The Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives

Michael Horton, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Brian D. McLaren, Erwin Raphael McManus, Andy Crouch, Leonard Sweet

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780310861379
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

What should the church look like today?What should be the focus of its message?How should I present that message?We live in as pivotal and defining an age as the Great Depression or the Sixties–a period whose definition, say some cultural observers, includes a warning of the church's influence. The result? A society measurably less religious but decidedly more spiritual. Less influenced by authority than by experience. More attuned to images than to words.How does the church adapt to such a culture? Or should it, in fact, eschew adapting for maintaining a course it has followed these last two millennia? Or something in between?These are exactly the questions asked in The Church In Emerging Culture by five Christian thinker-speaker-writers, each who advocate unique stances regarding what the church's message should be (and what methods should be used to present it) as it journeys through this evolving, postmodern era. The authors are: Andy Crouch–Re: Generation Quarterly editor-in-chiefMichael Horton–professor and reformed theologianFrederica Mathewes-Green–author, commentator, and Orthodox ChristianBrian D. McLaren–postmodernist, author, pastor, and Emergent senior fellowErwin Raphael McManus–author and pastor of the innovative and interethnic L.A.-based church, MosaicMost unique about their individual positions is that they're presented not as singular essays but as lively discussions in which the other four authors freely (and frequently) comment, critique, and concur. That element, coupled with a unique photographic design that reinforces the depth of their at-once congenial and feisty conversation, gives you all-access entrée into this groundbreaking discourse.What's more, general editor Leonard Sweet (author of SoulTsunami and AquaChurch, among several other acclaimed texts) frames the thought-provoking dialogue with a profoundly insightful, erudite introductory essay–practically a book within a book. The Church In Emerging Culture is foundational reading for leaders and serious students of all denominations and church styles.

Andy Crouch

Life After Postmodernity

ON A HOT, SUNNY DAY EARLY in the twenty-first century, I took my five-yearold son to see the high-water mark of modernity.

As we drove over the causeway onto Cape Canaveral in central Florida, the third largest building in the world rose on the horizon—the Vehicle Assembly Building, a massive gray box with doors the size of skyscrapers, where the Apollo missions’ rockets were prepared for their crawl to the launchpad. Devoid of ornament except for the massive American flag painted on one side, designed along the most utilitarian lines possible (up close, in spite of its scale, it reminds me of the corrugated-aluminum equipment shed on my grandfather’s dairy farm), it is an unlikely temple. But it is as much the architectural embodiment of transcendent longings, animated by a compelling master story and focusing the wealth of a civilization, as all the cathedrals of Europe—several of which, come to think of it, could stack very nicely inside.

The moon missions mobilized hundreds of thousands of Americans galvanized into action by the Russian Sputnik I satellite and by John F. Kennedy’s dramatic call on 12 September 1962 to put a man on the moon within 10 years. Invoking explorer George Mallory (who climbed Everest “because it is there”), Kennedy declared, “Space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”

{

BRIAN D. McLAREN: Of course, beneath these noble words hid the chill of the Cold War and the fear of the Russian communists (and the desire to get to the moon before they did for a host of reasons). So even this noble achievement— seemingly of pure science—is intimately connected to the engines of war Andy describes in a few paragraphs. }

In response to Kennedy’s call, NASA and its contractors deployed every tool in the modern arsenal and invented hundreds of new technologies along the way: microscopic control over surfaces and materials, macroscopic systems to harness enormous quantities of force and fuel, mathematical understanding of fluid dynamics and gravitational mechanics, and a global telecommunications system, aided at every step by the recent innovation of computing machines. They not only created the Saturn rockets and lunar landers, machines of dizzying complexity that had to work perfectly the first time; they also created a massive human infrastructure that dwarfed any before it, organized to maximize human talents while eliminating as far as possible every vestige of human error, ambiguity, and risk through intensive and extensive planning, training, rehearsal, and (should all else fail) redundancy.

