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Postmodern and Wesleyan?: Exploring the Boundaries and Possibilities
Change is in the air and it may entail a radically different way of looking at life. The most common word to describe this change is postmodernism.Postmodern and Wesleyan? is both an exploration and an internal dialogue. Essays written by differing voices explore various dimensions of postmodernism as they relate to theology, church, practices, communities, and missions.Each section includes a critical response by a respected Wesleyan leader to the ideas expressed. Dr. Leonard Sweet concludes each section with comments to continue the conversation.This important conversation piece invites churches, pastors, and laity to explore together how the Christian faith might shape both the present and the future.By providing a forum for engaging issues, both important and difficult, Postmodern and Wesleyan? offers a voice to some of the most creative thinkers in the movement and a help to Christians deciding the direction they must go in order to share the good news of God's love.
- GenresTheology
192 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2009
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May 14, 2012
This book has a distinctively ‘in-house’ flavour as members of the Church of the Nazarene discuss postmodernism and its impact upon the Church. An outside observer, the United Methodist scholar Leonard Sweet, is brought in to interact with this discussion by way of short reflective pieces at the end of each section. Most of the contributors, and presumably the editors, are convinced that the Church must in its present context make adjustments to its way of being and to its presentation of the Gospel in light of the impact of postmodernism on culture and society. To the editors’ credit at the end of each section of the book are included the contributions of respondents who are somewhat skeptical about this claim. In its four Parts it deals with Postmodernity as a cultural movement, the Gospel, the Church and engagement with the world.
If you are hoping for any detailed discussion of postmodern philosophy you will not find it here. Throughout most of the book broad generalisations stand in for deeper analysis. For example, Dean G. Blevins, in his chapter 17 on ‘The Emerging and Emergent Church’ uses an extremely broad brushstroke to define postmodernity, as ‘almost every new cultural expression in the Western world’ (p. 102). The brevity of each chapter (typically two or three pages) does not help as there is simply not enough space allowed to develop ideas.
Postmodernism as a philosophy and postmodernity as a cultural trend seem not to be sufficiently distinguished here. Most of what is said by contributors relates to the latter not the former. To me the most penetrating statement in the entire book comes in a footnote citation from Brian Leiter, ‘post-modernism is non-existent in all the leading philosophy departments throughout the English-speaking world, where it is regarded, with justice, as sophomoric skeptical posturing.’ Yet we are told that postmodernism has so radically altered our cultural landscape that we can no longer effectively communicate the Gospel unless we adjust to it. Much of what is described here as ‘postmodern’ seems to me to be indistinguishable from Romanticism. The preference for nature over the machine, for poetry over facts, for imagination over knowledge and for emotions over thoughts is deeply embedded in western culture. Such preferences do not begin to make their presence felt only in the last fifty years. If one were to attempt to trace this development historically one would do better to begin in the 1860s than the 1960s. Still we have here the oft-repeated claim that the shifting of our cultural landscape in such ways is something very new (p. 182).
In a multi-contributor work of this sort the chapters inevitably vary in quality. One could not respond adequately to thirty-four chapters in a book only 185 pages long. I will reflect here on only one chapter, one critical response, and Leonard Sweet’s ‘Conversation Igniters’ that appear at the end of each section of the book. In ch. 18 on ‘The Sensory Side of Being Spiritual’ Keith Schwanz pleads for a multi-sensory approach to worship and warns about the rampant hyper-individualism of much evangelical worship. While I am in sympathy with the point he is making, I’m not sure that the overuse of ‘I’ and ‘me’ rather than ‘you’ and ‘we’ in Gospel songs of an earlier era, as well as in many contemporary songs, should be seen as the fruit of modernity. Certainly such language can be grating especially as it tilts toward the sentimental. Consider, however, the first person personal pronouns that litter Charles Wesley’s hymns. ‘Died he for me who caused his pain? For me who him to death pursued? Amazing love! How can it be that Christ my God should die for me?’ Here is the eighteenth century expression of Luther’s pro me which lies at the heart of the Evangelical concept of grace. Certainly believers are not autonomous individuals; they are part of a holy community. Yet until the believer has grasped the universal love of God in the particular revelation that Christ died ‘for me’ as well as ‘for all’ the Gospel has not been fully grasped. Rampant individualism has both ancient and modern forms, but there is a difference between shallow ‘feel good’ spirituality and a personal appropriation of the grace of God in Christ.
