Velvet Modernism
Look, I’m not saying modernism is our unqualified friend. Did only good things happen in theology in the nineteenth century, the very historical epicenter of modernism? No. Was it perhaps a bit naive to think we could develop antiseptic evangelistic methods that would cut perfectly through cultural bias and conditioning to deliver utterly pure, God-pleasing belief and practice? Was that maybe a little bit influenced by the modernist zeitgeist? Were you thinking yes? I was too.
So let’s say goodbye to all of that, and thank-you to any cultural movement and its Christian exponents who are helping the church away from Fundamentalism (our own paradoxical adaptation of modernism), crusade evangelism, meticulously programmed church ministry, and other relics of the past. I am not hanging on to them. They are not mine, not of my people, and I have no zeal to defend them. Good riddance.
But you know, finding all this modernist soot on our hands, we are probably not well-served to dive into a life of fully-orbed postmodernism. Who among all my fellow disowners of modernism thinks the cultural changes in the past 30 years have been of sufficient magnitude to warrant a change in traditional church worship services–no really, pick anything in the last 30 years from Episcopalianism to the Vineyard–to this? Anyone? Anyone see the proportionality there? [tumbleweed blows across stage, sound of crickets]
(Darn it, I said stage! Clearly this is because of my patriarchal, colonialist, imperialist, phallocratic urge to oppress marginalized voices by being the Big Man standing up in front of the masses telling my Big Story in order to keep them pliant and working diligently for the capitalist oppressor whom I enable. I am Wal-Mart Shareholder, hear me roar!)
This blog’s deconstruction notwithstanding, I am having a hard time taking the Emergent Church seriously. The movement tends to discredit itself by being breathlessly radical. It’s impossible to see it as anything other than the current age’s instance of the time-honored tradition of young people doing foolish and short-lived things in their zeal of just having awakened to adult life. They roll out of the bed of their teen years, get a cup of coffee by age 20 or 22, and are shocked to see the horrible state of their parents’ house. The velvet Elvis, the green shag carpet, the olive appliances! They never noticed all these things before. Time to replace all these dated things with the right decor: white carpet, low-voltage halogen lighting, and stainless steel appliances. See how old and busted you were, Mom and Dad? Stainless and halogen, that’s the right paradigm. We get it. You didn’t. The sins of the past have been redressed!
And the saddest part is always the few aging hipsters who are willing to jump in for the ride, giving faux intellectual heft and organized leadership to youthful folly. Now there is not a thing in the world wrong with being an aging hipster: take if from me, being a hipster is better than being a nerd, and I like the idea of aging better every year. These folk ought to be able to connect with especially foolish youth, identify with them, and share their hard-won lessons. This does not seem comprehensively to be the case with the leaders of the Emerging church. Despite being old enough to know better, they seem to be embracing a certain amount of folly themselves.
Running with the parents’ decor metaphor a bit, I have noticed that grandchildren are seldom so horrified by their grandparents’ faults as are first-generation offspring. Grandma and Grandpa’s bickering is kind of funny, after all. Grandchildren didn’t grow up hearing it, didn’t feel the shame and self-loathing at long fights touched off by their own misbehavior, didn’t sit alone in their rooms wondering if this was finally the fight that would end in divorce just like the parents of all their friends at school. Absent the pain of close contact, Grandma and Grandpa’s faults faults become endearing.
Applying this to the question of the ongoing modernism debate–and that is what this really is, still–we can look back now with some fondness on the Medieval European classical synthesis. It’s not as bad as Modernism told us it was; maybe a little tip o’ the hat to some kind of tradition every now and again isn’t so bad. It’s easy when no one has ever held a sword to your throat for questioning received authority. Sure that Francis Bacon was a cut-up, but premodernism can’t have been as bad as all of that, can it?
Of course the real world is more complicated than this. Sweeping historical movements (which so dominate history that their immediate neighbors are defined using the suffixes pre- and post-) are not monolithically good or evil. My generation is well past any kind of uncritical embrace of modernism, but does that mean we should reject it like Dad’s velvet Elvis and run into the waiting arms of postmodernism? I doubt it. A more mature appraisal of our situation might go a long way.
