Notes Along the Way -- TF3 -- Postmodernism

... continuing my years as a Teaching Fellow at Asbury and student in classics at the University of Kentucky. Last post here.
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1. In the years when I was a Teaching Fellow, I was learning more and more about literary criticism and, of course, postmodernism was in the mix. My original source of exposure here was Dr. Bauer at Asbury.

Dr. Bauer was a leader in narrative criticism, especially in the Gospel of Matthew, which I've mentioned before. As it was practiced in the United States, narrative criticism examined the stories of the Bible as stories. His Dokter Vater Jack Kingsbury and others like Mark Allen Powell bracketed the historical questions. You didn't ask whether or not these events happened. You assumed each Gospel was a self-contained story world. It was a very convenient hermeneutic for evangelicals to work on their PhDs because they didn't have to address those critical issues.

Alan Culpepper has a complex but helpful diagram in his book, The Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel which captures the main dynamics. And of course, Mark Allen Powell wrote a helpful little book called What Is Narrative Criticism? The three main elements of a story are the events, characters, and settings. There is the narrator, the implied author, and the implied reader. There is narrative time and story time. I would use some of these categories in my PhD dissertation, as I've said.

When I got to Durham, I felt like they weren't quite as sophisticated at these hermeneutical approaches as Bauer and others were. They were still quite historically oriented, and those who were dabbling with narrative criticism had not fully disconnected their study of narratives from the study of history. 

Of course, as Joe Dongell once mentioned to me, the very use of language assumes a historical baseline. I would understand this better my first year at Durham when I was exposed to Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, the idea of narrative criticism was to examine the text in isolation from historical questions and historical background.

2. As I've said before, in those days I felt like I was slowly moving through the historical progression of biblical criticisms. In the early 90s, I would catch up. Textual criticism asked whether the King James tradition was more or less original. Historical criticism searched for the history. Source criticism looked for written sources. Form criticism looked at oral traditions. Redaction criticism asked how the authors edited their sources. Composition criticism asked how the writings were composed. Narrative criticism analyzed the stories as stories.

Now, in the early 90s, I had caught up with reader-response criticism, the next step after narrative criticism. The first two thirds of the twentieth century had focused on the world behind the text, the historical. The 80s had tried to focus on the world within the text. Now, with the 90s, there was a turn to the reader, the world in front of the text.

Reader-response criticism had at least three varieties. First, there were those who viewed it with a historical lens -- what was the impact of the text on the original audience. David Smith, doing his dissertation at Durham in the late 90s, hypothesized how the passion narrative of Mark was written in a way to have an impact on the original audience. If the author ended the book at Mark 16:8, what kind of an effect would this have on the audience?

A second variety relates to the impact of the biblical texts on various groups of modern readers. How do women experience the letters of Paul (feminist readings)? How might an African-American woman experience the text (womanist readings). There were black readings and Latinx readings. There is ideological criticism, such as liberation theology readings.

I would read Stephen Moore's Literary Criticism of the Gospels my first semester of my doctoral program. I found it very helpful to sort out these different approaches hermeneutically. I think I mentioned before the SBL presentation I managed to hear from him in 1991. You can find it in the helpful hermeneutical volume, Mark and Method.

Perhaps the most extreme form of reader-response criticism is the one that basically says you can read any meanng you want into the text (see Stanley Fish). As I began to embark on my doctoral studies, I would become acquainted with Paul Ricoeur and the notion of the autonomous text and the polyvalance of texts. Although I don't think the number is infinite, the same text can be interpreted in vastly different ways. Once a text is uttered, Ricoeur observed, it becomes autonomous. The author can no longer control what it comes to mean.

If you've had me for certain classes or read much of my hermeutical stuff, you will begin to hear where my understanding began to sharpen. There are virtually as many potential meanings to a text as there are readers. The text is often a mirror in which we see ourselves. 

3. In those days, I was gaining a good perspective on the way I grew up reading the Bible. We wanted God to "quicken" the text and speak directly to us. God might tell you to move to Florida or go to a specific mission field when a few words in a verse jumped out at you. I grew up with almost no sense of how to read the Bible in context. The meaning of the Bible was to some extent untethered from its historical moorings. We read the text in reader-response mode, shaped by the tradition we came from. 

In terms of ideological criticism, we made "holiness readings" of the text.

Those of a more charismatic nature regularly read the text this way. I've come to believe that if God didn't speak to people in this way, we would all be lost. Although pastors and people in the pew think they know what the Bible means, the fail rate is actually quite immense in terms of the details. I suspect that Sunday morning sermons across the globe are filled with some spectacularly creative interpretive moments.

Perhaps most scholars who come out of these backgrounds, like Gordon Fee, end up rejecting these sorts of reader-response readings. "The text can't come to mean something that it never meant," he wrote. He's right of course in terms of the original meaning, but can't God speak to people through the text however he wants to?

I'm not sure who first came up with the idea of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern interpretation. I can overlay the people I was reading in the early 90s with it. Hans Frei's Eclipse of Biblical Narrative was quite challenging but the first few pages gave me a powerful sense of what I later called "unreflective" readings of texts. Two decades later, when our IWU Religion Monday reading group read Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, an even deeper sense of the shift from pre- to modern was to be found.

Putting it all together, we start off as unreflective, "pre-modern" readers. We don't see ourselves as readers of the text. The meaning of the text seems obvious to us without us realizing that we are bringing our own "dictionaries" to it. 

Pre-modern or precritical interpreters don't read the text in context, but they don't know they aren't. They have a "what you see is what you get" approach. They think they are seeing meaning in the world that they are actually reading into it. Paul Ricoeur called these kinds of readings a "first naivete."

I recently encountered some Bible readers of this sort in discussions of biblical prophecy. It's quite clear that they have no idea how to read verses in context. They see the meanings someone has told them. 

When I taught inductive Bible study, it was very hard to get students to read certain Old Testament texts in context. It was quite discouraging actually. You might give them a text that the New Testament reads in relation to Jesus. But they couldn't detach themselves from that meaning to hear the verses in the flow of whatever Old Testament book it was in.

Meanwhile, my holiness forebears and modern charismatics are very open to these on-the-spot "zappings" of the Spirit too.

All of these readings are exercises in reader response, and there are potentially as many meanings as there are interpreters.

4. This, of course, is why the notion of sola scriptura itself was pre-modern because it assumed the meaning of the text is intrinsic and self-evident in the text. The Reformers were more or less premodern and non-contextual. They increasingly knew literary context. Melancthon understood literary context, but he didn't understand the depth of historical context. Wesley largely did not know how to read the Bible in context. And so when he said he was a man of one book, the book he had in mind was the Bible filtered through his reader-responses.

Now to be sure, his reader-response interpretations had a massive archaeology. As an Anglican, he had massive amounts of church tradition rattling around in that head of his. Somewhere in the back of his head were vast numbers of historical texts and of course the biblical text. He knew those texts as Tradition had brought them to him.

And here, let me tip my hat to Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer suggested that we do not actually read the text as it was originally, but we read it as it comes to us through layers and layers of tradition. I would say this is absolutely true for the pre-modern, unreflective reader. They have no idea of the glasses they are wearing when they read the text. So it was with Wesley.

5. Postmodernism is then a step beyond reader-response criticism. Jacques Derrida did not believe the text had any stable meaning. Of course, this seems to deconstruct in that he wrote books. [1] In my opinion, he deliberately wrote ambiguously to try to make his point. But the fact that we all know his point suggests that words can indeed have meaning.

Postmodernism is thus a warning sign rather than a philosophy in itself. It tells us that our confidence in the meaning of our words is almost certainly overconfidence. Some like Stephen Fowl have pointed out that the meaning of many texts, including biblical texts, is frequently underdetermined. That is to say, we may lack sufficient evidence to know for certain what their original meaning actually was.

But in my mind, he has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. He effectively says, because we cannot know for certain the meaning of certain texts, why don't we just assume that they're orthodox. This is a certain brand of what has been called "theological interpretation." 

In the end, interpretation is a never ending struggle. But at any point in time, it does seem likely that we can identify a host of things that the text didn't likely mean -- including a lot of the meanings that people from various church traditions give it today.

6. The hermenutical struggles of those years left me concluding that there is more than one legitimate path to biblical interpretation. First, there is the original meaning, about which we can have varying degrees of certainty. If you want to be an expert on this original meaning, you must know biblical languages. You must know biblical history. You should know the history of interpretation. 

This is something beyond the level of most pastors. They're simply not trained on this level. And many don't have the aptitude.

Then, there is the reader-response understanding of broad orthodoxy. It does not tell you how to interpret every verse, but it gives boundaries to your appropriation of Scripture. The more we dig into the history of orthodoxy, the more nervous we might get about this reading. We almost have to have some sense that God was behind the scenes, directing this process. Even within the Bible itself, an honest contextual understanding inevitably has to believe that God directed the flow of revelation within the pages of Scripture.

