Part 4 And the church. (First of a number of parts)

You could say I lost my faith in science and progress
You could say I lost my belief in the holy church
You could say I lost my sense of direction
You could say all of this and worse, but
If I ever lose my faith in you
There’d be nothing left for me to do.

Do you recognize these lyrics written a few years ago by singer, songwriter Sting? Do they scream “post-modernism” to you? It’s undeniable I think that in the past 20 years there has been a fundamental shift in people’s attitudes and thinking – the way they see the world. It is not a clean break from an old worldview; ideas didn’t change completely overnight, but in many ways people, particularly younger people, those who haven’t been saturated in old (modern)ways of thinking, think differently. They have a post modern worldview-they react to the world and life generally in ways that are different than in the past. A traditional church, delivering its message and conducting itself as it has for the past umpteen years may not be received by this group of people and future generations.

If this is true, (and I think it is), how might the church change? Or need it change?

In Who’s Afraid of Postmoderninsm, James K. A. Smith took 3 fundamental postmodern ideas and considered how the church might change to be able to speak to post-modern thinkers. Smith is a professor of philosophy at Calvin College. The content of the book was first delivered in a series of lectures at the L’Abri study centre, which has a working relationship with Calvin’s department of Philosophy. The book is dedicated to his son Coleson “whose dreams and visions of a fantastic world encourage me to hope for a re-imagined church.” To that I offer a humble, but hearty, “Amen”, and I intend to restate and then add my thoughts to his ideas.

It was Jacques Derrida who famously wrote that there is “nothing outside the text”. In doing so he set out a fundamental postmodernist idea, which, as I understand it is this: that every fact and idea is described by language that is personal to the author and as a result each account that is described is dependant on (among others), the context, history, education, presuppositions, and meaning of the language used of the particular author. The result is that the meaning (interpretation) by the original author may not be the same as the interpretation of the same event by another. As well, a reader subsequently interprets the description again, and this subsequent interpretation will also be dependant on factors that are unique to him. This is the way with every communication and so for post-moderns there is no “pure”, “natural”, objective truth in or behind a text. Every communication is an “interpretation”.

Now, this scares the daylights out of modern (as opposed to post-modern) Christian thinkers who have no doubt that they have uncovered the truth of most biblical pronouncements. Modern Christians study mostly for one reason, to uncover “truth”, which we can then apply (hypothetically) to our lives. Modern church leaders tell the faithful weekly just what is meant by various biblical passages. For them, to suggest that a biblical account is the “interpretation” of its author, and that past and present day theologians are only offering an “interpretation”, of which there may be others, has for them, a number of dire consequences. Our whole system of thinking is built upon the “truth” of the word of God, that there are clear and certain theological propositions. We reject the claim that Paul, Matthew or some other writer “filtered” the event or the fact that they described. For modern Christians, biblical statements set out “objective”, “absolute”, “unadulterated” truth. The “Holy Spirit” spoke through biblical writers and somehow overrode any influence unique to an individual writer. Similarly, the Holy Spirit then reveals the objective truth behind the text to us, overriding any tendency we might have to apply our context to the Scriptural passage.

Now I'm ging to write more about this in the future. I need to give this more thought. But I will offer an initial response in a few days. It will be a little like shooting from the hip (with some aimimg provided by Smith. My initial responseis that there is much that is good in embracing this idea, but I admit as well to some concerns about abandoning our belief that we know the "truth". Indeed there are times lately where I wonder if a rug is being pulled out from under me, as I see many of my foundations crumble. Sometimes I feel like Sting, but there is a difference; I still have faith in “You”.