This is an article written by Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Fellowship in Seattle.
Defining postmodernity is a very unpostmodern thing to do. Categories, definitions, dates and such feel like impositions forced upon seasons and experiences for the purpose of simplifying and marginalizing things profound. Nonetheless, I will attempt in the wandering stream of consciousness that follows to take you on a journey through the emerging matrix of our world that is not intended as an academic treatment of the issue. Instead, I will write whatever comes to mind for one hour and then stop because anything more than that makes me pop Advil to dull the throb in my three pound, fallen brain. I will also provide the disclaimer that I write this on my rainy day off in Seattle listening to the new Creed album while recovering from a potentially fatal dose of house paint inhalation following my recent Bob Villa adventure on my little piece of the Promised Land.
For the Christian conversation, postmodernity is a sub-topic within the post-Christian world. The troubles began with the well meaning Constantine who shifted the Christian faith from a marginal rag tag of persecuted also-rans to a viable first rate religion. In so doing, he wed the state and church, and their bizarre freak show child became known as Constantinianism, or what the American founding fathers called civil religion. As such, the church and her kingdom experienced great favor and freedom within the confines of the kingdom of the king. Over time, it became vogue and chic to be a "christian", to the degree that many nations fund churches with tax dollars, and in the U.S. every president has claimed to follow Jesus and commenced their violation of most of His commands with a public prayer from a highly trained professional. The religious right has so committed itself to this nutjob sitcom that they have attempted to revise history and sell the myth that the founding fathers were all good Christian folks with minivans who attended fundie churches on Sundays and got the Constitution on tablets of stone from deist Thomas Jefferson's encounter with the triune god (slavery, deism, and rationalism) upon a grassy knoll. A little over 1000 years into this doomed marriage Rene Descartes was commissioned by the now wealthy church to create a defense of the Christian faith against the emerging academic elite that dismissed ecclesiastical dogma as outdated and unfounded superstition. Why? Because he was not a Calvinist who believed God could fight his own battles. After all, some major assets were at stake and so big Descartes needed to defend the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; for a fee of course. Forgetting that God's only defense of Himself is saying that people who don't know that are fools, Decartes had to created a big bottom piece upon which to construct his giant Jenga game of philosophical inquiry. And what was his bottom piece? "I think therefore I am." From the firing of this rationalist shot, the human race toward dis-enlightenment commenced, as the only thing that could be trusted was the individual and their mind. Armed with the scientific method, the four hundred year marathon sprinted from scientific rationalism (we can only trust what the mind can prove through "objective" scientific testing and retesting) to deistic naturalism (the world is a closed system that runs like a machine according to laws that cannot be violated, even by God), to skepticism (since God and miracles cannot be proven by science and violate our natural laws, it is unreasonable to commit to religion as anything more than good morals for social order) to atheism (God does not exist, or as Nietzsche saw it, God was a concept that we killed). This handing of the baton from one runner to another, combined with the evolutionary myth that we are born good and getting better all the time thanks to education, science and caffeine, resulted in the oppression of the less fit and killing of those nations resisting "progress." We also learned from the industrial, scientific, and technological revolutions that science is good for more than creating television altars where the entire family can be numbed into a vegetative state by sports, game shows, and people getting kicked in the groin recorded on the grainy Blair Witch footage of hand-held family cameras and shown on America's Funniest Home Videos of Modern Educated Highly Evolved Well Educated People Laughing At Other Highly Evolved Well Educated People Getting Kicked In The Groin. Yes, we could build bombs and guns and kill the bad guys. And so we did. And, the twentieth century witnessed more bloodshed and groin shots than all of human history to that point combined.
Convinced the race should be called off before the world ended, some postmodern philosophers decided to pull the bottom piece out from under the now towering Jenga game that Descartes started. Men like Jacques Derrida began taking critiques raised by Wittgenstein, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Kant and raising objections against the modern project. Is the concept of rugged isolated individualism a dangerous myth? Is the human mind entirely trustworthy? Is it possible that objectivity is not possible? Is not naturalism an unproven faith assumption? Is not the human condition evil and not good? Is it truly funny to get kicked in the groin?And so postmodernity began. Not as a unified system of thought, nor a collective dream for the future. Instead, it is a critique; a deconstruction of a kingdom that laid a foundation with Constantine and became a high rise with Descartes. As the bottom piece of the Jenga game is nearly entirely kicked out, the western church finds itself being dragged from the center of power and influence like a spoiled bratty kid who turns dead weight and throws a fit on the floor because they dropped their ice cream cone. The western church has lost any concept of missions from the margins since they have been in bed with the king so long and enjoyed the benefits of his palace so greatly that any concept of leaving is unthinkable. Now, kicked out of the palace and sent by God as a people on mission into the chaos of the collapsing world, the mighty and empowered sent people of God packed up their evangelical fish baptized minivans and headed to the suburbs at breakneck speed in an attempt to set up shop, hawk some Christian gifts, market some cheesy Christian bands to disadvantaged kids whose fundie parents never allowed them to watch MTV, invite their friends into the ghetto, and erect the walls; tossing over the occasional moral hand grenade against abortion doctors and homos and calling it �evangelism�, the good news of the loving and well marketed Rambo-Christ.
Meanwhile, the mainline church continues to live in a state of denial, kind of like my buddy who was once cool and is now fat and bald and married with four kids who kick him in the groin. He drives his Camaro past our old high school whistling at girls because in his tweaked Ridlin head he's still a young fresh fellow. Likewise, mainliners somehow look at empty buildings with a handful of grey haired faithful and talk about the good old days when people knew they existed, back when Noah was their bishop and the organ on the Ark was powered by the Spirit of God directly, and simply think they can outlive time, which has passed them by.Meanwhile, the world is on the internet forming a global nation. Information is expanding at a rate unparalleled in human history. Everyone is spiritual and atheists are the last of the fundamentalists. People know they are sinful, but without the Gospel they fall into depression and run to shrinks and drug companies to cope. People are longing to connect in community as whole people while the church remains a goofy collection of individual minds with very bad pop music. Filmmakers have become the new preachers, telling spiritual parables to a listening world (i.e. Seven. The Matrix, The Devil's Advocate). Meanwhile, nutty, Christian, end-times-prophecy-Kazinski's throw books on the shelves and films into the theaters trying to predict when we'll get off the postmodern roller coaster, while the lost try to figure out how to squeeze ten minutes of semi-sanity in our breakneck isolated selfish debt ridden sexually confused lonely world temporarily propped up by Viagra and Prozac.In it all, Jesus with tear-stained cheeks cries out to believers and non "Come to me all you who are burdened and heavy laden and I will give you rest." Finally, some good news.
