What is Postmodernism?
hen you start a blog with the intention of dealing with issues of postmodernism in the church, it’s a good idea to define what “postmodern” and “postmodernism” is. This introductory essay will attempt to do just this. We’ll take a look at the development of humanity in terms of chronological ages and their corresponding worldviews, and what they mean in terms of the Christian Church. In the end, we will arrive at postmodernism and discuss its implications.
You’ve all heard the labels used for different time periods. When Moses, Homer, and Alexander the Great lived, times were “Ancient”. Of course the term “ancient” wasn’t used by Homer or Alexander to describe themselves—it’s a term we use to divide history into manageable sections for study. These sections are usually defined by a series of important events that cause society (in our case, “western society”) to start rethinking the way the world works. The general consensus is that the “ancient” west began to change into the “medieval” west during the 5th – 7th centuries AD (the 400’s through the 600’s) as the Roman Empire began to crumble. The medieval era is characterized by the results of this crumble, such as the deterioration of Roman authority and the rise of a rural, “feudal” society.
During the 15th and 16th centuries (the 1400’s through the 1500’s) the medieval worldview began to give way to a new one. The causes of this are still debated by scholars, but most agree that it had something to do with the increase in agricultural technologies in the 1200’s and 1300’s which allowed the more efficient growing of food, which in turn allowed a greater amount of the population to do stuff other than producing food. People were now becoming freer to move into the cities and do other stuff, like make technological advancements. Combining these increases in information technology (the printing press) with the general distaste with the Roman Catholic Church developed over the last few centuries (Google “investiture controversy” or “western schism”), society was very conducive to ideas of life outside the reign of the Church. This period of development is called the “Early Modern Period”. Things like the Renaissance and the Reformation are products of this philosophical and technological shift from medievalism to modernism.
Eventually the early modern period developed into the Modern Period, and the new worldview began to take shape in reaction to medievalism. Papal authority was the only universal authority of the medieval period; this was thrown out in the early 1500’s by Reformation thinkers. The Pope was no longer the only person who could interpret scripture. The inflation of cities due to the increased efficiency in food production created a new generation of secular scholars and academics. The universe was no longer interpreted solely by the church, either.
This shedding of the authority of the Church gave rise to the ideas of “secular humanism”. The physical universe is separated from the spiritual world; man can think and act outside the influence of spirituality, and he could actually work to make the world a better place. This secular humanistic worldview was a direct counter to the medieval one. During medieval times, people believed in all sorts of superstitions. Their spiritual worldview was remarkably unified with their secular one. “Supernatural” events happened everyday; you might hear about a miller’s son in the village a few miles away who saw St. Whatever. Your village might run the local witch out of town. Stuff like this happened. It really wasn’t a big deal, and you certainly weren’t “irrational” or “illogical” to believe in such things.
Secular humanism eliminated the necessity of knowing God for understanding the way the world worked. The universe, modernists contended, could actually be understood by men. Thinkers like Isaac Newton developed the idea that the universe was ordered and governed by laws, that God himself didn’t have to hold everything in place. These ideas began to take shape during the “Enlightenment” period, from the mid 1600’s to the early 1800’s. Empirical sciences were born on the basis that observation and experimentation were crucial to understanding what was really going on. If you couldn’t prove it with empirical observations, it wasn’t true—thus the idea of the “supernatural” began to be viewed as negative.
Secular humanism gave birth to a new philosophical worldview. If mankind could actually improve the world, eventually some sort of high point, or Ideal, could be reached. Modernism is defined by this “idealism”. The universe was governed by absolute Laws. All men were created equal. The “invisible hand” of economics would keep the capitalist world turning. This is why the 19th century (the 1800’s) is known as the “century of isms”. Capitalism, Marxism, socialism, communism, liberalism, conservatism, progressivism—all modes of thinking that tried to grasp at the ideal.
Historian E.H. Carr argued that World War I effectively burst the bubble of 19th century idealism. All the ideas of working to better the world didn’t do much to stop the bloodiest war to date. The war left the western world in a depressed state, emotionally, economically, and spiritually. Coinciding with this depression, the “new science” dismantled the modern or “Newtonian” view of the universe. Atomic theory and the theory of the electromagnetic spectrum showed that the universe was far more complicated than enlightenment thinkers had contended; Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty went so far as to show that we could never, under any natural power, observe the true state of the universe. So much for idealism.
Thinkers of the interwar and postwar period noticed this change in the way western society was working, thinking, and acting. There was a definite change from the way things worked before, and many thinkers noticed changes similar to the nature of changes in western society during the 1400’s. It looked as if a new age was upon us. This new age has since been labeled the “post-modern age”.
