Christianity & Postmodernism 5: Nothing outside the text?

By Caleb | September 8, 2010

Continuing my series on Christianity and Postmodernism:

French philosopher Jacques Derrida, is famous, or infamous, for his technique of “Deconstruction”. He made the provocative claim in his book Of Grammatology that “There is nothing outside the text”.

By this, he didn’t mean that the things around us – people and trees and knives and forks – don’t actually exist, that there aren’t really any material objects, just ideas. Rather, he was criticising the idea that we can ever read something without interpretation. We usually only talk about “interpretation” when we encounter something we find hard to understand. I interpret the book of Revelation, but I just understand the newspaper.

Derrida is saying that everything is interpreted – not just words on a page, but all our experiences. There is no way of getting at the world in an entirely objective way, apart from our pre-existing knowledge, experiences, beliefs, culture and so on.

The worry for Christians is that one interpretation becomes just as good as any other. People say “That’s just your interpretation” to end a discussion, to imply that it’s just a subjective opinion and there’s no meaningful way of judging one interpretation as more true than another. If the Gospel is an interpretation, it is not objectively true in the modern sense of being self-evident or universally demonstrable.

But if we look at what the Bible says, it doesn’t portray the Gospel as objective in this sense. As Abraham says to the rich man in Jesus’ parable in Luke 16:

‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’

Or think of the reaction of the people to God speaking from heaven in John 12 – some said it was thunder, others an angel.

Again, the truth of the Gospel isn’t self-evident because we are sinners with darkened minds. People don’t need more evidence to become Christians, they need changed hearts. Knowledge of God is as a gift of his grace, as well as salvation – we don’t have to work it out by ourselves before we can be saved by grace. God graciously reveals himself to us by his Spirit – it’s his work, not something that’s universally demonstrable by us.

There’s no neutral position free from prior assumptions and faith commitments, as various Christian writers and apologists such as Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til recognised. Modernism pretends to be objective, but even that has to begin from a position of faith in autonomous human reason. Postmodernism rightly tries to reveal the underlying assumptions of supposedly neutral and objective positions, but goes too far if it says its impossible to make any kind of rational judgement between positions them.

Further reading:
  • Nothing Outside the Text? Taking Derrida to Church – article by James K A Smith
  • Is there a meaning in this text? : the Bible, the reader, and the morality of literary knowledge by Kevin J Vanhoozer (Apollos, 1998) – detailed examination of the epistemology of literary knowledge from a Christian perspective
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My new smartphone

By Caleb | July 26, 2010

My mobile phone contract recently came to an end. I’d been paying £8.50 per month to Virgin Mobile for 100 minutes and 100 texts. I sometimes used up all my minutes, but almost never that many texts.

I really fancied getting some kind of smart phone, and since my mp3 player was literally being held together by an elastic band, if it could double as a new mp3 player, so much the better. The key features I wanted were:

Easy synchronisation with my email, calendar, tasks and so on.Ability to download and play podcasts directly on my phoneCheap or unmetered Internet access

Since I use Google’s Gmail, Calendar, Tasks and so on, a phone with Google’s Android operating system was an obvious choice, and I knew that Android has a great podcast app in the form of Google Listen. There was no way I could justify an expensive gadget like the iPhone, or the top of the range Android models only available on the £30 per month contracts, to myself (or more importantly, to my wife), but there are by now plenty of cheaper options on the market.

I quickly settled on T-Mobile as the most promising choice of network for my needs. If you choose a smartphone, “unlimited” Internet access is included, even on the cheapest tariffs. T-Mobile also offer a choice of a “Flexible Booster”, such as unlimited texts, landline calls, or T-Mobile calls, which you can swap around monthly. Since most of my minutes are spent on the phone to my wife Bev, and she had just switched to T-Mobile, the “Unlimited T-Mobile Calls” booster would make a big difference to me, even if my basic allowance of minutes and texts remained unchanged.

Of course, I’d only been paying £8.50 a month – T-Mobile’s cheapest tariff is £10 a month, and they don’t offer any Android phones for free at that point. One option was to go up to £15 per month, get 300 minutes and texts, and a smartphone “free”. Alternatively, I could pay money upfront to get a smartphone on a £10 tariff.

So in the end I opted for an Android phone on the £10 a month tariff – 100 minutes and 100 texts, plus unlimited Internet access, and unlimited calls to other T-Mobile phones, on a two-year contract.

I strongly considered getting the LG Intouch Max phone. My friend Phillip has this phone, and one of its most attractive features is its slide-out QWERTY keyboard. I’m not a big fan of touchscreens and have always found texting on a numeric keypad cumbersome, so that was quite a selling point.