I wrote up how this might work in a book I first published in 2006. I had first submitted the text to Westminster John Knox in a competition. Then, I gave it to Abingdon for year, at the end of which they published a curiously similar book with someone else. 

7. In addition to the orginal meaning, there are the many different reader responses to the biblical texts. There are denominational readings. There are our "tribal" readings of various kinds. Finally, there are individual readings when God speaks directly to you.

These years were the crucible in which I was catching up with the postmodern discussions of that moment. I was learning to distinguish between what I thought was valuable and what I thought wasn't. It would eventually allow me to have a second naivete (another Ricoeur phrase). My childhood church involved readings of a first naivete. 

With a second naivete, we can read the texts in the same way we did in our first naivete. The difference is that, now, we are consciously reading the texts out of context. First, we read it out of context without knowing it. But now, we can read it that way quite conscious of what we are doing.

[1] Deconstruction is the term used to refer to his philosophy. It's the idea that meaning unravels in the very act of trying to construct it. He did not claim to try to construct a philosophy--his was an anti-philosophy. But, ironically, his own attempt to deconstruct meaning was a veiled attempt to construct it.

3.1 Setting the Stage for a Political Conversation

A philosophical journey continues.
1.1 Unexamined Assumptions
1.2 "Unitary" Thinking
2.1 Binary Thinking in Ethics
2.2 Contextualization in Missions
2.3 Beyond Relativism and Absolutes
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1. They say that there are two subjects that you do not discuss in polite company: religion and politics. People can seem perfectly rational about many subjects and can calmly converse on many subjects without getting out the knives. But often not on matters religious or political. Our ability to reason seems to go out the window.

There was a great sifting of Facebook friends during the first Trump presidency. Families divided. People changed churches. Some stopped going to church. More than any time in my lifetime of well over fifty years, politics divided and continues to divide America.

A book that I found very insightful in this regard came out in 2013, several years before the Trump phenomenon. This was Jonathan Haidt's, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. [1] A fundamental metaphor in the book is that of a rider on an elephant. The elephant, he suggests, is largely going to go where it wants to go.

Meanwhile, the rider may like to think he or she is in control of the elephant. They might be able to steer the elephant a little one way or the other. But, mostly, the elephant is going to go where it wants to go. The rider is more likely to go along with the elephant than to truly be the one calling the shots.

In the metaphor, the rider represents our reasoning. The elephant represents our inner drives and impulses, our intuitions about the world. In my terms, it represents the assumptions and inclinations that we have absorbed from our cultures and subcultures, our instincts about the world. It represents our "gut" responses and our tribal thinking. It represents our unitary and binary thinking.

2. We like to think that we are reason-driven. I always smile around people who think that if we can just get our ideas straight, our lives will fall into order. Codswallop. It's the other way around for the most part. People primarily come up with ideas to justify their impulses. I'm not just talking about people who aren't into ideas. The personalities that most talk about ideas are often some of the most driven by group, tribal thinking and a drive to hide the thinking of their subcultures behind a veneer of intellectual argument and reason.

Some of the smartest people in terms of intellect are often some of the quirkiest when it comes to ideas. When I went through a time of questioning after seminary, I once said to myself. "Maybe I could have maintained some of my old views if I were smarter or more ingenious. The evidence just doesn't seem to add up to my little brain."

What I mean is that, as I studied, I often found incredibly bright people who seemed to apply their considerable intellect to trying to wiggle out of what seemed to me the most obvious conclusions. I would later chalk some of my problems up to my love of science in high school -- you should choose the hypothesis that bets fits the evidence in the most straightforward way.

Ironically, some of the influence of American fundamentalism on me contributed here too. Josh McDowell's book Evidence That Demands a Verdict came out in 1972, and it implicitly affirmed that the normal rules of reasoning and assessing evidence worked in favor of Christian faith. [2] We were still in the age of modernism at that time. 

Christian fundamentalism did not question whether logic was valid or whether scientific reasoning was valid. On the contrary, McDowell's point is that reason and evidence "demand" a Christian conclusion. I emerged from my teens with the mindset that I absolutely could use scientific reasoning and good logic when in the pursuit of truth. Reason and evidence would end up supporting my faith, not contradicting it.

Indeed, I was shaped to think that the problem with secular and non-Christian thinkers was that they did not reason well or follow the evidence well. I was shaped to think that it was their biases and faulty presuppositions that led them to other conclusions. I was given a green light to use the best logic of Aristotle and the best scientific reasoning of Francis Bacon. It would only lead me to the truth of Christ.

3. I mentioned "modernism." In the late 1900s, there was a "philosophy of history" that was quite common. In this schema, the period before the 1600s was the pre-modern era. By and large, people took the world as it appeared to them. They didn't see their own assumptions clearly. They largely argued for the ideologies of their tribes uncritically.

Then came Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Descartes went on a quest for certainty that questioned everything. [3] He concluded that reason was the only sure path to truth. The stream of "rationalism" would suggest that the pursuit of truth is best carried out by the vigorous pursuit of clear and distinct thinking.

Around the same time, Bacon articulated clearly what we now call the scientific method. [4] The best path to truth, he suggested, was to gather evidence from our senses. We formulate hypotheses. We test them. We modify them. We test again. Eventually, we refine theories. Thus we have a stream of "empiricism" that has shaped a large amount of what we might call "Western" thinking.

In the philosophy of history I experienced in the first decades of my life, modernism was the era from the 1600s to the mid-1900s, where the pursuit of truth primarily focused on reason and evidence as the surest and most reliable method to discover truth. In his 1996 book, A Primer on Postmodernism, Stanley Grenz used Spock from the late 1960s science fiction show Star Trek as the paragon of modernism. [5] Think carefully before you argue with him because he is almost perfectly objective and he forms all his conclusions strictly on the basis of reason and evidence.

But Grenz notes a change in Star Trek's approach to Spock (and reason) in the decades that followed. In Star Trek 2, Spock dies. Then he comes back to life in Star Trek 3. But he's not quite the same Spock, and the "epistemology" of Star Trek is not quite the same either. Spock is somehow more human. He has spent his life up to that point trying to subdue emotion, trying to keep it from tainting his thinking. Now, he recognizes the limits of logic.

In Star Trek, the Next Generation, Grenz notes, there is also a Spock-like figure, Data. Data is not human. He is an android. If Spock spent his life trying to control emotion, to purge emotion, Data is headed in the opposite direction. As an android, he doesn't have emotion, but he is very curious about human ways. The series culminates in him receiving an "emotion chip." Far from emotion being something to purge, it is something that turns out to be desirable.

Grenz and others saw this cultural shift of the late 1900s as a move into "post" modernism. In the early 2000s, it was trendy to be postmodern. It was the latest thing that all the cool kids were doing. We got over it. Unsurprisingly, many were tauting postmodernism as the new era of enlightened thought. It fit well with the fact that we were changing millennia in 2000, a change of the calendar that only happens every 1000 years.

4. In those days, I always distinguished between the cultural trend of postmodernism that was all the rage and philosophical postmodernism. Trendy postmodernism was really hype, a pop movement that hardly understood the philosophical school of thought. The pop version was interestingly very trendy in youth ministry and other Christian circles. There was the "Emergent Village" with popular writers and speakers like Rob Bell and Brian McLaren. Many from the millennial generation of Christians were strongly influenced by these voices in their formative years. 

And there was the predictable push back of the binary machine. Groups like The Gospel Coalition arose to push back on some of these cultural forces. A good deal of rhetoric emerged against postmodernism as a movement, especially postmodernism in the church. In my own circles, Asbury Seminary underwent somewhat of a crisis during the decade of the 2000s. Part of this crisis was a bit of a snap back from a friendliness toward postmodernism to a somewhat more conservative approach.

I was never very interested in the pop version of postmodernism. I chuckled that a philosophy whose point is "we can't do philosophy" had become the latest trendy philosophy. The philosophical version of post-modernism was anti-philosophy. It said, reason is not reliable, and the evidence doesn't demand a verdict.

Postmodernism basically said that we could never be objective like Descartes and Bacon supposed. We always have biases that are clouding our thought processes. Thomas Kuhn (1922-96) argued that science was far from some Spock-like enterprise of inevitable progress. Rather, he initially argued, science was just an endless wandering from paradigm to paradigm. [6] Paul Feyerabend (1924-94) went even further, seeing science as a mere example of human sociology at work. [7]

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) argued that language didn't have any stable meaning -- which made his writing task particularly difficult. How do you use language to argue that language doesn't have meaning? I used to have quite a bit of fun mocking him in class. Richard Rorty (1931-2007) argued that truth was simply a matter of what works within communities, not a matter of what's truly true or what corresponds to reality. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) argued that "power is knowledge" far more than "knowledge is power." 

I found these voices more as a warning sign than a destination. In fact, postmodernism can't be a destination. It's an anti-destination that says, "There is no destination." That was part of what I found so funny about the popular versions of postmodernism in Christian circles, thinking that we had finally arrived in our thinking.