So, if you’re keeping track, we’ve gone from Ancient, to Medieval, to Modern, to Postmodern.
Perhaps two hundred years from now thinkers will call this age something else. It really doesn’t matter. “Postmodern” will work for us. Medieval simply means “the middle age” in Latin, referring to its coming between late antiquity and early modernism; so it’s really not a big deal if we label our age in relation to what it is not.
The postmodern worldview really began to take shape in the middle of the 20th century. “Postmodern” thinkers reacted to modernism the way moderns reacted to medievalism. If modernism sought to define the universe in terms of ideals and absolutes, postmodern thinkers contended that there was no such thing. If moderns said that ration, empirical science, and logic were the only ways to determine real knowledge, postmodern thinkers said no—spirituality is all around us, and there probably is no such thing as “real knowledge”.
I call this worldview “High Postmodernism”.
Now, as the 20th century trekked on, the reactive nature of postmodernism began to slow down. Hardly anyone likes to live with the idea that there is no such thing as truth. No one wants to accept that we can’t really understand anything. Thus postmodernism has, in the last 20 years, taken back certain aspects of modernism. It isn’t that there is no truth; it’s that all truth is subjective by nature, and finding the truth is a difficult process that requires approaching a subject from many (but not infinite) angles. It isn’t that we can’t understand the universe; it’s that there are multiple, if not many, ways of understanding it.
I call this matured version of postmodernism “True Postmodernism”.
So there are two aspects of postmodernism that we’ve talked about. There’s the chronological distinction—the idea that our age is a “postmodern” age as opposed to a “modern” one. You can’t escape this. Nothing you do, say, or think will change the fact that the defining characteristics of modernism—idealism, absolutism, progressivism—are no longer the mainstays of society. We’re all living in the postmodern age, whether we like it or not.
There is, on the other hand, postmodern philosophy. While to many this automatically entails relativism (the idea that everything is relative to the observer), most academic fields (History, science) do not embrace or encourage relativism. Current postmodern thinking calls for the questioning of enlightenment assumptions and the customization of truth, not the outright rejection of its existence.
The biggest part of postmodern thinking comes from the realization that many of the assumptions we think with today are largely products of modernism and modern thinking. This comes into play big time when we look at Christianity in terms of “Systematic Theology”, “The Five Solas”, and “The Four Spiritual Laws”. These are big points of conflict between the orthodox (modern) and emergent (postmodern) Christians.
It is this conflict that this blog will address. What does postmodernism mean for Christianity? What can we embrace? What should we embrace? What should we reject?
Stay tuned.
You’ve all heard the labels used for different time periods. When Moses, Homer, and Alexander the Great lived, times were “Ancient”. Of course the term “ancient” wasn’t used by Homer or Alexander to describe themselves—it’s a term we use to divide history into manageable sections for study. These sections are usually defined by a series of important events that cause society (in our case, “western society”) to start rethinking the way the world works. The general consensus is that the “ancient” west began to change into the “medieval” west during the 5th – 7th centuries AD (the 400’s through the 600’s) as the Roman Empire began to crumble. The medieval era is characterized by the results of this crumble, such as the deterioration of Roman authority and the rise of a rural, “feudal” society.
During the 15th and 16th centuries (the 1400’s through the 1500’s) the medieval worldview began to give way to a new one. The causes of this are still debated by scholars, but most agree that it had something to do with the increase in agricultural technologies in the 1200’s and 1300’s which allowed the more efficient growing of food, which in turn allowed a greater amount of the population to do stuff other than producing food. People were now becoming freer to move into the cities and do other stuff, like make technological advancements. Combining these increases in information technology (the printing press) with the general distaste with the Roman Catholic Church developed over the last few centuries (Google “investiture controversy” or “western schism”), society was very conducive to ideas of life outside the reign of the Church. This period of development is called the “Early Modern Period”. Things like the Renaissance and the Reformation are products of this philosophical and technological shift from medievalism to modernism.
Eventually the early modern period developed into the Modern Period, and the new worldview began to take shape in reaction to medievalism. Papal authority was the only universal authority of the medieval period; this was thrown out in the early 1500’s by Reformation thinkers. The Pope was no longer the only person who could interpret scripture. The inflation of cities due to the increased efficiency in food production created a new generation of secular scholars and academics. The universe was no longer interpreted solely by the church, either.
This shedding of the authority of the Church gave rise to the ideas of “secular humanism”. The physical universe is separated from the spiritual world; man can think and act outside the influence of spirituality, and he could actually work to make the world a better place. This secular humanistic worldview was a direct counter to the medieval one. During medieval times, people believed in all sorts of superstitions. Their spiritual worldview was remarkably unified with their secular one. “Supernatural” events happened everyday; you might hear about a miller’s son in the village a few miles away who saw St. Whatever. Your village might run the local witch out of town. Stuff like this happened. It really wasn’t a big deal, and you certainly weren’t “irrational” or “illogical” to believe in such things.
