I'm thinking out loud here, but...Modernism won't work. At least, not coupled with Christianity. You can't rationally arrive at the Christian faith, and you can disprove significant portions of it (e.g. Creation) in the Modernist view. It's created marvelous things like capitalism (and therefore democracy) and technology, but it is spiritually insufficient. My beloved Modernism --things just aren't working out between us. Maybe we should start seeing other philosophies. Do you want to still be friends?
Anyway, PostModernism doesn't work, either. It's epistemology is just loony. PoMo has lots of philosophical maneuvering room for faith, but also lots of room for nonsense. The idea that truth is dependent upon the observer, and not independent of it, is demonstratively false in everyday life.
And that leaves me with...nothing. Unless there is some sort of naturally Christian 'worldview', although its philosophical parameters I cannot even begin to speculate on.
14 comments:
John
How about a "Supernatural Worldview," could that have been the context of the Bible?
Craig, please elaborate.
Youre critique of postmodernism leads to nihillism. But the Postmodern Christian responses that I have read, ie: Stanley Hauerwas, Stanleny Grenz, Radical Orthodoxy and several others- are that we (Christians) live out of a worldview based on the story of God and Israel and the story of Jesus. These narratives (scripture) formulate and inform reality for the people called Christian.
We are not left in nihillism because we know from scripture and tradition that we can have hope that God is in the process of setting things right with the world.
pomo'ism isn't all bad, there are good critiques and responses out there. but your critique on modernism is RIGHT ON!!!
shalom,
jonathon
John
Years ago while at Fuller Seminary, John Wimber of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship used to come to minister and lecture in a few of my classes. Wimber taught that he believed that the worldview of the NT was supernaturlism, even among the pagan cultures. These people believed in the interaction between God (gods) and human beings. Jesus was the ultimate example of someone with a supernatural worldview. He expected divine intervention and experienced it in his ministry regularly.
Wimber said that with the current rationalistic/modernist worldview, the contemporary church was not open to supernaturalism and could not accept it as reality and considered it primitive or a myth. Wimber stated that the original worldview of the Vineyard was based on supernaturalism. More on this subject can be found in the writings of Morton Kelsey. I came across him at Asbury in the last 70's, he was a guest lecturer.
I have no idea what Post-modernist think of supernaturalism in the Bible. I suspect not much, no doubt it is only a metaphor.
But, if you take the Bible literally, like I do, the supernatural worldview of Jesus makes sense. I doubt if Jesus would limit himself to the views of the world that we human beings place on ourselves.
OUr difficulty in talking about postmodernism is that it is not just one thing, as if one could seek to supercede modernity from only one direction. Sure the neo-Nietzscheans seem to get the most press, but there are many other varieties out there - at the very least:
1. Those who learn from Aristotle & Aquinas (MacIntyre)
2. Those who learn from Hegel, Herder et al. (Charles Taylor)
3. The Pragmatists (Rorty)
4. Radical Orthodoxy (mentioned by Jonathan)
5. The baptists (Hauerwas, McClendon, Yoder)
6. The Emergents (Grenz, Franke)
And then there's the pile of philosophers who clearly move beyond modernity and serve as resources for many types of post (or non) moderns: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Austin.
Interesting thoughts all around. Jonathon, how are you defining nihilism in this sense? Craig, I like what you're suggesting. My Modernist instincts are rebelling at the thought, but you may be on to something. Richard, alas, you've gone completely over my head.
Nihillism can be simply defined as a total lack of hope which leads to despair. Nihillism is a matter of speaking to the profound sense of psychological depression, lack of personal wholeness, and social despair.
I think that in a time where there is the tension of living between an "anything goes/there are no absolutes culture" and a "rigid legalistic culture" people find themselves without clear and meaningful options for a worldview.
Modernism is not bad nor failed. It brought meaning in its time. But now we find ourselves in search of a way to "do church" that moves away from both fundamentalism AND universalism tendencies. I have found that Radical Orthodoxy and Narrative Theology, though not perfect by any means, are both forming and shaping ecclessiology in a very cool way that resonates with me.
I for one am excited about some of the things that are being done in the realm of theology and ecclessiology to respond to the tension. I think its a very creative and exciting time to be in ministry and to be a "folk theologian" (even a pretty poor one like myself :).
shalom,
jon
richard,
i'm sure that hauerwas is methodist not baptist, although he currently is worshipping at an episcopal church and yoder is mennonite not baptist (although i suppose he is anabaptist).
i'm unclear in what way they are baptist. just wondering.
richard,
i'm sure that hauerwas is methodist not baptist, although he currently is worshipping at an episcopal church and yoder is mennonite not baptist (although i suppose he is anabaptist).
i'm unclear in what way they are baptist. just wondering.
