Commending the Gospel at the Crossroads Between Modernity and Postmodernity
© David Wheeler

We Baptists have often imagined ourselves the possessors of a transcultural faith, clearly defined and self-identical in myriad settings all the way back to the apostolic church. The clearest exemplar of this tendency is the “landmark movement” which sprang up among Baptists in the south in the early twentieth century. But all of us are prone to fits of exclaiming such slogans as “We’re the people of the Book!” or “We have no creed but the scriptures!”, as if the biblical witness had no cultural context, or the act of reading scripture allowed us to automatically transcend our own cultural context. The fact is that we all read scripture through different cultural and ideological lenses which shape and color that reading, and value up certain parts of the Canon and value down others. 

For example, reading scripture in the context of the Roman Empire post-Constantine valued up the elements of hierarchy and authority implicit in the pastoral and Johannine epistles and over time gave impetus to the emergence of the Roman Catholic Church. Reading scripture in the context of the neoplatonic philosophy so prevalent in the first centuries of the Christian era lifted up scriptural allusions to the eternal soul and devalued the earthiness and embodied spirituality of the Hebrew scriptures and much of the New Testament, so that “soul saving” and an ascetic ideal became widespread in various expressions of Christian faith. I won’t go into the myriad culture and gender specific biblical hermeneutics which emerged in the late twentieth century. They are at least up front about a reality traditional evangelicals often seek to obscure or deny. 

Early Baptists emerged in the transition time between Renaissance humanism and the birth of a full fledged modernity in the Enlightenment. We are children of the Protestant Reformation, which spread and flourished as newly literate urban Europeans studied the Bible in their own languages, learned and sang new hymn texts and absorbed the flood of religious literature emerging from that epoch-making new technology called printing. People became the subjects of their own faith, and not merely the objects of priestly care. The Reformation was a supremely modern event.   would argue that in spite of the primitivist elements in Baptist folkways and piety, our typical Baptist apologetic is thoroughly modern. Let me illustrate. 

(1.1)  One might describe the modern mind in terms of four characteristics. First, there is the identification of the autonomous self as the fundamental unit of value in the world and the arbiter of all other value. In premodern societies, the group is primary, and individuals find their identity and value in the context of the group. One need only think of the strictly defined roles of priests and levites in the Old Testament, or the interminable (to our mind) “begats” woven through both Testaments. 

Foundational to the modernist understanding of the imperial self are the epistemology (knowledge theory) of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and the ethics of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Descartes, in his famous Meditations, exercised a systematic doubt in which he imagined that all the deliverances of his senses and the common sense of his culture might be illusory. But at the utmost extremity of this exercise, he could not doubt that he, the doubter, was in fact the agent of this thinking and doubting. He then proceeded to reconstruct common sense and the received wisdom of his culture on the basis of his own indubitable thought process. The self reigns. Kant sought to base his ethics, not on custom, creed, or tradition, but upon reason’s construction of an ethical principle applicable in any and every situation, the so-called “categoreal imperative.” Again, the autonomous self reigns. 

Baptist teaching and preaching has lifted up from scripture those episodes where Jesus, Peter, or Paul appeal to individuals for a response of faith. Jesus is the “personal saviour”, not the herald of the Kingdom of God, and the heart of the Gospel is the appeal to the autonomous individual to exercise their sovereign power of decision to punch an individual ticket to everlasting wellbeing. 

(1.2)  Implicit in this lifting up of the autonomous self is the birth of the critical consciousness. Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus of Rotterdam debunked ancient pious forgeries and subjected scripture to the same canons of literary and historical criticism as any other documents. Ancient traditions were no longer received at face value or followed blindly. The autonomous self decided whether or not to honor or obey them based on rational analysis of their utility. David Friederich Strauss’ Life of Jesus (1836) applied the critical consciousness to the activities, teachings, and especially the miracles of Jesus himself. It is no accident that Baptist apologists both naïve and sophisticated have responded by trying to demonstrate the reliability of scripture and the “evidence” for the most audacious claims of a supernaturalistic gospel, enlisting archeologists, pagan historians, and converted skeptics to battle the critical consciousness on its own turf.