Carl Leth, in his Critical Response (pp. 172-76) to Part IV on ‘In, With and For the World,’ raises some valuable questions. In his view the six essays to which he responds, ‘are more helpful in their constructive proposals than in their historical assessments, more useful to inform our exploration of what a Christian postmodernism should move toward than what modernity has been’ (p. 172). Like most proposals to adopt something new there is in most of the contributors a failure to appreciate the genuine benefits of what has gone before. There is in fact nothing very new in these proposals though there may be some valuable suggestions about new ways we might consider old problems. I remember asking a student in a ‘Theology of Ministry’ class whether the following was his viewpoint: Jesus’ understanding of how the church should function was lost after he ascended to heaven. The church in the intervening two millennia has been fundamentally flawed in the way that it has structured its ecclesial life, right down to the present time. Now twenty-year-old undergraduates who have uncovered Jesus’ original plan are starting with a blank sheet of paper and getting it right. I did this as a kind of reductio ad absurdum argument hoping he would see the silliness in such a claim. To my surprise he replied, ‘Yes that is exactly my position.’ Against such invincible ignorance it is difficult to argue.
Leth also asks just how ‘Wesleyan’ this collection is (p. 176). The book would perhaps be more accurately given the title ‘Postmodern and Christian’. The contributors are Wesleyans but they do not often reflect self-consciously from a set of Wesleyan theological convictions, except in somewhat superficial ways. For example the ‘conversational approach’ of the book is said to reflect John Wesley’s ‘preference for dialogue.’ (p. 11) It is true that Wesley published ‘Conversations’ and ‘Conference Minutes’ but anyone who has read these knows that Wesley was an autocrat whose own opinion always trumped that of any other participant.
I find Leonard Sweet’s contributions at the end of each section particularly unhelpful with their attempt at hip scatological reflections that are often weighed down with excess verbiage. If designed as examples of postmodern discourse they demonstrate that felicity of expression and precision in ideas are not highly valued commodities among postmodernists. Then there are Sweet’s oversimplified categorisations. Jean-Francois Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives.’ Yet Leonard Sweet wants to neatly divide the human race into ‘Gutenbergers’ (modernist rationalist types who read printed material and favour head over heart) and ‘Googleys’ (postmodern feeling-oriented people who use Google and favour imagination over knowledge). Toward such broad overarching explanations I must confess considerable incredulity.
In Sweet’s world, everything ‘modern’ is bad and everything ‘postmodern’ is good, because ‘modern’ people rely too much on their minds whereas ‘postmodern’ people are feelers more than thinkers and thus better able to negotiate the changing world we live in. Since modernists have attempted to ‘deodorize the slime of feeling from every source’ we must look to poets like D. H. Lawrence who defines his ‘great religion as a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says is always true’ (p.139). Really? Always true? Is it not rather the case that our emotional life, our instinctual life, is as much fallen and in need of grace as our intellectual life? Sweet admits this himself on the following page when he concedes that our emotional state ‘may be weird or wonky’ (p. 140). His claim, also on p. 140, that the Holocaust was a result of Nazism’s ‘rationalization and industrialization of [the] emotion [of hatred]’ draws a very long bow indeed and is typical of his tendency to perform surgery with a sledgehammer. If Sweet is looking for an affirmation of the value of non-rational capacities why not draw on the Pietist approach to heart religion or theological reflection on eros or the Lockeian empiricism that informed the Evangelical Awakening, rather than on Lawrence’s rampant hedonism?
Can Sweet really be serious in citing John Chrysostom (fn 7, p. 140) in support of the postmodern approach to reason? When Chrysostom condemns the heretics for creating ‘a dust-cloud of countless reasonings’ in his Commentary on Romans he is not attacking reason as such but the heretics’ use of sophisticated reasoning to oppose orthodoxy. Plato is usually the bugaboo in popular writing on postmodernism yet Chrysostom was as much indebted to Plato as the rest of the Christian theological tradition of his age. I cannot believe Sweet is not aware of this; his selective use of Chrysostom here is bewildering.
