Christ and postmodernity ;Rediscovering Christ in the age of countless homemade "truths"
United Press International - December 02, 2000 00:05
By GENE EDWARD VEITH
(Editor's note: The first church year of the third millennium will begin on the first Sunday in Advent, Dec. 3. From now until Easter, United Press International is running a series of articles on the meaning of Christ in postmodernity. The authors will be prominent scholars, theologians and ordinary lay people from different Christian denominations. The first contributor, Dr. Gene Edward Veith, is professor of English at Concordia University Wisconsin. His book, "Postmodern Times" (1994), was the first major attempt to analyze this new era from a Christian perspective. According to Veith's definition, postmodern man no longer accepts absolute truths. Everybody constructs his own truth. The result can only be chaos. As a remedy Veith proposes a return to the faith in Christ.)
MILWAUKEE, DEC. 1 (UPI) -- With the season of Advent marking for Christians the first new church year of the new millennium, it is clear that Christianity has outlived many of its critics. Many pundits a hundred years ago were predicting that religion would die out in the 20th century, to be replaced by the "modern" age of science and reason.
Now, it is the age of science and reason that is under attack. The new "postmodern" ways of thinking are calling rationalism itself into question. Though postmodernism is also posing challenges for Christianity, challenges far different than those posed by modernism, it is evident that Christ is more culturally relevant than ever.
Two thousand years after Christ, as we enter a new century and a new cultural moment, we are still in the "year of the Lord."
The last century saw the rise of modern art, modern literature, modern architecture, modern thought, and modern theology, all grounded in the conviction that the 20th century was the culmination of scientific progress and that old ways of thinking had to be cast out in favor of anything new.
Ironically, from the vantage point of the 21st century, all of those "modernist" styles and ideas now seem old-fashioned, naove, and culturally irrelevant.
We are "postmodern," and in field after field the verities of modernism are collapsing like the Berlin Wall. The conquest of nature has given way to environmentalism. Abstract art is being replaced by concrete art.
The desire for unity is now a desire for diversity. The hard sciences are bowing to the social sciences, which insist that culture, not nature, is the source of everything we can know.
Technology keeps advancing, but its focus has shifted from the manufacture of tangible goods to the manufacture of information.
Last century, the principles of modern science were thought to be transferable to social problems, so that rationalistic ideologies and social experts could engineer a progressive utopia. The unintended consequences were concentration camps, gulags, world wars, and cold wars, and even the more benign welfare state solutions proved costly failures.
Somehow, the new, unfettered information economy has brought a level of prosperity that all of the rational systems never could.
Observers in the 1890s, looking ahead to the bright century ahead, predicted that in the 20th century religion would die out. The modern mind, it was said, was ruled only by science. There would be no place for the supernatural, for what could not be empirically verified or rationally proven.
Many churches and their theologians, afraid of becoming culturally irrelevant, responded with a new, progressive, "modern theology." The supernatural claims of Christianity were jettisoned, the Bible was demythologized, and salvation was turned into an allegory for the real work of the church -- namely, improving society.
Ironically, it is the mainline churches that embraced modernist theology that have become culturally irrelevant. Far from dying out, religion of the most supernatural kind is booming, from megachurches with members in the thousands to the most esoteric New Age mysticism. Even those who are not "religious" claim to be "spiritual."
Not that the 21st century is shaping up to be the Utopia that the 20th century failed to create. For all of the economic boom, the society is plagued by fragmentation, the lack of consensus on just about anything, and family breakdowns. Individuals often seem almost paralyzed by cynicism, indecision and malaise.
There are basically two different ways to respond to the end of modernity. One way of being postmodern is postmodernism, the new critical stance toward all knowledge that has found its way out of academia into the popular culture. Just as modernism was marked by skepticism toward everything not provable by scientific reasoning, postmodernism takes the next step, being skeptical of rationalism itself.
