Laminin I by Sunny Raschke
It's been a long while since I posted anything - a little over nine months.
Blogging is supposed to be a routine, if not an obsession. Yet as a result of certain uncalculated eventualities that turned into an unscripted rationale, I have not really committed anything this this space since last fall. I find that it is time to start anew, and with a renewed determination. More will follow.
Blogging is supposed to consist in a kind of holy routine, a ceremony of tossing incense before the Zeitgeist. The economic and political events of last autumn were without doubt and by everyone's reckoning at the time - how would the old German philosophers say it - epochal. The world has changed significantly in eight months. I won't offer any kind of signature flourish with the all-too-familiar phrases "for the better" or "for the worse."
That is not the point. Things are different, and now it is time to harvest - at least cerebrally - the first fruits of these changes. In American people did not vote for a candidate so much as for some ubiquitous vapor they understood as "change." Change they now have. When it comes to the financial apocalypse, we are still experiencing the effects. Some say it is improving. Others say it is growing worse. But that's not the point either.
The point is that the past nine months have shown us it's not all about America any more. It's about planetary shifts taking place that even the trendiest and edgiest of us seem only dimly aware. So much of the American press - and I would add the American public - seem focused on the odyssey of the Obama administration.
The electric "messianism" of Obama's election in November, and his high-flying inauguration this past January, has faded into a brutal "reality check" of what it means to govern a nation riven by ferocious regionalisms, the cancerous politics of ethnic and cultural identity, narcissistic consumerism, and clueless educated elites who have never let go of the modernist fantasy that human history and human destiny can be "intelligently" engineered. Whenever messianism becomes the immanent politics of the moment, it tragically fails.
The "postmodern moment" looks increasingly like a senior moment. A widely distributed dementia of which there are current, but not entirely clear, indices!
The culture wars are over in America, and so for that matter is "emergent" Christianity as we know it. It is time to rethink the entire "postmodern" scene, particularly the way in which it has been redefined generationally and praxis-wise according to the American fixation with hailing the new, the cool, and the marketable rather than globally, structurally, and historically.
The end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, it has been said, marked the end of the Reformation, which was essentially about the reform of the state church, but devolved into a form of Christian ethno-regionalism (cuius regio cuius religio), one branch of which lapsed even further into pietism and the sectarianism of popular Protestant Innerlichkeit, the other into the fashionable theological insouciance we remember as the Enlightenment.
The end of the culture wars, which was originally about the preservation of Christian spiritual discipline amid what Christopher Lasch in 1978 termed the "culture of narcissism," has meant the total exhaustion of Christian identity politics - whether it be conservative or progressive, "foundational" or "postmodern". We are only beginning to experience the fallout. If we have abandoned promiscuous consumerism in the economic sphere after the collapse of the banks, we are only beginning to abandon the promiscous spiritual consumerism that both the megachurch and the microchurch ("smells and bells" versus "candles and sandals") have presented to us as an unholy Hobson's choice.
This past winter I spent two months on the European Continent according to the plan of my European sabbatical. Most of the time I was in Austria, where I have close friends and university connections. But I also did some traveling around and lecturing at some small colleges, seminaries, and community Christian groups - specifically in the Black Forest, Prague, and Amsterdam. I'd been with these people and to these places (Prague is the exception) in the past, but because it was part of a concentrated and intentional journey with certain identifiable "research objectives", I came back with some insights I had never had before.
It's taken me quite a few months to digest these insights in the maw of ongoing current events to come up with some theses, or observations, that I believe would stick. But here they are:
- The kind of highly Americanized, consumer-driven, "postmodern church" that we have all been promoting, celebrating, and cooing about in many respects is flying into some devastating headwinds, especially in this country, and is going to have to change or perish. So that critics such as D.B. Carson don't get too overwrought with Schadenfreude at this pronouncement, let me point out that the same headwinds are buffeting American Christianity as a whole, and that the older, Seventies-style, "family-values and Biblical inerrancy" package that dominated evangelicalism for several decades is even more imperilled.
