Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? (The Church and Postmodern Culture): Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church

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Preface

To the Reader

A word about my intended audience and modus operandi: Although I wish seriously to engage philosophical currents and ideas (in the way Francis Schaeffer faced ideas head-on) and am a philosopher by both profession and training (though also engaged in ministry for the past dozen years), in this book I am writing not primarily to philosophers or theologians (though they might find it of interest) but rather to students and practitioners— to those trying to orient themselves to the issues and those on the front lines of cultural engagement in the postmodern world: pastors and youth pastors, campus ministers and worship leaders, clergy and laypersons, and those training for such vocations. Given its original context at L’Abri, the book also speaks to spiritual seekers trying to navigate the postmodern terrain while searching for meaning. To them I want to suggest that, quite unlike the anti-institutional mentality of postmodern spirituality, it is actually a robust, vibrant, liturgical church that speaks meaning in and to a postmodern world. With these audiences in mind, I have not assumed any philosophical knowledge and have avoided becoming bogged down in textual exposition. Although it is important to trace ideas to their source and listen to theorists firsthand, I have minimized footnotes and citations and concentrated on the ideas and claims being made. Of course, sources and engagement with other literature could be multiplied almost ad infinitum. But rather than distract the reader with extensive footnotes, I have included a bibliography for further reading, which will also point interested readers to my more scholarly discussions of these matters.

Acknowledgments

This book came to me, its author, as a gift—as a wonderful effulgence at the intersection of two very deep, rich streams: the heritage of the Calvin College department of philosophy and the tradition of L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland. The core of the book was initially presented as a series of lectures in the summer of 2003 at L’Abri, the study center founded by Francis and Edith Schaeffer. The opportunity to give the lectures arose from a working relationship between Calvin’s philosophy department and L’Abri that regularly takes Calvin faculty and students to Switzerland. I am very grateful to the philosophy department, particularly Lee Hardy, for the opportunity to go to L’Abri, and to the generous hospitality of Jim and Gail Ingram and the folks at L’Abri for welcoming my wife, Deanna, and me. Both the faculty and the students at L’Abri provided thoughtful questions and insights that have helped me to clarify my thinking on the matters examined in this book.

Throughout my preparation for those lectures, I had a keen sense of being a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants. On the one hand, the opportunity to present those lectures was a chance to repay a debt. I find myself on the path of Christian philosophy today because of an encounter with the work of Francis Schaeffer when I was a sophomore in college. To be able to carry on that tradition of philosophical reflection, cultural analysis, and biblical discernment in the original lectures and now in this book is an attempt to render thanks and honor to Schaeffer’s legacy—even if I might take that legacy in directions that Schaeffer would not. On the other hand, I count myself blessed to be part of the legacy of philosophy at Calvin College, drawing on the stream of tradition handed down from figures like Jellema, Runner, Mouw, Plantinga, and Wolterstorff. And I feel a special sense of gratitude to my contemporary colleagues in the department, who have welcomed me and encouraged me in my labors.

The transformation of the original lectures into a book has also profited from the generosity of several friends who took the time to read the manuscript and offer their comments and criticisms, which have undoubtedly improved it, except in those places where I was too stubborn to listen. My thanks to John Franke, Brian McLaren, Bill VanGroningen, and Geoff Holsclaw for this very tangible expression of friendship.

Finally, I owe much to my family for their unflagging support and for keeping me rooted in the realities of faith and practice. This book brings back special memories of an adventure with Deanna in Switzerland and France that I shall never forget and shall always cherish. The challenge of raising children in a postmodern culture is what spurs many of my concerns in this book, particularly the reflections on the formation of desire in chapter 4. I dedicate this book to my second son, Coleson, whose passion for Tolkien, King Arthur, and things medieval spurs my own ancient-future sensibilities. My prayer is that he will keep seeking the Grail.

Some of the material in chapters 2 and 3 appeared in an earlier form in Christianity and the Postmodern Turn: Six Views, ed. Myron B. Penner (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005) and is included here with the kind permission of the editor and publisher.

1

Is the Devil from Paris?

Postmodernism and the Church

Postmodernism tends to be something of a chameleon, portrayed as either monster or savior—either the new form of the enemy or the next best thing to come along. This chapter introduces the questions that the phenomenon of postmodernism poses for the church and suggests a strategy for engagement that avoids simple dichotomies of either demonizing or baptizing postmodernism.