As we will explore later in the book, I took from Kuhn that we all operate with paradigms. From Derrida I took that language is often far more ambiguous than we suppose. Rather than go full-Rorty, I came to agree with the critical realists -- truth and the world is real even though our apprehension of it is inevitably finite and flawed. And Foucault was not saying anything new when he showed example after example of how the forces of society shape our thinking on key issues.

5. As a person in my late-50s, it is interesting to look back and observe how the church rides these waves without hardly realizing it. One moment, we feel so strongly about certain issues. We are itching to fight over them. Then they pass. "Should we go to war with Iraq?" the question arises in 2003. Our respective riders on our tribal elephants gear up to defend our herd. Perhaps we could have a more rational conversation about it now, 20 years later -- especially with younger people who weren't around back then. But as usual, it was quite polarized at the time.

We seem to forget. And we usually don't change sides. We come up with reasons and arguments to defend whatever positions our group feels strongly about at the moment -- whichever group it is. In the early 2000s, I used to joke that my mother supported the NRA because she was against abortion. She was against abortion, so she was a Republican. Republicans supported the NRA. Therefore, by the transitive property of equality, she supported the NRA. [8]

In the case of the Iraq War, it turned out that there were no weapons of mass destruction -- the pretext for going to war. [9] There was no connection between Iraq and 9-11. The Iraqis did not greet us as liberators -- a naive sense some had that everyone would love democracy if we brought it to them. [10] Following just war theory, it seems difficult to say we were really justified in invading their country. It seems more possible to have that conversation rationally now.

It wasn't so easy at the time. We were so sure we were right and righteous, whatever our side. I personally hoped at the time that the Bush administration had more information than they were sharing. They didn't. I was open but unsure at first. Obama would win in a landslide in 2008 in large part as a rejection of that unprovoked war. You think of all the people on both sides who died in that war. You think of the incredible mental impact that war had on a generation of soldiers. And in the end, it's hard now not to conclude that it was a mistake. 

Yet our ways of thinking have not changed. The same political tribes ride whatever the latest political waves are, defending similar positions that history will abandon in a decade without realizing that we are simply playing out the same basic scenario over and over again. My group is right and the other group is either stupid or demonic. 

At this present time, it has gotten incredibly hot. We're not at the level of a Civil War, but the sides are drawn more sharply than ever before in my lifetime. And I would argue we are more irrational than ever. I hope in twenty years we can have a rational conversation about these days... 

[1] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage, 2013.

[2] Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict. Thomas Nelson, 1972.

[3] See Descartes' work, Discourse on Method.

[4] See Bacon's work, Novum Organum.

[5] Stanley Grenz. A Primer on Post-Modernism. Eerdmans, 1996.

[6] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago, 1970.

[7] Paul Feyerabend. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. New Left, 1975.

[8] If we get real serious, it is a legitimate question whether I have it slightly wrong even here. Was my mother a Republican because she was against abortion, or was she ultimately against abortion because she was a Republican? After all, she was a diehard Republican long before the issue of abortion came to the fore in American society.

[9] Even now, you will occasionally hear someone say, "No, no, no. There were weapons found. They're just not talking about it." You can always find some webpage, some rumor somewhere on social media, some conspiracy theory whispered off to the side saying, "I have secret information. The overwhelming majority is wrong. You were right all along." These voices whisper to us from the corners of the internet, "Let me give you secret knowledge so that your elephant can be happy against what reason and evidence are saying."

[10] 43 days after invading, President Bush stood on an aircraft carrier with a sign behind him saying, "Mission Accomplished." The war would last almost 9 more years.

England - Postmodernism 5

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46. I have mentioned a number of my friends in England so far--Neil Evans, Helen Fox, David Fox, Rachel Leonard, James Quirk, David Morton. Another friend was David Mossley, who was working on his doctorate in philosophy.

I have always liked philosophy. Sometimes I daydream about getting another PhD in philosophy. I would love to write some real philosophy book. I did write what I think is a mighty fine introduction to philosophy from a Christian perspective. David was a real philosopher.

It is fairly common to invoke postmodernism as some kind of trendy boogie man that threatened us twenty years ago but that thankfully faded away. I read a paper not too long ago by someone who casually labeled relativism, romanticism, and empiricism as postmodern. Thus post-modernism had come to be an overarching label for anything but absolutism. In fact relativism is modernist and romanticism was a late eighteenth/early nineteenth century phenomenon. Empiricism is certainly modernist and some would even describe Aristotle as an empiricist.

There was an intellectual vastness that was part of my England days. These were days where truth was truly the aim. My own thinking on Hebrews was of course limited by my own limitations. I did my best and I think some of my resulting work was good. I would go for five mile runs out South road to Darlington Road to Neville's Cross and back, thinking all the while about some exegetical decision I needed to make.

In this time I found discussions on postmodernism most stimulating with David Mossley. I already knew Derrida from my literary studies. I never had any sympathy or interest for him. Meaning happens. Derrida is thus a footnote, a reminder that language divorced of context is mere lines and squiggles without meaning. If you specify a language for the lines and squiggles--a general context--a sentence becomes polyvalent and ambiguous, but it takes on certain more probable meanings in a word cloud. But since words can have metaphorical meanings, the polyvalence is still practically infinite. Only in a specific context does the waveform collapse into a specific meaning.

My philosophy of language and meaning has become refined over the years. Wittgenstein has been my greatest partner on this quest. I stopped at Frege's house for a reference but he didn't make sense. J. L. Austin was helpful but was really only clarifying Wittgenstein. Paul Ricoeur gave me language to express the situation very nicely. If I ever write a real philosophy book, it will be on this subject matter.

47. It was from Mossley that I learned names like David Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty. Perhaps I had heard one or two of these but knew practically nothing of their contributions. Except for Derrida and perhaps John Rawls, I knew little of philosophy beyond the existentialists. [1]

The focus of our philosophy discussions, as I recall, was Michel Foucault, who had died ten years earlier in 1984 in France of AIDS. In my mind, Foucault is an extension of the fundamental ideas that Thomas Kuhn set out in science. However, Foucault applied these ideas to history and culture.

The problem I see with Kuhn and Foucault is of course the problem with postmodernism in general. They make it difficult to say that any way of understanding reality is truer than another. When I read Tom Wright's The New Testament and the People of God, I was quite taken with the construct of critical realism--the world is real and exists but our apprehension of it is skewed in our perspective.

This is a little different from Rorty's pragmatic realism, which is agnostic on the question of any underlying reality. Rather, some conceptions of reality "work" better than others. Sometimes I have wondered if my approach became a certain "pragmatic epistemology." By faith I accept the underlying reality. I believe there are constructions that are true and false, certainly ones that are more true and less true. But our language and paradigms are constructions, not das Ding an sich.

I didn't have those things worked out much in my head at the time. That would take teaching philosophy my first couple years at Indiana Wesleyan.

48. I found Foucault's thought fascinating. It had a ring of truth. :-) For example, his book Madness and Civilization showed how societal constructions of insanity had changed over the years. In ancient times, the insane were sometimes viewed as touched by the gods--"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad." Insanity was thus seen as a divine action. Even today we can sometimes think of insanity as a kind of genius.

Many have wondered whether some of those Jesus healed in the Gospels were mentally ill or schizophrenic. If so, demon possession would be another paradigm by which those at the time of Christ processed certain types of mental illness.

The "ship of fools" might have suggested to some in the late medieval period that the minds of the insane were wandering on a journey. They are looking for their place in the world but cannot find it. Then we went through a period where we locked up the insane, such as in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Currently, the insane are viewed as having an illness that needs to be treated.

Kuhn's notion of paradigms is very helpful here. The current paradigm is a medical one. Where my critical realism takes over is our sense now that insanity has an underlying biochemical, perhaps even brain structural cause. But this is not just another equal paradigm. It corresponds much more to physical reality and can even be treated by real chemical reactions. Some paradigms thus work better than others.

49.  Foucault also did a three volume History of Sexuality and a work called Discipline and Punish. I never plowed through them, but my cursory knowledge of them has again, I believe, brought me insight. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about the shift from execution as a matter of public shaming to its current "revenge" form.

This perspective fit insights I gained from Bruce Malina. His work The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology is a classic that helped attune me to the fact that the ancient world was an "honor-shame" world rather than an individual guilt world. The cross was not primarily about punishing Jesus. That's the way we process executions. The cross was meant to humiliate Jesus and to tell everyone who walked on that path into Jerusalem what happened to people who crossed the Romans.

In England I tried to brush up a bit on my British history. Why were "political" figures assassinated publicly outside the Tower of London? To humiliate and to warn everyone what happened when you opposed those in power.

Now Western culture has shifted toward individualism, away from group identity and collectivist personality. Execution is now focused on paying the individual for what he or she has done. Foucault saw modern executions as private revenge ceremonies. Of course the paradigm has shifted again in the current trend away from capital punishment altogether.

