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Putting God back in the church

By Peter Sellick - posted Tuesday, 13 June 2006


It is a great pity that the move in philosophy called postmodernism has attracted negative sentiments in the general public.

There is a fear this movement removes all that we know is solid - morality, values, and the scientific world view - to replace it with a sea of relativities and uncertainties.

It is thought postmodernism is just more radical scepticism emptying all that we thought we knew. Certainly the more outrageous expressions - particularly those originating in France - give off this odor. conjuring up a vision of young philosophers eager to make their names rampaging through our universities and overturning all the old authorities and certitudes.

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An example of how postmodernism has been misrepresented is the silly questions set in English literature exams asking students to criticise texts from a particular position such as Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, or queer.

The origin of these questions lies in the program of deconstruction with its critical examination of texts for their underlying and often unrecognised biases and agendas.

While this process can be recommended for identifying false consciousness, it is important to understand how our position in life - as man, woman, indigenous, privileged, and so on - informs the kind of world we construct. Its deconstruction lays bare our soul and allows other points of view room to breath.

However, when this technique becomes the be-all and end-all for studying literature, then students standing back from the text with judgment in their heads are likely to miss the text altogether. The result can be moral megalomania, with the student self-righteously assuming the position of moral arbiter over our great texts of literature.

When suspicion rules there is no way texts may engage us. The greatest advantage of studying the great literary texts is that they are “other”. Student-centred learning, which insists on texts from the students’ own world, will not be confronted by difference and will remain in its own comfort zone.

Surely the importance of the great texts is their accurate representation of the human - something Big Brother as an alternative text does not do.

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It is increasingly being recognised there was never room for theology in the modern project of setting up clear and distinct ideas based on firm foundations. This philosophical absolutism found its ground primarily in the natural sciences where theory could be tested and affirmed, or found wanting.

The success of this method ensured that all other forms of knowledge were relegated to the margins as subjective, with little or no foundation in the world. Theology suffered most from this move because the God that it investigated could be imagined only in terms of being under the auspices of natural science.

As a being among other beings God was vulnerable to negative evidence. And by seeking to lay the foundations of proof for God’s existence, we also lay the foundations of proofs for his nonexistence.

The whole argument about God’s existence or nonexistence is easily exposed as a kind of idolatry for both atheist and theist. This kind of god is a simple projection of our hopes, needs, desires and fears. As such, it acts as a mirror reflecting these concerns to us but closing the path to an interaction with the divine as “other”.

So, far from being a revision of Pyrrhonian scepticism in proclaiming the emptying of all known things, postmodernism - as its name implies - seeks to correct the errors of modernism.

By insisting on firm foundations for knowledge, modernism artificially limited what we thought we could know. Time and again in On Line Opinion’s comments section I am confronted by those who tell me I can’t prove anything.

That was the whole point in modernism, but postmodernism - even though it denies absolute foundations of knowledge - allows us to know enough to get along together.

We are reminded how recent the modern project is when we read St Paul, who tells us;

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Cor 13:12 NRSV)

and:

But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. (2 Cor 4:7 NRSV) 

Rather than being about absolute foundations, scripture is conditioned by the transient nature of being and the movement towards a new reality. It’s the mentality of the nomad rather than of the settled people - of a people straining to see an emerging future rather than settling down to old verities.

The demise of the modern project of certitude allows theology to move outside the categories of being and absolute certainty to reclaim biblical speech about God.

What does it mean that God, in the first creation narrative, brings the world into being by his Word? “And God said, “Let there be …”, and it was so. What does it mean when, at the end of a prophecy, the prophet says, “Thus says the Lord?”

Who is this God who is identified with the sound of pure silence? But most puzzling of all, what do we make of the creative Word of God, which spoke the universe into being, becoming flesh.