There is a belittling tone in so much of what Sweet writes. Gutenbergers, for example, have spent their lives ‘burrowing in rational furrows and learning to flex logical muscles.’ They have undergone a heart bypass and are in danger of a ‘heart attack.’ What they lack is ‘attack hearts – lives trained in deep, hard attack thinking but suppressed in wide, compassionate attack feelings that can take on the challenges of life’ (p. 140). If I am reading this frustratingly obscure sentence correctly, we seem again to be encountering the simplistic analysis - head bad; heart good.
The inclusion of exactly the same Application question at the end of every single chapter is grating - ‘In light of this chapter and its topics, how might you act differently? Think differently? Feel differently? Relate differently?’ Some thought should have been given to a different set of application questions for each chapter. Finally, I assume that the decision to eschew the correct use of upper and lower case letters in the chapter titles and author’s names is meant to be an example of postmodernity’s cavalier attitude toward convention. The result is, in my view, ugly and distracting but perhaps that is my overly modernist aesthetic speaking.
As a book designed for the average lay reader who hears the term ‘postmodern’ bandied about in the church but is not sure what to make of it, this book may prove helpful. This is indeed the book’s intended audience so perhaps some of my criticism is misplaced. Certainly the Church of the Nazarene is to be commended for publishing a book that tackles the question of how the Church is to respond to new cultural trends and which expresses a range of views within its own constituency. A more scholarly work which allows for substantive development of the ideas canvassed here would be a welcome accompaniment.
If you are hoping for any detailed discussion of postmodern philosophy you will not find it here. Throughout most of the book broad generalisations stand in for deeper analysis. For example, Dean G. Blevins, in his chapter 17 on ‘The Emerging and Emergent Church’ uses an extremely broad brushstroke to define postmodernity, as ‘almost every new cultural expression in the Western world’ (p. 102). The brevity of each chapter (typically two or three pages) does not help as there is simply not enough space allowed to develop ideas.
Postmodernism as a philosophy and postmodernity as a cultural trend seem not to be sufficiently distinguished here. Most of what is said by contributors relates to the latter not the former. To me the most penetrating statement in the entire book comes in a footnote citation from Brian Leiter, ‘post-modernism is non-existent in all the leading philosophy departments throughout the English-speaking world, where it is regarded, with justice, as sophomoric skeptical posturing.’ Yet we are told that postmodernism has so radically altered our cultural landscape that we can no longer effectively communicate the Gospel unless we adjust to it. Much of what is described here as ‘postmodern’ seems to me to be indistinguishable from Romanticism. The preference for nature over the machine, for poetry over facts, for imagination over knowledge and for emotions over thoughts is deeply embedded in western culture. Such preferences do not begin to make their presence felt only in the last fifty years. If one were to attempt to trace this development historically one would do better to begin in the 1860s than the 1960s. Still we have here the oft-repeated claim that the shifting of our cultural landscape in such ways is something very new (p. 182).
In a multi-contributor work of this sort the chapters inevitably vary in quality. One could not respond adequately to thirty-four chapters in a book only 185 pages long. I will reflect here on only one chapter, one critical response, and Leonard Sweet’s ‘Conversation Igniters’ that appear at the end of each section of the book. In ch. 18 on ‘The Sensory Side of Being Spiritual’ Keith Schwanz pleads for a multi-sensory approach to worship and warns about the rampant hyper-individualism of much evangelical worship. While I am in sympathy with the point he is making, I’m not sure that the overuse of ‘I’ and ‘me’ rather than ‘you’ and ‘we’ in Gospel songs of an earlier era, as well as in many contemporary songs, should be seen as the fruit of modernity. Certainly such language can be grating especially as it tilts toward the sentimental. Consider, however, the first person personal pronouns that litter Charles Wesley’s hymns. ‘Died he for me who caused his pain? For me who him to death pursued? Amazing love! How can it be that Christ my God should die for me?’ Here is the eighteenth century expression of Luther’s pro me which lies at the heart of the Evangelical concept of grace. Certainly believers are not autonomous individuals; they are part of a holy community. Yet until the believer has grasped the universal love of God in the particular revelation that Christ died ‘for me’ as well as ‘for all’ the Gospel has not been fully grasped. Rampant individualism has both ancient and modern forms, but there is a difference between shallow ‘feel good’ spirituality and a personal appropriation of the grace of God in Christ.