Secular humanism eliminated the necessity of knowing God for understanding the way the world worked. The universe, modernists contended, could actually be understood by men. Thinkers like Isaac Newton developed the idea that the universe was ordered and governed by laws, that God himself didn’t have to hold everything in place. These ideas began to take shape during the “Enlightenment” period, from the mid 1600’s to the early 1800’s. Empirical sciences were born on the basis that observation and experimentation were crucial to understanding what was really going on. If you couldn’t prove it with empirical observations, it wasn’t true—thus the idea of the “supernatural” began to be viewed as negative.
Secular humanism gave birth to a new philosophical worldview. If mankind could actually improve the world, eventually some sort of high point, or Ideal, could be reached. Modernism is defined by this “idealism”. The universe was governed by absolute Laws. All men were created equal. The “invisible hand” of economics would keep the capitalist world turning. This is why the 19th century (the 1800’s) is known as the “century of isms”. Capitalism, Marxism, socialism, communism, liberalism, conservatism, progressivism—all modes of thinking that tried to grasp at the ideal.
Historian E.H. Carr argued that World War I effectively burst the bubble of 19th century idealism. All the ideas of working to better the world didn’t do much to stop the bloodiest war to date. The war left the western world in a depressed state, emotionally, economically, and spiritually. Coinciding with this depression, the “new science” dismantled the modern or “Newtonian” view of the universe. Atomic theory and the theory of the electromagnetic spectrum showed that the universe was far more complicated than enlightenment thinkers had contended; Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty went so far as to show that we could never, under any natural power, observe the true state of the universe. So much for idealism.
Thinkers of the interwar and postwar period noticed this change in the way western society was working, thinking, and acting. There was a definite change from the way things worked before, and many thinkers noticed changes similar to the nature of changes in western society during the 1400’s. It looked as if a new age was upon us. This new age has since been labeled the “post-modern age”.
So, if you’re keeping track, we’ve gone from Ancient, to Medieval, to Modern, to Postmodern.
Perhaps two hundred years from now thinkers will call this age something else. It really doesn’t matter. “Postmodern” will work for us. Medieval simply means “the middle age” in Latin, referring to its coming between late antiquity and early modernism; so it’s really not a big deal if we label our age in relation to what it is not.
The postmodern worldview really began to take shape in the middle of the 20th century. “Postmodern” thinkers reacted to modernism the way moderns reacted to medievalism. If modernism sought to define the universe in terms of ideals and absolutes, postmodern thinkers contended that there was no such thing. If moderns said that ration, empirical science, and logic were the only ways to determine real knowledge, postmodern thinkers said no—spirituality is all around us, and there probably is no such thing as “real knowledge”.
I call this worldview “High Postmodernism”.
Now, as the 20th century trekked on, the reactive nature of postmodernism began to slow down. Hardly anyone likes to live with the idea that there is no such thing as truth. No one wants to accept that we can’t really understand anything. Thus postmodernism has, in the last 20 years, taken back certain aspects of modernism. It isn’t that there is no truth; it’s that all truth is subjective by nature, and finding the truth is a difficult process that requires approaching a subject from many (but not infinite) angles. It isn’t that we can’t understand the universe; it’s that there are multiple, if not many, ways of understanding it.
I call this matured version of postmodernism “True Postmodernism”.
So there are two aspects of postmodernism that we’ve talked about. There’s the chronological distinction—the idea that our age is a “postmodern” age as opposed to a “modern” one. You can’t escape this. Nothing you do, say, or think will change the fact that the defining characteristics of modernism—idealism, absolutism, progressivism—are no longer the mainstays of society. We’re all living in the postmodern age, whether we like it or not.
There is, on the other hand, postmodern philosophy. While to many this automatically entails relativism (the idea that everything is relative to the observer), most academic fields (History, science) do not embrace or encourage relativism. Current postmodern thinking calls for the questioning of enlightenment assumptions and the customization of truth, not the outright rejection of its existence.
The biggest part of postmodern thinking comes from the realization that many of the assumptions we think with today are largely products of modernism and modern thinking. This comes into play big time when we look at Christianity in terms of “Systematic Theology”, “The Five Solas”, and “The Four Spiritual Laws”. These are big points of conflict between the orthodox (modern) and emergent (postmodern) Christians.
It is this conflict that this blog will address. What does postmodernism mean for Christianity? What can we embrace? What should we embrace? What should we reject?
Stay tuned.
posted by david t at 6:09 PM
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