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Vince Bacote: In terms of "the other," the marginalized, it's not necessarily a new thing, but a new kind of openness to hearing marginalized voices. I don't know many periods of history in which people tried to hear all these different voices (women, the poor, ethnic minorities, and so on), attempting to find some way to move forward with a deeper understanding.

If the themes are not necessarily new, why the Christian fascination with postmodernism and especially postmodern jargon?

King: In order to engage the culture, we have to speak the language of the culture, and the language of the culture right now, at least in intellectual circles, is couched in postmodern terms. The language might be new but the ideas are not. Yet the situation is different. Take the recognition of the other. The media saturation of our culture makes a huge difference in who is given a voice. People who are in control of the voices that speak and the voices that don't speak—on radio, television, print media—are the people who are in power.

Chris Simmons: Modernism changed the world. Nothing can take us back to the way it was before. Take that part of the modern we call the Reformation: Somebody said that before the Reformation there was one way to go to hell, and after the Reformation there were hundreds. You can't put the genie back in the bottle and talk about Christianity as if the Reformation didn't happen. Because of modernism—the naïve thinking that assumes that if, without God, we just keep applying reason, we can get to the bottom of everything—we think differently, we experience relationships differently.As a result of technology (one of the fruits of modernism), we experience the world fundamentally differently.

For example?

Simmons: In the 1996 movie Swingers, John Favreau's character has an entire relationship with a woman through an answering machine. He asks her out on her answering machine. Then he gets anxious about it, and he calls her back. And he calls her back again and again. And he finally calls her back one last time, and she picks up the phone; she's obviously been screening her calls. She says, "Don't ever call me again." It's an exaggerated example of how technology changes our interactions. The Internet, cell phones, media—the fact that we gain our collective history and our individual histories in large measure through mediated forms like these makes our experience of the world different.

Carlos Aguilar: I'd like to offer an alternative voice here. I think there is some reticence on behalf of emerging urban Christian leaders to buy fully into the postmodernist shift. We place a little more trust in reason, in what knowledge can do to empower people. Maybe we need to change our view as to what constitutes knowledge; maybe we only need a move away from the more radical modern view that it's certitude we're after, and maybe we should seek something like justified true belief.

Simmons: The pendulum always swings too far. Some postmodernisms talk about not being able to know anything, that we live in an illusion, and all that stuff. As a Christian, I do not subscribe to that. The response to the naïvete of modernism has been to be overly cynical about knowledge. But God has endowed us with the ability to know him and to know his world through our relationship with him.

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November 13 2000, Vol. 44, No. 13