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- Posted by Tim on Monday, February 16, 2004 at 1:45:43 pm PST
- Category: Theology
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21 Responses to “Velvet Modernism”
I clicked on the Emergent Church link, and I couldn’t get past the breathless, eager tone on the front page.
“Look at this stuff! It falls out of the sky! It lies around in puddles, and you can like, DRINK IT, man! And wash in it! And like, EVERYTHING!”
That’s what it reminds me of — like a teenager who thinks he’s the first person ever to discover the importance of dihydrogen oxide.
Chill out guys, and you might find out that the people who’ve been knowing Jesus for 30 years in the Baptipiscopoterian church down the street just MIGHT have something worth listening to. Maybe not everything, but something.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 16th, 2004 at 2:17 pm |Oh, and BTW, they remind me strongly of myself 20 years ago.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 17th, 2004 at 7:19 am |Velvet Modernism and the Emergent Church
If only I possessed half the wit and writing ability of Tim Berglund, then I might have been able to write a post on the Emerging Church as good as this one: This blog’s deconstruction notwithstanding, I am having a…
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 17th, 2004 at 7:43 am |And there’s little shame in having been like that as a high school senior. No, wait, I mean a ten-year-old girl! Yeah, sorry: ten-year-old.
And your breathless discovery of water made me laugh out loud, literally. (LOLL?)
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 17th, 2004 at 8:21 am |Very swave and deboner Tim, but I was in college then.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 17th, 2004 at 9:21 am |Good analysis Tim. I’ve been attempting to say much of the same thing in my posts on the Po-Mo Em-church fad. What is especially troubling is their apparent rejection of rationality in favor of emotionalism. A movement based primarily on feelings will soon find itself on shaky ground.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 17th, 2004 at 11:04 am |Hmm. You’ve got a point when it comes to the faddishness of the PoMo movement. But, hey, let’s not be PoMophobic either.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 17th, 2004 at 2:55 pm |As you acknowledge at the beginning of your blog, they’ve got a point. There were excesses of modernism that needed to be exorcised. But you don’t go beyond the rejection of past errors. That’s not the only point that PoMo folks make. Their bigger point is that there are, in fact, real changes that have taken place in the last 40 years. We do, in fact, live in a different world.
What exactly that world WILL look like is yet to be known. One thing we do know is that it will have some similarities and some differences with what went before. To say “Let’s not get swept up in the fad” may sound quite grown-up, but is it really?
If cars replace buggies, we don’t embrace carism. If TVs replace radios, we don’t embrace TVism. If CDs replace LPs, we don’t embrace CDism. We don’t embrace these things and determine our lives by them, but we do live in a world filled with them and therefore have to deal with them and they way of life and thinking that comes with them.
That is what I think those in the em-church movement are trying to get us to realize.
Oh, no, Psan. From the sites I’ve waded through and the books I’ve read, those who grasp the title Postmodern Christian are embracing the philosophical underpinings of that system, not just trying to point out the obvious cracks in the walls of the house that Modernism built (because if you look carefully at the cornerstone of that house, it really wasn’t crafted by Modernists anyway. Neo-fundamentalism Evangelicals, perhaps). Cdism, Starbucksim, TVism - those are all welcome planks in the E-church culture.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 17th, 2004 at 4:04 pm |Sorry to break the deafening silence, but I do. There have been a lot of cultural changes in my lifetime, and those changes have impacted the church.
For better or worse, those of us who are under 50 or so grew up in an egalitarian milieu that is less formal, less hierarchical and less tied to traditions than what we saw in the middle of the 20th century. While some may like traditional services, a lot of people in this new milieu will appreciate a church that is more informal and takes the idea of the priesthood of all believers seriously. Business is less formal, less hierarchical and more group-oriented; many churches have followed suit.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 18th, 2004 at 10:45 am |Less formal, more group-oriented, less traditional — all true.
But two questions are in play: does the worship of the church lead and teach, or follow and learn from, the culture?
Second, even if you grant that the church follows and learns from, which I don’t for a second, how do you get to this: http://www.graceway.org.nz/ which was what Tim was referring to, without minimizing the message of the gospel, which I couldn’t find on that site? (It might be there, but if it’s not front and center, I think I can at elast be forgiven for being wrong, if I’m wrong to assume that the salvation of the hopeless from sin and death is not considered primary to the gospel.)