Carl Leth, in his Critical Response (pp. 172-76) to Part IV on ‘In, With and For the World,’ raises some valuable questions. In his view the six essays to which he responds, ‘are more helpful in their constructive proposals than in their historical assessments, more useful to inform our exploration of what a Christian postmodernism should move toward than what modernity has been’ (p. 172). Like most proposals to adopt something new there is in most of the contributors a failure to appreciate the genuine benefits of what has gone before. There is in fact nothing very new in these proposals though there may be some valuable suggestions about new ways we might consider old problems. I remember asking a student in a ‘Theology of Ministry’ class whether the following was his viewpoint: Jesus’ understanding of how the church should function was lost after he ascended to heaven. The church in the intervening two millennia has been fundamentally flawed in the way that it has structured its ecclesial life, right down to the present time. Now twenty-year-old undergraduates who have uncovered Jesus’ original plan are starting with a blank sheet of paper and getting it right. I did this as a kind of reductio ad absurdum argument hoping he would see the silliness in such a claim. To my surprise he replied, ‘Yes that is exactly my position.’ Against such invincible ignorance it is difficult to argue.
Leth also asks just how ‘Wesleyan’ this collection is (p. 176). The book would perhaps be more accurately given the title ‘Postmodern and Christian’. The contributors are Wesleyans but they do not often reflect self-consciously from a set of Wesleyan theological convictions, except in somewhat superficial ways. For example the ‘conversational approach’ of the book is said to reflect John Wesley’s ‘preference for dialogue.’ (p. 11) It is true that Wesley published ‘Conversations’ and ‘Conference Minutes’ but anyone who has read these knows that Wesley was an autocrat whose own opinion always trumped that of any other participant.
I find Leonard Sweet’s contributions at the end of each section particularly unhelpful with their attempt at hip scatological reflections that are often weighed down with excess verbiage. If designed as examples of postmodern discourse they demonstrate that felicity of expression and precision in ideas are not highly valued commodities among postmodernists. Then there are Sweet’s oversimplified categorisations. Jean-Francois Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives.’ Yet Leonard Sweet wants to neatly divide the human race into ‘Gutenbergers’ (modernist rationalist types who read printed material and favour head over heart) and ‘Googleys’ (postmodern feeling-oriented people who use Google and favour imagination over knowledge). Toward such broad overarching explanations I must confess considerable incredulity.
In Sweet’s world, everything ‘modern’ is bad and everything ‘postmodern’ is good, because ‘modern’ people rely too much on their minds whereas ‘postmodern’ people are feelers more than thinkers and thus better able to negotiate the changing world we live in. Since modernists have attempted to ‘deodorize the slime of feeling from every source’ we must look to poets like D. H. Lawrence who defines his ‘great religion as a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says is always true’ (p.139). Really? Always true? Is it not rather the case that our emotional life, our instinctual life, is as much fallen and in need of grace as our intellectual life? Sweet admits this himself on the following page when he concedes that our emotional state ‘may be weird or wonky’ (p. 140). His claim, also on p. 140, that the Holocaust was a result of Nazism’s ‘rationalization and industrialization of [the] emotion [of hatred]’ draws a very long bow indeed and is typical of his tendency to perform surgery with a sledgehammer. If Sweet is looking for an affirmation of the value of non-rational capacities why not draw on the Pietist approach to heart religion or theological reflection on eros or the Lockeian empiricism that informed the Evangelical Awakening, rather than on Lawrence’s rampant hedonism?
Can Sweet really be serious in citing John Chrysostom (fn 7, p. 140) in support of the postmodern approach to reason? When Chrysostom condemns the heretics for creating ‘a dust-cloud of countless reasonings’ in his Commentary on Romans he is not attacking reason as such but the heretics’ use of sophisticated reasoning to oppose orthodoxy. Plato is usually the bugaboo in popular writing on postmodernism yet Chrysostom was as much indebted to Plato as the rest of the Christian theological tradition of his age. I cannot believe Sweet is not aware of this; his selective use of Chrysostom here is bewildering.
