postmodern testimony

A.J.,

Thanks so much for sharing your story…
I really enjoyed listening.

I’m about a year in the midst of a fairly similar paradigm shift right now…

It seems like a revolution is taking place in my own heart.

God Bless you,

Shea

AJ, Thanks so much for sharing your story and this part of your journey. Just think what it would be like to be twice your age…probably more… and have to work through twice the “baggage”. That’s where I find myself…confused, almost disoriented at times yet I also find myself thrilled and amazed as I see my faith and our God and His Kingdom through a different set of lenses (actually probably a different set of eyes)...a changed heart and mind. As you I feel no bitterness for the past. At times I feel near bursting with the urge to share and then I think “share what?”. It’s like I’ve found a secret yet I can only feel it I can’t descibe it….yet. I know that will come as my journey deepens. Good Luck on yours, God Bless all that you do, and thanks again for sharing, JRB

AJ,
I think you may have a small clue as to just how many of “us” are out there, being that you made this testimony to share. But as I listened, I was slightly overwhelmed by the possible number of us out there. I have the same testimony- nearly word for word. Pete Rollins, Lief at the Bleeding Purple Podcast, and thinkers such as Derrida, Caputo, Tolstoy, and Kierkegaard are precisely the people who have clarified my thoughts for me, expanding my small bible-town mind and letting me know that there is always more to learn. And of course, Emergent has been the facilitator in a lot of ways for people like us- allowing open-minded professors/youth leaders to simply hand us a book after recognizing our disillusionment.
Thanks so much for this podcast to you and the village. I’d love to talk. I’ll look you up on facebook. :)

Thank you AJ! I’m another person that has nearly the same testimony. I also loved “the life of pi”. It has been liberating to finally find a group of people who share this understanding that the “myth” is a better story than the facts.

“life of pi” was incredible. i love that paradox of the story. pi can be hindu, muslim, and christian and he doesn’t seem to have an issue with that. pi echos ghandi who said (at least in the movie), “we are all muslim, we are all hindu.” and i would add “we are all christian” to that.

Good to hear that others have read Life of Pi! Such a good book. Although I wouldn’t say that Yann Martel is necessarily positing that we should believe in a farce because it’s a “better story”. I don’t think he’s saying that fiction is better than facts; what he’s getting at is that there are no “facts” -there are only faiths of various kinds.

I wrote you emergents a theme song. It’s on You Tube… Called New Enlightened Church Anthem…dig it.

AJ,

I’ve had nearly the same story.

I wouldn’t call myself “emergent”.

However let me help you define “post-modern”

The “modern” age was reconfigured by Descartes and articulated by Kant-Hegel.

Descartes turned everything into “subjects” and “objects”. Those terms weren’t around before.

Of course it took others to help define these terms…like Luther who said “every man is a pope” and Gallileo to describe what kinds of “objects” there were.

However Descartes is not a totally worked out philosopher…there are alot of big contradictions in Descartes. But here is the beginnings of the subjective-objective divide.

Kant completed Descartes and articulated the “enlightenment” view. What is it to be a “subject”? Kant defined a subject as “not obeying the pope or the king except for reasons I give myself”...that people up to that point had been like children obeying the pope or king and giving yourself your own reasons will make someone “mature”. For Kant the hightest thing you could be is “autonomous”.

Up until this point, in Medieval Christianity, like in Dante God is the source of all meaning and the autonomous find themselves in the inferno. Now the subject, or the mind, is the source of all meaning, receiving inputs, synthesizing representations, and conferring meaning on them.

So from God as the source of all meaning to autonomous subjects giving themselves meaning is a BIG SWITCH…so big it gets its own name…the enlightenment.

You need a little piece of Hegel to understand the next transition. Hegel added the concept of “progress”.

History, according to Hegegl, is the emergence (how’s that for ya) of practices based on beliefs. The final stage in historical progress is practices becoming “institutionalized” where the institutions have “roles” and each person takes up their “role” or “social station” as their identity. You have a fixed identity according to the roles your culture affords.

Now we can finally get to “post-modern”. Nietzche really is the best ecpression of “post-modern” although there is still a struggle to define that term.

Nietzche rebelled against objectivity calling Socrates/Plato who started this tradition “degenerate”. The Greek nation provided enough wealth and security that they could all sit around philosophizing and so Nietzsche showed that philosophy is decadence.

Nietzsche really put everything on a strong-weak scale. Unless you can overcome yourself you are weak. Life is constant overcoming.

So overcoming your former “kind” of christianity shows you are strong. The fundamentalist folks would say you are not “overcoming” but “undermining” Christianity, but because they see it that way they are “weak”.

More importantly…postmodernity is a theory of identity. Just as the modern identity is defined as rational automatons taking up their social station…postmodern identity could have MORE THAN ONE IDENTITY. You could be a teacher, then a writer, then a film-maker, then a chef.

Nietzsche’s term for this is “making your life a work of art”. You also don’t subscribe to present social roles but constantly innovate your role thereby creating new roles.

Later, Heidegger would criticize Nietzsche for saying that we have to constantly overcome ourselves and get new identities. You can have one identity and still make your life a work of art. Instead of your life being a collage it could be a fine portrait.

As far as “truth” and “objectivity”...you emergent types are correct to criticize the Historicist Christianity who turn their religion into a science, gather data, and verify their hypotheses, in search of an “objective truth” and once you admit that truth the rest (your practices) are supposed to just follow…that kind of truth can be shown to be logically impossible because it is an “inductive” process (look it up)

I see that you emergent types claim Derrida as your philosopher and “deconstruct” christianity….but I think you are missing something.

Read Soren Kierkegaard’s “Truth is SUBJECTIVITY” in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. While your at it…read the rest of Kierkegaard.

Your anti-objective view of truth seems to be more “existentialist” than “deconstructionist” (which is really a theory about the limits of language) or “postmodern”.

Instead of finding “truth” in verifying historical hypotheses…you find it in LIFE…in your life…in your Existence.

So “belief” in Jesus is meaningless unless it find its way into your practices in your life…in your existence.

You don’t discover the “truth” by a rational process…but by experiencing it for yourself in your life…like in the born-again experience for example, which is supposedly a DIRECT EXPERIENCE of the god-man, a moment when you receive your truth, the moment you are “inspired”.

AJ, thank you for telling your story, the pain, the uncertainty … the journey.

I have no idea what God is leading me out of or leading me into … the only thing I can say for sure is that I sense that it is indeed Him leading. I didn’t want to leave the security of the fundamental Christianity that I had been born and raised in for the past 52 years, however I knew that if I didn’t let go of my security then I would be missing something very alive and meaningful that God wanted to show me. I knew it would be quite uncomfortable at times, and it has been. There is no distinct end point or prescribed way to get there. The only thing that I know is that it is REAL, and it makes all the difference in my purpose for these remaining years of my life.
It’s amazing the blank looks I get when I try to explain this to people. They love me, so they make an attempt to listen and understand, but their blank stares and confused look in their eyes makes me sputter and stumble in my pitiful attempts to chronologue this path that I’m blindly groping along.
It is a comfort to know that there are others so similarly afflicted, especially those who are over 50 with many years of “traditional Christianity” beckoning for them to return to that which we’ve known as truth for so long.
I pray for us all, that we would never be content to sit back while on this journey and simply talk a new philosophy, but rather to serve wholeheartedly and with great love those who are in our path, and those whom we actively seek out. ~Donna