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THE GOSPEL IN POSTMODERNITY: FINDING A “CENTER”

Suspicion is widespread within the postmodern ethos of those who claim to speak from a “center” claimed to be self-evident and beyond dispute. The postmodern person is said to live a “decentered” existence. A favorite metaphor to depict this decentered condition is that of a voyager inhabiting a leaky boat in constant need of repair and set adrift on the high seas. This nautical metaphor, suggested by the philosopher 0. Neurath, pictures the ship of postmodernity as requiring emergency repairs to keep it afloat while the hapless vessel is still in the water. With no chance to put in to harbor one must salvage the craft before it sinks, and one must do so with no dry dock for a “foundation” and nothing but the raging sea beneath one’s feet.

This vision of life as precariously decentered should come as no shock to Christians who know the human heart is restless until it finds its rest in God. The Christian is well acquainted with the precariousness of the human journey, but he or she also knows that the journey is not merely an aimless drifting. It is a pilgrimage set upon a homeward course. For Christians, moreover, what infuses life with risk and challenge is not the com-plete absence of a “center” but the conviction that the “center” we confess is none other than the unfathomable and uncoercible God.

Karl Barth used to say that in proclaiming the mystery of God theology is always forced to “begin again at the beginning.” Throughout his life Barth compared the “center” of theology to the open hole at the center of a rimless wagonwheel. The “open center” is the divine-human relationship in Jesus Christ. In The Epistle to the Romans Barth imagined the spokes surrounding this open center as a ring of questions that never for a moment cease to be questions. Jutting out into the open, with no “outer rim” to circumscribe them, this ceaseless questioning implies that the outer edges of theology are without predetermined limits. In a seldom-read passage in the Church Dogmatics Barth declared that the outer penumbra of the wagon wheel includes certain distinctive voices from outside the believing commu-nity as well as the voices we are already accustomed to hearing from within it. There are “secular parables of truth,” he explains, which are non-Christian affirmations of grace that help to “illumine, accentuate, or explain the biblical witness in a particular time and situation” (see Church Dogmatics, IV/3.1 §69.2,115).

In the same way that the spokes of a wagonwheel radiate in all directions, so too the Word of God speaks in all directions. On the one hand, Jesus Christ is the “center,” the norm of Christian theology; but, on the other hand, one cannot assume at the outset that every-thing worth knowing about Jesus Christ has already come into the open. Perhaps insights emanating from sources on the periphery of established meaning are but dim refractions of a ray of light that so far has been ignored. One often-cited example of this is the way in which slavery used to be widely accepted by Christians but is now almost universally condemned. Another more recent example is the dawning recognition of how women have been sorely oppressed by a patriarchal society. In her now-classic book In Memory of Her E. Schüssler Fiorenza seeks to uncover something about the Christian “center” that was not clearly seen before, namely, the liberating implications for women present in the way Jesus gathered his disciples. Only by looking at the center afresh through the prism of the “periph-ery is she able to see more of what the center itself is really all about. In a similar vein R. Chopp, in her book The Power to Speak, conceives of the Word as an “open sign” that liberates and promotes human flourishing by gathering meaning not simply from the ordinary centers of power but also from the periphery.

Perhaps a better nautical metaphor, then, to describe the theologian’s task is that of an off-shore oil rig. Massive drilling rigs must drill for oil in deep water often under extreme conditions. In order to drill in such conditions it is critical for the rig to stay directly over its “center,” the well head on the bottom of the ocean floor. Yet keeping the rig stable against the force of a turbulent sea is an inherently impossible task which requires a technol-ogy called “dynamic positioning.” Mounted on the hull of modern drilling rigs are an array of powerful thrusters that work continually to reposition the equip-ment over its ever-elusive target. Able to swivel, if need be, a full 360 degrees, these thrusters are there to respond, should currents change or winds shift, to meet the changing conditions of an untamed sea.

To be true to its task, theology today must preach the gospel’s ancient message while also meeting the novel conditions of a changing sea. Because it is the Word of God we proclaim, there will be manifold ways of proclaiming this message, no one of which can exhaust the wonder of who God is in Word, the grace of who God is in liberating Deed.

By William Stacy Johnson, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.