There is a belittling tone in so much of what Sweet writes. Gutenbergers, for example, have spent their lives ‘burrowing in rational furrows and learning to flex logical muscles.’ They have undergone a heart bypass and are in danger of a ‘heart attack.’ What they lack is ‘attack hearts – lives trained in deep, hard attack thinking but suppressed in wide, compassionate attack feelings that can take on the challenges of life’ (p. 140). If I am reading this frustratingly obscure sentence correctly, we seem again to be encountering the simplistic analysis - head bad; heart good.
The inclusion of exactly the same Application question at the end of every single chapter is grating - ‘In light of this chapter and its topics, how might you act differently? Think differently? Feel differently? Relate differently?’ Some thought should have been given to a different set of application questions for each chapter. Finally, I assume that the decision to eschew the correct use of upper and lower case letters in the chapter titles and author’s names is meant to be an example of postmodernity’s cavalier attitude toward convention. The result is, in my view, ugly and distracting but perhaps that is my overly modernist aesthetic speaking.
As a book designed for the average lay reader who hears the term ‘postmodern’ bandied about in the church but is not sure what to make of it, this book may prove helpful. This is indeed the book’s intended audience so perhaps some of my criticism is misplaced. Certainly the Church of the Nazarene is to be commended for publishing a book that tackles the question of how the Church is to respond to new cultural trends and which expresses a range of views within its own constituency. A more scholarly work which allows for substantive development of the ideas canvassed here would be a welcome accompaniment.
July 4, 2021
I just finished "Postmodern and Wesleyan? Exploring Boundaries and Possibilities," edited by Jay Richard Akkerman, Thomas Jay Oord, and Brent D. Peterson.
This one has been staring at me for a while so I thought I'd give it a read.
Intro warns that everything "modern" is not bad and everything "postmodern" is not good. How can churches move forward when some are steeped in modernity and some are exploring the boundaries of postmodernity? Seems an even handed entry into the topic.
T. Scott Daniels covers being big tent enough to allow discussion and tolerance in love on nonessential matters which is of the Wesley tradition.
Thomas Oord covers the question of "does Postmodernism reject truth?" He draws a line between Postmodernism and extreme relativism, acknowledging that to say that there is no truth is a truth statement and thus a contradiction.
Joseph Bankard deals with the church in postmodern pop culture by challenging the categories sacred and secular. Outside of God isnthere a purely sacred? If this is God's world then is there a secular? With that in mind there should be places in the "secular" that shines with the sacred.
Deirdre Brower Latz covers gender, ethnicity and economics. Seems a no-brainer but can Christians have the three differences while worshiping (being Church) in unity? Yes. The push here is for equality and dialogue in an eschatological unity called the Body of Christ: my identity is in us-in-Him.
Thomas Oord is back with types of Postmodernism.
Deconstructive Postmodernism admits that language I'd fluid making it difficult to ground meaning.
Narrative Postmodernism claims that meaning and truth are found in stories which are intelligible as part of a community story. Truth is thus communal and lived in community and conversion is living in community.
Liberationist Postmodernism seeks to elevate those or that who or which are or is seen as lower: the poor or environment.
Revisionary Postmodernism draws from wisdom while incorporating new ideas to create a livable worldview in an attempt to avoid relativism.
The counters to the above were well done though my issue with them is equating drinking cyanide with some interior feeling, or objective and subjective are not the same things though this seems to be something not quite addressed by either side.
I only covered the first section because this was the most contention one, beyond this the contributors and and their antagonist were growing closer and closer. Counter arguments deeper in the book are almost nonexistent and more like amens to the previous chapters pro Postmodernism.
Good, thought provoking book, but that's just my truth.
#PostmodernAndWesleyan #PostmodernAndWesleyan? #pOSTMODERNaNDwESLEYAN #Postmodernism #Postmodern #Postmodernity #Wesleyan #Wesleyanism #Nazarene #ChurchOfTheNazarene #COTN
This one has been staring at me for a while so I thought I'd give it a read.
