Pop Spirituality or Genuine Story? The Church’s Gifts for Postmodern Times

Those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the Gentiles shall be blessed in You” For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed.

Galatians 3:7-9

We hear or see the word spirituality thrown around frequently in conversations and in the media these days, but that term has become so ambiguous as to be meaningless. How would the various forms of popular spirituality in our culture compare with the faith of Christians, who consider themselves grafted on to God’s promises to the Jews as they worship the triune God? And what might that comparison mean for Christians’ desire to be Church in order to serve their neighbors? What is happening spiritually in our culture, and how can we best respond out of our love for God and our love for others?

We live in a society that seems to have lost its way and is scrambling to find it by resorting to a wide variety of spiritualities. As one type of the many we could choose for examples, let us consider the “religions” presently finding their way into cyberspace. Stephen D. O’Leary examines some religious rituals found on computer networks and predicts that

we will continue to see old and new religions jostling for attention in the cultural marketplace and using available technology to reach new audiences. If current trends hold, computers and computer networks will play an increasingly significant role in the religions of the future.1

What will characterize these “religions of the future”? O’Leary recognizes the following aspects in almost all of the transcripts he studied:

1. “an attempt to recreate or simulate real space in virtual space and to sanctify a portion of this space as a theatre in which spirit is manifested”;

2. an emphasis on the difference between this space and the world outside or other places in cyberspace

3. “an assertion of the power of language to bring about wish fulfillment through the verbal act of declaring the wish within the ritual circle.”

These observations lead O’Leary to conclude that the cyberspace rituals

appear as attempts to fulfill authentic spiritual needs now unmet by the major institutions of religious tradition. Yet there is an irreverence to these discourses…; they are ludic and playful, they revel in pastiche and parody, and they make few (if any) cognitive demands upon the participants. This conjunction of reverence and irreverence seems to me to be in some way characteristic of the spiritual situation of postmodern culture, which can neither dismiss religion nor embrace it wholeheartedly, but which ultimately leads to its commodification along with every other product and project of the past that is not doomed to be discarded in the ash-heap of history.2

As Christians, we have to ask why religious traditions are not meeting the “authentic spiritual needs” of these rituals’ participants. What is the “spiritual situation of postmodern culture,” and how should Christians respond to postmodernism? What are the needs and concerns of those who live in the postmodern condition as exemplified in pop spiritualities? How can Christians love our neighbors who might dwell in that condition? What might it take to offer a Christianity that could be embraced wholeheartedly?

So that we can understand much of pop spirituality and the needs of people in our culture, this chapter will investigate the postmodern condition and assess the spiritual needs it creates. We will find that one great challenge for people in our times is the lack of a genuine story, one that is coherent and gives meaning to their lives. Bear with me as we trace the roots and some of the aspects of postmodernity in order to see what the Christian community can be in the midst of it and what we have to offer in terms of the larger story that we all need and that calls forth wholehearted commitment.

Does This Really Matter?

The term postmodernism is used in a wide variety of ways and covers a wide variety of ideas as postmodern worldviews, attitudes, concerns, and results spread rapidly throughout the world and enter every major aspect of contemporary life. In university history departments, postmodernism leads to revisionist accounts of events and an ever-increasing fracturing of society into victim groups demanding their own stories. Postmodernist philosophers absolutize the relativity of truth, stress playfulness, and speak in random aphorisms. English teachers and visual artists who accept postmodern theories claim that there is no meaning in texts or paintings except what the reader or viewer brings to them.

Though postmodern thinking was once confined to these university humanities faculties and the intellectual elite, now even the sciences are exhibiting effects of postmodern thinking. Recently, at a small college in Washington State, a guest lecturer insisted that Newtonian physics (emphasizing such natural laws as the law of gravity) was simply the product of male oppression (a typical postmodern tenet) and should, therefore be replaced by an openness to other perspectives. A female professor, failing to get him to see reason, sarcastically responded that perhaps, then, this lecturer should demonstrate non-Newtonian physics by jumping up from the edge of a twenty-story building!

