11.02.2004
Stephen Shields on Post-emergent
I just re-read Stephen Shields' Next Wave article with Nancy’s comments. I’m also reading Ken Wilber’s “A Theory of Everything” which more closely resonates with my own approach than a lot of what I’ve read on many of the pomo lists. Here is my take on things.
Much of the conversation is about out-growing the trap of modernism or moving from modernism and propositionalism into postmodern deconstruction of prevailing oppressive metanarratives is no more than same old stuff that we have come to expect from our modern counterparts. I think this is the wrong approach.
But old habits die hard. Let me try an analogy:
I have a friend who works at a prison. He walks the same halls the prisoners do. He breathes the same air. He sees the same bars that they do. But there is one big difference – he can leave. He has the keys. The prisoners are bound by the prison and constrained by it. Mike, otoh, employs the prison as a source of income. It may define his career but it doesn’t define his life. He comes and goes; he uses it to his advantage but he isn’t confined by it, even though it is a prison.
I am much the same way with modernism. To those who are stuck in it, it is a prison, but to those who have the keys, we can come and go at our pleasure. We ought not to view it as something bad – prisons do serve a vital purpose for society and this is where the analogy breaks down because I don’t think modern thinking is a prison but a paradigm – but as something useful for organizing a certain kind of thought into a constructive pattern that achieves definite ends and answers certain questions. I would never advocate that we discard modernism any more than that we abandon the contribution of the Magna Charta just because we have a Declaration of independence and a Constitution. The first is a means to the last, not a structure to confine us.
This is why I am NOT AGAINST even the most fundy of churches. Just because I have outgrown them, doesn’t mean they do not have a place in God’s kingdom. If I am what I am by the grace of God, then they must be what they are by the same grace of God. And some people need the confines of various stages of fundyism to shelter a nascent faith that can’t handle things like uncertainty, doubt and conjecture. But for me to look down my nose at them as less than us, or not as enlightened, or in some way lower than we are is the height of elitism and narcissism. It’s not about me – or us. It is about God, and His Kingdom and His Righteousness. And bad-mouthing moderns or Willowback/Saddlecreek folks is as far from kingdom righteousness as I can imagine.
And here’s the defect of pomo – by denying hierarchies, it is blind to hierarchies that subsume postmodernism. My background is science so I have no trouble with hierarchical arrangements. Some are merely taxonomical like the cataloguing of biological life into a “Taxonomic Tree” that shows organizational relationships such as kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. Even more useful is chemistry that shows organic hierarchies in both directions from atoms. We can get larger and larger into molecules, compounds, structures, cells, tissues, organs, systems, organisms, families, communities, ecosystems, etc. or smaller and smaller into protons, neutrons and electrons, quarks, bosons, mesons, to supersymmetric strings. But no one argues that “molecules are better than atoms” or that “organs are preferable to tissues” because you can’t have the higher form without the lower.
I see postmodernism as a summation of all that has come before, not a replacement for it. And even that is an incomplete statement. Pomo is a KIND of summation and is certainly not the pinnacle of thought. The pomo/mo conflict is like an argument between the Kool-Aid and the sugar as to which has the “right” flavor or makes the largest contribution. We can’t have one without the other and they’re both swimming in the water, so why see it as a dichotomy? I don’t think the mo/pomo split IS a dichotomy, any more than I feel that there is an atom-molecule dichotomy.
Postmoderns who portray things dichotomously are really trustees in the prison. They may think they are different than everyone else, but unlike the guards, they don’t have the keys and they are still stuck in the prison. Pomoxians who don’t embrace the moderns in their midst are still prisoners of modern thinking, no matter how pomo they claim they are.
So who is up for an integrative form of Christianity that embraces all God’s children regardless of where they are as fellow travelers on the journey from whom we all have much to learn and possibly a little to contribute?
Much of the conversation is about out-growing the trap of modernism or moving from modernism and propositionalism into postmodern deconstruction of prevailing oppressive metanarratives is no more than same old stuff that we have come to expect from our modern counterparts. I think this is the wrong approach.
But old habits die hard. Let me try an analogy:
I have a friend who works at a prison. He walks the same halls the prisoners do. He breathes the same air. He sees the same bars that they do. But there is one big difference – he can leave. He has the keys. The prisoners are bound by the prison and constrained by it. Mike, otoh, employs the prison as a source of income. It may define his career but it doesn’t define his life. He comes and goes; he uses it to his advantage but he isn’t confined by it, even though it is a prison.
I am much the same way with modernism. To those who are stuck in it, it is a prison, but to those who have the keys, we can come and go at our pleasure. We ought not to view it as something bad – prisons do serve a vital purpose for society and this is where the analogy breaks down because I don’t think modern thinking is a prison but a paradigm – but as something useful for organizing a certain kind of thought into a constructive pattern that achieves definite ends and answers certain questions. I would never advocate that we discard modernism any more than that we abandon the contribution of the Magna Charta just because we have a Declaration of independence and a Constitution. The first is a means to the last, not a structure to confine us.
This is why I am NOT AGAINST even the most fundy of churches. Just because I have outgrown them, doesn’t mean they do not have a place in God’s kingdom. If I am what I am by the grace of God, then they must be what they are by the same grace of God. And some people need the confines of various stages of fundyism to shelter a nascent faith that can’t handle things like uncertainty, doubt and conjecture. But for me to look down my nose at them as less than us, or not as enlightened, or in some way lower than we are is the height of elitism and narcissism. It’s not about me – or us. It is about God, and His Kingdom and His Righteousness. And bad-mouthing moderns or Willowback/Saddlecreek folks is as far from kingdom righteousness as I can imagine.
And here’s the defect of pomo – by denying hierarchies, it is blind to hierarchies that subsume postmodernism. My background is science so I have no trouble with hierarchical arrangements. Some are merely taxonomical like the cataloguing of biological life into a “Taxonomic Tree” that shows organizational relationships such as kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. Even more useful is chemistry that shows organic hierarchies in both directions from atoms. We can get larger and larger into molecules, compounds, structures, cells, tissues, organs, systems, organisms, families, communities, ecosystems, etc. or smaller and smaller into protons, neutrons and electrons, quarks, bosons, mesons, to supersymmetric strings. But no one argues that “molecules are better than atoms” or that “organs are preferable to tissues” because you can’t have the higher form without the lower.
I see postmodernism as a summation of all that has come before, not a replacement for it. And even that is an incomplete statement. Pomo is a KIND of summation and is certainly not the pinnacle of thought. The pomo/mo conflict is like an argument between the Kool-Aid and the sugar as to which has the “right” flavor or makes the largest contribution. We can’t have one without the other and they’re both swimming in the water, so why see it as a dichotomy? I don’t think the mo/pomo split IS a dichotomy, any more than I feel that there is an atom-molecule dichotomy.
Postmoderns who portray things dichotomously are really trustees in the prison. They may think they are different than everyone else, but unlike the guards, they don’t have the keys and they are still stuck in the prison. Pomoxians who don’t embrace the moderns in their midst are still prisoners of modern thinking, no matter how pomo they claim they are.
So who is up for an integrative form of Christianity that embraces all God’s children regardless of where they are as fellow travelers on the journey from whom we all have much to learn and possibly a little to contribute?