In all these things Foucault and Kuhn gave me a good sense of how any society operates on the basis of paradigms that they think are intrinsic to the world, "the way things are," when in fact we are largely driven and tossed by the winds, ignorant of the forces on us.

This is no bit less true in the church as in broader society. We think we are standing on the Bible when in fact we have no idea of the forces leading us to interpret certain passages certain ways. Sometimes we believe things vehemently and we don't hardly even have a passage.

50. Foucault catalogs similar shifts with regard to sexuality. He posits that sexuality as a category of human identity is a fairly recent development. I have not read his work so my examples may or may not be in his books. As an example, I understand that King James may actually have been what we would call "gay" today. Yet he was married and had children. Foucault suggests that this was the norm prior to recent times.

Foucault thus suggests that homosexual acts were seen as something certain individuals might do on the side within a marriage in earlier times. The idea first of a diagnosis in the eighteen hundreds (a medical condition) and then as a fixed orientation that someone might have in the nineteen hundreds are both changes in paradigms.

Yet without insight into one's cultural glasses, one will inevitably project your current paradigm onto a book like the Bible. Homosexual acts are mentioned in the Bible, but it is not clear that homosexuals are. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about an attempted gang rape but not at all clearly about homosexuality. There are other cultural elements here that were equally or more significant in ancient times, such as the way one treats a visitor to your city.

I used to make fun of such interpretations because they seemed to miss the "obvious." It took some time to realize that in fact certain interpretations were obvious to me because of my cultural paradigms and that, in fact, I was ignorant of the cultural influences on me and my own inability to listen to the text on its own terms.

51. I might mention the work of Mary Douglas here, Purity and Danger. This book opened the book of Leviticus to me like never before. We have a tendency to interpret the food laws of Leviticus in terms of food safety because it makes sense to us in our paradigms. Douglas unfolds possible ways of processing purity and such things in more likely cultural categories.

I have come to call this aspect of the Levitical paradigm, "kind" theology. The ancient Israelite priestly worldview processed the world in terms of certain "kinds" of things. Certain characteristics went in the bird box. Others went in the sea creatures box. Surrounding peoples ate pig, but the Israelites were shepherds. To eat pig was thus to be a traitor to your people and to your God, Yahweh. While I will not say these interpretations are certain, they fit much better in the Ancient Near East than our weak attempts to make these laws fit within our modern paradigms of hygiene.

This period opened up a dimension to the biblical texts to me that I liken to seeing a third dimension to Scripture that I had never seen before in church. It made understanding the Scriptures a profound thing. I do not expect this third dimension from preaching. A sermon is good to me if it helps people on their journey with God through life.

[1] It is noteworthy that the Principal of St. John's prior to David Day was Tony Thiselton. Through knowledge of him and his work I was introduced to Gadamer (cf. The Two Horizons).

Secular Pre-Modernism

1. If you know how I think, I use the model of pre-modern, modern, and post-modern as a framework for how people process reality. Here's the decoder ring for the way I use these terms:

• pre-modern - "first naivete"; this is when any of us--and let me stress that we all do this, no matter how educated or reflective a person becomes--when any of us project meaning onto the world or onto a text without knowing we are doing it. We are unreflective about our knowing of the world. We make assumptions of which we are not aware. We don't recognize the glasses we are wearing. We don't realize the element of subjectivity we are bringing. We see things that aren't there--they're in us.
• modern - the modern turn is when we become reflective about the matter we were previously unreflective. So I used to read Matthew 5:45 to say that God allows bad things (rain) to happen to good people. Then suddenly (embarrassingly after I had a PhD in NT in hand) I realized that rain was overwhelmingly good in an agricultural world like Palestine that sometimes had drought! I became reflective ("modern") after not even knowing I had been unreflective ("pre-modern").
• post-modern - "second naivete"; as I speak of postmodernism, it can involve a reflective return to some of the pre-modern interpretations I had before I was reflective on some issue. I recognize that I can still read Jeremiah 29:11 about me even though that's not what it meant originally. But now I do this knowingly rather than in ignorance.

That's all set up.

I'm sorry that I so often point out areas of unreflective thought among Christians. I just hate making God look stupid. And anyone who knows me knows that I hate this most about myself, when I make God look stupid.

2. But today I want to rag on the secular world, because being pre-modern is not a Christian thing. It's a people thing. We are all, by default, unreflective about the opinions we hold. Most of us do not, by nature, try to look at things from other points of view. We are a herd animal, whose nature is to exclude those who aren't in our group and assume the values and perspectives of our herd, whatever it may be.

For example, I know there are plenty of atheists with a strong sense of morality. Some of them are reflective about this--they might attribute it to evolution (it helps the species survive) or to a choice (an existentialist decision) or to sentiment (I can't tell you why but it feels good).

But even more non-theists are completely pre-modern about their morality. So what is the basis for an atheist to argue against genocide? I'm not sure there is any other than it violates our gut feeling as a post-Christian culture. As MacIntyre would say, we have the fragments of an earlier morality with no justification for them.

And what of rights? What is the basis for believing in human rights from a reflective standpoint? Why should we stand up for the weak or the excluded? Because they have rights? Who said? Where is this imaginary force field that keeps us from oppression? Evolutionary success? Sentiment? A social contract?

Again, there are vast aspects to secular society that have no real basis in the world itself. They are more the pre-modern fumes of a previously Judeo-Christian culture. As Nietzsche would say, as long as the supermen can continue to convince these pre-moderns that these things are real, we'll be okay. but the madman warns of holocaust.

The Postmodern Critique: Possible Christian Take Aways

I'm trying to write a textbox that captures the take-away for Christians from the postmodern critique of knowledge.  What do you think about the following?
____________
1. None of us have a God's eye view of the world.
Perhaps the most important Christian take-away from postmodernism is the strong reminder that we are not God.  It is not only that our finite minds have a partial understanding of the world.  Even the partial view of the world we have is filled with blind spots and skew of which we are not aware.  Our minds cannot see the world as it is for we inevitably see it from the perspective of where we sit in our localized contexts.  This situation calls for an "epistemological humility" on our part, a humility about what we think we know for certain.

2. Faith is far more fundamental than reason.
The evidence does not demand a verdict, but what we believe as Christians is far more a matter of faith than of proof.  That is not to say that faith is irrational.  It is to say that even the most fundamental elements of Christian belief are more a matter of faith than of evidence.  It pushes us to see God as far more interested in our attitudes than in the specifics of what we believe.

3. The Bible as a text is polyvalent (susceptible to multiple interpretations).
No matter how perfect a truth the Bible might represent in God's mind, we as finite, contextualized humans can never escape our situation in order to know it as God does.  We cannot arrive at a God's eye view of truth from the Bible because we are incapable of having one.  We see the Bible through our partial, skewed lenses just as we see the rest of the world.

Further, as texts encapsulated in human language, the words of the Bible are susceptible to a multitude of interpretations and configurations of meaning.  Even more, reading the Bible in context reveals that God actually intended to speak to its individual audiences in their own context-dependent categories.  The result is that we as readers of the Bible are inevitably forced not only to interpret individual texts but also to organize their particular meanings into a coherent whole.  This situation calls for a more robust sense of the role of the Holy Spirit and God's speaking through the church than many Christians have.

4. The larger a system of ideas is, the more likely the skew.
The more particular data we try to sweep up into a generalized system or "worldview," the more likely we are oversimplifying and in the process omitting or skewing individual bits of data.  This is true of our generalizations about the Bible ("the Bible says..."), and it is true of our theological systems.  Given #1 above, this is even true of systems that are largely deductive (e.g., Calvinism) because it is likely that our starting premises are already somewhat figurative in ways we could not comprehend. This situation calls for increased Christian conversation between believers who come from different Christian traditions with different theological systems.

5. Power plays a role in what we call truth.
We should acknowledge it openly so that it does not play out secretly.  What is considered true at any time and place, not to mention how ideas are policed, involves a significant element of power.  The best ideas are not always the most popular, nor can we trust those in authority to police ideas with justice.  Once again, we are pushed toward seeing the attitudes of others far more significant than the specifics of what they believe.

Vulcans are not mean...

I watched Star Trek, the most recent movie in the franchise, again yesterday. I did enjoy it very much. I did get the same sense again that I did the first time--contemporary culture has a tendency to equate objectivity with being mean.

The portrayal of the Vulcan council is off, and I'm not surprised that whoever wrote this version had Vulcan destroyed. Spock comes off as mean half the time and he is portrayed by the bad guy from Heroes.

To be sure, this Spock will be more interesting than Data. Maybe that was partly a conscious choice. But objectivity is not mean and the Stoics did not argue for apathy. The truth is neither mean nor kind. It just is.