For academic postmodernists, truth is not something we discover; rather, it is something we construct. Knowledge and morality, laws and institutions, the arts and the sciences, are all social constructions.
There are no absolute truths, only a series of explanatory paradigms, which have a pragmatic use but which vary from culture to culture.
Some postmodernists stress how truth claims and cultural institutions are essentially acts of power, of the people in charge imposing their will through a fagade of rationality or high moral purpose on groups they are oppressing (minorities, women, the poor, the homosexual, or other "marginalized" groups).
Others stress that human beings can create their own truths by their own will. What may be true for one person may not be true for someone else, and no one has the right to impose his or her view on anyone else.
Those who believe in abortion call themselves "pro-choice." According to postmodernist ethics, if a woman chooses to have the baby, that is right for her. If she chooses to have an abortion, that is right for her.
The content of the decision -- reference to any transcendent moral absolutes of right and wrong, or any objective information about the nature of the fetus or ethical arguments -- have no bearing. Having a choice is what gives the action moral validity.
Postmodernist ethics are also evident in debates about euthanasia (If a person chooses to die, how can we say no?) and genetic engineering (Parents should be able to choose the kind of baby they want).
Popular postmodernism is evident in the recent U.S. election debacle. Modernists assumed that it was possible to hold an election by ascertaining an objective, mathematical count, a process helped along by the inexorable objectivity of machines.
But in our first postmodern election, objective certainty was thrown into doubt. The findings of voting machines were suspect, to be replaced by human observers interpreting the significance of tiny indentations on pieces of paper.
For postmodernists, all meaning is nothing more than interpretation, and interpretation is inherently subjective, variable from one person to another, and open to ideological bias.
Whether Western democracies built on earlier worldviews that affirmed objective truth and trans-cultural absolutes can survive postmodernist skepticism remains to be seen.
But there is another way to respond to the end of modernity, of being post-modern. Instead of extending the critical spirit of modernity to reason itself, another option is to recover the pre-modern, bringing back the insights and achievements of the past and apply them, in new ways, to the contemporary condition.
This too is happening throughout the culture. Contemporary artists are experimenting in new ways with classical aesthetics. The new homes being built have Victorian-era gables, wrap-around porches, and other retro-stylings, with the addition of all of the high-tech conveniences.
Historical novels and movies are in vogue. Educators are re-discovering classical education, as a better way of teaching in the computer age. And millions are having their lives changed by historic, conservative Christianity, and nearly every denomination is re-discovering its distinct confessional and spiritual heritage.
To be sure, many churches, emulating the modernist theologians of the last century, are changing their teachings and practices to fit in with the new tenets of postmodernism.
Some are jettisoning their doctrines, allowing each member to construct his or her own beliefs. Some are playing down their traditional moral teachings, cultivating the postmodern virtue of "tolerance" for all lifestyle choices.
If modernist churches promoted an ecumenism that tried to bring all Christian churches into unity, postmodernist ecumenism embraces all religions, promoting a syncretic universalism (mixing religions) that sees all faiths as being equally valid paths to God.
Even churches that maintain a veneer of conservatism are flirting with postmodernism. If beliefs are just consumer choices, persuasion whether in sales, politics, or religion becomes a matter of marketing, manipulating customers by the cultivation of image and "meeting the consumers' needs."
Thus, the mass-marketing techniques perfected by the new economy are being used by many churches to mutate into megachurches, which appeal to a mass market through entertainment-style worship and positive thinking ("you create your own reality") sermons.
And yet, at the same time, in an equally-valid response to the end of modernity, other churches and other Christians are rediscovering ancient liturgies and ancient theologies.
The practices and beliefs of the early church, the insights of the Protestant Reformation, the witness of persecuted Christians, all examples of the faith practiced in the face of cultural hostility and cultural change, seem uncannily relevant today.
And faith in the One who claimed to be the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, and who brought salvation not by setting up an earthly Utopia but by dying on a Cross seems to be girding itself for another thousand years.
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