But having played around with my wife’s new touchscreen phone, I found that the newer capacitive screens are quite usable, and the T-Mobile Pulse at £40 less (£35 instead of £76) had very decent reviews and a better screen. While it came with the same fairly old version 1.5 of Android, I discovered it could be upgraded to Android 2.1 through an update released on T-Mobile Hungrary’s website (slightly bizarrely, it’s not on the UK site, though it works fine here). So I decided that while a physical keyboard would be nice, a cheaper phone with a bigger, better screen and more recent version of Android was a bigger draw.

My T-Mobile Pulse arrived on Friday. The first thing I did was to update the operating system following the useful instructions given on the Modaco Android forums, plus some other tweaks – I might discuss my customisations in more detail in another blog post.

Once that was done and I’d set up my email address and so on, I went a bit crazy with Android Market, quickly filling up the internal memory with various weird and wonderful free Apps! I’ve calmed down a bit now and cut back to those I think I’ll actually use. Once I’ve had more time using them, I might write about which I find to actually be worthwhile.

I’ve had it a couple of weeks now and I’m very happy with it. The number and variety of apps is bewildering but there are some that are genuinely handy. Easy access on the go to the web is very handy, especially combined with GPS for maps and the like. I’ve even begun to get the hang of touchscreen.

Oh, and it also happens to make phone calls!

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God’s will is good grammar

By Caleb | July 26, 2010

A month or so ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Christian Postgraduate Conference in Dovedale, Derbyshire, at which Edith Reitsma from L’Abri Fellowship England and Alister McGrath, writer of many books including The Dawkins Delusion, were speaking. I’m starting my masters in September, but might as well get started early in thinking about how my faith and my studies will relate!

One of the many fascinating people I met on the conference was Anthony Smith, who is a PhD researcher in Astronomy. He also writes a blog, and just drew attention to a talk entitled “The Sound of Freedom” by Jeremy Begbie on freedom and faith from the Veritas Forum, drawing on the analogy of music. Another talk for my ever-expanding queue to listen to on my mp3 player, then!

Anthony’s introduction to the talk is as follows:

We tend to think that if we allow God into our lives, in the way that the Christian message suggests that we should, then that will make less room for ourselves. That is, there is a certain amount of “space” in my life, and the more God enters that “space”, the more I get shoved out. So to become a Christian is to diminish my freedom.

But this isn’t the only way of looking at things. Drawing heavily on the analogy of music, Begbie presents a much more enriching and appealing perspective on how the presence of God in my life affects my own freedom.

This reminded me of another analogy of how rules bring freedom: God’s will is like good grammar for our lives.

In language, it’s only by having a shared set of grammatical rules that we can communicate to each other. Language free from grammar isn’t really free, it’s nonsense. But the rules of grammar give us a framework through which we have the freedom to express our thoughts; there are virtually no limits to what can be said through language.

Of course, grammar isn’t rigid and unchanging. If you know the rules well, then you can break them in creative ways – for example, the statement that “Verbing weirds language”. But such variations depend on knowing the conventions of grammar, and understanding how they are being departed from. To make sense of the above phrase, you actually need a very sophisticated understanding of grammar; it only works, in fact, because it is still obeys the rules of grammar at a deeper level. And language changes and develops over time, of course, but still relying on shared rules and conventions. In short, you need the structure of grammar to give freedom of speech.

The same principle, that form and freedom go together, has much wider applications. I think it’s helpful to think of God’s will for our lives less like a fixed text, and more like a grammar that governs our lives, but within which we have great freedom and creativity. This grammar for life is what the Bible calls “wisdom”.

Often we think of God’s will as something fixed and monolithic – there is only one right answer. That may be true in some situations, but I think that often we are free to choose between equally valid options. What matters in such cases in not so much what we choose, as how we choose it – do we do so prayerfully, bringing our choices to God, not necessarily to find the One Right Answer, but rather to learn from him the habits of love and humility, passion and commitment, that he wants to develop in us. God’s will does not constrict our freedom and the expression of our humanity, but is their basis and fullness.

Or as the Psalmist put it far more poetically:

How sweet are your words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!

Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light for my path.

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James: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

By Caleb | July 5, 2010

James: Wake Up and Smell the CoffeeYesterday, I preached the first in a new evening series at Mack on the book of James titled “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee“. James urges us to put our faith into action, and is like a shot of coffee to wake us up in our Christian lives. Below is the text of my sermon.

