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EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY AND THE CHALLENGE OF POSTMODERNISM

Western society is today in the midst of a vast cultural and intellectual upheaval that is profoundly changing our world. Just as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a transition from medieval to modern periods, the late twentieth century is beginning to move us from modernity to a new "postmodern" era. Because we are only at the beginning of this shift, it remains unclear how much is really changing and where the purported changes are heading. Yet even in its early stages, certain postmodern trends seem irreversible. 

To understand postmodernity we must first examine modernity. Based as it was in the Enlightenment, modernity saw the autonomous, thinking individual as the fundamental unit of human society. Such individuals were thought to possess a common capacity to reason and a common human experience that transcended the particularities of their culture, language, or historical era. Through the use of reason and by reflecting on their experience, individuals could sift through various truth claims (including those of Christianity) to discover what is in fact verifiably and therefore universally true. Modernity was marked by a series of contrasting dualisms: fact and belief (or opinion), mind and matter, reason and emotion, subjective and objective. 

All of this had a profound effect on Western Christian theology, eventually generating its division into competing "liberal" and "conservative" wings. The liberals began transforming Christianity to fit it within these newer ways of thinking by such things as eschewing miracles and downplaying unverifiable supernatural claims; conservatives defended traditional teachings, often through providing rational arguments designed to move Christian truth claims from the "opinion" category to that of "fact." Both shared Enlightenment assumptions. 

Postmodernity begins its thinking with the community rather than the individual, and understands persons to be products of their culture and its web of relationships. Reason and experience are seen not as universal but culturally conditioned capacities; that is, we do not all reason and experience the same way. Consequently reason is not a neutral arbiter of what counts as universal truth but is itself dependent on a set of implicit cultural beliefs that actually make such reasoning possible. Postmodernity is also more holistic and organic in its thinking: fact and belief, mind and matter, reason and emotion, subjective and objective are seen as inseparably and mutually necessary elements of a larger whole. 

Postmodern philosophers are divided over what to make of these trends. Two different approaches have emerged, each with implications for theology. "Ultra-critics" such as J. Derrida, M. Foucault, and R. Rorty passionately seek to honor and preserve difference and diversity. They do this by denying any claim to universal truth, whether made by a secular philosophy like Marxism or a religion like Christianity; "truth" for them is socially constructed, not discovered. They see in such universal truth claims (or "metanarratives") attempts to impose one's particular and limited version of "truth" on those who are different, thus suppressing the distinctiveness of the "other." All too often, this imposition of truth by one group on another is accompanied by violence; always it entails the denial of the integrity and worth of the "other." A reliable and user-friendly introduction to this strand of postmodernism is A Primer on Postmodernism by S.J. Grenz (Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1996). 

Contemporary theology has been enormously affected by this way of thinking. The diversity of theologies representing the perspectives of various cultures, races, and genders as well as the confession of one's own limitation due to one's social location (e.g., I am a North American white male) is one manifestation. A more radical form is the religious pluralism that denies universal truth to any religion, including Christianity. 

A second strand of postmodern thought includes "post-critics" such as L. Wittgenstein, A. MacIntyre, and M. Polanyi. Post-critics argue that we all participate in communities in which we are shaped by communal narratives and practices; it is these that enable us to understand our world. These persons are more open to our actually discovering universal truth than the ultra-critics, but nevertheless maintain that our knowledge is always necessarily mediated through our communities with their distinctive culture, language, stories, and practices. We always see our world through a cultural lens; without the lens we would be unable to see at all. A very helpful introduction to this post-critical strand is Anglo-American Postmodernity by N. Murphy (Westview, 1997). 

This strand of postmodernism too has had an impact on contemporary theology, most notably in the writings of postliberals such as H. Frei, G. Lindbeck, W. Placher, and S. Hauerwas. Because postliberal theology defends historic Christian claims it has interested many evangelicals, as is seen in the essays in The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation, edited by T.R. Phillips and D.L. Okholm (InterVarsity, 1996). 

How should evangelical theology respond to postmodernism? I will suggest several lines of critical response, and note some representative theologians who illustrate them. 

