EngineeredTheology

The terms modern, postmodern, and emergent have been getting thrown around quite a bit within the Christian circle for the past 4-5 years. While these terms have some meaning outside the Christian subculture, they take on some specific connotations when referring to religion.

To start, there was a pre-modern time. This was the term we give to the time before the renaissance. For Christian thought, this was the time when the holy catholic (with a lower-case “c”) determined what was orthodoxy. We would label much of the belief as dogma because there was no identifiable logical progression of ideas.

The age of enlightenment then came to shed light on the dark ages. Dogma was examined and belief was transformed. Theology began to be determined solo scriptura, and the bible studied to define exactly what was, and was not being taught. As we have progressed into the 1980′s and 1990′s extra biblical text and histories began to be compared against the bible. Groups like the Jesus Seminar then compared biblical text and began to define what was most likely, and likely not factual history.

In very broad terms, the age of enlightenment came to help organise and define the world. If there was an idea that could not be categorised and logically defined, it was cast out for one that was more scientifically sound. This sort of reasoning drove the industrial revolution and helped bring the technological advances we have today.

The church, for at least the past 30 years has found its self in uncomfortable waters. When the light of science came squarely to bear on the Christian faith, the church saw its self staring down into heresy and areas it could not go. The resurrection, divinity of Jesus, and the recorded miracles in the bible were non-negotiable. When faced with meeting modernity head on with these questions, Christianity fled back to much of it’s pre-modern dogma. To date, the majority of Protestant churches have halted their theology advances with C.S. Lewis (and the Roman Catholic churches far earlier). Even some of his ideas, if observed closely, would be somewhat suspect by today’s mind. Have theologians had nothing to contribute to Christianity in the last 50 years?

While Christian thought has halted, the organisational structure has embraced modernism wholeheartedly. Much of modern American Christianity has become very structured, organised, and logical. Christianity is big business, with sizeable money and political influence. What we have is a super fit state of the art body running off of a wilted underused mind.

Post-modernism is labeled aptly for the period after modernism. For me, most of what is labeled as post-modern is not what I would define as a departure from modernism, but the evolution of modernism. Much of the green movement and the current spirituality shows much of the same fingerprint as modernism. It isn’t so easy as to label Hummers and Twinkies as modern and call the Prius and Whole Foods post-modern. Both come from the same industrial, logic driven, marketing machine. Organic food has some scientific backing to be better for us than McDonalds – and we have realised that the Hummer lifestyle is not sustainable. This is not a departure from modernism, just its next evolution. For me, the Christian face of post-modernity is Mark Driscoll. While it is probably unfair and short sited of me, much of the post-modern movement has been a new marketing scheme (with new Web 2.0 graphics!!) wrapped around much of the same pre-modern theology.

For me, what is a departure from modernism is not well defined (but the least threatening term I hear is emergent). If it is a departure from the structured logic and definition of modernism, it is not very surprising that the movement is largely undefined (and unnamed). It is not a retreat into pre-modernism, but an acknowledgement that not all life is conveniently defined and organised. It has reviewed the best that modernism has to offer and found it wanting. Theology has been redefined, and the problems that kept the church away from modernist theology are found to only exist within modernism.

This current time is difficult because a modern church cannot accept any theology outside of it’s own orthodoxy. With a deterministic viewpoint, you have mapped out the truth and anything outside of that truth must be false. A truly postmodern viewpoint does not even traffic in the same thought patterns, so little effective communication is had over the wall. I can feel change coming, and I suspect a lot will be changing in the American Christian landscape over the next 10 years – into what I cannot say.