Introduction

When was the last time you received a letter from someone? Not just a bill or advert, but an actual letter from a friend, written to you personally?

In this electronic age, many of us are more likely to dash off an email or a text message, or to write on someone’s Facebook wall. It’s great that we can keep in touch so easily. But there’s something special about a letter you can touch and hold on to. Our emails and texts are transient scraps of thought sent today and deleted tomorrow.

LettersBut fortunately for us, James and other leaders of the early church, such as Peter and Paul, relied on good old pen and paper, or probably ink and papyrus. These weren’t just passing thoughts, the first century equivalent of “Train running late, C U soon”.

Instead, they were moved and inspired by God the Holy Spirit to write down wisdom, teaching, and encouragement. The church quickly recognised these letters as being inspired by God himself. Christians carefully copied them and handed them down through the centuries. Through these letters, God is speaking words of eternal truth to his people throughout history, right down to us today. These letters, or “epistles”, make up 21 out of the 27 books of the New Testament.

So who was James? Who was he writing to, and why? What does a letter written almost 2000 years ago have to say to us today?

Matthew 13:55 tells us that James was one of Jesus’ younger brothers. Although we often refer to the Virgin Mary, after she had miraculously given birth to Jesus, she and Joseph went on to have a normal family. In Acts we see that James was a leader in the early church, and history tells us he was executed in 62 AD.

The book is written to “the twelve tribes scattered among the nations” – the 12 tribes referring to Israel, so mainly to Jewish Christians. It often talks about the Law, the Jewish Torah. It is similar in style to Jewish wisdom literature like the book of Proverbs. It has lots of memorable advice on different topics, moving quickly from one subject to another – which is why we’ve decided to tackle a different theme each week, rather than going through it chapter by chapter.

Throughout his letter, James is calling us to action. “Count it all joy”, “Ask God”, “Don’t be deceived”, “Know this”, “Receive the Word” are just a few of the many commands he gives us. His aim to spur us into action, to give us a kick up the backside, a shot of coffee for our spiritual lives.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be looking in detail at the practical instruction James has for us in various areas of our lives. Good works aren’t an optional extra, but a vital part of living out our lives as Christians. I urge you to think practically each week about what specific steps you can take to live out your faith in God and love for God more fully. As we go through James, identify at least one thing each week to work on. Write it down. Pray each day about it. Tell some Christian friends about it, and get them to check up on how you’re doing.

We often put up our defences to avoid the full force of what the Bible is telling us:

  1. Ignoring what God says to us
  2. Pretending not to understand God
  3. Thinking we can have faith without deeds
  4. Dismissing God’s commands as impossible

But James steam-rollers through all of our defences, by reminding us of God’s gifts to us. Let’s see what he’s got to say to us:

Defence 1: Ignoring what the Bible says

MirrorJames tells us “anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like”.

A question: when you read the Bible, do you feel at peace? Be honest – don’t just give a pat good Christian answer. Does the Bible make you feel uncomfortable? Do you ever get the sense that there something missing? You look around at your life as a Christian and the church here around you, on the one hand – and then you read the Bible, see the life of the early church, and you look at Jesus on the other hand. And there’s a contrast. You read the New Testament, and being a follower of Christ seems to demand a whole other level of commitment and adventure.

If the Bible makes you feel uncomfortable, then there’s still hope for you. Part of you remembers what you saw in the mirror. The Bible isn’t supposed to be comfortable. When I look in the mirror first thing in the morning, my first thought isn’t “My, what a handsome chap”. It’s more like “Help! There’s a Yeti shuffling towards me! Oh, wait, that’s my reflection!” Looking into the mirror when I’m in an early morning state isn’t comfortable, but it does show me I need to shave, wash, have a cup of tea and put some clothes on.

If the Bible never makes you feel uncomfortable, be worried – you might already be too good at blocking out anything challenging, anything that would force you to act or to change. You may have already deafened yourself to what God is trying to say to you.

One way in which I think I’m in danger of deafening myself, and perhaps some others of you too, is in the way we talk about the preaching. If we actually get round at all to discussing the sermon, we so often spend our time complaining about the preacher’s style (or lack of it), the length of the sermon (too long or too short), minor points of disagreement – anything and everything except what we think God might have been saying to us through his word.

But there is always hope; God gives sight to the blind and opens the ears of deaf. Pray to him, go and “look intently into the perfect law that gives freedom”; “humbly accept the word planted in you.” Read the Bible until your skin crawls! Put it into action, and keep on putting it into action, and James promises you, you will be blessed by God’s gift of his word.

