its historic borders.. Among other things, this means we must be honest about the dark side of Christian history before our story will be heard in the postmodern world. Having spent my life within that story, I know much of its dark side and well as its marvelous commitment to a world hungry for hope.

So I will be offering columns celebrating the life and work of the church as it has lived out the story of God’s will for the world. But first we must come to terms with the evidence that from time to time the church and its message have been among this world’s most negative and destructive enterprises. I will only then get to the positive life-giving gospel with which we have been entrusted, and describe hiow it has been a blessing to this, the only world we knowl

You may ask why I am engaging in an area far removed from my usual political and personal musings. Let me explain. What I believe to be a serious distortion of the Christian faith is having enormous influence in our national life, and that distortion cannot go unchallenged. For a long time I have sought to know just how and why this destructive perception has been seized on by so many millions of America’s Christians. My look at postmodernism may be a clue.

A few generations ago there was an epidemic of lead poisoning among children. It was discovered that they were eating chips of lead-based paint from the walls of their rooms. It seemed that their bodies were hungering for a mineral nutrient and were not getting it in their regular diets, so they resorted to lead-based paint chips. Could the current distortion of religion be like the unfilled hunger of these children? Bad religion may be like eating lead-based paint. I believe the Christian message may hold an answer. At least that is the reason I have taken this journalistic path.