(Third of three parts; click here to read Part 2)
The pragmatic nonchalance of Grenz on this point is disconcerting. Without apparent reservation, he trades away the linguistic and liturgical history of the church and receives in exchange only the desperate nominalism that undergirds the structuralist view of language and the postmodern view of the self. In a structuralist theory of language, words are signs that reveal nothing but their differences from other signs and their origins in contingent and arbitrary human longing. The father of modern structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure, put the matter directly in the classic text on the subject: “Language is a system of arbitrary signs and lacks the necessary basis, the solid ground for discussion. There is no reason for preferring soeur to sister, Ochs to bouef, etc. . . . Because the sign is arbitrary, it follows no law other than that of tradition, and because it is based on tradition, it is arbitrary.”
Saussure’s judgment about the arbitrariness of tradition dovetails neatly with the view of culture underlying these three different books. To employ the categories of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, these works approach the question of contemporary culture from a “Christ against culture” position. That is, they operate from the assumption that culture has little or no legitimate claim to our loyalty and is, in some fundamental way, inimical to the lordship of Christ. These contemporary Christian books sound a good deal like a series of works that Niebuhr calls “the best loved books” of the second-century church. Those early Christian works “present Christianity as a way of life quite separate from culture,” and whether they see grace or law as the essence of the Christian life, “in any case it is life in a new and separated community. What is common to second-century [and these contemporary evangelical] statements of this type is the conviction that Christians constitute a new people, a third ‘race’ besides Jews and Gentiles.”
Middleton, Walsh, and Grenz explicitly promote the Christian gospel and Christian community as a “third way.” In their view of contemporary culture, modernism is a godless, decaying structure, postmodernism a leveling wind, and the Christian church a group of relief workers who have been flown in to build things right at last. “Like the architects of modernity, the builders of Babel had a grand aspiration,” write Middleton and Walsh. In the analogy they draw between Babel and modernity, the tower turns out to be curiously small, consisting of only three floors: science, technology, and economic growth. Postmodernity is the archaeologist who discovers that “beneath the ground floor” of the tower of modernity lies “nothing but our own strong shoulders. We are carrying this building on our backs, like Atlas. . . . This tower is built on a foundation of radical, self-determining freedom, . . . [which] very closely resembles what is described in Genesis 3 as the primal human sin, which results in death.” Then suddenly in Middleton and Walsh’s account, the archaeologist somehow metamorphoses into “the postmodern winds of [the] icy heights” that rip through the uncompleted fourth floor of the tower, leaving nothing but “shattered walls, broken windows and the roof torn off. . . . The old ‘sacred canopy’ of modern progress which had previously sheltered the inhabitants of modernity has blown off the fourth floor and the biting chill of anomie now settles on ‘the naked public square.'”
What possible hope could emerge from this welter of mixed metaphors–from a world in which we are at one moment Atlas holding up the three-story building of modernity and in the next moment find ourselves shivering in the chill of anomie on the naked public square and dodging the shards of the sacred canopy of progress blowing toward us? If we are homeless, naked, and cold in the postmodern world, and all our building materials are smashing about us, how are we to get on with the task of building a new structure, a truly redeemed postmodern culture? If this is the highly touted “level playing field” created by postmodernity, what is there for us to do on this field but rummage in the rubble?
Grenz does little to answer such questions, beyond welcoming the “struggle among conflicting narratives and interpretations of reality” that has come to the fore in postmodernity. He asserts that these “conflicting interpretations can be evaluated according to a criterion that in some sense transcends them all . . . , the story of God’s action in Jesus of Nazareth.” In Grenz’s words, this narrative “provides the fulfillment of the longings and aspirations of all peoples.” Beyond such generalizations Grenz does not say much about the crucial epistemological and ethical questions raised by postmodernity. He gives no hint of conflict within the church about the nature of the “story of God’s action,” nor does he indicate how this Christian “criterion” is to engage and then persuade the skeptical postmodern mind. (How, for example, would Grenz move from talk of “narrative” and “longings” to engage those who celebrate “the right to die” or unfettered sensual hedonism?)
In a similar fashion, Middleton and Walsh envision the church as the site of holy dreaming, where “the Spirit of God . . . can capture our imaginations and thereby liberate us from the constrictions of the dominant culture.” The imagination becomes the agent of resistance to all of history and the source of the radically new culture that is to replace “this present nightmare of brokenness, disorientation and confusion. A liberated imagination is a prerequisite for facing the future.” Repeatedly, they ask, “Dare we imagine?”–imagine the end of the extremes of affluence and poverty, a relationship of friendship with the creation, a morally sensitive mass media, and an economy that is driven by stewardship rather than profit?
Like Grenz’s positing of a “criterion” without support or development, Middleton and Walsh’s “radical dreams” magically become, without the presentation of evidence or the elaboration of argument, “nothing less than the metanarrative of God’s redemptive plan for the world.” Those “who follow Jesus” must have the “audacity to proclaim this story as the light of the world.”