We are not concerned so much here with the philosophical and academic manifestations of postmodernism, but with the effects of postmodern thinking on the average person, for even young children now experience and react to postmodern conditions. My concern here is for how postmodern notions—often without our awareness—hit the streets, creating our children’s worldview, and influence the people in (or absent from) our churches’ pews. How do these notions impact the basic presuppositions and attitudes of those to whom the Christian community seeks to minister? My remarks will not detail aspects of the condition itself, but will paint a broad picture of the general social fabric so that we can then consider what Christianity has to offer in response and what leaders of churches can do to prepare their congregants for mission in the postmodern world. It is essential that you and I, as we seek to be Church, know all that we can about what drives the despair and nihilism in our culture and how we can genuinely care for those who suffer in the midst of its postmodern condition.

Leszek Kolakowski describes the disastrous despair generated by late modernity’s and postmodernity’s flight from the past and from meaning as follows:

Culture, when it loses its sacred sense, loses all sense. With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is ‘in principle’ an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny [humanity’s] total autonomy and thus to deny [human beings themselves].

Not only is this illusion demented, but it sows a disastrous despair. The omnipresent Nietzschean or Sartrian chimera which proclaims that [human beings] can liberate [themselves] totally, from everything, can free [themselves] of tradition and of all pre-existing sense, and that all sense can be decreed by arbitrary whim, far from unfurling before us the prospect of divine self-creation, leaves us suspended in darkness. And in this darkness, where all things are equally good, all things are also equally indifferent…. But this is a belief that cannot be accepted in good faith and can only give rise to a desperate flight from nothingness to nothingness. To be totally free with respect to sense, free of all pressure from tradition, is to situate oneself in a void and thus, quite simply, to disintegrate.

To reject the sacred is to reject our own limits.3

The Movement to Postmodernism

We can best understand the present postmodern condition and its disintegrating pressures by tracing its roots in three particular themes of premodernity and modernity. We will limit the discussion to these three themes not to be reductionistic about the complexities of postmodernity, but because it will be especially helpful for our purposes here to focus simply on each epoch’s understanding of God, authority, and truth.4

In the premodern world, everyone believed in some sort of god or gods. To understand the immense world alteration brought about by the modern epoch we must comprehend that, prior to the European age of Enlightenment which ushered in modernity, all cultures were devoted to their gods. All societies recognized the superior power of some kind of supernatural (theme A). Moreover, in premodernity those who were the bearers of knowledge about the specific culture’s gods served as that society’s authorities (theme B). They taught the rest of the people how to worship or appease the gods; they were thus the agents of truth, its promoters and practitioners. Truth was understood as absolute (theme C) because it came from god, and it was thought to be reliably transmitted by the shaman, priest, or witch doctor.

The development in the Enlightenment of science and reason (partly as one attempt to end the religious wars destroying Europe) turned the center of societies from the supernatural to the natural (A). We have to recognize what a mammoth change it was when the locus of authority shifted from persons who passed on the truth of god to the scientific method, by which the truths of the natural world could be objectively discovered. Of course, there is nothing wrong with science—the first scientists were, generally, faithful Christians—but science increasingly displaced the supernatural, especially for those people who had only had a “god of the gaps” before the onslaught of scientific disproof. Those who attributed to God only whatever was not otherwise understood thus thought they had a decreasing need for the God of the Bible as science filled in more and more of the gaps. With the progressive ascent of technology, human beings assumed increasingly that they could control their own futures, that with just the right technological fix they could solve all their problems. Consequently, a “Tower of uilt on the ground floor of science, with technology and economics comprising the next two floors. Science provided the insights, technology the power, and economics the wealth to combat ignorance, superstition, and poverty in a never-ceasing spiral of progress.5

Instead of trusting authorities, human beings insisted increasingly on their autonomy (B), and all truth, including what could be scientifically determined, became relative (C). Now God was no longer absolute, and religion was marginalized to the private sphere. People could simply say, “Christianity might be true for you, but it is not true for me.”

