"The abnegation of reason is not the evidence of faith, but the confession of despair."
- J.B. Lightfoot
Thursday, August 21, 2003
I sent an email to the Thinklings today lamenting the amount of post modernist thinking I'm seeing in the church (meaning the church as a whole. Not necessarily where you or I attend). It just seems to me that more and more we're getting sucked in.
Tonight, to make my mood that much better, I stumbled upon this post on the Gutless Pacifist, linked from a blogger who I thought I had checked out. He's been on my blogroll for a long time. I'm removing him tonight. The "postmodern" in his blog name should have tipped me off but I was too naive.
The post has to do with getting rid of the God that was/is worshipped by modernity. He has a list of this God's attributes. Some I agree need to go (the collusion of God and political power, etc.). But in the list are these other attributes of God that he'd like to do away with:
* the impassable, sovereign God of classical theism, with His omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence;I left a snarky comment, but - holy cow.
* the God tied to a shaming doctrine of the Fall, in which humans are destined to inevitable sin, due to the disobedience of Adam and Eve, and yet held responsible for that sin;
* the moralistic God whose chief role lay in the reinforcement of the commands of parental superegos;
* the male-gendered God.
Listen to the ending to the article:
Are we ready to let go of all these "gods"? Even if we are, what about the Christians who sit next to us in the pew on Sunday or to whom we preach the Gospel? One of the challenges the Church faces is that Christians are finding it increasingly difficult to communicate with one another. It's not so much a problem of cross-denominational misunderstanding as it is a clash within denominations, even congregations, of worldviews, stages of faith or whatever paradigm one wishes to use. How can those who have discarded Fowler's "dead gods" be in fellowship with those who cling to rigid ideas of orthodoxy and biblical inerrancy? It seems to me that it is a challenge at least as great as that faced by the young Church as the clash between Jew and Gentile developed.It is dripping with the arrogance and condescension that is part and parcel of postmodernistic thought.
I don't think I was very kind. But I think I've kind of had it.
Trackbacks:
Trackback URL: http://thinklings.org/bloo.trackback.php/476.
Comments on "Post Modernism. It's in the church":
2. Mac Swift
- 08/21/2003 5:26 pm CDT
Allen Brill strikes again. He has a site called "The Right Christians" which is taken by a quote Al Sharpton made that was a slight to the "Christian right". When somebody quotes Al Sharpton you know there's going to be trouble.
His website is pretty much an extremist guide to destroying the Christian right. I knew this the second I surfed into his blog, and pulled a muscle in a frantic effort to click my way the heck out of there. It took you this long to figure out the guy's a whackie? You're getting slow in your old age Bill. ;-)
3. Bill
- 08/21/2003 5:42 pm CDT
Yes, I must be :-)
What's even slower, the site that where I saw a very complementary link to Brill's post is a site I've frequented quite a bit and even blogrolled. What was I thinking?
I'm also becoming grouchy as heck in my old age. I am Wilford Brimley.
4. susan b.
- 08/21/2003 6:01 pm CDT
I've heard of this guy too. My general reaction to his stuff is to roll my eyes, say, "Yeah...whatever..." and click the back button.
5. Pressed
- 08/21/2003 6:22 pm CDT
Wow, what is the point of preaching the Gospel, a message of a God that you just stripped of all His power and your need for a savior. If there wasn't really a fall of man then you don't really need Jesus anyway. Wow, amazing.
6. Barry
- 08/21/2003 6:48 pm CDT
Bill, et. al.
Thanks for your comments on the Alan Brill post on my pmpilgrim blog. I am sorry that you feel you can't link to me anymore, but I will continue to link to you and read your blog. Here is what I have posted on my site.
......
One of the main reasons I blog what I do and at times link to what I link to is to further the type of debate that this one managed to bring. Whether we like it or not we are living in the midst of a great deal of postModern thought. Such thought is often neither good nor bad in and of itself. What does it tell us about the world we are living in? What does it tell us about the medium for our message? What is at the heart of who we are? How much of what we have is culture and how much is Gospel? These are critical issues in our world today for the church. These are issues that will bring more people to Christ- or turn more people off- depending on how we face and handle them.
A look at the list of blogs on my blogroll will show some quite liberal and some quite conservative blogs. If you wander into this pmPilgrim's site you will have the opportunity to see what is happening around us in our culture and even within the church. I feel it is essential that we learn to speak to the culture where they are. Not where we want them to be. Paul did not quote the Bible on Mars Hill. He quoted their own Greek poets.
Yes, perhaps too many "Greek poets" are being quoted in some churches today- and perhaps not enough in others.
Yes, perhaps James Fowler and Alan Brill have gone to an extreme- and others of us, myself very much included, get stuck in not being able to speak to those issues. What Brill and Fowler have done is to raise issues. As I said then, it is a good thought provoking post.
To my former readers from the other blog, I hope they return and will continue the debate. I know that they are thinkers with an important point of view- not all of which I would agree with, but all of which I need to continue to hear and be in dialogue with.
Above all and in all, I pray that whoever comes to this site will find a vision of Jesus and of a God who loves us so much that he sacrificed his most beloved Son so that we could be forgiven and have life and hope for this life and the next. All the rest is commentary on that. Some of that commentary is essential, some is non-essential. But it all is given here in love of Him who has loved me and given himself for me.
7. Jared
- 08/22/2003 2:29 am CDT
Barry, it is one thing to examine such thought. To consider it in the context of commentary.
But if you believe as you do (I'm going by your last paragraph), how could you let someone preach "a different gospel" from your pulpit?
Couldn't you have just posted something Alan said in one of his blogs and then commented on it?
It is one thing to declare postmodern thought requiring our attention (I agree with that); it is quite another to, by association, give your voice to that thought's undermining of the very Gospel you say you believe.
8. jen
- 08/22/2003 4:55 am CDT
As always, Jared says what I wanted to say better than I can.
However, I take slight exception to one statement in your explanation, Barry:
Whether we like it or not we are living in the midst of a great deal of postModern thought. Such thought is often neither good nor bad in and of itself.
Yes, it is. When the character of God is questioned, by people who claim to follow Him, then it's bad. Satan uses that to discredit the Lord, and the insidiousness of saying, "Oh, those thoughts aren't right, but they're not bad," is what will keep people from seeing the Truth about God, Jesus, and the Gospel.
9. Jared
- 08/22/2003 7:53 am CDT
What's weird is that I had been considering a discussion of PostModernism and the Church for my blog series submission. It's either gonna be that or a discussion on whether or not C.S. Lewis was a universalist.
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Yikes.
I wonder, when we get rid of all of our orthodoxy, exactly WHAT are we sharing with lost people? And if we have been wrong all along, what right have we to share anyway? And maybe it is we who are lost.
This guy's dumb.
I am a huge proponent of seeker-targeted ecclesiology and ministry. I think co-opting postmodern approaches to cultural artifacts (like art and literature) can aid our sharing of the Gospel. I think of Paul on Mars Hill pointing to the statue of the unknown God. Or, more recently, T.S. Eliot (who was really a Modernist) and his idea of "broken images" or C.S. Lewis (who was really a Classicist) and his idea of myth being "gleams of celestial beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility." The Lewisian concept of Christianity as "the myth become Fact" is very influential on me.
But despite all of this and my own endorsement of innovative church methodology, evangelicalism should not -- and CANNOT -- surrender the theological bedrock of God's Truth. We must insist on the sovereignty of God, the inspiration and infallibility of His Word, moral absolutes, and Incarnational ecclesiology, ministry, and evangelism.