Postmodernism 101 (for the church)

Postmodernity is something that I have a growing appreciation for lately.  The way that our worldviews have changed has been an amazing thing to track and see the new developments played out.  It was difficult for me to want to learn about postmodernity at first because it does not feel that we are heading the directions that they say we are going. 

After reading Postmodernism 101 by Heath White I have come to a different perspective.  I hope to help you understand in this blog that we in fact do live in a postmodern environment and we (as the church) need to know how to respond to it which is what Heath White tries to do.

What White does in the first chapters is lay out the framework from what Postmodernism has come from and what it is today.  Postmodernism is not what has always described our worldviews.  Originally, during the biblical times to the Enlightenment or the premodern era, people lived by faith.  Faith was in regards more toward authority.  This was authority in the king, or even the Pope.  People were to respect those that were in charge and to listen to what they declared right.

From the premodern era, the world moved into the modern age.  This was largely focusing on the areas of reason and rationality.  All people were to come to the same conclusion on every issue and if you did not come to the same conclusion then you simply did the problem wrong. 

For example, people would come to read the Bible and if a scientist would say that science does not fit with the Bible, then that was it.  Pure reason would say that religion and science could not coexist.  This separated religion from the rest of the world because much of the Bible was not "rational."  Yet, when people began finding out that much of what the rational thinkers were saying, not only in regards of the Bible, were wrong, people began to lose hope.

This leads into the new age of postmodernity.  Postmodernism gets away from rationality into more of a relativist type of way of looking at things.  Relativism more or less says "what is true for you is not true for me."  Absolute truth is not universal, but truth is based upon culture or self.  This does not mean that truth does not exist, but that truth is dependent on a universal statement.  For example, Rhode Island is the smallest state would be a universally held truth and thus absolute truth.

So, what does all of this mean for the church?  Some churches seem to stay within the area of modernity unwilling to budge from the changing cultures around us.  This is influenced on preaching that says there is an absolute truth is the traditional view of Scripture. 

Yet, our culture asks the questions of science and reason and ask if they coexist with Scripture.  Our answer should be to this not a yes or a no, but a dialogue between the two.  Church needs to become apart of the culture, not in becoming "worldly", but by listening to what the world is saying and working to understand the world and the people that we are trying to reach.

My goal is not to seem really smart or anything (most of what I got from postmodernism is from the book and some classes).  But, I wish for a church that does not shut itself off from the world that we live in!  Let us become open with how people act and live.  Our world is changing while the church has simply stayed the same.  Let us not conform to the world, but let us know the people and be open to them.