Development of the postmodern spirit was really inevitable, since modernity believed so firmly in the faulty Enlightenment idolatry of Progress. With the rise of science and technology, economics and communications, this modern myth insisted that everything would get better and better—that we could solve the problems of the world with enough scientific discovery and technological fixes. However, this modern fantasy was built on shaky foundations, without adequate checks on who controlled the power. The euphoria of the myth of progress began to give way to the despair and hopelessness of grave anxiety as the twentieth century unfolded into major world wars, severe economic depressions, the callous violence of Hitler, the world-changing terror of Hiroshima, the assassinations of leaders and massive betrayals by government in the United States, the environmental destruction and relentless dread of the Cold War, the Challenger explosion and Chernobyl and Bhopal, the recent frenzy of ethnic cleansing and tribalism in Africa and the Balkans, growing economic tyranny by major corporations and massive global unemployment, the emptiness and ennui of entertainment that continues to escalate its graphic violence and blatant immorality, the salient loss of any moral consensus or commitment to the common good. Through all these graphic contradictions to “progress” the move to postmodernism has accelerated.

Postmodern theorists recognize that science had degenerated into a scientism that needed to be deconstructed. Technicism and economism also were idols, as were the grand narratives of truth, justice, freedom, and beauty. All these gods must be debunked; their proponents must be unmasked for the oppressive authorities that they are as they use these narratives merely to gain power. Thus, both the gods of the premodern supernatural worldview and the various modern myths of progress in the natural world are attacked by postmodern deconstruction (A), which leads to constant suspicion, loss of meaning, and rejection of any fixed point of reference.

Postmodern art uses a haphazard mixture of different methods and modes ironically juxtaposed; its literature uses amalgamations of various styles, genres, and even typefaces.6 Channel surfing with the remote control illustrates the postmodern condition: from a distance the viewer experiences no plot, but merely disconnected images and smatterings of feelings.

The failure of “progress” thus has led to postmodernist spirals of despair and hopelessness. The poor outlook for finding meaningful jobs leaves young people without any reason to learn, even as their entertainments deprive them of the brain space or skills to do so.7 We might as well amuse our selves to death.8 One very visible indicator of postmodern anomie is the immense proliferation of gambling casinos and lotteries.

As many scholars in the United States have noticed, postmodernism has moved young people from the alienation of the 1960s to the schizophrenia or multiphrenia (a legion of selves with no constant core of character) of the 1990s and 2000s.9 Having no point of reference, no overarching story, no master narrative, people don’t know who they are. Constantly shifting their image of themselves to fit in with the fads and fashions of the times, young folks especially lack a nucleus of identity, a personality that has been formed by moral authority and mentoring models. Furthermore, since they have no sense of themselves, they are unable to make commitments to another person in marriage or friendship or to a job, a vision, a vocation, a religion. Their subconscious cry often becomes, “Keep entertaining me, so that I don’t have to face the absence of my self.” Religion, in the form of pop spiritualities, is merely another technique for entertainment. Thus, the postmodern condition has moved people from both the premodern confidence in authorities and the modern confidence in self (autonomy) to the decentering (B) of both self (incoherence) and society (fragmentation) in contemporary culture.

Most important of all, the failure of the hyped-up promises of science and technology accentuates the loss of truth already inherent in modernist relativizing and in the rejection of authoritative structures or persons with moral authority. Consequently, the major characteristic of the postmodern condition is the repudiation of any Truth (C) that claims to be absolute or truly true. “Christianity might be true for you, but not for me,” our children used to say with modernist relativity—but now they are learning in their schools and from the media that any claim to truth is merely a means of hiding an oppressive will to power. The result is the malaise of meaninglessness, the inability to trust anything or anyone, the loss of any reference point or “web of reality” by which to construct one’s life.

As Edward Farley explains, many of our current social problems arise partly as

the result of a loss or diminishment at the very heart of culture—some would say the loss of culture itself— namely, a loss of the society’s powerful deep symbols. Without such things a society becomes alienated from past wisdom, develops institutions that have little connection with sources of humanization, and instigates styles of everyday life whose primary function is ephemeral entertainment and trivial comforts. The diminishment and sickness of all deep symbols, that is, constraining and guiding words of power, is at least one of the things at work in the larger societal infirmity.