Defence 2: “The Bible is too hard to understand”

God Said It, I Interpreted It, That Doesn't Quite Settle ItIt’s all very well to want to put the Bible into action, you might say, but how can I know what exactly the Bible says? There are so many interpretations, after all.

You’ve probably heard the saying “God says it; I believe it; that settles it.” We often pooh-pooh such a naive approach. We’re wise not to assume that we’ll always understand the Bible right first time. But if we do believe that God has said something, surely that should settle it – not as a stick to beat other people with, but for us to follow in our own beliefs and behaviour?

Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard claimed the following:

“The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand it, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?”

If we think we can’t understand the Bible, James gives us a very simple solution in 1:5: “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him”

So as we look at the book of James, I want to challenge you – don’t overcomplicate things. Take the Bible at its word, simply pledge yourself to act on whatever God says to you. If you don’t understand it, study it, read books and commentaries, talk to other Christians. But most of all, pray to God for his gift of wisdom.

Defence 3: “We’re saved by faith, so I can sit back and relax”

But wait a moment – Paul tells us in Romans 3:24 that we are “justified freely by God’s grace”, and again in Ephesians 2:8-9 that we are saved “by grace”, “through faith”, “not by works”, so that no-one can boast”. Does this mean we can sit back and relax – how we live doesn’t really matter?

But if you think like this and live like this, you show that you haven’t actually understood grace. Worse, it might be a sign that your faith itself is not faith at all, and you may not actually be a Christian in the first place!
Abraham and IsaacJames tells us that faith by itself, just believing in your head, if not accompanied by action is dead. He points us to the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22 to illustrate his point. God tested Abraham’s faith by asking him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham was willing to do so, trusting that God would still keep his promise to make Abraham’s descendants a great nation. God sent an angel and a ram to tell Abraham that he, God, would provide the sacrifice.

James goes on to say that “the scripture was fulfilled that says ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness’ and he was called God’s friend. You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.”

We sometimes struggle to understand the Bible because we lose our place in the story. For example, you might get the impression that the Jews in the Old Testament had to obey the Law in order to be saved – after all, haven’t you got all those rules, in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus?

But if you follow the story, you’ll see that God rescues Israel first, he brings them out of slavery in Egypt to be his people, and then gives them the Law. Grace and mercy were woven into the very fabric of the Old Testament law, just as they are woven into the perfect law that brings freedom for us now.

James might seem to suggest that Abraham somehow earned his God’s approval by his actions. But if we pay attention to Genesis, we’ll see that the point at which Abraham believed God, and was considered righteous, was way back in chapter 15, before Isaac was even born! Abraham believed God’s promises, and that’s what made him God’s friend, and then obeyed God in fulfilment of his faith.

So James isn’t telling people who aren’t Christians that if you do lots of good works, then you will be accepted by God because of them. The moment we have faith in Jesus, when we trust in his death and resurrection, God accepts us completely and entirely because of what Jesus did, not because of what we do.

Just as a side note, this is something that distinguishes us, as an evangelical church in the Protestant tradition, from our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. The Catholic Church teaches that we are accepted by God on the basis of the faith and works that he produces in us over time. Some Catholics are believers, some are not – the same is true of any church or denomination; we should disagree lovingly and courteously.

But Catholic teaching on this point takes the emphasis away from Jesus onto us, which brings a greater danger of relying on ourselves and our own efforts, rather than having faith in what God has done. The doctrine of salvation by faith alone was the fundamental divide when Protestants broke off from the Catholic Church in the Reformation 500 years ago, and despite many efforts to find some compromise, remains a key point of disagreement today.

If faith is the beating heart that gives life, then our actions are the pulse that shows we are alive. It’s not the pulse in your neck or wrist that keeps your body going, but if you can’t find your pulse, it’s a clue something is badly wrong with your heart. Living faith always expresses itself in love. James is writing to tell us how we should be living as a result of what God has done for us.

When we realise what God has done for us then “I’ve got to” becomes “I get to”. Nothing we do can make God love us any more or any less, so we are free to do good works, not out of a sense of obligation, but simply out of love. Real faith in God doesn’t mean just believing in your head that God exists, but trusting him and loving him, because of the gift of God’s grace.

Defence 4: “I’m never going to be perfect in this life anyway”

But we often think that the heights of love, generosity, faith and goodness commanded in God’s word are out of our reach. We hear stories of great heroes of the faith, such as George Muller, who depended on God to provide for the orphans he cared for, and saw God provide for him at the last minute time and time again. We think we can never match up. We recognise in theory that we should “be perfect as the Father is perfect”, but in practice we dismiss it as a lofty ideal that can safely be ignored.