And they did it.

There are other twentieth-century projects of equally vast scale that were also animated by compelling master stories and focused the energies of an entire nation. But most of them were ultimately failures, horrors, or both—the Holocaust (which was also aided by IBM computer technology), the collectivization of a vast agricultural and industrial economy in the Soviet Union, and of course the Manhattan Project and its mushrooms. The Apollo project, unlike the others, was a sweet success (with the exception of Apollo 1 and the near escape of Apollo 13). Men thundered away from our planet, walked on the moon, came home, and talked about it on the evening news in their taciturn, impossibly confident, sexy astronaut way.

To hear some prophets, and critics, of postmodernism talk, you might think that the Kennedy Space Center and all it represents is now a rusting, nostalgic shadow of its former self. The most overexcited folks will tell you (perhaps throwing in some French) that back in the bad (or good) old modern days, we actually believed we could know something about the world. But the certainties of the modern era are lost. Everything is relative. Scientific certainty is a myth (or a language game or a social construct), and the new generation, who are coming along fast and are about to invade your church (or who are staying away from your church in droves because you are so deucedly modern), don’t believe in Truth. They are much more interested in Narrative, or Mystery, or just Nose Rings.

To be sure, these prophets {

BRIAN D. McLAREN: I’m not sure which “prophets” Andy is referring to (since my name gets mentioned later on, I was worried I must be among them, but I have been assured otherwise), but his description here shouldn’t be seen as an expression of thoughtful postmodern reflection. Rather, Andy’s description seems to cobble together the most extreme statements that a motley assortment of people might say either on an off moment or if they don’t really know much about what they’re discussing. I certainly have never heard any one person regale anybody with this kind of “potted philosophy,” but if any has, all I can say is that I join Andy in being turned off. No doubt “moderns,” “postmoderns,” and “antimoderns” (whatever they are) have created quite a few straw men that they have then attacked with righteous fury. } probably regale you with this potted philosophy shortly after stepping off an airplane, which is itself a product of the same modern values that made the space program possible—mechanical complexity and precision, redundant systems, coordination, analysis, and control. If the captain’s voice had come over the intercom before takeoff and begun to talk dreamily of Narrative or Mystery—“Ladies and gentlemen, it is truly a mystery how we manage to ‘fly’ to San Diego today. But is ‘flight’ really a metaphor for something else, and is there really any ‘where’ which we can truly call a destination?”—the postmodern prophets would have been hustling off the plane along with everyone else. Mystery is fine, but not when it’s mission-critical.

And if you happen to visit Kennedy Space Center on the day when my son and I return, as I’ve promised him we will, you’ll see him and every other five-year-old—the supposed heirs of postmodernity, along with most of their parents—dreaming of being an astronaut, gazing in awe at the Saturn V rocket that put a man on the moon. IT ’S SIMPLY NOT TRUE that our culture has somehow left modernity behind, even in the way that you can leave downtown Orlando behind but still have miles to go within its limits. {

BRIAN D. McLAREN: Andy is so right: You can’t leave modernity behind. But here I think we should be careful not to play into a common and understandable misunderstanding about what many of us mean by the troublesome term postmodernity—a term that, although nobody likes it (including Jacques Derrida, who frequently says, “I cannot be held responsible for the use of this term!”), many keep on using because of the failure of a better alternative to appear. Again, postmodernity is not antimodernity. The prefix post means “flowing on from or coming after,” not “unilaterally rejecting or naively dismissing.” The term suggests continuity as well as discontinuity: A postpubescent adolescent, for example, still occupies the same name, lives in the same family, carries on the same story, and is at heart the same person as the prepubescent and pubescent boy. A postgraduate student similarly doesn’t become anti-intellectual. If “postmodern prophets” oversimplify and exaggerate the differences sometimes, I hope they can be as mercifully treated as all should be who create ultramodern or antimodern straw men and, having thrashed them, declare to have vanquished postmodernity. In this regard, for Andy to insist that the prefix post is completely inappropriate and the prefix ultra is appropriate (as he does in the next sentence) strikes me as an either-or way of thinking that is neither necessary nor appropriate. I would never say that modernity is over. Just as the modern world arose in the shadow of the medieval world, and the two overlap and interact even until today (think of the modern West’s ongoing dialogue—and too often, warfare—with medieval Islam), I would assume modern and postmodern realities to be both-and, not either-or. When I was in the prime of life in my 30s, I had children:Just because the next generation had been born didn’t mean my generation was dead! Postmodernity, in my view, is the infant child of modernity, still small and quite insignificant, that may grow up to learn a little from its parents’ mistakes. And of course it will make plenty of its own because we’re talking history here, not Heaven! }