The stereotype of thinkers in most pop media and pop culture is exactly that a stereotype. A truly objective person realizes that humans are emotional creatures, feeling things. A truly objective person would realize that emotions have to be taken into account and would deal with others accordingly. The stereotypical thinker who doesn't take feelings into account is one notch less a thinker than the one who knows feelings must be taken into account.

Categorizing the Hermeneutical Landscape

I'm now on my third draft of an introduction to a proposal. I hope this new approach is a winner. Here's a summary. Any critique?

Primary stimuli of developments in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
1. presuppositional changes: such as non-supernaturalism and those who read the Bible as they might have read other books

2. developments in contextual understanding: a) deepened perspectives on literary context because of reading the words as one might read other books and b) deepened perspectives on historical context because of engagement not only with already known literature, but also with increased archaeological discoveries of other ancient literature and material culture.

Trajectories that emerged
1. non-engagement with these developments: those outside the West who were not exposed to such discussions, revivalists, Pentecostals, dispensationalists to some extent. They not only continued with traditional presuppositions, but continued largely unaware of how to read the biblical books in context, read the texts a-contextually as primary default.

2. accommodation to many of these developments, including non-supernaturalism: mainstream Christian institutions. Miracles are part of a mythological worldview. Jesus was an exemplary individual and model to be emulated but not divine, Bible inspired like other literature

3. rejection of these developments: engaged fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals. Clear acceptance of supernaturalism and historical context accepted in principle, but varying degrees of rejection of contextual conclusions, Bible/Babel controversy, parallels often denied or reinterpreted, primary focus on alternative explanations of data

4. acceptance of contextual readings of the Bible but with supernaturalist presuppositions: In our typology, this group accepts the consensus opinions of mainstream scholarship (which evangelical scholars often do not) but does so in the belief that the Scriptures do indeed give witness to God's saving events within history. Individuals like Oscar Cullmann come to mind.

5. rejection of the historical paradigm as the principal paradigm for understanding Scripture. In some respects, this is an informed return to the pre-modern paradigm of #1. Karl Barth perhaps is a forerunner of this approach in that he advocated the idea of the Bible "becoming" the word of God as God speaks through it. Barth was well aware of historical critical interpretations but did not find them the locus of Christian significance to the biblical texts. In the same way, theological interpretation today rejects historical context as the be all and end all of Scripture's meaning.

Great Time for Wesleyan Tradition 3

The first two installments of this book idea, A Great Time for the Wesleyan-Evangelical Tradition, were:

1.1 Changes Afoot
1.2 Identifying Wesleyan-Evangelicalism

1.3 Surfing the Waves
With the exception of the "new perspectives" on Judaism and Paul, the other three developments we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter seem to be riding a similar wave of contemporary culture. Theological interpretation, the missional emphasis, and the ancient-future trend all relate in one way or another to the unraveling of modernism that has taken place over the last few decades. As we already warned, it is questionable to characterize an age by a set of ideas. At a particular point in time we have at best a group of people who profess certain ideas, and often it is not ideas that most characterize an age. Ideas are often epiphenomenon, symptoms of more underlying, concrete factors. We should thus sit very loosely to those who reduce a period to a label like "modernism" or "postmodernism" with some simple list of ideological characteristics.

Nevertheless, the three trends we have just mentioned fit certain cultural shifts that seem to have taken place in recent years, shifts in the ideas that people profess. Prior to these last decades, those individuals in power within Protestantism and evangelicalism had argued or assumed that the meaning of Scripture in which we should most be interested is something called the "literal" or "plain" meaning of the words. Indeed, one of the founding emphases of early Protestantism was an aversion to the non-literal interpretations of the Middle Ages and early church, principally, allegorical interpretation.

Also in keeping with some of the fundamental dynamics of the Protestant Reformation, Protestants and evangelicals tended to have little interest in the period between the New Testament church and the 1500's. The very origins of the Reformation entailed a reaction to developments that had taken place after the New Testament. The assumption of all Protestants was that developments needed to be peeled off. The only question was how many. Anglicanism peeled off the least. The Anabaptists and the Radical Reformation peeeled off the most.

What happened to mainstream Protestantism in the late 1800's and early 1900's is well known, namely, the rise of theological liberalism. Here we refer to a dominant group of Protestant scholars who did not believe in miracles or the authority of the biblical texts. They read the books of the Bible as they would have read and analyzed any other collection of texts and derived their meanings entirely in the light of what they knew from the history and literature of the time when these books were written.

To some extent, the shifts that we see happening at the turn of the twenty-first century, including the so called new perspectives, are caused in part by some of the same forces that initially drove theological liberalism. The difference is that, in the case of evangelicalism, the drive to read the biblical texts in their historical and literary context has come from the presumption of traditional faith, while nineteenth century liberalism did not. It has been as evangelicals have pursued the original meaning of Scripture that they have found themselves confronted with the same phenomenon that Lessing proclaimed in his categories the "ugly ditch" between the Bible and theology. [1] The rise of theological interpretation, with its greater openness to figural readings of the text, relates to the perceived distance of the original meaning from the very purposes of Scripture as a word from God for today.

At the same time, philosophy in the twentieth century was heavily preoccupied with language and meaning. The idea that words point to fixed meanings, for example, was undermined by Ludwig Wittengenstein, who argued that meaning was a function of the way words were used not a matter of set meanings to which words refer. [2] J. L. Austin and others then extended his insight to show that words "do" things, indeed far more than simply "declare" meanings. [3] Meanwhile, Ferdinand de Saussure argued that the relationship between the symbols or signifiers of words and the meaning they signify is almost completely arbitrary. [4]

The long and short was a general tendency in the late twentieth century by a number of thinkers to argue that texts did not have fixed or stable meanings. [5] So as the drive of evangelical scholarship to read the books of the Bible in context was distancing the meaning of the text from today, developments in hermeneutics questioned even what a literal reading of the text might be. Indeed, some hermeuticians suggest today that almost all meaning is ultimately metaphorical. [6] This climate once again has loosened the Protestant sense that a text has only one meaning, and that the one meaning is inextricably bound to the original meaning.

François Lyotard described postmodernism as an "incredulity toward metanarratives." [7] What he referred to thereby was a rising number of thinkers who found it difficult to accept overarching philosophical frameworks that claimed to encompass the whole of reality. Nicholas Wolterstorff and James K. A. Smith have ably shown that the rejection of rationally based ideological superstructures need not signal the death of faith-based ideological structures. [8] As for our part, we need not buy into any of these thinkers lock stock and barrel to recognize that the wave they are riding has at least some substance to it.

For one thing, the flattening of the globe has put us into unprecedented contact with others who think and behave differently from us. [9] The age where a group can isolate itself from the ideas of the rest of the world is, for the most part, done. The relativist and pluralistic tendencies of late modernism were not simply the deterioration of faith as part of some demonic conspiracy theory. They were one predictable response to a world where we are thrust into contact with the other.

Similarly, the work of thinkers like Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault have accounted too well for historical changes in scientific paradigm and social paradigm too well at certain points for us to chalk all their ideas up to Satanic influence. [10] To be sure, we do not have to accept every aspect of their thought to agree that interpretive groups have paradigms with which they approach the biblical text and that those in power tend to decide which paradigms are correct. We cannot absolutize their ideas and have this discussion, but we can recognize that there is at least some substance to the wave of culture they represent.

The result is to recognize that the fundamental principles of Protestantism, as well as those of twentieth century evangelicalism, are deeply ensconced in cultural paradigms just as any other set of ideas. That is not to negate entirely their truth value. It is merely to point out that they are as human as they are truthful, and they are subject to critique. Thus one of the ironic twists of the "evangelical" (or perhaps better, "fundamentalist") response to elements of the new perspectives on Judaism and Paul has been a tendency to treat particular Protestant traditions--Calvinism in particular--as absolute paradigms. N. T. Wright, for example, has critiqued John Piper's reaction to his ideas as an ironic placing of tradition over Scripture. [11]

Postmodernism has thus brought an appropriate humility with regard to overarching ideological systems. In consequence, we have seen a revival of interest in symbols and sacraments, in mystery--thus the ancient-future movement. We find a reappraisal of the importance of "works" in the Christian life, which fits not only with the new perspectives on the biblical world, but also with a missional Christianity that is interested in the whole person and the whole world.

These are some of the developments that make the beginning of the twenty-first century potentially a great time for the Wesleyan tradition. We are a tradition that has always taken the deeds of the body as seriously--if not more seriously--than the thoughts of the mind. Suddenly we find original meaning scholarship telling us that whether we are Pelagian or not is a question of later Christian tradition. We had correctly apprehended a key element of Paul's thought.

And as a tradition that has always been more open to Spirit-led interpretation and typology, we suddenly find ourselves not the ugly step-child of the evangelical tradition, but a group that intuitively practiced what is only now becoming philosophically acceptable in theological interpretation. And our sense that experience is as key to Christian life as reason makes us easily appreciate the revival of interest in the symbolic and sacramental dimensions of the ancient church.

We never went to the ideological excesses of certain other evangelical traditions. The missional focus on the whole person, social and economic in addition to spiritual, is nothing but a cultural affirmation of who we have been even when it was not evangelically popular. In short, it is a great time to be in the Wesleyan evangelical tradition. It is a day when, ironically, we are well situated, for perhaps the first time, to lead evangelicalism with our ideas and not simply with our piety.

[1] Lessing

[2] Philosophical Investigations.

[3] How to Do Things with Words. Searle, speech act theory...

[4] Structure of Linguistics.

[5] The more extreme form of this trajectory was of course Jacques Derrida and deconstruction.

[6] Lakoff and Johnson.

[7] Lyotard

[8] W *, and S, Radical Orthodoxy

[9] A phenomenon aptly caught in the title of the book The World is Flat.

[10] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and, for example, The Order of Things.

[11] Justification

Suggested Postmodern Shift in Confirmation

Last night my Church and Postmodernism class came to an end with presentations from all the students. I have permission from Kevin Davis © to post six possible changes in the way the Lutheran Church might do confirmation with middle schoolers in the light of shifts in postmodern culture.

1. From Program to People
Build on the interpersonal relationships rather than meetings and activities.

2. From Attractional to Missional
Less concerts, flyers, etc. and more going, doing, service.

3. From Centralized to Decentralized
More small groups throughout the week, let the youth worship with their families on Sundays

4. From Agenda Driven to Service Oriented
Get out into the community rather than going down a checklist in the church walls

5. From Separatists to Collaborationalists
Interact with other churches, let the community use your facilities

6. From Orthodoxy to Orthopraxy
Focusing more on the heart than the head

I thought this was a good presentation because it 1) accurately reflects changes in culture, 2) has good priorities, and 3) might actually work with real people :-)

C. F. H. Henry as Foundationalist Evangelical

I'm continuing through Robert Webber's The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World. I'm finding it an incredibly clear guide to the postmodern impact on evangelicalism--way clearer than anything else I've seen, including James Smith's Who's Afraid or anything by Grenz.

In chapter 6 on apologetics among younger evangelicals, he describes the very modernist separation of truth from "embodiment" that typified the founding voices of neo-evangelicalism in the mid-twentieth century. What this means is the modernist sense that you can detach truth neatly from you as the one discussing it.

He illustrates this modernist evangelical approach to truth by way of 3 of Henry's 15 theses regarding revelation:

10. God's revelation is rational communication conveyed in intelligible ideas and meaningful words, that is, conceptual verbal form.

11. The Bible is the reservoir and conduit of divine truth. [in contrast to the person, Jesus Christ and the church that continues his embodiment in the world today].

12. The Holy Spirit superintends the communication of divine revelation, first, by inspiring the prophetic apostolic writings, and, second, by illuminating and interpreting the scripturally given Word of God [understood in terms of words].

For the younger evangelicals, said Webber, truth must be embodied in a person and is only known truly by those who live it.

Postmodern Youth Ministry?

Like I mentioned, I'm teaching a course for the next few weeks having to do with postmodernism and ministry. The textbooks are standard for the course in our Grad Min MA program, so I'm reading books chosen by someone else. One that is different from my usual fare is Postmodern Youth Ministry, by Tony Jones of emerging fame.

I've taught cohorts coming off this class and after reading Jone's first chapter, I better understand the kinds of allusive statements I've heard them make about the course. I just finished the first chapter. It is very suggestive and impressionistic to me--not inappropriate for a book about youth ministry in a postmodern world. But I can imagine that it has been a cross between confusing and irritating to many of our students.

Here are some of my thoughts. First, I think this book, as so much postmodern hype, confuses what I call "philosophical postmodernism" with what we might call "cultural postmodernism." By the way, this book was written pre-9-11 and pre-economic meltdown, so it seriously remains to be seen what youth culture will look like in the days to come. 9-11 provided a conservative backlash that at the very least affected what is emerging. And a post-economic crisis world may make the anti-materialist message of some moot.

My problem with discussions of the postmodern turn is 1) it essentializes postmodernism--it makes postmodernism into a thing when postmodernism is an anti-thing, 2) you can't live with an anti-thing. We must live as if our conceptions of reality are, on some level, fundamentally true. The end result of postmodernism is thus a humility toward knowledge and a massive sorting out of truths that work and truths that don't.

As a bit of a critique, I think it may be wrong to pin relativism on postmodernism, as so many do. Extreme postmodernism does away with all certainty, even individual certainty. Relativism at least claims certainty on the level of an individual or a group.

So Jones' first chapter gives us some impressions of changes. But I have serious questions about the claim that something completely different is "emerging," that we are at the point of a turn as big as the Reformation. There are some massive turns underway perhaps, but they are more concretely based than based on ideas.

And philosophical postmodernism's contribution to such changes are only transitional. It is an abyss it is significant to look into. But after we have taken a look and realized how little we know, then we will go back about our business of living and ministering, chastened and humbled, but still proceeding as if we know some things. Life is otherwise impossible.

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.

Friday Review: Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?

In preparation for James Smith's visit to campus, a number of faculty and student reading groups read through his little book, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? The book has five chapters: 1) an introduction to postmodernism, 2) a chapter on Jacques Derrida, 3) a chapter on Jean-François Lyotard, 4) a chapter on Michel Foucault, and 5) a concluding chapter making his pitch for radical orthodoxy.

1. Each chapter begins with a long summary of some movie. For example, the first chapter, "Is the Devil from Paris?," begins with Matrix. Neo is emerging from one construction of reality to another, from modernity to postmodernity (17). Not really the best analogy. Postmodernism would be for Neo to recognize that he lives in a matrix from which he can never emerge.

And herein is probably my central critique, not just of Smith's book, but of postmodernism itself. We can push back on modernist certainty to be sure, but the dualistic "myth" of subject over and against object has served truth very well these few hundred years. Postmodernism is a footnote on this distinction. It is a big footnote, but life doesn't work if we treat the footnote as the central thing and the "world as other" as the footnote.

Postmodernism is the eternal reminder that almost every meaning machine breaks down at some point. But it would be stupid just to sit on the machine while it was still actually working. The Enlightenment enterprise has worked very well, even when it has worked to make nuclear bombs. It has worked in the sense that we have learned to manipulate our reality to where we can go to the moon or speak to people across the globe while walking in the park using a small hand held device.

I'm getting off track. In the introduction Smith introduces the three thinkers he will be discussing and suggests that we need to recover some of the pre-modern that we have lost. The final goal of the book is to "issue in a thickly confessional church that draws on the very particular (yet catholic) and ancient practices of the church's worship and discipleship"--a radical orthodoxy (25).

2. The second chapter deals with Derrida, focusing on his famous statement that "there is nothing outside the text." Smith cleverly suggests that we as Christians can consider that text to be Scripture, giving all new meaning to the phrase "sola scriptura."

What Derrida means is along the lines of Nietzsche earlier, "There are no facts, only interpretations." By saying that there is nothing but the text, Derrida suggests that there is no part of the world that we know by any means other than by interpretation. To this degree, I agree with Derrida.

Derrida also wishes to claim, however, that there is no stable meaning in these texts. In my opinion, Smith sugar coats Derrida just a little too much--at times I could hardly distinguish how he was describing Derrida from how I view things. Then again, Smith is ultimately a little more post-modern than I am...

However, I agree with Smith's critique of D. A. Carson's critique of Derrida (assuming that he has accurately described Carson). There is a vast difference between saying what I just did above--that all our conscious knowledge of the world involves interpretation and that no human being is objective--and saying that a person does not believe in truth.

To me, the "truth" I gain from Derrida is that any text can be interpreted differently from the way its creator might have intended and, indeed, from the way other people understand it. Texts--mirroring their human creators--are prone to internal inconsistencies on some level.

But this is a footnote. It's a very important footnote, a very true footnote. Yet Derrida spent practically his entire career on a footnote! To make his point, he went to ridiculous lengths to find alternative readings of texts whose meaning otherwise seemed pretty clear.

Thanks, Jacques. I got the point back in '67.

Smith then goes radically orthodox on us. If the world is ultimately all text, then, hey, let's make the Bible be that text--sola scriptura. There is nothing outside the scriptural text.

Pure genius. I suspect it basically translates into getting scripture into our imaginary. It's a beautiful poetic image... But it doesn't really tell us anything about interpreting specific biblical texts. :-)

3. The third chapter deals with Lyotard, who as much as anyone gave us the terms "pre-modern," "modern," and "postmodern." Lyotard defines postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives" or in French "big stories."

By "big stories," Smith doesn't think Lyotard has in mind the kinds of narratives that in fact have been the very stuff of postmodernism. In fact, I found it a little hard at first to understand Lyotard, for I have always associated postmodernism with the idea that you can't step outside the story to give some God's eye interpretation of it. I've always associated propositional interpretations to be the modernist and staying in the "stories" they try to interpret as the postmodernist.

... which is why "grand stories" is a bad translation in English of what Lyotard is saying. A metanarrative for Lyotard is an overarching rational supertheory that is meant to stand alongside reality to explain it objectively. Smith does not think that, when properly understood, Lyotard contradicts the idea of understanding the world through the eyes of the Christian story.

I largely agree with Lyotard, at least as I understand him. We would do well to think of the systems by which we describe the world as expressions of the world rather than literal explanations of it. This approach requires the revaluation of metaphor and a realization of the value of myth. As I've said before, we do well to think of scientific theories as very useful myths, expressions of reality that accommodate massive numbers of "characters" in the expression. These myths allow us to predict and manipulate reality. But they are not strictly statements of that reality. They are metaphors for things-in-themselves to which we do not have access.

With this last comment, of course, I distinguish myself from Smith, who with other postmodernists has tried to abandon Cartesian and Kantian dualisms. For me, these dualisms are also myths. But they are extremely functional ones.

4. The fourth chapter deals with the third of the three postmodern giants (why does Smith not treat the pragmatist Rorty, I wonder): Michel Foucault. I found Smith's movie clip here the most useful so far--One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Foucault's famous saying is "power is knowledge" reverses Frances Bacon's old dictum, "knowledge is power." Foucault's basic claim is that what we consider true is not a matter of what is simply fact but that what is considered true is a function of lines of power.

Let me say with Foucault as with Derrida that there is an incredible amount of truth to what Foucault is saying here. What is considered true is as much and usually more about who has the power to convince others of their ideas as it is about some blunt truth out there. Foucault's case studies are far more valuable than Derrida's, describing how our conceptualizations of things like punishment, medicine, and sexuality have changed over the centuries.

Smith suggests that with the givenness of power, we would do well as a church to use the inevitable systems of power at our disposal to form others Christianly.

5. In the final and longest chapter, Smith furthers his agenda of a radical orthodoxy for the emerging church. So when it comes to dogma, we unapologetically affirm it without concern over the Cartesian drive to correlate it to the facts. This is the Christian "take away" from Derrida.

The Christian take away from Lyotard is a re-embrace of the Christian story and Christian traditions. This is the ancient-future trend that we see, for example, in the late Robert Webber's book on worship. We reaffirm the value of ritual and symbol, the role of the tactile in worship rather than just the cognitive.

Smith perhaps best sums up his overall take away in this way: "the best way to be postmodern is to be premodern; to be emergent, one must be catholic" (135). We develop a sacramental imagination rather than, as modernism has, a "gnostic" or dualistic one.

A Postmodern Trickle of Semi-Consciousness

So what are we to do with postmodernism? The greatest value of postmodernism in philosophy is the way in which it draws our attention to how little we really and truly know. Of course this idea is not new. We have seen that Socrates and others recognized this centuries before Christ.

But postmodernism points us to the ultimately "mythical" character of our knowledge. We argued in our chapter on the birth of philosophy that we do a disservice to ancient myths when we think of them as "bad science," as if the myths primarily served to explain how the world works. Rather, myths were far more poetic expressions of the mysterious workings of the world. Our scientific equations today are really just very precisely tuned myths. It is not at all clear that they tell us about the world.

What science and math do is express the mysteries of reality in very precise ways. But we have no way of knowing how they might relate to some reality-in-itself. So the distance something travels is the speed it is going times the amount of time it travels at that speed. This formula works very well to tell you how far you have travelled since the last pit stop. We can say that this myth really works when you're talking about things like cars.

But does it really tell us what the reality of these things is apart from us? What is distance, really? Is it a thought in the mind of God? What is time, really? Einstein told an even more precise myth he called relativity. It works even better than the myth above. Perhaps it will prove to be such a great mythical expression of how things works that we will never replace it.

Our attempt to arrive at what is true is our attempt to find the most accurate myths that we can to express the way the world works. We can believe all sorts of things about what is behind the way the world works--or not believe that there is anything behind it. But a good myth and one worthy of being called a "true myth" is one that accounts for the way things work the best.

Where does God and Christian revelation fit into this picture. Because we are stuck in our heads, it does not change the process by which we reach toward truth. As we saw in our chapter on a Christian View of the World, whether we like it or not, revelation still must pass through our reason and experience to get into our understanding.

But as believers we believe by faith that God exists and that He is involved in the world, that He is involved in the process of our understanding. This does not mean that God works around our myth-making ways. We find equally godly people in all the different forms of Christianity--and God lets them go on believing different things. We see over and over throughout biblical and Christian history that God's people have also formulated their understandings of God in ways that were deeply influenced by the culture of their day.

In short, God apparently does not reveal by showing us absolute truth removed from our worldviews and paradigms, our "myths." Rather, God's consistent mode of revelation seems to meet us where we are at, to meet us in our "myths" and make them work far better than they did before. He makes them far more true than they were before.

But the only One with a God's eye view on reality is God. Only He knows all the data of the universe in all of its relationships to all the other data of the universe. We see an infintesimal portion of it and comprehend the interrelationships of that portion only in part and in fact further as skewed by the perspective from which I can never fully free myself.

We are thus all myth-makers. All the words in this chapter are indeed attempts to express the myth-stery of life as precisely as possible. Derrida and Foucault were themselves mythmakers, as are other philosophers like Heidegger or Rorty. Those who urge us to stop thinking of ourselves as knowers and the world as that which is known are only urging a different myth that they think expresses the mystery better. And those who would urge us to stop talking "meta-talk"--talk about talk--are themselves only urging a different myth.

The key is not to mistake these stories philosophers tell themselves for reality. I will continue to use meta-language, and I will continue to discuss myself as a subject reflecting on reality. I do so not because I am committed to a particular subject-object metaphysic or epistemology, but because this mythical construct works really well. I use this language with an eternal footnote that says, "You should not think that I mistake this language for the actual nature of the world in itself." You foolish Lyotard to think I mistook these things for reality. The meta-myths never left the field you story tellers thought you captured.

Another thing that works is a movement toward greater reflectivity. I may not be able to become absolutely reflective, but I can point to places where I have become more reflective. The problem with modernism is that it thought it was more reflective than it was. It labeled the lack of self-awareness of those before it pre-modernism.

But we are all at the same time some mixture of reflectivity and non-reflectivity. The postmodern truth is that we are never fully reflective. We see through a glass darkly. A healthy dose of postmodernism will not lead us to give up on the idea of truth and reflectivity altogether. After all, that approach to life certainly doesn't work. It is to know what we think we know humbly. To listen and learn from others, from all those around us, from all those of the past. Ironically, experience is the best path to greater reflectivity.

When God's kingdom comes, we'll see far more of the puzzle. Perhaps God will miraculously undo the egocentric predicament. Or maybe God will then enjoy watching how our myths become more splendid than anything we might currently imagine.

Postmodernism Etc...

Since the 1980's it has become common to consider ourselves in a "postmodern" age. But what exactly does that mean? Probably the best way to start exploring the question is to recognize that "post" modern surely means in a most basic way "after" modernism. Apparently, we best define postmodernism not so much in terms of what it is, but in terms of what it is not. And what it is not, is modernism.

Now to be sure, we can describe postmodern culture without reference to modernism. Postmodern culture is pluralistic, it emphasizes not only the tolerance of all ideas but professes them all to be just as valid as each other. There is less a sense of an overarching right or wrong. Everybody's business is their own business. Whatever floats your boat is your own business. We could play out this Zeitgeist in all sorts of areas ranging from art to ethics.

But to understand postmodernism as a philosophical development, we best look at what it is unraveling. In the philosophical sense, you can hardly be a post-modern if you have not at least passed through the fires of modernism. Historians of Western thought usually point to Rene Descartes as the father of modern philosophy because of the way he turned philosophy's attention on me as a knower. He asked not what is certain in general, but how can I know what is certain.

This development in philosophy roughly paralleled the rise of science and the decline of the church as sources of truth. The focus in the quest for truth comes to be evidence and the goal objectivity, the ability to look at the world without bias or preconception about where the evidence will point. Stanley Grenz likened the goal of modernist epistemology to Spock in the late 60's TV sitcom Star Trek. [A Primer on Postmodernism] Spock was half human and half Vulcan. He struggled to keep the emotions of his human side under control so that he could think objectively about things.

Grenz considers the transition from Star Trek to Star Trek the Next Generation a metaphor for the transition from modernism to postmodernism. If Spock has emotions but does his best to bury them and keep them from affecting his thinking, Data in the Next Generation has no emotions because he is an android, but he covets them and finally receives them in the first Next Generation movie.

Therefore, postmodernism in the philosophical sense is a movement that recognizes the vast limitations of human objectivity. Such reactions vary among thinkers "after modernism." Some would throw out the concept of truth altogether. The meaning of a text is a free for all, whatever you want it to mean. There is no such thing as reality, I can make my world whatever I want to make it. Then there are those like me, the author of this chapter, who believe that we can still speak of truth and of more and less objective understandings of it.