Elijah praying for rainBut James tells us that Elijah was a man just like us. The heroes of the faith were all ordinary people, just like you and me. They had faith in an extraordinary God, and that same God is our God today. He answers prayers and changes lives, and will answer your prayers and change your life if you trust him.

Throughout the Bible, certain people are recognised as “righteous”. Genesis tells us that Noah was righteous, blameless in his generation. Throughout Psalms and Proverbs, the ways of the righteous and ways of the wicked are contrasted. In Luke’s Gospel, Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist, are described as “upright in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and regulations blamelessly”.

“Righteous” in these cases seems to refer to the people themselves, not just them being accepted as righteous because of Jesus. It doesn’t mean they are completely perfect – the Bible tells us about their mistakes – but on the whole, they are living holy lives of faith in God, and trust him for forgiveness and grace when they mess up. With God at work in us, it is within our grasp to genuinely become righteous people, people marked by faith and love.

In fact, it’s easier for us now than for the saints of the Old Testament! The big difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament isn’t that one is a covenant of law and the other is of grace – both contain law, and both are of grace.

Through Jesus, we have now received the promise of the New Covenant that God made in Jeremiah 31:33 when he said “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts”. God has given us a new inner power to live holy lives – he has come to live in our hearts by his Spirit. As James put it “He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created”.

Hamster with wingsIf we were just left on our own, without God to help us, it would be unreasonable to command us to be holy. You might as well tell a hamster to fly; it isn’t going to happen, no matter how hard the hamster tries!

But we aren’t hamsters being told to fly – we are birds with injured wings. If we know Jesus, if we have placed our faith in him, then he has healed our broken wings. When James reminds us to “love your neighbour as yourself”, God isn’t asking the impossible, telling us to be something we are not, because he has given us the gift of new life, the gift of his Spirit.

God is telling us: little bird, your wings are healed – become what you are, and fly!


Dove in flight

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Christianity & Postmodernism 4: Incredulity towards metanarratives

By Caleb | June 30, 2010

In 1979, philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote The Postmodern Condition (introduction, first five chapters). He was the one who popularised the term “postmodern”. In his introduction, he said:

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.

What is a metanarrative? The simple answer is that “metanarrative” means “Big Story”. Since Christianity tells a Big Story of Creation, Fall and Redemption, and since postmodernism is incredulous of big stories, you might think that this places Christianity and postmodernism on a collision course – and many Christian thinkers and writers would agree.

But James K A Smith argues in Who’s Afraid of
Postmodernism? that if we look a bit closer at what Lyotard wrote, and how he defined “metanarrative”, we’ll see that it’s not quite that simple.
Lyotard wrote:

Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. For example, the rule of consensus between the sender and addressee of a statement with truth-value is deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity between rational minds: this is the

Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end — universal peace. As can be seen from this example, if a metanarrative implying a philosophy of history is used to legitimate knowledge, questions are raised concerning the validity of the institutions governing the social bond: these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice is consigned to the grand narrative in the same way as truth.

This is fairly involved, but basically he defines modernity as extending “science” – objective reason – beyond simply stating scientific fact and making larger, universal truth claims. The Enlightenment narrative claimed to be true on the basis of a “possible unanimity between rational minds”, for example. A “metanarrative” isn’t simply a “Big Story”, but a narrative that claims legitimation by universally accessible reason, as Smith explains it in his book.
So is Christianity a metanarrative? The Bible certainly gives us a big, overarching story, but does it claim that it can be legitimated by universally accessible reason?
Some Christians say that modernists are just starting from the wrong foundation – the individual self. But if we just begin from the right foundation – God, who knows all things and stands objectively outside all human culture, context and subjectivity, and who reveals the truth to us – then viola! We have certain and objective knowledge. Because God exists, we can prove he exists by our own independent reason.
But that actually fails to reckon with what the Bible itself tells us about the human condition. On the one hand, the Bible talks in several places about creation declaring the glory of God. Romans 1:18-20 says that humanity is “without excuse” because “what can be known about God is plain to them”, and his “eternal power and divine nature” have been clearly perceived.
But Paul goes on to say that our minds have been darkened by sin, that we became futile in our thinking, and in 2 Corinthians 4 talks about the Gospel being veiled, and that the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers. The Bible shows us that the Fall affects every area of life; all areas of human activity are damaged by sin, including our ability to know and to discover truth. If we ignore the “noetic effects of sin”, then we end up joining in with modernism’s misplaced confidence in autonomous reason.
So I’d say no, Christianity isn’t a metanarrative in Lyotard’s sense – we shouldn’t claim our faith is provable in this way. Some Christians treat our faith like a metanarrative by trying to prove Christianity in a very rationalistic way, but I think this is a mistake.
So how do we witness to our faith, if we can’t argue people into it by universal reason? I’ll come back to this in later posts when I discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by postmodernism.
This question of whether Christianity is a metanarrative has been discussed in quite a few places online – for example, Christianity is not a metanarrative on Wet Lenses, Lyotard’s Postmodern Critique of Metanarratives and the Proper Christian Response by Tom Sherwood on Confession of Inadequacy, and Is Christianity a Metanarrative? by David Nilsen on Evangelical Outpost. And there’s plenty more out there too.
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Christianity & Postmodernism 3: What is postmodernism, anyway?