- The action for Christian transformation in the West is shifting from America to Europe, specifically Continental Europe. The epicenter of this transformation will be Germany, where the original Reformation began in 1517. The real changes, which have to happen so that the irreversible "postmodern turn" in Western culture can lead to what I have called The Next Reformation in Christianity, will be theological and intellectual, and they are more apt to happen, ironically, where it all began in the first place. Look to movements like the Novavox alliance in Karlsruhe, Germany, which this October will be hosting a major conference with Alan Hirsch as keynote speaker(the site's all in German, but you get the idea). We are not talking about any sort of "new Eurocentrism" here. Europe in general, and Central Europe in particular, is becoming the kind of multi-cultural gateway region for the waves of globalization that the new world Christianity - Philip Jenkins' "next Christendom" will ride upon.
- "Global postmodern missional Christianity", which I have described as the future of the faith in GloboChrist, comes down to this: a serious commitment of the so-called "Christ follower" to engage the stranger in our midst rather than the exotic in the faraway, as "foreign missions" and most of today's church "mission trips" are set up to do. That is the argument, at least, of David Boyd in his new book.
More on all of the above in future blogs!
The reason American Christianity is slowly expiring, as a faith if not as an institution or organization, is that it bitten into the poisoned apple of identity Christianity with all the self-destructive machinations that what we call "identity politics" entails. That is why it is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the world at large.
The only identity that any Christian genuinely has is "in Christ", and that involves dissolving boundaries, not carefully refining them. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28).
We could also add that in Christ there is no young or old, institutional or entrepreneurial (church), megachurch or microchurch, Euro-American north or global south, white or non-white, privileged or marginalized. "If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (v. 29)
Wherever Christianity distinguishes itself in terms of worldly, ethnic, or political identity, it is commiting sin against the body of Christ, the GloboChrist. Interestingly, Paul writes the above lines as his ultimate challenge to the legalism of the Judaizers, those who vest the Christian witness in terms of the privilege of special election.
Europe has long memories of its own disasters that emanated from the pride of particularism and the elevating of collective identities, whether excluded or "dominant", over the promise of the Kingdom. Read Bonhoeffer. That is why spiritually it is now sufficiently broken for genuine revival. America remains prideful and is still not broken.
The postmodernism of Christian identity politics and the endless culture wars is dead! Long live the the genuine "emerging" church of the global, relational church, the true postmodern or community that breaks down the boundaries not only of culture, but of identity, even identity based on these "cultural differences." That is the authentic form of "emergent" Christianity.
The transformation is coming in the midst of what was once a radically broken nation!
Thy Kingdom come! Amen.
Isn't Christianity really about how we "define" our relationship to Christ? I think you're exagerating here the importance of theological definition.
Posted by: Jason Eckler | August 01, 2009 at 03:33 PM
great post. i do wonder where scholarly biblical scene fits into the picture, in your opinion. its popularity appears to be on the rise and although it is strongly tied (at the very least) to modernism, many of the lessons of postmodernism are being acknowledged. disclaimer: i've developed a bit of a fixation with biblioblogs that may need external justification.
Posted by: mark begemann | August 04, 2009 at 12:11 AM
In response to the first Jason's comment, I would say that on the contrary Christianity is about how God establishes his relationship, through Christ, to us, and through Christ in us to the other in our midst. It's not the story of our personal salvation, (how we define our relationship to Christ). It's the story of the missional God who has laid hold of us; whom we are desperately trying to lay hold of in return (Phil. 3), not by chanting mantras about personal salvation, but through missional obedience patterned after Christ's obedience, for the sake of resurrection into the new creation. Not mere 'theological definition,' so much as missional reflection on (or refining of?) Christian practice, in the light of what is coming.
Posted by: Jason Valdez | August 04, 2009 at 12:32 AM