He notes that the postmodernism that has led to such a loss of deep symbols refers

to the way institutions of leisure, buying and selling, governmental, educational, and corporate bureaucracies dominate and set the tone of everyday urban and suburban life. Alienated from the interhuman and from communities of human intimacy, these institutions are fairly emptied of moral, normative, and aesthetic dimensions.10

Though the philosophers use words like random, playfulness, and banter to describe their assessment of and approach to, postmodern life, the effects on young people seem more like catastrophe, confusion, and chaos. Lacking authorities in the modern world to guide the formation of their moral character, now children lack basic resources of principled disposition to know how to find delight in what is beautiful, to have compassion for those who suffer, to develop goals for their work and lives. Distorted by the entertainment mentality of their parents, a large proportion of the young people in my husband’s fifth-grade classroom have little desire to learn, insufficient conscience calling them to civility and propriety, hardly any sense of meaning and purpose in life, no sense that there is any truth except what they create for themselves.11

Dutch theologian Arend van Leewen heightens the radical difference between our times and the previous theocentric world by suggesting that there have been only two basic eras in all of history, which he calls the ontocratic and the technological eras. In the former, life was inherently a cosmic totality, in which belief in a God or gods transcendent to the natural world and to the life of human beings held together the contradictory and confusing elements of that life and world. However, comparatively abruptly, within the last three hundred years or so, this unifying notion has been rejected for “a multiform system of relationships, with no specific cornerstone, no single integrating element which gives all other things their reason for being.”12

The Denial of Meta-Narrative

Perhaps the most important aspect of various kinds of postmodern thinking for our practical theological purposes here is this loss of an integrating element, this general rejection of meta-narrative. The term meta-narrative refers to an overarching story that gives focus, cohesion, commonality, and meaning to life. When I lectured at a seminary in Oslo last year, we acknowledged that Norway’s meta-narrative includes the sagas of the Vikings; the grievous domination by both Denmark and Sweden; the courage of church and government leaders, of fishermen and schoolteachers in resisting Nazism; and, in present day, the people’s respectful relationship to the king, their leadership in world-class skiing, and their careful stewarding of oil reserves for the nation’s future. These and many other elements of that nation’s story link the people together and give them common understanding of, and pride in, themselves and their heritage.

In contrast, the United States displays much greater postmodern breakdown and fragmentation as various interest and victim groups compete with another. The larger, overarching worldview of the United States— including its founding by religious groups, the heroism of the pioneers, the splendor of its democratic vision, the nobility of its leaders—has in recent years given way to small stories of anger over the brutality of the first explorers and settlers against the native tribes, resentment against a government that has betrayed its people, indignation toward religion, and fear of the crimes and violence of our neighbors. Of course, much of this postmodern critique is justified. But the fact remains that we have lost much of our common, unifying story.

Postmodernism especially rejects the meta-narrative of Christianity and claims that it is violent and oppressive. It is alleged that in a pluralistic world no religion can be seen as universal. Meanwhile, retaining the modernist elevation of choice as a major value, many persons who claim to be Christians have assembled their own belief systems with a mixture of biblical elements along with hodgepodge of ideas from other traditions,13 together with a rejection of what they find “oppressive” in Christianity, such as the doctrine of the Atonement or narratives exhibiting God’s wrath. Thus, pop spiritualities are not manifested only by people outside churches.

The Biblical Meta-Narrative as Eternal

Those of us who believe that the Revelation14 of God does offer a genuine meta-narrative which is universally available and applicable and which is not violent or oppressive must especially remember that we make those claims, not because we stand outside of the biblical narrative as objective observers, but because God does. We agree with the postmodern thinkers that no one can make inflated claims about knowing the truth clearly without being influenced by our position in time and space, but we do not thereby give up all assertions of absolute truth.

Though postmodernists reject the Church’s claim of the Christian meta-narrative’s comprehensive inclusivity we believe that the triune God has disclosed himself through the Revelation given to a faith community stretching all the way back to Sarah and Abraham, incarnated in the flesh in the person of Jesus Christ who lived among us, and passed on through the centuries by the guidance and empowerment of the Holy Spirit. The main theme of the Revelation, incarnated and enscriptured, is the comprehensive grace of God given freely to liberate the whole world.

The biblical narratives can be seen as universally applicable for several reasons. The Revelation knits all human beings together because they are equally created by God, because Christ died for all, and because the Spirit has been poured out upon “all flesh” and the result of that outpouring originally was that each person heard the disciples speaking in his or her own language. The Revelation of the Trinity encompasses all persons threefold.

