At the Tuesday evening session of the
2014 meeting of the Northwest Association for Theological Discussion I
presented the response that I had written to the book Evangelical vs. Liberal by James Wellman. You can find that paper
immediately below this one on this blog. In that presentation I said that if
Christianity is going to survive it must adapt to the “tectonic shift” that is
under way from modernism to postmodernism. I said that what Wellman calls the
liberal churches are in a position to do that in a way that his evangelical
churches are not because evangelical, literalist Christianity is grounded in a
modernist literalism that is a product of modernism’s reduction of truth to
fact. I grant that I was pretty critical of literalist Christianity. I said
that it is already dead, it’s just that there are still lots of people who
don’t know it yet. I’ve said that many times before, and I think it is true. My
presentation, however, provoked a very interesting and challenging response.
Present at our gathering was Michael
Kinnamon, former General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, former
professor at Eden Seminary and a former seminary head, and currently a visiting
professor at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry, my alma mater.
He said that he liked and appreciated my paper, but he also said that he sees
my position as itself thoroughly modernist because it sets up one vision of
Christianity as tenable and the other as untenable in the postmodern world. I
said that’s fair. I think it is fair, but I don’t think it’s right. Since that
session I have given the matter some thought, and I want here to think it
through some more.
Kinnamon, one of the world’s leading
Christian ecumenicists, doesn’t like my interpretation because it is on some
level exclusivist. It denies the ultimate legitimacy of religious literalism. I
grant that. I think literalism is just flat wrong. I think that it is
ultimately untenable. I don’t want to accommodate it, I want to defeat it. I am
convinced that it will kill Christianity if we can’t overcome it. Literalism
will kill Christianity because it is incompatible with the emerging worldview
of postmodernism. Religious literalism of all kinds, not just Christian
literalism, is incompatible with postmodernism because it is grounded in
modernism’s reductionist ontology and epistemology. Modernism reduces truth to
fact. That’s its reductionist ontology. Only facts are real. Only factual truth
is true. Factual truth is known primarily through the scientific process, but
for Christian literalism the Bible trumps mere human science. If an asserted
scientific truth contradicts what Christian literalists see as a fundamental
biblical truth, the Bible wins. Modern science does contradict fundamental
biblical truth in several ways; but it does that if, and only if, those
biblical truths are understood to be on the same level and of the same nature
of truth as scientific truth.
The best example is Genesis 1:1 to 2:3
and the pseudoscience of creationism. The great creation myth with which the
Bible opens says that God created the earth and the heavens in six days (seven
actually if you count the creation of Sabbath on the seventh day, as I believe
we must). Biblical literalists take that ancient account of creation as “true,”
but by true they mean factual. They mean that in the impossible case that you
had been there to see what happened you would have seen something like what
Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 says happened actually happening. For modernist literalists
the first creation myth of Genesis is true, and that means to them that it has
to be factual. The sciences of evolutionary biology, geology, and anthropology
tell a very different story. At least they tell a story that is different for
those who insist on understanding Genesis factually. Since for such a
literalist Genesis and science are both speaking facts, and because they report
different facts, they cannot both be true. Yet because for our literalist all
truth is, or at least is factually consistent with, scientific truth, there
must be science that says essentially the same thing as Genesis and the science
that says something different from Genesis must be wrong. Hence creationism, or
creation science. Creation science isn’t science because it begins with an a
priori truth—God’s acts of creation understood literally according to the
Bible—and sets out to prove that a priori truth with factual findings that
sound scientific. Clearly what these literalists are doing is reducing the
Bible to modernism’s limited view of truth, its limited view of the nature of
reality.