By Caleb | June 26, 2010

So what is postmodernism, then? It’s a bit hard to pin down, since it refers to a broad range of ideas, many of which call into question traditional notions of language and communication. In some ways, it’s not so much a defined philosophy as an anti-philosophy, a way of questioning established systems of thought. So this will inevitably be a rough sketch, intended to give you a general impression of its typical characteristics and an overall framework for understanding it.
Firstly, the name “post-modernism” give us a clue. Postmodernism is what comes after modernism! But what’s modernism, then, and how is postmodernism different?
One of the easiest ways to understand the differences – and similarities – is by looking at how they treat the relationship between reason and faith. By “faith”, I here mean “trust” in an intellectual sense generally, rather than the Christian faith or religious faith specifically.
Modernism and Postmodernism both divide reason and faith from each other. Modernism seeks knowledge on the basis of human reason and investigation alone; you can work from a neutral starting-point and build upwards to truth. Accepting anything on trust is unnecessary and irrational.
Modernism is often associated with the Enlightenment and its optimism that human reason can discover or create universal ethics and morality. Its roots can be traced back to Descartes, who responded to the scepticism of his time by attempting to prove the Christian faith by reason alone. He wanted to get right back to a foundation that no-one could possibly doubt, and started “I think, therefore I am”.
What Descartes did, however, was to make the individual self the basis for knowledge, and removed any element of faith from the equation of how we know things. As you can see from my story, it’s easy for us as Christians to buy into this way of thinking, but our pretensions to such God-like knowledge is basically idolatrous.
Postmodernism deconstructs the modern self and its claim to objectivity. Marx, Darwin and Freud all cast doubt on the reliability of the self. How can we trust our reason if our beliefs are shaped by our material conditions, as Marx sought to demonstrate? How can we be sure we are objective if the desires and motives that drive us are often outside of our conscious rational awareness, as Freud believed? And how can we trust our brains if our minds evolved by blind evolutionary forces, as a naturalistic reading of Darwin’s theories would imply?
Postmodernism sees – I believe correctly, though postmoderns often push the consequences of this too far – that there is no neutral starting-point, and that the claim to believe something by reason alone is pretence.
But postmodernism then goes on to conclude that if there’s no way of stepping outside of our presuppositions and perspectives, then there’s no objective way of deciding between truth-claims. What you believe becomes a matter of faith without reason. So any choice is as justified as any other, working out on a popular level in attitudes like “That may be true for you, but not for me” (though academic-level accounts of postmodernism are typically more sophisticated!). Postmodernism is particularly suspicious of any universal truth-claims.
Both these two extremes allow us to operate autonomously. In the case of modernism, it’s my reason, my ability to think and investigate that’s paramount. In the case of postmodernism, there is no external authority to limit my personal beliefs and choices.
When reason and faith work together, you are looking outside yourself for answers, but are constrained to weigh up the possibilities as best you can, and in doing so, you limit your freedom, placing yourself under the authority of something external to you.
Of course, as sinners, we can still end up looking outside ourselves but misplacing our faith and reason. We naturally choose idols rather than the living God who reveals himself in Christ, because idols are easier for us to manipulate. But when we make ourselves our idol, declaring our self-sufficiency, that’s easier still for us to control than an external idol.
In many ways, modernism and postmodernism are two sides of the same coin. Both are strongly naturalistic, and share an idolatrous self-sufficiency. Both divide reason and faith from each other. Both take the autonomous rational individual as the basis of objective knowledge. But modernism says it works, while postmodernism says it doesn’t work. N T Wright described postmodernism as “a necessary judgement on the arrogance of postmodernism”.
Understanding the similarities between them helps us to see how people can be very modernist in some ways – “science has disproved Christianity” – and very postmodernist in others – “that’s your private belief, that’s fine for you, just don’t try and impose it on others”, often at the same time. We have divided public and private, sacred and secular. Religion, morality and meaning is seen as a matter of blind faith, confined to the realm of private and subjective; whereas in the public sphere, only that which is – allegedly – neutral, objective and rational is admitted.
That’s a very simplified bare-bones description. For some further explanation, I recommend the following books and audio lectures:
  • The God Who is There, Escape from Reason and How Shall we then Live? by Francis Schaeffer.
    Schaeffer recognised and responded to the postmodern mindset before it was given the label “postmodern”, and gives a good analysis of how we got to where we are now.
  • The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas
    This gives a good overview of the history of Western thought to the present day in more detail than Schaeffer, though Tarnas’s own beliefs, which he discusses at the end, are somewhat odd New Age philosophy.
  • Lectures on Epistemology – What is it to know? by Andrew Fellows of L’Abri Fellowship from Bethinking.org
    These lectures discuss the possible ways of relating reason and faith to each other, and also give a potted history of the relationship between the two faculties.
In my next post, I’m going begin looking at some of the big ideas that have become slogans or catchphrases for postmodernism, and to try to dig into them a little deeper to see how there might be more we can agree with as Christians than we might at first think.
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Christianity & Postmodernism 2: My story