Raising the Curtain: The Matrix

"Welcome to the real world."¹ With these words, Neo is welcomed by Morpheus after emerging from his imprisonment in the matrix, a neural-active simulation complex designed by machines to control human beings. Although Neo escapes from the trappings of a postapocalyptic world, the scene in fact replays one of the most ancient of philosophical images: emerging from Plato’s cave. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates recounts the way in which the masses are enslaved to a world of images and shadows, as though chained in the depths of a cave, their heads locked in position. Because of these restraints, all they have ever seen are the shadows dancing on the cave wall, cast by a small fire that sends light across the puppets and artifacts carried along a wall behind them. Never knowing anything different, each of the cave’s prisoners considers the shadows real, until one of them is released. Turning from the wall of shadows, this liberated prisoner begins to make his way out of the cave, steadily proceeding toward the world above. Immediately upon turning around, he realizes that the shadows are only images cast by the puppets and cutouts behind him. Moving past these and past the cave’s interior fire, the prisoner slowly emerges from his subterranean confinement into the light of day and the world above.

At first the experience is bewildering and bedazzling; the sun’s light blinds eyes accustomed only to darkness. Indeed, the light of the real world is painful to eyes that have not seen it. Unable to look up at first, the liberated prisoner must navigate his way around the world by looking at shadows on the ground and images in the water. But these images are cast not by copies and cutouts but by the things themselves. Indeed, the experience of emerging from the cave has slowly revealed that what the prisoner had thought was real was in fact but a shadow of reality, a copy of a copy. In the world above he could behold not just the shadow of a tree, nor even the cutout image of a tree, but the tree itself. What would have seemed ludicrous to him before his liberation—that the world of his birth, his entire environment was not real—was now clear. Clearer still is what the prisoner must now do: return to the cave, liberate his companions, and proclaim the truth of what is real.

The figure of Neo in the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix is a postmodern Platonic prisoner. He has spent his entire life in a prison of sorts, a pod of quasi-uterine liquid where he is nourished by hoses, and dancing before his consciousness is not a dim, darkened world of shadows but a Technicolor reality of highrises and coffee shops, computers and nightclubs. The wall on which all of this is played out is within Neo’s own mind, where a neural-active simulation program feeds a world of images directly into his consciousness. Thus, though these human pris-oners are actually trapped in pods where they are harvestedfor energy to run AI, they believe themselves to be someone and somewhere else. While Neo’s body is hooked up to a system of cords and hoses, he thinks that he is one Thomas Anderson, a mediocre employee of a growing technology firm.

Morpheus comes to Neo as a liberator, someone who knows the truth and can thus descend into the depths of the cave’s darkness in order to liberate others. Although Morpheus meets Neo in the matrix, he and his crew are able to effect the release of his body—his real self—from the pod. When his questioning mind no longer receives the neural-active simulation that is the matrix (something like a body rejecting a transplanted organ), the system flushes him out of the pod as waste. Morpheus and his crew seize Neo, lifting him from the dark dungeon toward the luminous light of reality, dramatized by his body being hoisted from the dark caverns up toward the tunnel of light shining from the ship Nebuchadnezzar. When Neo awakes, Morpheus greets him: Welcome to the real world. Slipping in and out of consciousness, Neo asks: Why do my eyes hurt? Because you’ve never used them before is the reply. This lack of use requires a rigorous regimen of rehabilitation. Spitting out a stream of questions and receiving a barrage of dizzying answers, Neo experiences a kind of vertigo and vomits out of disorientation. It’s not easy getting used to the real world.

Our contemporary culture, including the church, has experienced a similar dis- and reorientation. This book focuses on a transition not unlike that experienced by Neo: an emerging from one place to another, from one construction of reality to another, from modernity to postmodernity. While we might not name it as such, our experience of cultural shifts and changes can be traced to the advent of postmodernity and the trickle-down effect of postmodernism on our popular culture. The transition calls into question almost all our previously held sureties and rattles a faith that has been too easily equated with such Cartesian certainties,sometimes issuing in a kind of vertigo. Like Neo’s experience, our emergence into this new situation engenders a host of questions and a confused sense of being lost. As Morpheus puts it to Neo, whose mind is swirling in this new reality: I imagine right now you must feel a bit like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole. Or as W. H. Auden once described this kind of cultural upheaval, It’s as if we had left our house for five minutes to mail a letter, and during that time the living room had changed places with the room behind the mirror over the fireplace.² If the shadows we thought were real have been unveiled as mere shadows, doesn’t it sometimes feel as if the whole world were dissolving? Even if we have a sense that this is the real world, as Morpheus announces, we’re not sure how to make our way in it.