(1.3)  Both the sovereignty of the autonomous self and the exercise of the critical consciousness imply the authority of reason in modernity. Modern reason is not just a tool for managing and applying tribal traditions. Reason decides what can and cannot be so. Reason demands that even sacred text and traditions be, well, reasonable. Therefore Baptist apologists respond by presenting scripture as an axiomatic system of propositional truths which defeats competing systems and world views in terms of its consistency, coherence, and illuminating power. Such a system cannot exhibit any flaws in fact or consistency, lest the whole system unravel; hence, “inerrancy”. Frankly, I cannot imagine that any mind other than the modern mind could force the luxuriant variety of historical narratives, myths, poems, proverbs, and occasional writings that comprise the Holy Scriptures into the straight jacket of a system, but we remember that faith’s newly emerging competitor in modernity was the “scientific world view”, so our apologetic became the mirror image of our competitor. 

(1.4)  Modernity’s scientific revolution and its technological applications involve the turning of autonomous reason to a disciplined examination and manipulation of reality for the sake of knowledge of the natural world, and the mastery of that world for humanity’s comfort and well being. It is no accident, given the striking success of the “scientific method” and its incalculable effects on our lifestyles, that Christian apologists would promote “creation science” where secular scientists threatened cherished convictions, while these same apologists used the technological application of science (computers, electronic media, etc.) unquestioningly to promote their ministries and ideological agendas. 

In response to modernity’s creation of secular ideologies based on the deliverances of autonomous reason, Christian apologists have argued that our foundation is surer, and our “system” is more comprehensive, more useful for promoting the good life, and finally, upon examination by an unbiased reason, truer. But what if our emerging global culture takes a turn in which the existence of stable “foundations” of any sort is questioned, the stability and enduring identity of the self is called into question, and a sovereign reason gives way to multiple “reasons”? What then becomes of our apologetic reply to modernity? 

Over the last thirty years or so a number of intellectuals in Europe and the United States have been claiming that the reign of modernity is ending and we are entering a new phase of intellectual history. But more recently, a conversation that began amongst philosophers has been spreading to popular culture, so that wherever the questioning of received truths and values is happening, the commentators cry “postmodern”!  What this postmodern era might look like is a matter of great contention. Indeed, in so far as we can generalize about postmodern thought at all, we might say that it resists definition by nature. But there are some common themes that run through the writings of its seminal proponents which are in striking contrast to the fundamental convictions of modernity. 

(2.1)  The dissolution of the self. Modernity made the autonomous self, with its sovereign reason and its other fixed attributes, such as a sense of moral obligation and an innate aesthetic sensibility,  the arbiter of all value.  But what if, in the words of the American “a/theologian” Mark C. Taylor, the self is not a stable, enduring entity, but an ephemeral “trace”, an “erring” across the fluid landscape of reality in search of value and meaning? The postmodern self is as much “project” as “project manager”, and is defined as much by the “other” that it isn’t as by the ever changing and incomplete “I” that it is seeking to be. A Christian apologetic that aims to translate sinful selves once and for all into redeemed selves by eliciting one sovereign, permanently valid moment of decision, may seem like a futile appeal to the fluid self of postmodernism, like trying to make bricks from smoke. 

(2.2)  In postmodern thought, the critical consciousness of modernity has been unleashed so that not only any given ideology with its attendant intellectual foundations is subject to skepticism, but the very idea of foundations is called into question. Every system has a particular, partial perspective on the world, and functions within its own setting of gender, generation, language or social class. World trade, the linguistic hegemony of English, the pervasive influence of mass media and the nascent “global culture” have provoked reactions of “localism” and renewed pride in the particular values, faith commitments and cultural expressions of local and regional communities. Appealing to the “one foundation” and to one universally valid and binding faith system may come across as a sort of religious imperialism to the postmodern spirit. Indeed, the spirit of “deconstruction” invoked by the seminal French thinker, Jacques Derrida, continually asks whose interests are being served by any given ideology or system. A “hermeneutics of suspicion” claims that there is no totally “objective” take on the world; every system – intellectual, political or economic – benefits somebody at somebody else’s expense. 

(2.3)  Furthermore, not only are postmodern persons continually reinventing themselves and skeptical of foundations and systems per se, but the languages we use are constantly evolving, and words acquire multiplicities of meaning. Particular meanings are partial, temporary and wedded to specific contexts. A word once uttered or written is out of the writer or speaker’s control, and may later function in ways unimagined by its original user. Who can approach Friederich Nietsche’s century-old text, “The Gay Science”, today without being aware of the evolution of the term “gay” from its original meanings of “happy” and carefree”, through its ironic use by members of a despised sub-culture to identify themselves, to its current dominant usage by persons within that same culture to express their emerging strength and pride. An apologetic appeal to the authority of the “unchanging” Word of God in this context may appear not only irrelevant, but willfully and ignorantly so.

