I'm currently reading Michael Scott Horton's book Covenant and Eschatology and wanted to excerpt a few lines and interact with them. In a discussion on the contemporary consciousness, on pp. 52-53 he interacts with Rudolf Bultmann's famous words:
It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of daemons and spirits. We may think we can manage it in our own lives, but to expect others to do so is to make the Christian faith unintelligible and unacceptable to the modern mind.
He counters with these words from Peter Berger:
In other words it may be conceded that there is in the modern world a certain type of consciousness that has difficulties with the supernatural. The statement remains however, on the level of socio-historical diagnosis. The diagnosed condition is not thereupon elevated to the status of an absolute criterion; the contemporary is not immune to relativizing analysis. We may say that contemporary consciousness is such and such; we are left with the question of whether we will assent to it. We may agree, say, that contemporary consciousness is incapable of conceiving of either angels or demons. We are still left with the question of whether, possibly, angels and demons go on existing despite this incapacity of our contemporaries to conceive of them (italics mine).
Those words are certainly pertinent to modern debates on postmodernism and the activities of the emerging church.
I think we can conceive that there is such a thing as a postmodern consciousness, defining what it is though is a whole different matter, and that certain older understandings of the nature of truth and the mission and ministry of the church are unintelligible and unacceptable to the (post)modern mind.
Yet the assumptions of postmodernism (again, whatever that is) are not an absolute criterion by which to judge truth and the assumptions that permeate our emerging world are not an absolute criterion by which to judge and/or refashion the church.
While I appreciate much that has come out of the postmodernism? and emerging church discussions, and while I do think these are necessary, in too many cases the assumptions of both have been too readily accepted as givens to which we must assent, and therefore submit. Many who look with favor on postmodernism? and the emerging culture or who simply accept these things as givens have arrogated unto themselves a superior position of being "in the know," in a way that those who don't share their assumptions are not.
They may, in fact, be "in the know" in ways and areas that the rest of us aren't and thus be great conversation partners with much to offer. Yet, at times it seems that they are unwilling to relativize and critique their own positions and practices the way they have done so to others. There is a sense in which they often absolutize their own critique of the absolutes of others.
And so I go back to that old familiar plea for epistemological humility, which is not the same as epistemological uncertainty, IMHO. Some of the most certain people I have interacted with are those who are certain we can't know much, if anything, for certain.
Epistemological humility would call us to be willing and open to receive the critiques of "contemporary consciousness," while calling those who have a "contemporary consciousness" to be willing and open to receiving the critiques of those who can't give assent to said "consciousness."
Related Tags: Bultmann, Rudolf Bultmann, Berger, Peter Berger, Sociology, Religion, Current Affairs, Theology, Postmodern, Postmodernism, Emergent, Emerging church, Christianity, Philosophy, Epistemology, Books, Michael Scott Horton
I like the introduction of a question mark into the orthography of "postmodernism?" in the above. Much more than a mere shorthand for "(again, whatever that is)," its threat to end the sentence before the thought [which cannot be complete while a key term remains in oscillation] has been completed emulates what it interrogates.
Cheers,
PGE
Posted by: pgepps | September 08, 2006 at 11:58 PM