By Caleb | June 25, 2010

To kick off my discussion of Christianity & Postmodernism, I’d like to begin in what’s arguably quite a postmodern way – not with explanations, arguments or definitions, but by pointing you to a story – my story, telling about some of my spiritual and intellectual struggles as an undergraduate student, which I first published on my blog in 2006 under the title Battles of the Mind:

I came to university a committed Christian, ready to set the world (or at least the university) on fire. I relished the challenge of my studies, and the task of engaging with secularism, naturalism, postmodernism, hedonism and a host of other -isms. I was also keen to examine my beliefs for myself, to make sure I was really following Jesus out of my own conviction, not just because I’d been brought up in the Christian faith.

As my first year progressed, this last task pressed down on me more heavily. How could I be a Christian with any intellectual integrity if I hadn’t for myself established beyond reasonable doubt the truth of the Bible’s claims?

Also challenging me were the postmodern ideas I was encountering while studying. Please read the whole story – I think it helps show what’s at stake. Postmodernism isn’t just an academic issue, but one that affects people’s lives, and is part of the spiritual battle for people’s minds.

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Christianity & Postmodernism 1: Introduction

By Caleb | June 24, 2010

The Tower of Babel

I recently gave a talk to Cardiff University’s Staff and Postgraduate Christian Fellowship (SPGCF) on Christianity and Postmodernism. I’m now going to adapt that talk into a series of blog posts, to go up over the next couple of weeks.
Many Christians think Postmodernism = relativism = bad! Titles such as The Truth Wars, The Gagging of God and Meltdown: Making sense of a culture in crisis are typical of the evangelical reaction to postmodernism. Many of these are good books written by intelligent people saying vital things about the importance of capital-T Truth.
But I believe that Christians who rush to “defend Christianity” against the “challenges of postmodernism” are in danger of making a shallow assessment of a complicated set of ideas and philosophies, and of missing many opportunities and points of connection offered by postmodernism.
On the other hand, there are Christians who have embraced postmodernism with open arms, such as many in the emerging church. Writers such as Brian McClaren have reached a postmodern generation with books that seek to marry Christianity with a postmodern outlook. Others have written titles such as The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity arguing that postmodernism is a good thing.
I find these postmodern expressions of Christianity a frustratingly mixed bag. Many postmodern Christian writers are annoyingly vague on important issues of Christian belief, and seem in danger of selling out completely to postmodern thinking, without weighing its ideas critically against the Bible.
In this series, I hope to briefly explain modernism and postmodernism in general terms. I then want to dig a little more deeply into what a few postmodern thinkers actually say. Finally, I’m going to try to highlight some of the points of connection and opportunity, as well as the conflicts and challenges.
As this is a series of blog posts based on a 40-minute talk, I apologise if I end up oversimplifying. Feel free to pick me up on anything you disagree with or would like to discuss further in the Comments!
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Is technology indistinguishable from magic?