Reality After Modernism
In some senses, postmodernism on reality is simply a different trajectory than Descartes and Kant took. Descartes concluded that the only thing I couldn't doubt was that I exist because I am doubting. We should revise his answer. Whatever it is I am calling doubt exists. Whether I exist as a person thinking the doubt is a different matter.

Descartes then rebuilds reality with confidence, bringing God in as a deus ex machina, the god of the ancient play who swoops in on some mechanism and rescues the person in distress. Because we can trust God, we can trust that the world basically is as it appears. Kant makes a similar move almost two hundred years later. Sure we can only know the world as our minds process it, but God has made the mind software, so it must work properly.

This tendency among believing philosophers to bring God into the mix highlights the fact that faith is always involved with our belief in reality and in what we know about it. Apart from believing that something exists, everything else that we believe, to one degree or another, requires faith, where faith is belief in the face of varying degrees of uncertainty. In saying that faith is always involved, we should not assume that faith is always blind faith. Blind faith is when we believe in something for which there is very little or no evidence at all, but we choose to believe anyway. Faith is belief without absolute certainty. Most of the time faith is not blind.

So does reality exist? I'll have to admit I can't prove it. I could be a brain attached to wires in a vat somewhere. I could be a sophisticated computer program like the Matrix. I suppose I could even be dreaming (although if so, this is the most vivid dream I've ever had). My belief that I actually exist on a planet called earth in the early twenty-first century requires faith--in some senses an immense amount of basic faith.

But it is a faith that works very well. In the 1700's, Thomas Reid became the "father" of what we might call the school of Scottish Realism. He called it "common sense realism" and others call it "naive realism." This is a sense that we actually do know the world directly through intuition. Over the last two hundred years several philosophers have suggested in one way or another that Descartes set us up for confusion by making the hard and fast distinction between ourselves and the world, the distinction between me as subject and the world as object [see the last chapter].

There is a great appeal, especially on a popular level, just to take the world as it is. I would argue--and because we are talking postmodern now, I intentionally bring myself as the writer of this chapter into view--that this common sense realism is fine as long as it acknowledges that this is an item of faith. Because I can brainstorm other possibilities that the common sense realist cannot disprove on her own terms she must concede that faith is involved. [this also applies to the phenomenologist that we will discuss in the final chapter]

A slightly different perspective that arrives at an ironically similar destination is pragmatic realism. These are those that consider questions about what is truly behind reality as largely irrelevant. What is real is the way things work in our world. Some, like Hilary Putnam, are more optimistic that what we are seeing might have some sort of reality beyond our interaction with the world. Others like Richard Rorty don't think there is any meaningful reality beyond how we function in the world. It seems to me that we are on good ground to accept at least this much. We may not be able to prove or demonstrate much of anything about the nature of the world beyond our interaction with it, but it is not incoherent to operate by faith as if it exists.

We as Christians might want to exercise even more faith and consider ourselves critical realists. We recognize that because of the fallen state of the human mind after Adam (whatever this might mean), we do not see the world objectively. But we have faith in a God who is a God of truth and thus that there is a reality out there that is real. We are critical of our own apprehension of that reality, but by faith we believe in reality.

Truth After Modernism
If Richard Rorty is perhaps the major postmodern philosopher to know in relation to reality. Michel Foucault is probably the one to know in relation to the topic of knowledge. For Foucault, "knowledge is violence." That is to say, all knowing of the world is an imposition on the world.

We might call Foucault a "post-structuralist," because he believes that all the patterns and structures we think we "find" in the world are really ideas we are forcing on the world. In one sense, Foucault's idea here makes sense. The world is an almost infinite collection of individual bits of data. Our finite minds cannot master even the smallest portion of that data, let alone have anywhere near a complete sense of how each bit relates to every other bit.

The result is that our knowing of the world requires us to "select" certain bits of the world as more important than others, which we then implicitly "deselect." We prioritize certain data and "rip" it "violently" from reality. Then we usually claim to have discovered the pattern in reality. Foucault suggests we are rather forcing the pattern on reality.

Truth for Foucault is thus not real but is a matter of power. What is true is what I can convince or force others to "see" with me. Ironically, Foucault studied a number of patterns in history that seem to "work" very well. He not only studied the history of sex but also the history of crime and of insanity. His constructions of reality are at many points very convincing. So he argues that sexuality as a distinct aspect of a person is a fairly recent way of structuring knowledge. And he shows how the punishment of crime has moved in the last century from a technique of public shame to a private revenge ceremony.

In the philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn seems to embody this approach to truth well. Kuhn has argued that scientific paradigms or ways of interpreting specific subjects are constantly changing and do not really point to any fixed truth. So at one time the "normal science" perspective was that the sun went around the earth. When Copernicus then argued that the earth went around the sun, his math was not at all the clear winner in the argument. But, in a Foucaultian way, we was able to convince a group of scientists who eventually had enough power to overthrow the geocentric paradigm. It was only with Johannes Kepler that the math actually superceded the other side.

Normal science resists paradigm change. Instead, it uses its power to maintain its status as the dominant paradigm. But there is almost always data out there that doesn't fit very well into the paradigm. I like to call it "naughty data." Eventually, someone notices this aberrant data and rather than using their intellect to try to fit the data into the present paradigm, they brainstorm a completely different one. They generally face resistance and opposition. But if they can gain power in the guild, their ideas might get a hearing. If the younger scientists go for the idea, the older scientists will eventually die off. Viola--a new dominant paradigm!

The history of science seems filled with examples of this process. We have already mentioned Copernicus and the question of whether the sun goes around the earth. We could also mention belief in the existence of oxygen, relativity, and quantum mechanics in physics. This last paradigm shift is particularly interesting, because in its case Einstein was one of the "normal scientists" who didn't accept the new paradigm.

Quantum mechanics operates on the idea that when an electron is moving from one charge to another, it simply jumps--it doesn't pass through all the theoretical charges in between. This shift in thinking entailed all kinds of differences between the way Isaac Newton did physics and the way nuclear physicists do today. Einstein was one of many who opposed many aspects of quantum mechanics.

But he's dead now. Today we find almost no competent physicists who would agree with Einstein. But Kuhn would say they will get theirs eventually. Eventually someone will come along with another paradigm shift. Some would say that string theory may bring a similar revolution, although it hasn't yet. Kuhn initially took a very "pessimistic" view of paradigms, as if no paradigm was ultimately any better than any other. In the second edition of his work, he allowed for the possibility that some paradigms might account for data better than others [Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Ironically, it was the topic of evolution that pushed him to make this allowance. He did not want to allow for the possibility that creation science might be an equally valid way of understanding the scientific evidence]

Texts after Modernism
We might finally mention how postmodernism has played itself out in relation to the meaning of texts. Here the key player is Jacques Derrida, the "father" of deconstruction. Deconstruction is a movement that believes there are no fixed meanings in any text. As soon as you try to construct the meaning of a text, it unravels or "de-constructs" before you.

The following illustration is a caricature of the deconstructionist idea. Let's say I want to know the meaning of the previous sentence. I go to a dictionary and look up each of the words. But what do I find? More words! I could spend the rest of my life looking up the words in the definitions of the words in the definitions of the words in the definitions of each word in that sentence. Meaning becomes like a dog chasing its tail.

Now this illustration does not do justice to Derrida, but it points us in the right direction. The main idea is that words have no meaning in themselves. We find the meaning in the difference between this word and that word, or as Derrida liked to put it, in the differance between them, in the "traces" of meaning left in the movement from one word to the next.

What are we to make of this? On the one hand, Derrida is not as pessimistic as we might make him sound. After all, he wrote books and wanted others (at least some) to understand him. But he seems to bring up a valid point. Take the word gift. What does it mean? If you are an English speaker, you no doubt think of a present of some sort. But if you are a German speaker, you will see here the word for poison.

The meaning of a word does seem to be a function of the mind looking at the word. To be sure, we don't just invent our own individualistic meanings to words. Stanley Fish has pointed out that we get our "dictionaries" for words from the communities to which we belong. Ludwig Wittgenstein put it a different way. The meaning of a word is a function of the "language game" we are playing in a particular "form of life."

If I say, "fire" in a crowded theater, the language game tells me that this is a command to run for your life. If the form of life is a firing squad and I am holding a gun in my hand pointed at someone, I am being told to shoot the person. If a boss tells me "you're fired" or I am on a deserted island and finally someone has managed to rub two sticks together enough to get a spark, all of these situations have different games that tell me what meaning to take from the word fire. The word has no intrinsic meaning apart from a particular context.

So Wittgenstein is also known for asking the question, "If a lion could speak, would we understand it?" The answer he is looking for is "no," because even if you could put its words into Google and translate it, we would not know the language game needed to understand it because we do not know the forms of life that pertain to a lion.