Furthermore, the Revelation carries within it counterideological elements15—texts that prevent us from siding with the voices of victors, prophecies against Israel herself, oracles calling for justice building and peacemaking, narratives of suffering and oppression that call human dominion into question, accounts of the misunderstandings of the apostles and the contrasting comprehension of the “little people.” Jesus himself is the most obvious element, for his submission to suffering demonstrates most graphically that God does not work through the power structures and ideologies of the world. Furthermore, on the cross he exposed and triumphed over all the principalities and powers of politics, economics, and religious institutions.16

Whereas the modern world rejected Christianity’s claims because they could not be scientifically proven, now postmodernity has opened people up to recognizing other kinds of knowledge and uses of reason. We can address the epistemological barriers to faith (that is, the issues of how we know what we know about God) by accepting the suprarational mystery of God and the community-attested Revelation and by recognizing the reasonableness of the Christian story as the best answer to the existential questions of who we are and why we exist, of what is wrong with the world and what can be done out it. As Diogenes Allen explains,

Christian faith is not a leap within the order of the intellect, a leap which violates the very essence of that order. The leap of faith is a leap from the order of the intellect to the order of the heart. We leap because we recognize the reality of the domain of the heart, not because there is a shortage of evidence.

We recognize the reality of the order of the heart when we realize that we cannot achieve the well-being we seek from possessing those goods which can be gained by power and wealth (the order of the body) and when we realize that all questions of value and self-evaluation are legitimately excluded from consideration within the order of the intellect. Faith is called a “leap” because there is a chasm between the orders of the body and the intellect and the order of the heart, which can be spanned only by a change in outlook and concerns….

Once we see that the intellect is not able to satisfy the concerns of the heart, and take into account the biblical teaching that God is above the power of the mind to comprehend, we recognize the appropriateness of faith. We may embrace God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength because God is accessible to us through the good God promises to give us. At least God is accessible to those who overcome their resentment of being utterly dependent on deity for their well-being.17

Because the God who has disclosed himself to us is eternal, because the story of his relationship with human beings encompasses all eras, because those who believe in him already have eternal life and so share in God’s freedom beyond time, and because the Revelation offers the standard by which we can assess what is of God and what is alien to his purposes, Christians can retain from each epoch what is warranted for our thinking and reject what conflicts with the Revelation of God to us. Instead of a fundamentalistic retrenchment into premodernity, I believe Christians can be at the forefront in offering to the world around us a better postmodernism, not one of fragmentation and chaos, but a genuine story of community and faith.

Christianity and Premodernism

The Bible thoroughly proclaims and reveals the existence of God and the meaning of human life in relation to God. For that reason, Christians in the present age find it essential to retain from the premodern era its theocentric consciousness, its spiritual Center. Certainly our society needs to recover the attention to the supernatural (theme A) of cultures before the Enlightenment, for we can easily see that the massive social problems of the present world are due to human beings’ prideful rejection of God as the center of and reason for existence.

Because the Bible also makes it very clear that all human beings are sinful and that human perception of God is marred by sin, we must reject premodern attitudes toward authority (theme B). Though we acknowledge that God is absolute and absolute Truth (theme C), we no longer trust that the pastor or priest is able to pass on the Truth of God absolutely truly. We acknowledge that our comprehension of God is affected by our social situation, and thus we need the whole creation, including those who do not believe the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, to reveal more of what we can know only relatively. Thus, from the premodern age, Christians keep the focus on God and believe in his Truth, but recognize that we know it only partially and can share it with others not as authorities but as co-learners.

Christianity and Modernism

It is modernism that taught us we didn’t know everything, so we can accept its turn toward relative perception, though we do not extend that relativity to God himself since God has indeed revealed himself as sovereignly knowing, caring, and saving. Moreover, the Scriptures also warn us (for example, in Ecclesiastes) against modernity’s reliance on human science and technology to conquer human problems. The Revelation of God clearly exposes the myth of human progress and names as sin the oppressions that result from unequal distributions of “progress” and power.