We are, if anything, ultramodern—more and more deeply embedded in, and committed to, modernity’s fundamental impulses. Anyone opposed to the modern project can say goodbye to the hope of being intelligible, let alone relevant, to the vast numbers of Americans who make their living in medicine, engineering, global finance, and myriad other modern endeavors. The 1990s gave us the postmodern manifesto The Matrix, but they also gave us the modern bravado (“Failure is not an option!”) of Apollo 13.

Yet there is no doubt that modernity has lost some of its swagger. America has never quite recovered from the other adventure into which John F. Kennedy led the country, the Vietnam conflict, whose monument receives one million more visitors per year than the Kennedy Space Center. In the wake of Vietnam (and Watergate, and the oil crisis, and the economic doldrums of the 1970s) America stopped going to the moon, and in the 1980s and 1990s NASA scaled back to projects that, while certainly impressive, were somehow less comprehensive and daring—such as the “smaller, faster, cheaper” interplanetary probes (many of which in turn failed). Americans over 30 today will never forget where they were when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, but we will not remember the loss of Columbia so vividly. Modernity’s limits no longer surprise us.

On their own terms, the moon missions were a success. But somehow they failed at the level of metaphor. The moon and the planets were there, indeed, but we’ve been there, done that, and “new hopes for knowledge and peace” were not exactly fulfilled. We achieved escape velocity from earth, but not from history.

IN BLOOMINGTON, MINNESOTA, you can visit another enormous building. If current plans for expansion are carried out, it will eventually surpass the Vehicle Assembly Building in size—though it sprawls rather than towers over the landscape. It already encloses 4.2 million square feet of space and receives 10 times as many visitors a day as the Kennedy Space Center. And like the Kennedy Space Center, it is another high-water mark of sorts, the epitome of another facet of modernity. It is here, in fact, that postmodernity really begins.

The similarities between the Mall of America and the Vehicle Assembly Building go further than their size. The Mall of America is a surprisingly utilitarian affair from the outside. All the excitement is within. It too is the architectural expression of a dream, the apotheosis of that magical American combination “retail and entertainment,” {

FREDERICA MATHEWES-GREEN: My local mall uses the term shoppertainment and follows it with an ® so you won’t steal their great idea for yourself.} set free from the constraints of weather and location.

But the differences are also striking. The Vehicle Assembly Building is the expression of one enormous collective effort, a massively coordinated pursuit of an integrated goal. The Mall of America, on the other hand, is a disorienting bricolage of stores, restaurants, indoor theme parks, and even a roller coaster. Even the way it distributes its volume—horizontal and spread out rather than vertical and compact, dozens of entrances rather than a few huge doors—suggests something more haphazard. At the Vehicle Assembly Building, only one thing matters: a safe mission into space. At the Mall of America, you can choose your pleasure. Suits? Sneakers? Lingerie? Legos? Five hundred twenty stores wait to serve you. The Vehicle Assembly Building overwhelms with its one great purpose; the Mall of America overwhelms with its cacophony of options.