Our problem is our view of biblical texts through the eyes of modernity blinds us to the texts’ original meaning - to the extent that we miss the extremely puzzling and paradoxical nature of biblical speech about God. The many examples of this could be teased out only in a larger work.

When our speech about God begins in the Bible instead of philosophical presuppositions, the God we arrive at is quite different - so different that John can tell us:

So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. (1 John 4:16 NRSV)

This language about God has no counterpart in the modern project, and only when we escape from its limitations can such a text make any sense. Only when we escape from the God of the 17th century scientist-theologians - the God that Newton believed in - can we hear what the Bible is saying to us.

God is not a being among beings. By centering his theology on the Word of God rather than the being of God, Karl Barth moved from the modern paradigm to the postmodern - before it was a recognised movement.

God thus ceases to be the subject of philosophical or scientific speculation, but is experienced as a spoken word. This word has content, not in the words of scripture, but in the reality to which scripture points - the humanism that emerged from Israel’s struggle with truth and in the man, Jesus.

This is the central reality of Christian worship, where the Word is faithfully preached and the sacraments celebrated. God is with His people. When this is affirmed, all speculation about God’s existence as being evaporates, making the scientist-theologians with their cosmological proofs redundant.

The Church’s long decline during the past few hundred years began when God was taken out of the Church and became an object of scientific speculation. It was entirely predictable this would produce the dominant heresy of the modern age, Unitarianism, since the modern paradigm could not cope with God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

When Newton could not affirm the doctrine of the Trinity (ironically residing, himself, at Trinity College, Cambridge), the king gave him dispensation to retain his post. In retrospect, this was a major concession to theological error and, given Newton’s fame, helped fragment the faith of the Church.

Understanding God in terms other than being requires considerable education against our natural tendency to think in terms of person.

We must speak about God in terms of person because He cannot be reduced to knowledge or force or process. Rather, he is in relation with us. But we must also remember He is not a person among persons. He does not exist in matter - especially not in a contradictory supernatural matter - but in the spirit of freedom and truth.

Only when we escape from the false orientations and restrictions modernity has imposed on us, can God be given back to the Church.Stanley Hauerwas has entitled an essay “In a world without foundations: all we have is the church.”

In modernity speech about God was a poor amalgam of the secular and the biblical, with the secular eventually crowding out the biblical. In postmodernity talk about God will be impossible without talk about the people of God.

God will no longer be a foundation for morality or existence to shore up our shaky lives but will be experienced as in the days gone by - as his creative, judging, forgiving, loving Word in the midst of the congregation. To hear this Word is to be saved from the powers of death around us and set free from the idolatry so natural to our hearts.

A theology centered around the Word of God rather than the being of God requires subtle changes in our understanding of the key occupation of Christian prayer. Prayer is certainly a conversation of sorts.

Paul told us we should “pray without ceasing”. Surely he did not mean we constantly press our concerns upon God, but that we unceasingly listen for His Word.

A medieval painting of Mary shows her being impregnated by the Word through her ear. This is an image of prayer. Prayer consists in us listening to the Word. It is not something we do occasionally but is a medium in which “we live and move and have our being”.

The seed crystal around which all Christian prayer grows is to be found in the opening of the liturgy: “The Lord be with you.” This desire, particularly expressed in the Gospel of John as God dwelling with His people, is the primary desire of all Christians and the focus of all prayer.

This hope is fulfilled in our listening to the Word, and also in intercessory prayer as hope for the “other”. Thus prayer is a different kind of conversation with an “other”, and different from private thought, which is insulated within the self. It is the opening of the self to the depths of the Word.

The modern paradigm never had room for biblical theology, and the Church’s task now is to throw it off to reclaim faithful speech about God.

This will take great educative effort directed to both the churched and unchurched such is the tenacious hold of modernity on our minds.

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Article edited by Allan Sharp.
If you'd like to be a volunteer editor too, click here.

This article was helped considerably by several chapters of Overcoming Onto-theology by Merold Westphal.



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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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