Christian theology gave in too much to modernity. We allowed the rules of science to determine how we studied the Scriptures instead of retaining our sense that there are many kinds of knowledge and wisdom and that the Bible carries within itself guides to the ways to study it—with the foundation of belief in Christ as the Revealed and Revealing One and with methods of openness to the Holy Spirit, the counsel of the community, meditation, memorization, submission to the text’s formation, obedience, and trust. We allowed modernity to turn us toward entertainment in our worship and toward ministry to people’s “felt needs” instead of offering them what is truly needful. In a society of choice, churches became false democracies—for example, in deciding doctrine by majority vote—rather than communities of gifted people equipped by their leadership for a corporate life formed by the biblical narratives and guided by the Holy Spirit.18

Theologians recognize that the tools modernity gave us— form, source, historical-critical, and redaction criticisms19—are inadequate, for they tend to atomize the text and leave us with nothing that forms us as a people of God. For the sake of what can be gained from them, we can retain these methods from the modern epoch, along with its sense of the relativity of our own knowledge, but the postmodernists (and, even more, the Bible) show us that we need more—for example, the people-forming results of literary, narrative, and canonical approaches to the Scriptures.20 These tools especially help us to learn the genuine story of our faith and how it differs from the new spiritualities of our culture.

Christianity and Postmodernism

Certainly by means of critique already given in the Scriptures, Christians can agree with postmodernity’s rejection of the modern world’s myth of progress. We concur with the postmodern deconstruction of the technological mindset, of political ideologies, of Enlightenment hyper-rationalism. We have seen the failures of technology truly to fix our problems, the destructive use of science for evil ends, the inability of economics to bring equitable wealth to all. From the narratives of the Revelation, we know the source of these defects in human pride, narcissism, and greed.

What we cannot accept from postmodernity is its “wholesale rejection of objectivity and the uncritical celebration of perspectival understanding,”21 its total decentering, its reduction of life merely to a carnival, with myriads of consumerist opportunities and entertaining sideshows—including those of various spiritualities. We recognize the logical fallacy of postmodernity’s rejection of meta-narratives, since its very insistence that they are violent and oppressive is itself an example of an imperious meta-narrative. Most of all, we observe the emptiness, the hopelessness, the despair, the lack of a coherent story created by postmodernity’s repudiation of God.

We acknowledge, however, that there is no going back to “the good old days” of premodern absolute conviction, of infallible authorities who passed on God’s truth. We readily confess that God’s people throughout their history have not passed on the whole Truth of God, nor have they always passed it on in ways compatible with the character of God himself. We realize that Christendom distorted its convictions and authority with disastrous results in the violence it perpetrated, the greed of many of its leaders, the oppressions it fostered, the suffering it caused countless peoples. In past eras, for example, Christendom misconstrued the biblical formulation of “Holy War,” which was actually a peace-building notion in the First Testament in that Holy War was intended to teach Israel not to fight and not to gain any booty from fighting.22 The Crusades were an appalling manifestation of human perversion of the biblical meta-narrative.

The Biblical Meta-Narrative as Gift to the Postmodern World

Accepting the postmodernist critique of our abuse of the biblical meta-narrative, how can we recover the Word, the genuine story of God and his people as a crucially necessary gift for our time? First we must examine the meta-narrative itself, and then we must clarify how it forms us. The biblical meta-narrative is the story of a faithful God, of a God who keeps his promises. When we read it in its entirety, we realize that it is different from other religious narratives because it focuses on God in relationship with a specific people.23 There are many other creation accounts in religious literature, for example, but only the Hebrew/Christian Scriptures emphasize that this Creator God is also a Covenant God. As Deuteronomy explains,

Because the LORD your God is a [compassionate] God, he will neither abandon you nor destroy you; he will not forget the covenant with your ancestors that he swore to them.

For ask now about former ages, long before your own, ever since the day that God created human beings on the earth; ask from one end of heaven to the other: has anything so great as this ever happened or has its like ever been heard of? Has any people ever heard the voice of a god speaking out of a fire, as you have heard, and lived? Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by terrifying displays of great power, as the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? To you it was shown so that you would acknowledge that the LORD is God; there is no other besides him. From heaven he made you hear his voice to discipline you. On earth he showed you his great fire, while you heard his words coming out of the fire. And because he loved your ancestors, he chose their descendants after them. He brought you out of Egypt with his own presence, by his great power. (4:31-37)

The knowledge of God began with the LORD’S intervention in the history of Israel—and from there they discovered that their covenant “I AM” was the One who had created the world.