And so it is at the Mall of America that the much-heralded features of postmodernity come into view. Take Brian D. McLAREN’s nice summary of postmodernity in A New Kind of Christian (in the voice of his fictional character Neo), constructed by adding post to the features of modernity: “postconquest, postmechanistic, postanalytical, postsecular, postobjective, postcritical, postorganizational, postindividualistic, post-Protestant, and postconsumerist.” Put a few of these into chart form (p. 69) and notice how nicely the two buildings seem to line up. {

FREDERICA MATHEWES-GREEN: Andy’s chart is very helpful. I’d quibble with only the fourth entry, on the grounds that lots of critique goes on behind the scenes. Marketing is a very aggressive science, and all the carefree detachment a mall implies is deliberately achieved. There are multiple, huge, obvious doors in, for example, while the exits are small and concealed. There is a reason for this. The mall experience may be emblematic of postmodernism, but it’s achieved by modernist means.}

So far, so good. But when we get to the last of Neo’s points, we start to scratch our heads. Is the Vehicle Assembly Building and all it represents “individualistic,” with the Mall of America being “postindividualistic” (whatever that would mean)? {

FREDERICA MATHEWES-GREEN: A further complication with individualism is that conformity is being marketed to us under the guise of individualism. We are exhorted to stand out from the crowd by purchasing the mass-produced items that the crowd most approves. Individualism is a profitable illusion. As Andy Warhol said, “Someday everybody will think just what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike.” } Not really—as we were tragically reminded in February 2003, even today’s mission specialists are still “Spam in a can,” quite consciously at the mercy of thousands of other people. Meanwhile, the Mall of America may be a magnet for families on vacation, but its celebration of individual preference and taste is quite simply unparalleled in history. Assuming you have a credit card, there are few places you can feel more gloriously autonomous than the Mall of America.

As for the modern moon missions being consumeristic, they actually represented an eagerly embraced national sacrifice that exceeded $25 per year for every man, woman, and child in America. True, they did introduce Americans to Tang and Teflon, but somehow consumerism isn’t the word that comes to mind. And the Mall of America postconsumeristic? Not unless I’m missing something. {

BRIAN D. McLAREN: Andy’s line of reasoning assumes that the Mall of America is indeed the icon of postmodernity and that wherever you find consumerism, there you have modernity. No, I would go back to what Andy said before: The Mall of America is a classic example of ultramodernity, not postmodernity. He seems to have pulled a bit of a bait and switch, I fear: told us that postmodernity didn’t exist and then told us it did, but located it in an icon that to me is clearly an example of modernity. I’m sure Andy is out to make a worthwhile point or achieve a worthwhile end, but I wish we could get there with him without needing to accept these assumptions. }

So something is not quite right about Neo’s list. Modernity {

BRIAN D. McLAREN: I think, after this response, that I should avoid redundancy and stop commenting on the huge differences between the way Andy and I use the term postmodernity. It seems clear that for Andy, postmodernity means all that is worst about modernity coalesced into one glob of ultrasuperficial, superdestructive, otherwise negatively prefixed consumerism. With this definition of postmodernity, neither I nor my friends who might be lumped by him in the ignoble club of “postmodern prophets” would agree. When we say Postmodernity, this is not what we mean at all. So here’s a proposal. When replying to Andy in the rest of this piece, I’ll try to accept (with some pain) his equation: Postmodernity in this chapter equals ultramodernity.

Having accepted that shift in nomenclature (just as if I were going to say casa instead of house when talking to a Spanish friend, or if I agreed to refer to red...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• SWEET Introduction: Garden, Park, Glen, Meadow
• SWEET Introduction to the Contributors
• CROUCH Life After Postmodernity
• HORTON Better Homes & Gardens
• MATHEWES-GREEN Under the Heaventree
• McLAREN The Method, the Message, and the Ongoing Story
• McMANUS The Global Intersection
• About the Publisher
• Share Your Thoughts