The Little Pre-Modern in all of Us...

I started another 8 week masters class in Indy last night with IWU's grad ministry program. This one's called Contemporary Theological Trends, but the subtitle tells what the course is really about: The Church and Postmodernism. Pending final approval (our site visit went muy-excellente), IWU will start offering an MDIV next Fall through this department. Then IWU might house it in a new seminary the following year--we'll see.

From what I hear, this class is a bit of a bear for most cohorts. The typical make-up of these classes is very interesting. They are very diverse and typically made up of individuals who would not otherwise seek a graduate degree or go to seminary. They tend to be very conservative in some ways (even compared to the traditional campus), although all over the theological map.

So last night I was trying to prepare them for reading in Stanley Grenz (A Primer on Postmodernism and Beyond Foundationalism). Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty aren't coffee table reading in most American homes. I would say most of them come to the course with a somewhat negative impression of postmodernism.

I made a couple of claims in preparation. The first is that we need to distinquish postmodernism as a philosophical trajectory from postmodernism as a cultural one. Culture is a never ending bounce from one event to another, from one ethos to another, from one ideology to another. The emerging/emergent trend in Christian culture is impacted by postmodern philosophy, but the two should be carefully distinguished, I think.

A second claim is that postmodernism as a philosophy should not be conceived as the current pinnacle of the evolution of thought. Postmodern thought is unthought, unravelling. It is not the next step, as if it gives us the new "assured results of philosophy." That is still modernist thinking. Extreme postmodernism is the end of philosophy, the end of thought as we thought we knew it. It is an abyss that everyone should look into... and then go back to their "normal" lives.

My take away is that we are all a mixture of pre-modernism, modernism, and hopefully, post-modernism. We are all "pre-modern" in the sense that we are all unreflective about aspects of our lives. There are always areas of our lives where we do not realize we could look differently at them. We cannot make ourselves reflective about all of them because we do not even realize we are unreflective about them.

The goal of the true philosopher should be to become as reflective as possible. The quest for objectivity is a never ending one and one ultimately doomed for failure. But the myth of objectivity is one we must repeatedly affirm and pursue. We may not be able to achieve it perfectly, but we can often distinguish more objective claims from less objective ones.

We become healthy postmoderns when we make this pursuit humbly. We recognize the limitations of our knowledge. We knowingly re-embrace some of our pre-modern values not as the only options objectively but the ones that we choose to embrace.