By Caleb | May 25, 2010

The current series of Doctor Who is self-consciously styling itself as a “dark fairytale”, even to the point of having characters describe it as such within the stories. Terry Pratchett recently criticised Doctor Who as not being science fiction.
This got me thinking – is it possible to tell a story that is both fairy tale and science fiction, or are the two genres fundamentally different in approach? Can Doctor Who ever really be both, or is it just a fairy-tale with science fiction trappings, or science-fiction in fairy-tale garb?

The third of Arthur C Clarke’s Laws of Prediction states:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

This is sometimes used by science fiction writers as an excuse to introduce the impossible without any kind of attempt at explanation or justification. Arthur C Clarke used it to criticise a lack of imagination when it came to predicting the future, and I don’t have any argument with that.

But what I do think is very different is how magic in fairy-tales and technology in science-fiction typically operate. In the traditional fairy-tale, magic is encountered by humans, commonly given as a gift or reward, rather than being exercised by them. Jack unknowningly trades his cow for magic beans; he doesn’t magically engineer them to grow a giant beanstalk.
Technology, however, typically operates in an attitude of control over nature. So while magic and technology might appear similar in that they can both be extraordinary and seemingly inexplicable, they operate in a very different spirit.
This distinction doesn’t hold true for all kinds of magic, of course. There are many stories of magicians who try to use magic simply as an exercise of power, and this is particularly true of modern fantasy. Harry Potter is a prime example of magic simply as substitute-technology – or as the wizards see it, technology is Muggles’ substitute for magic. In any case, the two are interchangeable in J K Rowling’s writing in a way that isn’t generally true of fairy-tales proper.
In writing my current novel, I’ve given a lot of thought to the nature of magic. I try to draw a distinction in it between magic as “Art” and magic as “Power”. It’s not the case that one is good and the other is bad, but I think that a cultivated dominion over nature carries with it temptations and dangers.
In doing this, I’m elaborating on some of the ideas suggested by Galadriel’s discussion of magic with Sam Gamgee in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings:

“And you?” she said, turning to Sam. “For this is what you folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem to use the same word for the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic?”

I think this is one of the interesting things that the use of magic in literature can do – raise questions of art and technology, of power and its abuse. What do you think?
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Election debate: first reactions

By Caleb | April 15, 2010

I’ve just finished watching the election debate between David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown, and I just want to get down some thoughts before reading the inevitable frenzy of analysis and having my impressions influenced by all the discussion.

The first question is, did it work as a debate? The discussion wasn’t as in-depth as I’d have liked, but it wasn’t as superficial as I feared either. The debate did give the three party leaders the chance to lay out their stall on a fairly wide range of issues, which is helpful. But the level of scrutiny and engagement between them, of critiquing and analysing each other’s positions, was very limited.
One of the key issues in the debate is public spending, and Brown and Cameron spent a lot of time arguing over whether their policies would help the economy, or put it at risk. Brown insisted that maintaining spending, paid for by a hike in National Insurance, is necessary for economic recovery, while Cameron called for waste to be cut, saying that it’s not about throwing more money at issues, and that raising NI would be counterproductive.
But there wasn’t any more explanation of the issues. I’d love to hear a proper, concise explanation from Brown and Cameron how and why they think their policies would have the effect they claim, and why their opponent is mistaken. But all we got was an “Oh yes it would”, “oh no it wouldn’t” restatement of their claims. Each party’s policies were stated, but not truly debated.
Brown came across to me as having the most substance to his arguments, giving more detail in terms of policies, fact and figures. I disagreed with him on several points, but thought he had the most content. He did, however, seem rather desperate to pal up with Nick Clegg, and it was rather funny to see Clegg’s bemused reaction to his insistence that “Nick Clegg agrees with me!”
As Lib Dem leader and least well known of the three, Clegg had the most to gain from the debate, and he certainly gained the most from this. He had the most confidence and engaged most effectively with the audience. He was obviously trying hard to come across as the straight-talking alternative, but to be fair to him, he largely succeeded.
Cameron seemed to me to be a bit on the back foot, with Brown pushing him hard to admit that he would need to make cuts. He seemed to bounce back a bit towards the end, and his closing statement was good. But I don’t think he succeeded in making a strong and convincing case that his plans would be best for the economy.
I’m a floating voter, and the debate hasn’t brought me any closer to making up my mind, yet. I hope to spend some more time over the next couple of weeks digging into the issues in depth, but I’m certain I’ll need to spend my own time analysing the different parties’ policies and candidates’ positions if I want any kind of in-depth understanding of the issues.
Television by its very nature tends to style over substance; the value of these events is not that they themselves are brilliant debates, but they are great talking points for everyone to debate about.
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