That way of understanding Christianity
and its foundational book the Bible will not survive in a postmodern world. It
can’t. It won’t and it can’t because postmodernism cuts its ontological and
epistemological foundation out from under it. It’s not that postmodernism
doesn’t know factual truth of course. Postmodernism accepts the findings of
science as established facts, or at least it accepts them as facts
provisionally. Postmodernism accepts the findings of science provisionally
because science, at its best, also accepts its findings provisionally. A
scientific truth is one that by definition is at least theoretically subject to
being proven wrong, so all scientific truths are by definition provisional.
They are true until they are proven to be false. So within the scope of its own
ontology and epistemology postmodernism accepts factual truth.
Postmodernism differs from modernism
however in that it does not reduce all
truth to fact. Postmodernism understands and accepts kinds of truth other than
factual truth. In this aspect of its worldview postmodernism has recaptured
something from the pre-modern worldview. The pre-modern world knew factual
truth of course, but it also knew other kinds of truth as well. It knew what I
and others (including Tillich) call mythic or symbolic truth. Some people
today, like Marcus Borg, insist on calling this kind of truth metaphoric, but
the theologically correct term for it is mythic. The ancient world sometimes
called this truth analogical rather than mythic, but it meant essentially the
same thing by that term as I mean by mythic. Mythic or analogical truth is
truth that is not factual. It is truth that is much deeper and in important
ways more powerful than mere factual truth. It is truth to which human language
can point but cannot fully capture. To use an old metaphor for it, it is a
finger pointing to the moon, not the moon itself. It is truth that is more
experienced by the whole person than known only by the intellect. It is truth
that knows that it is not complete, absolute, or final. It is truth that allows
for other truths different from itself, that is, it is truth that is not
exclusivist. It is truth that is open toward the future, not closed by
something said or supposedly discovered in the past. It is truth expressed in
story and the exegesis of story, not in scientific formula.
Postmodern ontology and epistemology
allow for different truths, but there is one approach to truth that
postmodernism must reject. Postmodernism must reject any truth claim that
reduces truth to fact and that claims exclusive validity for itself. I admit
that we are dealing with a paradox here. Postmodernism is an approach to truth
that is open to multiple truths but that must nonetheless reject some claims of
truth. It must reject truth claims that radically contradict its underlying
understandings of the nature of reality and of human knowledge. It must not condemn people
who still cling to those contradictory primary understandings (although it can
and must condemn their statements and public policy demands that are harmful to
people and to the earth), but neither must it accept and honor those
understandings either tacitly or explicitly.
The postmodern worldview does not
prohibit itself from proclaiming and developing itself. The postmodern
worldview does not prohibit itself from expressing its critique of the
modernist worldview that it has moved beyond. Nothing in the postmodern
worldview prohibits it from proclaiming the death, realized or pending, of
modernism in all of its manifestations, including its religious manifestations.
Postmodernism does not prevent one from doing penetrating analysis of current
reality. It does not prevent one from discerning the trajectory of human
culture and predicting where it will go. Indeed, it requires us to do such
analysis and such discernment.
So is my critique, indeed my
condemnation, of modernist, literalist Christianity itself modernist? I don’t
think so. Modernism cannot critique religious literalism the way I do because it
shares modern literalism’s ontology and epistemology. I think that my critique
is an expression not of modernism but of a postmodern sensitivity and
awareness. It is discernment of a fundamental contradiction between literalist
faith and the trajectory of western culture. It is not a condemnation of
people. As I said in the session in which Professor Kinnamon made his statement,
I don’t want to destroy any faith that gets a person through the night; and I
freely admit that literalist Christianity still gets millions of people through
the night. Indeed, in my book Liberating
Christianity I say that people do find a real connection with God in
literalist Christianity. I do not deny that connection, although many people
today who have been badly burned by conservative Christianity do deny it. It’s
just that I am convinced that that kind of Christianity will not survive in the
long-term future of western culture. That conviction is based on a postmodern
analysis not on a modernist one. So with all due deference to Professor
Kinnamon, the scope of whose life work and public prominence far exceed my own,
I respectfully disagree that my critique of literalist Christianity is
modernist.