Intro warns that everything "modern" is not bad and everything "postmodern" is not good. How can churches move forward when some are steeped in modernity and some are exploring the boundaries of postmodernity? Seems an even handed entry into the topic.
T. Scott Daniels covers being big tent enough to allow discussion and tolerance in love on nonessential matters which is of the Wesley tradition.
Thomas Oord covers the question of "does Postmodernism reject truth?" He draws a line between Postmodernism and extreme relativism, acknowledging that to say that there is no truth is a truth statement and thus a contradiction.
Joseph Bankard deals with the church in postmodern pop culture by challenging the categories sacred and secular. Outside of God isnthere a purely sacred? If this is God's world then is there a secular? With that in mind there should be places in the "secular" that shines with the sacred.
Deirdre Brower Latz covers gender, ethnicity and economics. Seems a no-brainer but can Christians have the three differences while worshiping (being Church) in unity? Yes. The push here is for equality and dialogue in an eschatological unity called the Body of Christ: my identity is in us-in-Him.
Thomas Oord is back with types of Postmodernism.
Deconstructive Postmodernism admits that language I'd fluid making it difficult to ground meaning.
Narrative Postmodernism claims that meaning and truth are found in stories which are intelligible as part of a community story. Truth is thus communal and lived in community and conversion is living in community.
Liberationist Postmodernism seeks to elevate those or that who or which are or is seen as lower: the poor or environment.
Revisionary Postmodernism draws from wisdom while incorporating new ideas to create a livable worldview in an attempt to avoid relativism.
The counters to the above were well done though my issue with them is equating drinking cyanide with some interior feeling, or objective and subjective are not the same things though this seems to be something not quite addressed by either side.
I only covered the first section because this was the most contention one, beyond this the contributors and and their antagonist were growing closer and closer. Counter arguments deeper in the book are almost nonexistent and more like amens to the previous chapters pro Postmodernism.
Good, thought provoking book, but that's just my truth.
#PostmodernAndWesleyan #PostmodernAndWesleyan? #pOSTMODERNaNDwESLEYAN #Postmodernism #Postmodern #Postmodernity #Wesleyan #Wesleyanism #Nazarene #ChurchOfTheNazarene #COTN
October 30, 2020
You might not agree with every thought shared in these collection of essays, but I think it's part of the point of this book - to welcome conversations and questions.
Really interesting perspectives shared by the writers. I recommend it.
Really interesting perspectives shared by the writers. I recommend it.
September 29, 2022
There was a lot of compelling pastoral, theological, and philosophical content here. I really like the short format of chapters, much more accessible than most anthology books.
But there was a relatively small amount of postmodern content/exploration considering the title.
But there was a relatively small amount of postmodern content/exploration considering the title.
August 18, 2014
A real wide range of perspectives and thought offered here. I like quite a few of the essays, found others a little too vague or thin, and some bordering on silly. I will confess that I find Dr. Sweet's style a little over-the-top, a sort of Christian motivational speaker. It also feels a little dated as the emerging church movement seems to have faded or been incorporated by missional.
But it is a a quick and easy read and offers a variety of perspectives and angles on this notoriously slippery topic. The author's are earnest and honest about their approach or perspective and even the critical responses are respectful and engaging. It very much has the feel of a conversation rather than a study or detailed approach. And if you take it at that I think it serves a useful purpose, particularly for those who are new to the topic.
But it is a a quick and easy read and offers a variety of perspectives and angles on this notoriously slippery topic. The author's are earnest and honest about their approach or perspective and even the critical responses are respectful and engaging. It very much has the feel of a conversation rather than a study or detailed approach. And if you take it at that I think it serves a useful purpose, particularly for those who are new to the topic.
June 23, 2015
A good overview...
Many solid contributions from a rich variety of authors. I think I would enjoy the Len Sweet material more as a single, separate section of the book. Divided up it was disorienting to get back into the flow of what he was saying.
Many solid contributions from a rich variety of authors. I think I would enjoy the Len Sweet material more as a single, separate section of the book. Divided up it was disorienting to get back into the flow of what he was saying.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews