The postmodernist is in every way a child of the romantics, one who stand alone in nature, defying demands upon the self and searching for that which will satisfy. The difference is that the postmodern self no longer harbors hopes of discovering truth or secure principles. Instead, driven by the ideals of therapy and consumption, it seeks, by whatever means will work, to provide satisfactions for the unencumbered self; it strives to reduce all individual moral actions to matters of choice for which there are no authoritative guidelines or binding principles. In the culture of therapy and interpretation, there is nothing to direct the self except its preferences. There is no goal for the actions of the self save the fulfillment of its desires.
Peter Lundin
The Culture of Interpretation:Christian Faith and the Postmodern World, p. 75
When the first volume of Douglas John Hall's Christian Theology in a North American Context, entitled Thinking the Faith was released, I had many, many faculty at Wesley Theological Seminary insist it would be a landmark. I bought it, and was, to say the least, underwhelmed. It has several things to recommend it, not the least of which is he states the problem of much of contemporary American theology quite succinctly; seeing academic theology blowing in the winds of fads and fashions, most particularly liberation theology, he desires to set forth a statement that is true to our own zeitgeist, while respecting countervailing theologies.
For all that, however, I have numerous problems with his work. First and foremost, he is Canadian. While he strives earnestly to link America and Canada under the rubric "North America", it falls kind of flat. Also, generally speaking, there just seems no methodological center. He insists he has one - the old Lutheran theology of the cross - but it doesn't really inform his musings and thoughts. He outlines it perfunctorily and then just leaves it there.
On the other hand, one thing he does quite well is insist that, before we get to the theological meat, we need an appetizer of a descriptive outline of our "context" (I wearied of reading that word . . .). I believe he failed quite masterfully at this - his main source if a long-dead Canadian psychotherapist - but he at least offered the attempt.
In that vein, I believe it important to state upfront and quite clearly, my own position as to where I believe the Church currently sits. What is the world, as it is currently understood, to which the Church claims to offer a word of grace, of hope, of love?
I offer the epigram above with more than a touch of irony. I wonder about the epithet "postmodern", to be honest. How can we be "postmodern", since we really aren't sure what "modern" is, or perhaps was? It is a lazy way of suggesting that the modernist project has run its course, to be sure; yet as a general way of describing the current state of philosophy, art, and culture in general, I think it is far too broad and ill-defined. Furthermore, while I think the general description Lundin offers - a rootless, monadic self, etching meaning on the walls of a meaningless universe always with the proviso that it is nothing more than a passing fancy - is correct (and would further add that even the heartiest philosophy is nothing more than that; it is our hubris which makes us believe we have reached a stopping point we can call "true"), I think it is banal.
I also do not think it captures the essence of our current culture. There are those who subscribe to this way of living in the world; I do not believe most people would be so bold as to put it this way. The possible exception, of course, are fundamentalists who think this kind of nihilism is pervasive, indicative of the secular mindset, and destructive of our common religious and moral heritage.
I think the world in which the Church currently lives faces far less a threat of cultural nihilism than it does the twin threat of exuberance on the part of some members who seem to believe Christian faith is necessary to our society, on the one hand, and the vocal opposition of at least a committed minority who see any expression of religious belief as a threat to our society. These extremes, to be sure, have limited appeal (as extremes always do), but they at least have the virtue of offering a vast middle ground wherein we Christians can stake out a position that challenges both.
To the fundamentalist, I would offer the insistence that to be the Church we are to live as those called out, set apart. To the secularist, I would simply ask how a world without the religious imagination in general, and specific, concrete religious expressions, would look. The fundamentalist disregard for the "Otherness" of the Christian community ignores the historic idea that we Christians are to be the salt of the earth; as Jesus himself asks, what happens when that salt loses its savor? It is to be cast aside and trodden underfoot! The idea that our society, our culture, can only be our society as long as it adheres to a particular, Christian, ethic and way of believing ignores the impossibility inherent in really being Christian that, at its heart, is part of the dilemma we all face. Since this fundamentalist insistence usually accompanies an insistence that Christian faith be reduced to a kind of middling morality - an obsession with sexual propriety, personal behavior to the almost total disregard of the social implications of love for neighbor, and a peculiar regard for the human fetus that borders on compulsion - it is easy enough to mock. Yet, we need to do more than mock. We need to be clear as to why this position does not address the Scriptural, historical approach that sees belief as a Christian as a witness to something other than prevailing norms.
To the secularist, the answer is completely different. While refusing to disregard the reality that Christians have been the authors of much horror, we would offer the unrepentant, "So?" The first attempt at a rational state, the French Republic after the Revolution, ended up at the logical conclusion of the Terror. I find that hardly exemplary, even from a humanist perspective. Any ideology is inherently totalitarian, which is why it must always be tempered with the acceptance of criticism. I fail to see where non-religious ideologues have offered anything remotely human, or anything that in the long run does not end with a mass grave.
While the caricature of the post-modernist as the romantic monad does have some validity, my own perspective is that uprooted self cannot exist. We are part and parcel of an historic stream, in to which we are born and from which we depart. We are rooted as human beings existing as part of that history - not History as some grand narrative, or overarching force driving us collectively forward or backward, but very concretely as the events of our times as reactions to past events, and creators of new reactions in the future - which keep us grounded. It is true that far too many Americans, most eloquently Emerson and Whitman, believed history was a chain binding us to a kind of ontological and ontic slavery from which we Americans must needs escape in order to be American. The impossibility of this, just on a practical level, is evident all around us. The constant striving to exist as a people outside the whims and fancies of time and history leads to unrealism in our approach to being a nation among nations, an unhealthy belief in our uniqueness, politically, socially, culturally.
Quite apart from any metaphysical argument, the simple reality is we as human beings exist as historic creatures. The attempt to actually live a life uprooted from history is, in the end, to choose not to live at all. It isn't even existence.
More than any other single thing, I believe this idea - our peculiar American notion that we do, or can, or should, exist outside our collective national and world history - is the most pervasive ideological stumbling block we face. From it we stream all the rest - our racism, our destruction of the native populations, our imperial wars in Central America and the Caribbean, the Pacific rim and southeast and southwest Asia, our refusal to allow others to be our guides as to how best to coexist with other nations, the pervasive insistence that ours is not only the greatest nation ever, but that all other nations desire to emulate our way of life. Both fundamentalism and secular ideologies hold these ideas; they are both rooted in our American claim to exist, in some way, outside of history.
Thus, our postmodern condition is only partly correct as a diagnosis, precisely because it, too, shares this delusion.