Third question: does this speak to people who still think concretely, in logical fashion, in traditional categories and are put off by dressing up the ancient faith in pagan clothes, or do they just not matter?
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 18th, 2004 at 11:26 am |If InfMonks is your detour…
Sometimes I feel silly linking to posts on Northern Alliance sites. It’s sort of like linking to a piece on InstaPundit. I mean, if you’re here, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve seen it. But perhaps you’re like me….
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 18th, 2004 at 12:32 pm |Why pick on http://www.graceway.org.nz as the one and only example ‘pomo’? I can find a traditional church you’d object to just as much if I thought the effort worth the google-time.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 19th, 2004 at 6:16 am |I’ve seen no shortage of that among ‘traditional’ evangelicals either.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 19th, 2004 at 6:22 am |Scott, thanks for your comments. I appreciate them.
Let me save you the Googling time: why look any further than John W. Robbins, who is credited with saying that the primary purpose of the church is to teach truth? I make no blanket condemnation of the man, but his view of this issue is a crisp example of the extremes the Emergent people bring up, extremes I would stand with them in wanting to fix. And even this error is nowhere near in magnitude to the apparent neopagan syncretism represented by Graceway’s site.
(And someone please correct me if I am misattributing this statement to Robbins. I recall an online forum discussion from a few years back in which Robbins participated and advanced this view, in contrast to ecclesiologies that might prioritize community, union with Christ, etc. I think I have him right on this, but I’m not interested in attracting any Robbins defenders to the fray and starting a subthread about him. He has his hands full with the N.T. Wright folks anyway.)
And you want to dredge up “traditional” evangelical churches to which I would object? You think I might accuse today’s evangelicals of cultural capitulation in their consumerist philosophies of ministry and uncritical embrace of popular cultural forms in worship? You’d better belive I would! But this thread is about the Emergent church and their careless cultural capitulation, not that of other evangelical spheres. My own church’s failings are for another essay.
And again, yes, emotionalism has a very comfortable home in traditional evangelicalism. You’ll get no argument from me there. The difference is we haven’t developed an ideology that purposely deprecates rational reflection in favor of emotional experience, where the Emergent church seems to have done this. Personally, I think and I feel, and I bet most people are like me in this way. I’d like any future anthropologies to acknowledge this as they attempt to build brave new churches unrecognizable to their very near cultural neighbors.
I don’t believe I’ve ever even remote suggested that evangelicalism as presently construed is the Millennium Itself and should be frozen in time to be duplicated across all peoples forever. I see it as no paragon of How To Be Christs’s Body And Do A Really Good Job At It, believe me. However the question on the table, as one lady recently put it, is whether the proposed cure here is any better than the disease.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 19th, 2004 at 12:30 pm |I don’t remember the Robbins conversation, to which I’m guessing I was a party, but I wouldn’t be a tiny, teeny, bit surprised if what he said was that the *only* purpose of the church was to teach truth. If you want to go looking for extremes and walking, talking reductios, he’s your man.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 19th, 2004 at 2:21 pm |“I make no blanket condemnation of the man, but his view of this issue is a crisp example of the extremes the Emergent people bring up, extremes I would stand with them in wanting to fix.”
My point was simply that you picked one extreme case to justify a complaint against PoMo-ness in its entirety, and someone could just as easily pick one bad example of a traditional church to do the same thing.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 19th, 2004 at 5:16 pm |Is it an extreme case, though? I’m hoping it is, but a quick Google and Technorati search didn’t turn up any Emergent bloggers trying to distance themselves from the place, or point it out as an example of the dangers inherent in trail-blazing contextualization. It is linked by a few people, though, seeming to include it within the Emergent pale without qualification or comment.
I don’t mean to imply it’s somehow central to the movement–I’m sure its leaders would be flattered by such a characterization–but it’s less than clear to me that the Emergent church leadership would view it with suspicion. And even if most Emergent churches don’t go far out of their way to sound overtly Pagan, Graceway is still useful as a boundary case. You seem to agree with me that it goes too far, that being non-Christian to appeal to non-Christians is illegitimate.
