Leadership Journal

I'm sitting here on a gray, snowy Saturday, looking out at flurries and longing for that warm, sunny time before we'd heard the word postmodern. It's hard to remember now, but a decade ago, seminars were given on preaching, not on "Preaching in a Postmodern Age." Books were written on plain ol' youth ministry, not "Postmodern Youth Ministry." Of course, we were all unenlightened, unwashed then, locked in a dead, Newtonian modernism.

How quickly we've learned.

Even six years ago, Leadership could publish "The Riddle of Our Postmodern Culture," because the concept was largely unfamiliar to ministers. Now we all toss off words like "deconstructionism" and "abductive." We've been blessed by conferences that are cool and collective, and we expect our websites to be flash-animated and our coffees dark-roasted.

Proponents of postmodern ministry (PPMs) have made important points for the church: We live in a time of transition from one worldview to another; Christianity must not be constricted by the prevailing worldview; the Incarnation is a central doctrine of Christianity that calls us to be incarnational in our culture; we need greater mystery, beauty, and experience in our worship of God. I agree. In fact, I think I did beforehand, but PPM writings have sharpened my convictions.

On other topics, I agree to a point. PPMs have called for metaphor, narrative, and surprise in preaching; after all, Jesus taught in parables. Good reminder. But the same Testament that gives us the elliptical parables gives us the straightforward exposition of Peter in Acts 2 and the dense argumentation of Paul in Romans 9-11, not to mention the name-by-name genealogies of Matthew and the linear history of Acts. Let us recapture indirection but not canonize it.

PPMs want us to listen to the postmodernizing culture, to enter relationship and accept our common brokenness. Who would argue? But while we love the relativist, let us hate the relativism. It puzzles me why postmodern theory has drawn such praise from Christians, when its essence (beneath the turgid prose) is that there is no objective truth. The "rules" of science or morality, pomo scholars contend, are as arbitrary as the rules of baseball. But as Dinesh D'Souza reminds us, "Postmodern theory suffers from the weakness that the postmodernists themselves don't believe it." When they get sick, they check into a modernist hospital, and when they fly, they step onto a plane built by engineers whose work must not be as random as the postmodernists claimed.

We're told that "the world you and I were prepared to lead and minister in is over." But modernism is proving to be a hardy old guy who doesn't quite die, no matter how many obituaries are written. Just as pre-modern witchcraft and superstition flourished during and after the Enlightenment, so will modernist approaches survive into a postmodern world. Indeed, modernism will remain powerful (though interacting with postmodern ideas), since we live in what Jeremy Rifkin dubbed ...