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We roam the global village as Alice roamed the chessboard in Through the Looking-Glass: pawns bewildered at every turn. The word "postmodernism" appears backwards, like the poem "Jabberwocky." Even when we hold it up to a mirror, the concept remains slippery. Alice responds to the poem in the same way we respond to postmodernism: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate." Modernity, we surmise, was killed, and its murderers are still fugitives.
Carl Raschke is our Humpty Dumpty, perspicaciously interpreting the "postmodern moment" in GloboChrist, the third volume in Baker Academic's series, The Church and Postmodern Culture. Whereas the first two books in the series, James K. A. Smith's Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? and John D. Caputo's What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, offered textual exegesis of postmodern thinkers to correct stubborn misunderstandings and to show resonance with the Christian tradition, Raschke's book offers cultural exegesis to clarify the church's missional task in a global age. An early explorer of the intersection between Continental philosophy and theology, author of The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity, Raschke serves as chair of religious studies at the University of Denver.
While too many Christians are tiresomely proclaiming that they are pro- or anti-postmodernism, crudely defining the heterogeneous concept, Raschke steps out of the impasse by announcing what should be obvious: "a dramatic global metamorphosis." Instead of wrangling over the "uncounted usages and syntactical peculiarities" of a word, he rightly claims: "Becoming postmodern means that we all, whether we like it or not, are now going global, which is what that obscure first-century sect leader from Palestine truly had in mind."
This book is directed to American evangelicals with the purpose of awakening them to "a pivot in world history that seems as unprecedented as the transformation of Caesar's realm during the first three centuries of the common era. That change came through the strange and distinctly un-Roman cult from Palestine centering on the crucifixion and resurrection of a mysterious nobody now known to history as Jesus of Nazareth."
Political scientists, cultural critics, economists, and sociologists have their own theories to account for today's change. Censuring the timidity of Western élites, Raschke asserts that the change agent is—hold your breath—Christ, who has been "subtly shaping and directing human history towards its consummation through the ages." After the Cold War, Raschke reminds us, futurists envisioned a "new neoliberal millennium" where peace, free markets, and technological progress would occasion worldwide democracy and prosperity. Unexamined ethnocentrism resulted in the prediction that Westernization would entail secularization. Today Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman are eating humble pie. The world is not flat, but it is becoming anti-Western and post-secular. Raschke commends the dissenting foresight of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who spoke about a "return of religion," and American political scientist Samuel Huntington, who posited the famous thesis about "the clash of civilizations." They helped reveal the "fraudulent utopianism" in the West.
Struggle—Raschke disconcertingly insists—will mark the future, not solidarity. Ethnic separatism, mass migration, feminism, gay liberation, economic oligarchy, Islamofascism, and genocide chasten our unbridled confidence, so much so that a recovering utopian like Richard Rorty confessed "it seems absurdly improbable that we shall ever have a global liberal utopia."
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