On that point: the fact that you’re accusing me of unfairness rather than defending that place speaks well of you. We do at least have some basis for agreement.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 19th, 2004 at 5:56 pm |This is awfully long - but after listening to this kinda stuff for 20 years now … thought I would say my 2p worth - hope its ok!
I’m a workin class lad from among the poorest holes in scotland …. a philistine and I’ve fallen for Christ … completely outside any formal church structures - a place where no evangelical or liberal or post-modern christian would go - no one would touch us with a barge pole — many of us have seen too much - too young - kids homes, abuse, bullying, poverty - we badly needed a Christ who would come to where we ‘live’ and lift our bruised bodies and broken souls … Christ is visiting us who are screaming in the urban wildernesses and caves— outside the bright righteous commerce of society and church and this argument; sorry! —
labels: call it emergence — call it resurrection… call it the ‘gospel for the poor’ ( as opposed to ‘the gospel’ - with ‘the poor’ chopped off!. er the Jesus’ one has a bias!— by the way… who noticed? the poor/the left out did!
But if Christ gets into/gets recognised in the most (reputedly) difficult - God-forsaken places on the planet - that includes my back yard… in the guise of ‘emergent’ - it means someone like me - gets in on it…. big time!
woopee!
gets in on - Christ emerging among the housing estates and nightclubs of Scotland…
In the NT Jesus likes the rough-voiced pagan galileans - shows us how to love our enemies and heal each other up a bit- rarely mentions worship services and gets irritated with - ‘teachers’ who haven’t got the foggiest idea about ‘God’ - wrapped in the tin foil of argument -they have blinded themselves to and shielded themselves from: the profound human suffering which surrounds them —
maybe the labels - to those resourced in christendom enough to stand above them! tossing aside one label in favour of another -
are problematic
but when the poorest (the unresourced, forgotten, outsiders) start to recognise and stumblingly name a holy Christ in their gehenna — beware - the ‘words’ they use to ‘name’ their experience may be the only cultural clothes they have — if you strip them of it — !! they will be naked and exposed to western christianity’s dark side! well, God is in our tradition - a comitted father to the fatherless - and is mightily protective about them - take care! or have I got my theology wrong - sorry!
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 25th, 2004 at 11:12 am |Wow. Great thoughts. Good challenges.
For the record:
(A) Never heard of the NZ site before, until now, so I couldn’t very well distance myself from something I wasn’t aware of. Now that I’m aware of it, allow me to officially distance myself.
(B) Not ALL pomergent writers/bloggers have bought into the philosophy of postmodernism; in fact a lot are quite aware of the dangers of mindlessly accepting all the tenets of postmodernism. There are those of us who simply recognize that society is postmodern, and we are called to be “missionaries” in cross-cultural settings, and are only trying to “learn the language & customs” in order to be ambassadors of Christ.
Hopefully, we’re able to do so carefully, prayerfully, relevantly, and without compromising the message. That is my desire.
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 10th, 2004 at 8:00 am |It’s been good to read about the problems you have with ‘the Emergent Church’ and how thinkers in that line present themselves.
Your analysis offers some valuable criticism, but I think you mis-interpret some of the goals behind this ‘movement’.
More than exorcizing the demons of ‘the past’ these PoMo-orientated churches and networks try to exercise for the future. By using (mulit-)media and other forms of communication they try to tell new stories and enable other people to engage in those stories on their own terms and within a familiar context and frame.
The real question is whether the church in the new age will be ‘another subculture’ among a lot of other ’subcultures’ or a force (or a flow) that transcends all subcultures and is present within the world outside the walls of the church as ’salt’ and ‘light’.
Comment Permalink | Posted on March 17th, 2005 at 7:11 am |…
The ‘new’ thing of PoMo is also the questioning of the sacred/secular-divide.
The response of the generation of the 60’s / 70’s was quite defensive. I think ‘our’ generation should be a bit more ‘aware’ of everything that is valuable. One opportunity is to network with others outside of your particular ‘box’.
Phil. 4:8 is not just speaking about ‘us’ but also about ‘them…
Comment Permalink | Posted on March 17th, 2005 at 7:18 am |