In the same way, we offer to people in the postmodern world an introduction to the God who loves them and wants to reconcile them to himself. We tell them the story of a faithful, promising God who demonstrated his devotion by always remembering his covenant with Israel. The dependability of the Revelation is established most profoundly in the resurrection of Jesus, for in the empty tomb we see the culmination of God’s work on our behalf, the fulfillment of all the prophecies concerning the Messiah, the down payment on all God’s promises for the future.

The Revelation, then, offers a convincing story of hope for people in our postmodern times. It proclaims a God of compassion and gracious mercy, who gives meaning and focus to lives tossed around by postmodern randomness. It announces forgiveness and atonement and reconciliation to those torn by guilt and lacking skills for relationships. It describes the Trinity whom our neighbors genuinely need—a loving Creator for those who think they have to create their own identity, a perfect Model for those who have no mentors, and an empowering Spirit for those who think they have to do everything on their own.

How the Revelation Forms Us

The Revelation is not a book of rules that gives us step-by-step procedures for life. There could never be enough rules to cover all the possibilities, and usually our response to rules and regulations is to resist them. Nor is the Bible a collection of timeless truths from which we draw out basic principles or goals toward which we aim. Since the Bible contains many dialectical tensions, opposing sides can draw out contradictory timeless principles, and often people use biblical goals to justify any means. Rather, to modify a basic schema from N. T. Wright,24 the Scriptures must be understood as a master story with multiple narratives that form us as we are immersed in them. We become part of this genuine story as we then live out of the character shaped by all of God’s Revelation.

Imagine that we found an unfinished drama by William Shakespeare, that we uncovered the first five acts and the last bit of the seventh.25 How would we produce the play? We could try to write the missing parts, but we could never be sure if we got them exactly right—and we could not check out our attempts with the author.

Instead, we would try to find actors (perhaps from the Shakespeare festival in Ashland, Oregon) who were highly experienced in the theater, who knew Shakespeare’s work inside and out, who understood all his writings and his life and his personality. Then they would have to immerse themselves in the acts of the new play that had been found. With this basis, they could improvise the missing parts.

Similarly, in the Christian community we have passed on the unfinished drama of God. The first act of the play is the creation, which teaches us that all the people of the world are brothers and sisters, designed to live in harmony with each other and the cosmos; thus the first act prohibits the violence toward other people against which the postmodernists rightfully protest. The second act of the drama is the fall, which enables us to understand the world’s brokenness and destruction. Acts III and V include the stories of Israel and of the early Christians, respectively, to offer us examples of both disobedience and trust and to demonstrate the consequences of each. Act IV is the record of the life of Jesus and manifests God’s covenant action on behalf of the world as the pinnacle of all God’s interventions in Act Ill and as the foundation for the Spirit’s work through the saints in Act V. We know a little bit of the end of the drama (Act Vll) from the book of Revelation, but what we know of the culmination of the world is only a sketch meant to encourage us in the struggles of the present.26

Act Vl is where we fit in, formed by what we have learned in the preceding parts. Immersed in the meta-narrative, the grand story of the people of God—the commandments, goals, chronicles, poetry, warnings, promises, and songs of the entire Revelation—we are formed to act with the character of God’s people, imitating the virtues and deeds of God himself. And we have a great advantage, for, as we improvise Act Vl in keeping with the spirit of the rest of the drama, we know that the Author is still alive!

What a great gift this meta-narrative is! It offers the people of the world around us a story into which they can place themselves and find forgiveness for their past, purpose for their present, and hope for their future.

The Christian Community as Gift to the Postmodern World

The most convincing testimony to the truth of God for postmodern people will be the incarnation of God’s love by, and the embodiment of his purposes in, the Christian community of those being formed by the Scriptures to be Church. Many books about “Generation X” or the “Buster Generation” (young people in their twenties and thirties) emphasize especially their need for love and compassion, their feelings of rootedness and homelessness.27 They are searching for genuine community, but they will not find it in the oppressive indoctrination of cults or in the kind of pop spiritualities found on the Internet. The online medium itself is “constantly faced with the evidence of its own quality as constructed, as arbitrary, and as artificial, a game played with no material stakes or consequences”; online rituals lack “the quality of physical presence.”28