(2.4)  Finally, even modernity’s fabulously successful favorite son, science, is understood by postmodern thinkers not as the heroic labor of supremely rational individuals, but as a communal enterprise, where “objective facts” are functions of socially constructed and sanctioned “paradigms”. For example, astronomers gave “objective” explanations of the motions of the heavenly bodies for centuries according to the assumptions of  the Ptolomaic cosmology, in which the heavenly bodies revolved in circles around the earth. There was tremendous social, political and even religious pressure brought to bear upon the original proponents of a sun-centered paradigm, such as Copernicus and Galileo, until the simplicity, elegance and superior explanatory power of the new paradigm won the day. Postmodern thought today celebrates the imaginative power and aesthetic qualities of theoretical physics, which seems to be as much art as science. Christian appeals to an objective, “scientific” theology based on the “data” of scripture may seem quaint and wooden in this context. 

(3.1)  So if our apologetic shaped by its response to modernity runs the risk of irrelevance in the emerging postmodern culture, how are we to respond?   Though postmodern thinkers may be skeptical of the doctrines and traditions of a Christian faith shaped by its apologetic response to modernity, people still have a hunger to connect with a reality that is transcendent and enduring. Think how common it is these days for people to say, “Oh, I’m not religious, but…”  People yearn to tap into some source of meaning and value greater than themselves. They intuitively know that we are not self-originating and finally self-defining, no matter how courageous and persistent our “pilgrimage” may be.  Because science has been exposed as contextual and limited like every other human enterprise, and its unintended side effects threaten to overwhelm its blessings (e.g., global warming, superviruses, etc.), we are once again compelled to look beyond ourselves for our “salvation”. “Religious” may be out, but “spiritual” is in. This is a great opportunity for testimony. 

(3.2)  Because we Baptists have always promoted an experiential faith alongside of (and sometimes in conflict with) our rationalistic biblicism, we have resources in our life together to appeal to the postmodern spiritual quest. “Spirituality” is thin fare unless it finds or creates specific, concrete forms and commitments. We can invite the seeker into the beloved community, where we pray for one another, support one another, and lift up the supremely attractive figure of Jesus as our model and guide. As we go about tasks of discipling, counseling, affirming and empowering others in Jesus’ name, we invite  erring postmodern selves to a worthy endeavor that is bigger and nobler than simply their own self-realization. 

(3.3)  Speaking of Jesus, we can unapologetically tell the story of Jesus, unencumbered by Greek metaphysics or the history of doctrine. I remember the testimony of Harvey Cox in his book, Many Mansions. He told how for years he would look for some common denominator of conviction about God in his conversations with people from other religious traditions. This is the way a modernist apologetic, for example, the tradition of rational “proofs” for the existence of God, works. Finally, he realized that what interested people about his faith convictions was not what they might have in common with other belief systems, but what made them unique. Simply telling the story of the supremely attractive and noble figure of Jesus of Nazareth opens an entryway into seeking hearts, especially if our lives reflect his values and priorities. Postmodern listeners respond to narratives, not systems. They are on a journey; they cherish companionship, encouragement and guidance on the journey. 

Our Christian faith is founded on a person, whom we believe opens up the depths of reality for us, and not a system. In saying this, I acknowledge the postmodern critique of the fixed identity and essential attributes of human persons (and, by extension, even the Divine Person). But I remember what the neoOrthodox theologians of a generation ago, such as Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, taught us: that for Christian faith the human person is not defined by a set of fixed attributes, as in Enlightenment humanism, but by the call of God that constitutes us as God’s children and dialogue partners. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you…” (Jer 1:5).

(3.4)     Finally, every reflective person makes certain commitments, more or less consistently and more or less boldly, in order to navigate the challenges of living.  Those commitments are always in the nature of a wager. What is the world really like? Who, or what, is trustworthy? We can only find out in taking the risk of believing. In the words of Jacques Derrida, making such commitments is always an act of faith and always an appeal to the “other” for a response. “You address the other and ask, ‘believe me’”. We proclaim as Christians that God has been addressing us in Christ and saying, “believe me”. A postmodern apologetic will begin with responding to that appeal ourselves, and then, in the name of Jesus, appealing to others, by all that we say and do. Our most effective apologetic will be in the form of  a supremely engaging story, not a doctrinal system. And it will be commended to a meaning-hungry culture not by words alone, but by transformed lives and welcoming communities.

                                                                                                      Dr. David L. Wheeler