First, evangelicals must surely reject any claim that truth is relative or is only a social construct. We hold firmly that Jesus Christ is not only our Lord and Savior but is Lord and Savior of the world. A number of evangelical thinkers have offered strong criticism of postmodern relativism. Roger Lundin traces the literary and hermeneutical path to postmodern relativism in The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World (Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1993). Thomas C. Oden offers a theological account in After Modernity...What? (Zondervan, 1990), and proposes as an alternative a contemporary recovery of the classical Christian tradition. David F. Wells, in his highly influential No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1993), provides a critique of our relativistic, materialistic, and therapeutic culture with its preoccupation with the self, and calls for an evangelicalism once again focused firmly on God. 

Second, while rejecting postmodern relativism, we should not be in the business of defending modernity. Evangelical apologetics as well as evangelistic practice has been far too wedded to Enlightenment individualism and rationalism. This is A. McGrath's warning in A Passion for Truth (InterVarsity, 1996), where he urges evangelical theology to free itself from Enlightenment rationalism and be faithfully rooted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the normative authority of Scripture. Indeed, to be free from the restrictive vision of Western modernity may open us to biblical realities that we have forgotten or denied. Charles Kraft, inChristianity with Power (Servant, 1989), makes a strong case that our Enlightenment worldview has made us unreceptive to the power of the Holy Spirit to work signs and wonders today, something Christians in other cultures easily accept. 

Third, while rejecting their relativism, we must take with utmost seriousness the ultra-critics' warning against the imposition of our beliefs on those who are different. J.R. Middleton and B.J. Walsh show in Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be (InterVarsity, 1995) that to indwell the biblical metanarrative is to participate in its sensitivity to suffering, creational intent, and open-mindedness, all of which counter tendencies to impose our agenda on others. Rather, the text invites and the Spirit empowers us to proclaim and live out the redemptive purpose of God for the world. I make a similar case in A Future for Truth (Abingdon, 1997), where I argue that because Jesus is raised from the dead he is universally Savior and Lord, but because it is the crucified Jesus who is raised, this "metanarrative" is intrinsically non-oppressive. From another angle, M. Volf understands salvation to entail not only reconciliation with God but the embrace of the other, even the other who has also been one's enemy. This he powerfully and sensitively argues in Exclusion and Embrace (Abingdon, 1996). 

Fourth, we need to take seriously our own cultural context and the effect it has on our understanding of the gospel. To acknowledge our own contextual limitations does not require us to deny the truth of the gospel, but it does require more humility concerning our interpretation of that gospel. Richard Lints proposes a theological method that takes into account our contextual bias. In The Fabric of Theology (Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1993) he urges evangelicals to be in conversation with postmodernism, and develops a method in which the Bible provides a fundamental framework for theology that in turn can generate a theological vision to address contemporary culture. Lesslie Newbigin, drawing on post-critical thinkers, distinguishes between true and false contextualization in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1989), and shows how the gospel can indwell and transform diverse cultures as Christian communities in those cultures indwell and faithfully live out of Scripture. 

Finally, we need to appropriate the holistic and relational aspects of postmodernism as developed by post-critical thinkers. These are much closer to biblical modes of thought than the individualism and dualism of modernity. Nancey Murphy, in Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism (Trinity, 1996), shows how post-critical thinkers enable both evangelicals and liberals to move beyond the impasse created by modern philosophy. New holistic models of thought mean one no longer has to choose-indeed, one no longer can choose-between Scripture and experience as the basis for theology, or immanence and intervention to describe how God relates to the world. Stanley J. Grenz makes a case for defining evangelicalism more as a spirituality than a set of doctrinal propositions. In Revisioning Evangelical Theology (InterVarsity, 1993) he proposes a narrative understanding of Scripture and shows how the life of the Christian community is the primary means of mirroring the life of the triune God on earth. 

We can especially benefit from the postcritical insight that reason is itself always rooted in a community whose practices are shaped by a particular narrative. This means even scientific reasoning is not a purely "objective" category but must necessarily rest on prior beliefs. As L. Newbigin and I argue, the resurrection of the crucified Jesus is the foundational belief upon which Christianity stands; it is the lens through which we see everything else. The resurrection no longer has to fit within some other "universal" framework of thought to be considered "true"; it is instead the starting-point for a distinctively Christian reflection on God and the world. 

Ultimately, postmodernism is a theological and missional opportunity. Because it honors particularity, postmodern Christians can be Christian without running afoul of some universal "truth" of modernity that would place limits on what Christians could intelligently say or do. As such, it is a much more open environment for evangelicals to do what they do best: proclaim with confidence the good news of Jesus Christ and manifest that love in mission to the world. 

By Henry H. Knight III, Assistant Professor of Evangelism, Saint Paul School of Theology.