In a world falling apart, universal, timeless tradition has traction. In the 1960's the opposite applied. Western culture was basking in the victory over Germany and the Axis powers; there was a distinct sense that the "good" had triumphed over the "bad" in World War II. History was on a right course. The fifties were a decade of the universal and conventional.
Beneath popular culture, however, scepticism was bubbling away, about to burst forth into the public square. Post-modernism had taken deep root in the intellectual institutions. Along came the Beatles with distinctly unconventional haircuts and strange musical idioms. Almost overnight being "square" did not cut it; change, change, change was the new normal.
Fifty years later the Western world has been "narrativised" and "perspectivised" to cynical boredom and jaded detachment. The only "ism" that has traction is the view that nothing has traction.
Those Unbelievers who still cling to normative constructs--such as militant atheists of the ilk of Dawkins and Hitchens, or climate catastrophists such as Greenpeace--appear merely cranky and idiosyncratic. Credibility they have not. Being normative and definitive about anything in a pomo world is a difficult act to carry off.
One way the church in the West has tried to cope with this is to become "seeker friendly". The idea has come from good goals--primarily an intent to reach the lost with the Gospel. The basic construct is that when a "seeker" comes into contact with the church he or she should find a gathering of people who are laid back, low key, unstructured, informal and--well--just pomo'ing in a groove like them. The modern "seeker" should come to church and find people of his idiom: who dress like them, talk like them, and groove like them. This will help them feel at home, welcomed, and able to participate.
It will not, however, deal with their cynical jaded detachment from life. Jesus becomes for them just another post modern perspective--one amongst many. And a feature of post-modern cultures is that people cling to their own narratives and perspectives and sub-cultures with a passion because that is all they have: it is the sum total of their existence. Since no one narrative is better than another, or more authoritative, my narrative is my identity. Parochial, dislocated, blind loyalties abound.
We have seen a dislocated and fractured culture before: namely, in the Graeco-Roman world of the second and third centuries. People clung to their local deities and traditions (perspectives, narratives and rituals) with a passion because none could gainsay them or discredit them. All were valid in principle: each town had its local gods, temples, traditions and rituals. Townspeople were fiercely loyal to their own. Anyone who despised or criticised their particular perspective risked not just disdain, but wrath. In a fractured, relativistic world, parochial loyalties assumed much higher importance. Society became a rag-tag collection of local gangs.
Did the church of the second-century become "seeker friendly" in order to reach their cynical, jaded contemporaries? Hardly. The church stressed the dichotomy, the differences between the Gospel and the culture.
The first point of difference was an irrepressible optimism about existence and living.
Among second-century authors, it is the Christians who are the most confident and assured. There is a magnificent optimism in the theology of Irenaeus and its faith that by redemption man could rank higher than an angel. Confidence is never far from the writings of Justin and his "sunny open-heartedness and innocent optimism . . . even when it leads him into naivety. Nothing could be less haunted than Justin's mind and conscience."To be relevant to a jaded post-modern culture--such as our own--the church needs to celebrate the joy and optimism that comes from the Gospel of God. It needs to underscore our future and our hope. In so doing, it will be exacerbating a great difference, a dichotomy between our jaded contemporaries and Christianity. Many moderns will find this ridiculous, even deeply offensive. Others will not. These will be the true seekers.
Expectation of the End did not lead most Christians into pessimism about the world or the flesh. Their authors wrote as warmly as any Stoic about the "providence" of God's Creation. They looked to the future reign of themselves, as saints, and the resurrection of their bodies, improved and enhanced. Their asceticism . . . was grounded in positive, conscious aspirations, not in an alienation from the material world. [Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1987) p.331]
A second point of difference between the church and the pagan culture of the Graeco-Roman world was the insistence upon the eternal, unchanging nature of the Gospel and the ancient timeless authenticity of the faith. In a world falling apart and fracturing, declaring truth that is timeless, ageless, and unchanging becomes a powerful point of differentiation and confrontation with Unbelief. In the Antonine age, pagans clung to their local traditions as their only security. The church turned this on its head in a powerful confrontation with the spirit of the age:
In the Antonine age, to be old and traditional was to be respectable, for a city or a philosophy, a cult or an individual: respect for antiquity extended to the very ways in which men of culture spoke and wrote. In many of their books, Christians excelled in this intellectual fashion. Through their Jewish heritage, they could claim to be heirs to the ancient "wisdom of Moses," which Greek philosophers had borrowed without acknowledgement. They could go further back to the "practice of Abraham" and even to the "philosophy" which God had laid on man at his Creation and which Jews and other peoples of the East had subsequently corrupted. (Ibid.)In an ironic twist, to be "seeker friendly" in a cynical, fractured, post-modern world requires that church worship and practice be timeless, traditional--a re-presentation of what our fathers have done for time immemorial, despite its many corruptions along the way.
A truly "seeker-friendly" church will not pander to the cynical post-modernism of our age: it will proclaim and demonstrate our non-post-modern the Gospel is.
No comments:
Post a Comment