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Postmodernism and Liturgy

Last night Tim McConnell at the Center for Christian Study made the comment that in an era of postmodernism, many Christians, including evangelicals, are returning to more liturgical forms of worship, prayer in particular. In context, "liturgical prayer" means prayer that is not spontaneous, but rather written by someone else, to be prayed by an entire group of worshipers. The explanation he gave was reasonable. A revival of liturgical prayer is a reaction against the postmodern notion that your identity and beliefs must come entirely from within; there is nothing in the outside world to guide you. Liturgical worship is a firm response against this. Liturgy helps define our identity and beliefs from outside ourselves. We aren't simply making it up as we go along.

I encounter the word "postmodernism" most often among evangelicals, who tend to overuse the term. They talk about it most often like it is a prevailing ideology which is reshaping the entire way society is structured. It isn't. In fact, what evangelicals have to deal with the day is not so much the influence of thinkers like Derrida as the influence of their own tradition. "Postmodernism" should really be called "post-evangelicalism."

It was evangelical Christians who taught generations of believers that true faith is about a personal choice, that it must come from within, and that it is not a matter of reason, but of the heart. In terms of liturgical practices, anything that seemed like it could be done by rote was rejected in favor of spontaneous, emotionally charged response to God. Worship music became increasingly improvisational. The Lord's supper became a once a month or less event (you wouldn't want it to become less special, would you?). The sermon, even as it solidified as the centerpiece of evangelical liturgy, became something to evoke individual response; at worst we see in our own day sermons used as self-help motivational speaking, or simply as entertainment.. The logic behind all of these moves is the same: God can only be known inside, rather than outside. Any external means we use must simply provide a platform for a "genuine" response to God, where "genuine" always means something that comes from within.

This shows up in apologetics, too. Science, it is said, can tell us many things; but there is another, spiritual dimension of experience, and that is where faith is necessary. But if science studies the outside world, then what realm of experience is left for faith? The inside world, no doubt--the world of thoughts and feelings, where I define myself because no one else can tell me who I am. That world may really be important, as one can learn by spending some time alone with one's thoughts. But it is an awfully small space for faith to live.

Why, then, are Christians so surprised at postmodernism? If transcendent truth is all found in an individual's mind, then how transcendent is it, really? When you rely on personal choice for your epistemology, don't be surprised at philosophical pluralism.

What is postmodernism, anyway? As far as I know, it's simply a rejection of the idea that an individual observer can be objective. I think this view can taken to absurd lengths, but overall, I'm inclined to agree with it. No individual observer can be truly objective, because what we see always comes through the filter of our cultural heritage and personal experiences. Evangelical Christianity, then, cannot be an objectively true system of beliefs, so long as it remains individualistic.

No individual observer can be truly objective; but we were not meant to be merely individuals. Biblical faith is based on collective, not personal, experience. All of the Israelites together heard God speak from Mount Sinai (Ex 20). Hundreds of the disciples saw the risen Christ together (1 Cor 15:6). Real, collective experience is the basis of our faith. More than these experiences, however, we also have experienced the presence of Christ together in the Lord's supper, in singing songs of worship, and in listening to the Scriptures taught. These are rituals, rather than singular experiences; but as we experience them together, we learn more and more what they mean, and how God interacts with us through them.

Personally, I get frustrated with the individualism of evangelical theology, and I think lots of others do, too. For all the evangelical talk about how God loves you and you don't have to earn salvation, they sure make it feel like you do. What if I come to church, and I'm not moved by the sermon, I don't particularly care for the music, I don't feel the urge to wave my hands in the air while I'm singing, and I don't feel like my quiet time that morning was all that spiritual? What if I find myself incapable of conjuring up feelings inside that Jesus is close to me? Evangelical theology--not evangelical people with bad attitudes, not Christians who are judgmental or rude, but the very ideas they hold dear--simply destroy people who find that they don't have the same personal experience as others. I expect to experience Christ personally; yet I find my own personal experience is as small as I am, a mere human trying to make sense of the world. At least one of my assumptions must be wrong.

A liturgy that brings worshipers outside of themselves can alleviate these dangers. I don't have to conjure up "authentic" prayers within myself. I pray the words that Jesus gave us to pray. Or I pray the words that centuries of devout believers have prayed, carefully constructing them out of a multitude of experience. I sing hymns that have been selected after centuries of effort to make beautiful music to God. I let all of these things come from outside of myself. I hear them, consider them, repeat them, absorb them. If I am receptive, I will be changed. It might not feel supernatural, but it is God's grace at work.

The process doesn't need to happen one way. As I experience and absorb the liturgy, my own reflections on it will become present in conversations I have with other Christians. I will have the opportunity for my own response. I don't need to lose my individuality to be part of a whole.

The bigger picture is that spirituality is not simply a dimension of personal experience. If our liturgical practices reflect an attitude that God exists nowhere except in the mind, then we will have a hard time making our faith relevant in public life. If, on the other hand, our liturgical practices connect us with a collective memory of the presence of Jesus Christ in the flesh, then we will find ourselves witnessing more faithfully to his presence now. It is one thing to say, "I had a personal experience of Jesus." It is quite another thing to say, "I worship the risen Lord alongside 2000 years of believers." Which of these is a more powerful testimony to the power of God?

Postmodern Christians and Truth

I just listened to an interesting sermon by Don Heatley, a man I had never heard of before, on the Emergent Village web site. After listening to it, I finally realized something about the emergents' postmodern approach to Christianity.

See, when I was growing up, I thought postmodernism was just silly. I bet lots of us evangelicals could imagine some conversation like this:

Postmodern: "I believe truth is relative, not absolute."
You: "That sounds like an absolute statement."
Postmodern: "No, not exactly."
You: "Oh, so I don't have to believe it?"
Postmodern: "Not if you don't want to, I guess..."

To my mathematical mind, it was as simple as a reductio ad absurdum: if truth is relative, then the statement "truth is relative" is not absolutely true, therefore truth is not actually relative, a contradiction. Now I realize I was missing the point.

What I think the postmodern means to say is that words fail to totally embody truth. This point shines through in Heatley's sermon, which emphasizes that the experience of God is mysterious, and can't totally be put into words.

Now many clever evangelicals would be quick to jump all over this. How can you be saying that the experience of God is mysterious and can't be put into words, when you yourself have used words to say that--and preaching from a biblical text, at that?

But words just have to be put in their place. The idea is simply that words fail to totally embody truth, not that words fail utterly to point to anything true. That is why for emergents, experiencing God and becoming more Christ-like are far more important than doctrine. Yet they immerse themselves in scripture as much as any evangelical, because the scriptures provide powerful glimpses of Christ.

A little while ago I argued that we Christians need a new epistemology--that is, a new theory about what we know and how we know it. The reason I think so is that I've seen certain kinds of epistemology totally ruin discussion: "You're not taking scripture seriously!" "Well, you're taking it out of context!" "Heretic!" "Closed-minded!" etc.

This isn't just people being rude, or mean, or whatever. This is the result of people having a certain conception of what truth is, and acting on that. For many, truth is "right there" in scripture, as if pulling truth out of scripture is like pulling ketchup out of a refrigerator. I think this is a seriously deficient understanding of truth.

It would have been more helpful if throughout church history we had taken more closely to heart the words of Jesus: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." For one thing, I think "truth" is much more connected to the way of life that one takes than it is to statements that one may pull out of scripture.

For another, these words of Jesus point to a more personal meaning of truth. You find truth by finding Jesus, not by finding the right words to say. Yes, I know, I just used words to say that. But the question is how perfectly you think words embody the truth. We must be careful not to make an idol out of words.

I have found that those who believe the words of scripture perfectly embody truth do more than just cling to those words. They cling to a particular interpretation of those words. If they admit there is more than one plausible interpretation of the text, then they've given up on the idea that the words perfectly embody the truth--it's not a perfect embodiment if there's room for error.

Perhaps the real irony to this whole thing, however, is that postmodernists really are often too absolutist (as is so often claimed). The statement "nothing is absolute" becomes a mantra, so that eventually the people who say it implicitly believe that it perfectly embodies a certain ethos that they're trying to achieve, and at that point they've defeated themselves.

My experience on both sides of this culture war has been that ultimately words are tools, and I've seen them used both to help and to hurt. I can only hope that my words can somehow be of help... and therefore I blog.

Postmodernism and Trinitarian Thought

I hear it all the time in church--we're living in a postmodern era, where truth is relative. People have forgotten where Truth, with a capital "T," comes from.

Not that modernism was well-received by Christians, either. Modernism, I am told, began with the skepticism of folks like Descartes, who decided to question everything he knew and build up a whole philosophy grounded in only those "self-evident" truths like, "I think, therefore I am."

(I'm glad I got to finally throw in that quote on this blog.)

This kind of skepticism seeks the "facts." Once you have the "facts," which are presumably unquestionable once firmly grasped, then it's a matter of interpreting the facts to gain sufficient theoretical knowledge of the universe.

Modern science derives from this, but so do a lot of other things. Skepticism about Christianity, for one. Modernism made humans the ultimate judge of truth. If something wasn't "self-evident" to us--either from just thinking about it or checking empirically--then it wasn't a fact, and if it wasn't a fact, then it bore a huge burden of proof. Christianity no longer sat so comfortably on the shoulders of faith.