If one goes by heritage and church affiliation, sure Hauerwas is a Methodist. But if you go by his deep indebtedness to Yoder, he's a baptist - though not a Baptist. If we were to try to line him up with the major divisions dating from the Reformation, I think his alignment with the baptists rather than the Catholics, the Lutherans, the Calvinists or the Anglicans are the closest fit.
gotcha. that makes sense. the anabaptist are considered radical reformers, right?
shalom,
jonathon
I'm not convinced you properly understand modernism, at least as it is used in the history of philosophy. Modernism, as in the rejection of scholasticism, Enlightenment philosophy, etc., arose in tandem with Protestantism, and is quite compatible with much of Christian belief. In fact, the founders of the modernist movement of philosophy were almost all Christians. Furthermore, there may be strong epistemic ground for Christian belief within a modernist framwork. I personally reccomend the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley, but there have been many others. Modernism is devoted to the belief that there is one, and only one, truth about the universe. It is also devoted to the idea that the universe is such that human beings are capable of understanding it (though not necessarily by unaided human reason). I think it's absurd to say that "modernism" somehow disproves special creation, or any other Christian doctrine, and you certainly CAN rationally arrive at the belief that the Christian faith has a high probability of being true, and if you can't, then we shouldn't believe it. The Bible teaches that our faith is no good unless it's true (see 1 Corinthians 15). Christian faith is not "blind" in the sense of "unjustified".
Kenny, I may be wrong, but I think that we're defining modernism in the same way. The scientific method would be an expression of this philosophy, right? If not, then we are talking about different philosophies.
As I said, much of the Bible can be disproven with modernism under this definition. The most obvious example would be the Genesis account of creation, which would make the earth merely 6,000 years old and would have its created in only 6 days. Paleontology proves this notion false, if not laughable.
If it is possible to rationally prove the existence of God, and specifically that the God of the Bible is that God, I would like to know it. That would certainly knock down a roadblock in my faith.
John, certainly the scientific method can be seen as a manifestation of the modernist (Cartesian and post-Cartesian) philosophy, but, in fact, as Del Ratzsch (philosopher of science at Notre Dame) recently argued in a fantastic paper entitled "Natural Theology, Methodological Naturalism and 'Turtles All The Way Down'" (in the October 2004 edition of the journal "Faith and Philosophy"), the scientific method is, in fact, in an important sense based in the Christian worldview: namely, the originators of the scientific method believed that the world could be explained and understood in this way precisely because they believed the world to have been created by a rational Being.
The scientific positions you refer to do not fall out of the modernist philosophy as such, but a later development not accepted by the first modernists, namely, geological uniformitarianism. This is the pre-scientific assumption that the geological processes going on on earth have proceeded in the same way at approximately the same rate from the beginning. Without this belief, many of the scientific theories that disprove Christian doctrine become rather tenuous in their hold.
As you say, there is probably no "knock down" argument for the existence of God. In many senses much of later modern philosophy (after the 17th century), and even later science, has been involved in recognizing that the early moderns were overly ambitious in their claims as they tried to explain basically all of existence. However, there may be arguments that show that belief in the existence of God is "warranted" (i.e. not irrational, based on the evidence available to us), or even "justified" (i.e. belief in the contrary would be irrational, based on the evidence available to us). As I indicated previously, my favorite such argument is found in the writings of the 18th century empiricist, Bishop George Berkeley (a very formal and technical version is given in his "Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge;" a more informal version is given in the form of a lively debate in his "Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous: Against Skeptics and Atheists"). This particular argument, however, is not particularly useful in evangelism, as it begins by disproving the existence of matter. Many other arguments have been proposed in recent years by the likes of Richard Swinburne (Oxford), Alvin Plantinga (Notre Dame), and William Alston (Syracuse). Also of note is a new version of the "ontological argument" in terms of modal logic given by Peter van Inwagen (also Notre Dame) in the fifth chapter of his book "Metaphysics."
I personally find it impossible to accept any moral system that considers irrational belief to be anything other than a vice, and therefore, as a Christian, cannot define faith this way. I much prefer C.S. Lewis's definition of faith as continuing to believe what my reason has told me to be true until new evidence is presented, regardless of what I fell like believing at the moment. I think it is much too early to give up on a rational justification for Christian belief, and I also think that if no such justification exists then there is nothing left for it but to abandon the faith as nothing but a charming illusion, an action which I myself am in no danger of taking at the present moment.
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