The rift with culture is apparent even in Ingraffia’s book. “Following in the tradition of Paul, Pascal, Luther, Kierkegaard, Barth, Bonhoeffer, and more recently JÆrgen Moltmann,” he explains, “I seek to separate the God of the Bible from the god of the philosophers.” This latter god is the “god of ontotheology” and is “always the product of human reason, is always the result of humanity’s attempt to formulate an understanding of god rather than the result of God’s revelation towards us.” Ingraffia considers it essential for the contemporary church to “tease apart” the “synthesis between biblical theology and philosophy, whether this philosophy be ontotheological or anti-ontotheological.” While allowing that “this process can never be complete,” he nevertheless believes that “the strands can be separated to a large extent.” Once the “Judaeo-Christian revelation” has been separated from Greek philosophy, “we are left with a wisdom which can be used to criticize modern ontotheology, but which is separate from and resists the postmodern critique of ontotheology.”
Ingraffia too thus sees “biblical theology” as opening “a third way” between the fatuous religion of popular culture and the virulent atheism of postmodern theory. With some reservations, he embraces the Nietzschean and Derridean argument that the distinction between nature and culture is meaningless. There is no such thing as a natural moral order, Nietzschean perspectivism claims, but only a series of cultural and verbal constructs that humanity has first built and then destroyed. And as Ingraffia sees it, the postmodern vanquishing of the “shadow god created by human reason and imagination” may open a clearing in which the God of the biblical revelation can build his kingdom at last.
Ingraffia situates Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the theological tradition he wishes to join with his work, but Bonhoeffer himself subjected to a withering critique the very Barthianism that Ingraffia champions in his indictment of the culture of modernity. In a 1944 letter to Eberhard Bethge, the imprisoned Bonhoeffer praised Barth for having been “the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion,” then criticized him sharply for his faulty view of the relationship between revelation and culture. Barth, he said, offered “a positivist doctrine of revelation which says, in effect, ‘Like it or lump it’: virgin birth, Trinity, or anything else.” To Bonhoeffer, “that isn’t biblical.” In offering the Christian faith as a complete alternative to culture, “the positivism of revelation makes it too easy for itself, by setting up . . . a law of faith. . . . In the place of religion there now stands the church–that is in itself biblical–but the world is in some degree made to depend on itself and left to its own devices, and that’s the mistake.”
Barth’s “mistake” is made in some measure by all three of these books in their response to culture. It is an error that follows from viewing culture melodramatically rather than tragically. In melodrama, the lines are clearly drawn between good and evil; its heroes are pure, its villains malevolent. Because the traits of the characters are fixed before the action begins in melodrama, and because the outcome of the drama is never in doubt, what happens within the play matters only to a point. We endure the action for the sake of that cataclysm that brings that action to an end and ensures the triumph of virtue.
The melodramatic temperament can take pleasure in the ruin of culture, because it feeds upon visions of apocalypse. It is an impulse that runs deep in the Christianity of the New World. In 1692, Cotton Mather defended the Salem witch trials as a necessary final step in the battle between God and Satan in the North American wilderness. “The devil is making one attempt more upon us,” Mather wrote, as accused men and women were being put to death up the coast in Salem, “an attempt so critical, that if we get well through, we shall soon enjoy halcyon days with all the vultures of hell trodden under our feet.”
In its response to postmodernity, the Christian church would do well to take Bonhoeffer rather than Mather as its guide. Instead of welcoming culture’s destruction, the imprisoned German pastor pondered its intrinsic worth and the sacrifices required to preserve it. From his cell in January of 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote that culture belongs “not to the sphere of obedience, but to the broad area of freedom” surrounding the divine mandates of marriage, work, state, and church. Might it be possible, he wondered, “to regain the idea of the church as providing an understanding of the area of freedom (art, education, friendship, play), so that Kierkegaard’s ‘aesthetic existence’ would not be banished from the church’s sphere, but re-established within it?”
In understanding culture as the product of human freedom, Bonhoeffer traces it to its sources in the divided human heart. He implies that instead of accepting the ruin of culture, the Christian must labor for its preservation and long for its transformation. We are, Bonhoeffer says, to “defend” cultural activity “against all the disapproving frowns of ‘ethical’ existences” and otherworldly piety. “A ‘culture’ that breaks down in the face of danger is no culture,” he tells Bethge, espousing a view that recalls Yeats’s “tragic gaiety.” “Culture must be able to face danger and death–even if it cannot conquer them.”
For Bonhoeffer, however, culture is to be viewed in light of the resurrection of Jesus Christ rather than in the grim glow of Yeats’s Nietzschean vision. “It is only when one loves life and the earth so much that without them everything seems to be over that one may believe in the resurrection and a new world,” he wrote from prison. The difference between the “redemption myths” of popular religion and the Christian hope of resurrection is analogous to the contrast between a melodramatic view of culture and a tragicomic apprehension of it. “The Christian, unlike the devotees of the redemption myths, has no last line of escape available from earthly tasks and into the eternal,” Bonhoeffer notes, “but, like Christ himself (‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’), he must drink the earthly cup to the dregs, and only in his doing so is the crucified and risen Lord with him, and he crucified and risen with Christ.” Even when “old civilizations” are “put to the sword,” those who live in the light of the resurrected Christ struggle to preserve what is of worth in them. Even though “All things fall,” they are to be “built again / And those that build them again are gay.” Even in these vertiginous postmodern times, “this world must not be prematurely written off,” especially when it is easy, all too easy, to believe we’re on the eve of destruction.
Roger Lundin is professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author of The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World (Eerdmans) and the editor of Disciplining Hermeneutics: Interpretation in Christian Perspective, just published by Eerdmans.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 20
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