The Postmoderns Are Our Friends — Part 1: Introduction

There’s an assumption in the church, particularly the theologically conservative church, that our temptations come primarily from accommodating to secular culture. This causes us to assume that Christian culture is simply what secular culture isn’t. This is reductionist.

Let’s consider parenting. As a parent, it’s not about being loving on one end or strict on another, it’s about how to love through discipline and that’s just one parental dimension. There are so many more dimensions to learn how to navigate — there are few easy answers. Any parent will tell you the dizzying complexities of parenthood with few binaries; so many ways to go wrong and few ways to go right. The gate is narrow.

The gate is also narrow for the church. I want to argue getting the church right is more like parenting than trying to stay on one end of a binary. There are equally as dangerous forces as liberalism that are antithetical to the biblical witness that have infiltrated our church.

Enter two streams of thought, modernism and postmodernism.

We can see modernism as a broad stroke term that refers to Enlightenment and post Enlightenment thinking up to around the mid 20th century. Thinkers like Immanuel Kant, René Descarte, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were key to shaping and constructing the underpinnings of what we now call modern society; the air the church breathes. The age of these writers is often referred to to “the age of reason” and that’s an aptly named title. This age championed the ability to “see” without religion. Rational empirical understanding would be the base for knowledge and morality, not religion.

What I want to argue in this introduction to a series on postmodernism is that our whole culture is modern and “rational” — even our church culture. The church has been swimming in modern society for a few centuries now. Modern thinking introduced the church to a way of seeing the world, people, theology, and the Bible through a rational lens. While we do see the bible in the church as the basis for knowledge our understanding of the bible is still heavily influenced by modern rationalism.

Enter postmodernism. This lofty term is a blanket word that refers to theories by a series of late 20th century philosophers — particularly Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. While these thinkers are often seen as enemies of the church, James K. A. Smith seeks to argue that postmodernism is not necessarily as much anti-Christian as it is anti-modern. Smith attempts in his book Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism to show how postmodern theory can actually be helpful in ridding the Church of its modernism. At the core Smith believes that while we shouldn’t take postmodern theory as the basis for our understanding of the world, it can help us deconstruct the ideas that we’ve inherited from modern culture that we don’t realize are unchristian. In essence, we don’t realize how modern and secular we actually are. Have you ever felt your experience with Christianity as mainly centered around ideas and the mind? Why do we feel the need to scientifically prove our faith? Have you felt the pressure that the church’s hyper individualism puts on the lives of believers? These are the influences of modernism on the church which Smith contends is deeply problematic to Christian faith. Smith sees postmodernism as a tool to help us counteract our modernism.¹

So why listen to postmodern philosophers like Jacques? Because they can help us be more Christian. Postmodernism is not antithetical to Christianity but to modernity.² Our churches are so modern we don’t even realize it because we’ve grown so accustomed to modern air, such as strict separation between the physical world and spiritual reality — a modern idea not a biblical one! Postmodernism helps us recapture a Biblical vision of the church through re-imagining it as not a group of individuals who believe a collection of ideas and engage in a strictly private affair with a transcendent being (often our functional³ understanding of Christian life), but instead a genuine community redeemed by an incarnational God and called for his purposes. We need to capture a vision of the Church as the primary place where God renews and transforms us.⁴ But, for the Church to truly be the Church, we need to jettison its modernist ideas. What are they? Enter Derrida and our French friends.

The scope of these next few essays is both limited and yet broad — we hope to break down Smith’s argument into a few sections and introduce some ideas that may contradict unconscious assumptions the Church as picked up from modern Western secular culture (example, I can see the world without being influenced, or, I am an autonomous Christian individual). The next essay, part 2, will focus on Derrida and his concept of interpretation and objectivity. Part three will look into Lyotard and the concept of metanarratives, and part four will wrap with charting a path forward with Radical Orthodoxy. The author of these articles hopes they will be accessible documents that will provide insight into how we can actually make the Church more richly Christian; more Biblically centered, more faithful to the historical Christians creeds, more orthopraxic (right action), and more orthodox (right doctrine).

Welcome to Paris.

Next article in series The Postmoderns Are Our Friends — Part 2: Derrida and Interpretation

[1] Smith, James K. A. Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006. 22

[2] Ibid.

[3] The word “functional” refers to how we actually live and think day to day instead of what we think we do. Example: I think I do my dishes but functionally I leave them in the sink most of the time. Example 2: I believe God loves me but functionally I think he’s angry at me.

[4] Smith. 30.