Post-Mod-what-ity?

No review of my studies at Briercrest would be complete without uttering the "p-word" at least once. Questions about post-modernity came up a lot in my courses: What does it mean for the church? What does it mean for ministry and mission? What does it mean for faith and theology? What kind of response should Christians make to it?

And what ever happened to absolute truth?

I don't think of myself as especially post-modern; but this mostly because I don't find the term itself all that useful, and I tend to resist labeling myself (or others) on principle. (Some would take this as a sure sign that I'm more post-modern than I care to admit.)

Anyways, pre-, mid- or post-modern as they may be, here are some thoughts from a paper I wrote looking at ministry in a post-modern world.

Regardless of one’s opinion of the so-called “post-modern ethos,” any attempt to explore the challenges of evangelism and mission in the twenty-first century must eventually acknowledge and make some kind of response to it. Though the term “post-modern” itself is admittedly difficult to define, in his Primer on Postmodernism theologian Stanley Grenz offers a helpful framework for understanding its significance: “Whatever else it might be ... postmodernism signifies the quest to move beyond modernism”. It eschews the “myth of inevitable progress,” “refuses to limit truth to its rational dimension,” “dethrones the human intellect as the arbiter of truth,” and rejects the “Enlightenment belief that knowledge is objective.” Adding his voice to the call of other Christian analysts of post-modernity, Grenz urges his readers to “appraise any new ethos that shapes the culture in which God calls believers to live as his people,” and to ask how we can “express the gospel in categories of the new social context”

Grenz’s own answer to that question—that Christians must embody the gospel “in a manner that is post-individualistic, post-rationalisitc, post-dualistic and post-noeticentric”—points to the possibility of proclaiming a vital and vibrant Gospel to a new generation. Such suggestions find notable similarities in the portrait of post-modern evangelism that Robert Webber paints in Ancient Future Evangelism. In brush-strokes similar to Grenz’s “post-rationalism” and “post-noeticentrism,” Webber pictures post-modern evangelism as a “display” as opposed to an “argument”—an invitation into “a community that is shaped by a tradition of worship, discipleship, Christian formation, and vocation.” Similarly, Webber echoes Grenz’s “post-individualism” when he describes worship as a dialogue between God and the community of God’s people. Rejecting the ego-centric, experiential nature of much contemporary worship, Webber argues instead that the Church’s worship must have a specifically missional focus: “Worship is not about me and my experience; it is about God and God’s mission to save humanity and to rescue the world through Jesus Christ’s death, resurrection, and coming again.” With Grenz, Webber is also emphatically “post-dualistic” in his vision for evangelism. He diagnoses much contemporary Christianity with an “incipient Gnosticism” that functionally denies the goodness of creation, bodily salvation, and the biblical truth that the work of Christ extends to all creation, and reflects instead “our individualistic, rationalistic and nonembodied modern view of Christianity.” The lesson here for the church is that evangelism must start “with God’s act of creation, with God’s love of creation, and with God’s intent to rescue the created order.”