Postmodernism, it's true, hasn't done much to bring people back to faith. What it has done, however, is call into question this whole notion of "self-evident" truths, pointing out that the way we see the world is largely shaped by our culture and personal experiences.

Modernism is still hanging on in a lot of circles, but postmodernism has pretty much made its way everywhere. One of my fellow math grads actually said that "science is just one perspective among many." Not even science, which has depended so heavily on modernism, can escape from the doubts of postmodernists.

But the problem with postmodernism is that it's not much more than a set of doubts about modernism, rather than a philosophy in itself. What could possibly fill the void?

Many evangelicals around me suggest that the only thing to fill the void is to go back to the revealed Truth of God found in the Bible. The problem I see with this is that the suspicions of both modernism and postmodernism really are quite penetrating. Like it or not, modernism brought with it a lot of scientific discoveries and historical criticism that raise huge doubts about the perfect accuracy of the Bible.

Perhaps the more crushing blow comes from the sheer number of different biblical interpretations there are. As hard as modern evangelicals try, we just can't help but read the Bible through layers upon layers of traditional interpretation that has been handed down to us.

But what, then, to take the place of modernism? How do we respond to postmodernism with something helpful?

It seems to me that the whole problem comes from a plain, one-dimensional approach to truth. The idea of obtaining revealed truth straight from the Bible is one-dimensional: truth goes from God to the Bible to you in a linear fashion.

Modernism, for all its skepticism, is no different. Humans observe nature, and "facts" come directly from nature to humans. By noticing patterns in these facts, we can ascertain truth.

In meditating on the Christian concept of the Trinity, I was struck by the idea that if God is not merely One, but also Three, why should we expect that truth would be merely one-dimensional?

After all, postmodernists have a point, don't they? Our thinking is always shaped by our culture. The way we perceive reality is shaped by our own experiences. There is, in fact, a trio of characters that interact in our pursuit of knowledge.

To be concrete, why don't I talk about the study of the Bible? The Bible is a collection of writings which exist independent of me. I cannot simply will the letters on its pages to change their form.

But when I read it, I am not simply being spoon fed "truth." The message I get will be shaped by my own mind. I may be prepared--whether through experiences or contemplation--to understand its words differently from someone else.

That's not the whole story. I am not on my own when I read the Bible; my culture reads with me. Sermons I hear, books I read, and conversations I have all shape what I am prepared to see in the text. Of course, the culture itself is shaped by the Bible, as people re-examine it. But the culture also shapes the Bible, in the sense that is shapes the message I receive from it.

That's not all, either. I shape the culture in which I live, and the culture shapes me. All of these different interactions are natural and inseparable. It is a trinity, if you will; three in one, and one in three. The Bible and I and the culture around me are ever three and ever one, and the search for meaning can only proceed with all three parts involved.

Each failed attempt at obtaining truth can be critiqued according to this model. Pure revelation cannot work, because it denies the role of self and culture. Attempts to evade self and culture are doomed from the start--they are inescapable, just as much as God the Father cannot be without the Son and the Spirit.

Modernism does not work because it denies the role of culture, and it seeks to trump up the self as impartial and objective (provided one is enlightened through skepticism). Postmodernism provides a critique of this, and I accept this critique.

In the place of Modernism, however, I would suggest "trinitarianism," the idea that truth is not a set of propositions revealed directly, nor a set of ideas derived from an objective study of the "facts," but that truth is the continually harvested fruit of a right relationship between the self, the thing studied, and that ever-present third party (e.g. one's culture, though one might think of something, or someone, else).

What, then, of doctrines? Doctrines are useful insofar as they promote this harmony. C. S. Lewis talked about how doctrine is not the destination, but it is a map toward the destination. Many people are too quick to line doctrines up beside one another, find them mutually exclusive, and therefore try to throw away one or the other; but I think this is not always the best approach. Ideas gradually evolve in their meaning as this "triune" process unfolds.

When I evaluate an idea about scripture (the doctrine of the Trinity, incidentally, is a perfect example), I must first see if it causes me to look for something I had not seen before. Then I must go and read the scriptures and analyze how this idea may have enlightened or conflicted with certain parts of my reading. Then I should share with other people what that experience was like, and let them share their own experience with me. The result of this will not be an artifact that we can put in a box labeled "truth." The result will be a better harmony between the three parts of my search for truth, and it is that harmony itself that is worth seeking.

Is this a shocking idea to Christians? Why are we so bent on having a tangible thing, like a statement, confession, or book, that we can call "Truth"? How do we come to know God the Father except through God the Son, by the power of God the Spirit? It is the same with all things. We don't know anything except through a three-fold harmony, and knowledge itself can be equated with this harmony.

Perhaps the doctrine of the Trinity can point us toward a vision of truth that is more attainable, a vision that appears to be needed in this time of uncertainty. I'd like to think so, anyway.