While I don’t want to claim the mantle of Morpheus, my hope is to offer a kind of therapy and rehabilitation, an orientation to the world of postmodernism, which is simply to say, the world in which we now find ourselves.

What Is Postmodernism?

The notion of postmodernism is invoked as both poison and cure within the contemporary church. To some, postmodernity is the bane of Christian faith, the new enemy taking over the role of secular humanism as object of fear and primary target of demonization.³ Others see postmodernism as a fresh wind of the Spirit sent to revitalize the dry bones of the church.⁴ This is particularly true of the emerging church movement (associated with Brian McLaren, Leonard Sweet, Robert Webber, and others), which castigates the modernity of pragmatic evangelicalism and seeks to retool the church’s witness for a postmodern world. In both cases, however, postmodernism remains a nebulous concept—a slippery beast eluding our understanding. Or perhaps better, postmodernism tends to be a chameleon taking on whatever characteristics we want it to: if it is seen as enemy, postmodernism will be defined as monstrous; if it is seen as savior, postmodernism will be defined as redemptive. This ambiguity tends to make us—Christian scholars, pastors and ministers, laypersons engaged in ministry—skeptical about just what we’re talking about. What is postmodernism?

The answer to this question is sometimes offered as a historical thesis: postmodernism has been variously described as a kind of post- (after-) modern condition and is sometimes even linked to particular historical events such as student riots in 1968, the abandonment of the gold standard, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or, to be specific, 3:32 p.m. on July 15, 1972!⁵ Each candidate for the advent of postmodernism relies on an account of the supposed collapse of modernity. Trying to pinpoint the advent of the postmodern condition by linking it to a historical epoch, particular event, or even a particular cultural sphere (architecture, literature, music, visual arts) seems counterproductive, given the widespread disagreement about such historical claims. Further, it seems naïve to think that a Zeitgeist like postmodernism could be spawned by a single event.

Instead of trying to pinpoint its historical origin or essence, I want to unpack an assumption that most commentators on postmodernism seem to share in common: postmodernism, whether monster or savior, is something that has come slouching out of Paris. In particular, postmodernism owes its impetus to French philosophical influences. While most commentators from various disciplines (architecture, art, literature, theology) concede this point, few have facility with philosophy or French philosophy in particular. In other words, we tend to give French philosophy a nod as crucial for understanding postmodernism but then do not engage the philosophical underpinnings. Brian McLaren, for instance, regularly tips his hat to the philosophical but then pushes it aside as too far removed from everyday life or not nec-essary for understanding postmodernity as distinguished from philosophical postmodernism.⁶ But I want to follow Francis Schaeffer’s footsteps by taking philosophy very seriously precisely because it does impact everyday life. Ideas have legs, and even in a culture of amusement, there is thought that shapes it.

As Schaeffer remarks in the foreword to Escape from Reason, If we are to understand present-day trends in thought, we must see how the situation has come about historically and also look in some detail at the development of philosophic thought-forms.⁷ In The God Who Is There, Schaeffer analyzes the shifts of modernity as beginning with philosophy (the first step in the line of despair); thus cultural phenomena, for Schaeffer, are symptoms of philosophical shifts, not vice versa. In his critical cultural analyses as found in The God Who Is There or Escape from Reason, Schaeffer offers what we might call a trickle-down theory of philosophical influence: cultural phenomena tend to eventually reflect philosophical movements. Perhaps my analyses of philosophical postmodernism can be understood as a necessary supplement (or better, prerequisite) to McLaren’s analyses of postmodernity.⁸

Thus in this book I want to employ a Schaefferian strategy in considering postmodernism.⁹ As such, I consider it a sequel to Schaeffer’s own engagements with humanism and existentialism; postmodernism (a term rarely used in France, by the way) is, in some sense, the heir to existentialism. By a Schaefferian strategy, I mean at least two things: first, we need to return to the philosophy itself