Modernist?

Modernist?

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.