There are two little words that are in fashion more than ever, and unfortunately, they are turning up more and more in the church.
What are the words that change everything?
For me.
Simply add “for me” to any of the basic Christian messages and you have gutted them of any meaning. Try “Jesus is the only way for me” or “The Bible is inspired and true for me.”
Those two little words turn a universal truth into a relative truth. The trend to relativism is the hallmark of the postmodern era that we find ourselves in.
In the past, the argument has always been over the way the world actually is… Was the world created by God, or are we just a bunch of fortunate molecules that happened to form? Can we know God, or is He utterly transcendent? And so on.
But now the very idea of the world actually being one way or another is no longer a given. The new view of things is always relative to an individual or a particular community. Within this view, truth has no meaning on its own, and right and wrong are merely social constructions.
This utterly destroys the Christian message. Jesus is reduced to a preference.
And this is not just a problem with the unbelieving world. There is a growing movement within the church that is embracing postmodernism. According to these advocates, one must experience life within a particular community for its truth claims to have any meaning. I believe that refuting relativism is abolutely THE apologetics issue of our day. But more on that later…
So are you saying that churches that fit the description of “emerging church” generally embrace relativism?
Maybe I read it wrong but as I was reading the wiki I was thinking, “yeah. yeah. Sounds good. Where do I sign up?” The definition uses vague phrases like “generally Christian” and “within reason” though. I felt like I fit right in to the definition. While some are closer than others, I don’t think any particular demonination has a monopoly on the truth.
I also think the gospel is designed to transend social structure while real personal convictions are fueled by it. As soon as you say something is relative then you remove it from the absoluteness of the gospel message. Then you have to ask if the gospel message can stand without it. (This relates back to Dan’s discussion on how much truth is enough.)
Problems come when churches start making relatives absolute and individuals start making absolutes relative.
Like with most things, the “Emergent Church” movement is not all bad or all wrong. But at its core is an insidious relativism that rejects propositional truth and elevates experience. Here is a short quote from an interview with Brian McLeron, one of the movement’s leaders…
Take a close look at his words. People must experience membership in the church before they can believe in it. (As a side note, belief in the church is not even really the point, but belief in Jesus.) Instead of the transforming power of the gospel changing peoples lives, it is the sense of community they feel that changes lives. McLaren has it exactly backwards. When the church’s primary offering is acceptance and community, then we are just another worldly group.
Please consider this post a sidebar with links to some discussion of postmodern criticism.
Communications From Elsewhere: a random essay generator that produces text that reads like a bona fide postmodern essay. Fairly hilarious.
The Social Text Affair: a professor from NYU submitted a meaningless paper chocked full of gobbledygook to an academic journal, and guess what? It got published. Here he reveals his hoax. See also the professor’s website.
How to Deconstruct Almost Anything: an engineer dissects postmodernist deconstruction and finds it’s just an academic fraud that’s useful for asserting that anything can be taken to mean anything… or nothing.
So keep this in mind: Eric’s right that postmodernism destroys the Christian message – it basically frees you from the idea that it actually means anything.
Well, it does for me. 😉
“When the church’s primary offering is acceptance and community, then we are just another worldly group.”
Excellent point. It wraps back very nicely into the two words that you indicated destroyed the Christian message – “for me”. And that really is the problem, right? While the Gospel (Christian Message) surely has great benefits for me (i.e. salvation instead of condemnation) – the true point of the good news is what God has done through Christ in spite of me.
A 2004 problem (and an age old problem, as well) is the church’s focus on man, and not on God. Acceptance and community are a by product of the church’s mission – worship and glory to the Almighty.
Sorry, another bit of po-mo humor:
Did you hear about the postmodern Godfather?
He’ll make you an offer you can’t understand.
😀
The spirit of Hugh is upon me:
Ravi Zacharius said: “A pre-modern baseball umpire would have said something like this: ‘There’s balls, and there’s strikes, and I call ’em as they are.’ The modernist would have said, ‘There’s balls, and there’s strikes, and I call ’em as I see ’em.’ And the postmodernist umpire would say, ‘They ain’t nothing until I call ’em.'”
I recently read a book by Brain McLeron and thought it was interesting. It was a thoughtful book, but not a well written book on how the church should emerge in order to reach post-modern seekers/people. I enjoyed the book, but feel his conclusions are more in line with counter-culture sentiment than, necessarily, church identity.
Read “Telling the Truth” by D.A. Carson (General Editor) if you want to get down and dirty into the mentality and Biblical parameters of dealing with post-modern thought.
In addition to Telling the Truth which Dan suggested, D.A. Carson also wrote The Gagging of God, which is very good but it is a huge book on the subject of pluralism/postmodernism and the Christian response (600+ pages I believe).
Another book which is not so much about how the church should respond to postmodernism, but a description of what it is and how it has permeated our culture is Postmodern Times by Gene Edward Veith Jr.
I am sure there are many other good books on this topic but these were the required textbooks for our class on Pluralism and Postmodernism.