Against this artificiality and the anonymity of computer networks, Douglas Groothuis points out, “Genuine community worthy of the name is largely fashioned out of the recognition of our embodied and sometimes awkward particularities.” Groothuis cites Francis Fukuyama’s Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, which emphasizes that “trust is the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior, based on commonly shared norms…of other members of that community.” Groothuis notes that such trust “is not easily established through the largely impersonal interaction of computer technologies.” Consequently, those seeking to meet authentic spiritual needs in computer spiritualities will discover that developing the required behaviors and trust “when cyberspace is our primary means of interaction is difficult if not impossible.”29

The Christian community, to be genuine gift to the postmodern world, must deliberately be an alternative society of trust and embodied faithfulness to our story and its God. Rather than becoming enculturated and entrapped by the world’s values of materialistic consumerism, of narcissistic self aggrandizement, of solitary superficiality, and of ephemeral satisfaction, members of Christ’s Body must be Church by choosing his simple life of sharing, his willingness to suffer for the sake of others, his communal vulnerability, and his eternal purposes. Leaders in the Christian community must constantly equip parishioners for the mission and ministry of communicating the Christian meta-narrative, of enfolding the world around them in God’s love, of deliberately choosing and living out the alternative values of the kingdom of God.

As Leszek Kolakowski stresses, what is needed in response to the kinds of “spiritualities” described at the beginning of this chapter is a people who are being trained by faithful leaders to be Church and thus to incarnate the faith. He writes,

After centuries of the growth of the Enlightenment, we suddenly woke up in a mental and cultural disarray; we are more and more frightened in the face of a world that is losing its religious legacy, and our fear is well justified. The lost myths seem to be replaced less by enlightened rationality and more by terrifying secular caricatures or substitutes. We notice with a kind of relief various symptoms of religious renaissance, and the “return of the sacred” has become a fashionable topic. And yet we—and by we I mean philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists or historians—cannot contribute to this process; we can describe it—with hope or with dread—but we are not priests, and only through priesthood, prophecy, and acts of living faith can human participation in the sacred be maintained or reinforced.30

The community gathers in worship to hear our story in the exhortations and challenges of our priests and prophets, in the retelling of the narratives of God’s word and works, in the singing of Christianity’s new and old exalted hymns of faith, in the remembering of our great creeds and doctrines, and in the prayers for God’s faithfulness and ours in response. The Christian community also listens together for the Holy Spirit’s guidance for our improvisation of Act Vl. Then we go out from our gatherings to bring the story we have learned to the world around us. In the Christian community, people left homeless by the postmodern ethos can find a home. In the community’s meta-narrative, those left to wander in the postmodern condition can find true roots and a story that embraces them. Most of all, in the community and the community’s meta-narrative, the godless can find the true God.

The Truth of God as Gift to the Postmodern World

Premodernism asserted that there was an objective truth that could be known by those who had the skill to see it. Modernism objected that truth was relative, that different people saw truth differently according to their own situations. Postmodernism insists that there is no truth at all, that whatever truth there might be must be created by each person, for any larger claims to truth are in reality disguised bids for power. The meta-narrative of the Christian community compassionately demonstrates that Jesus is the Truth, an objective Truth who can be known. We know him only partially, but because we know him we do not have to try to create truth for ourselves. Furthermore, his truth is not oppressive, for as Mark Schwehn emphasizes,

For Christianity, the quest for truth is bound up inextricably with discipleship, and therefore the shape of power is for them always cruciform….So long as Christians remember that, for disciples, power is not dominion but obedience, faithfulness, and suffering servanthood, they can rightly claim an integral connection between truth and power.31

The Christian story we offer to our neighbors introduces them to Jesus, the Truth, who brings healing to postmodern fractured souls. He is the Way to the home for which postmodernists search. He is the Life who gives us hope for eternity—and that hope “does not disappoint us” (Romans 5:5).

I believe that this is a critical time for the world and a momentous opportunity for the Christian community. Everyone around us is longing for a story that gives meaning to life. We have such a meta-narrative because of the God we know. I pray that, more and more, individual believers and the Christian community as a whole will be formed by the biblical story so that we can improvise well—and thereby draw to the triune God the world he loves and longs to save. Particularly I pray that the essays and sermons in this book will play a small part in equipping the Christians who read them with insights and skills for deepening the contribution of the Church’s worship in offering the gifts our postmodern world needs so profoundly.

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 6, No. 5 (Sep/Oct 2000).