Postmodern Protestants

"Postmodernity is Modernity with a broken heart."

Fun class last night. :) It started pretty slow, but then the prof had just come back from his honeymoon, and honestly he looked a bit worn out. I made that remark under my breath to my seatmates, and the girls on either side of me giggled & said in a knowing voice "yeah, but I'll bet it's a good kind of tired." Mmhmm.

Interesting dynamic in the class - most of the students are married (those two included.) I wonder if this is normal for grad school in general or just Seminary in particular?

Anyway, it was good to listen to some lecture and discussion rather than read. After 135 pages this week of the most tedious writing and arcane language I can recall in a while, it was time to just hear someone talk about the topic. I mean.. this is a sample paragraph from the text:

"Here we reach the particula veri of the notion of verbal inspiration. Because verbal inspiration was routinely misconstrued (sometimes by its defenders and nearly always by its detractors) as entailing divine dictation, the notion of inspiration has been 'personalized' or 'deverbalised' and redefined as authorial illumination. This distancing of inspiration from the verbal character of the text is considered to ease the difficulties of offering an account of inspiration by thinking of the words of the text as a purely human arena of activity, whether of authors, redactors, or tradents. But the result is, again, docetic."

Arghh. Makes me want to have this guy over for dinner and discuss the subject over some meatloaf and mixed vegetables, to see if he really talks like this in person. I can't imagine this being anything but a persona laid on to relate to other academics. Ick.

So, we talked about the doctrine of Scripture last night: inspiration, inerrancy, infallibility, authority, etc., and the interaction between divine agency and human agency in the writing of, and attesting to, Scripture. Fascinating. To me anyway.

And eventually, we got around to talking about interpretation (hermeneutics) and how the twin Reformation emphases on sola scriptura and "the priesthood of all believers" in northern Europe, served to cooperate with the Enlightenment in southern Europe, to essentially sever all ties with the past and repudiate the traditions of the Church.

I asked: "Well, okay. The Church guided our interpretation of Scripture for centuries, and then the Reformation knocked the legs out from under that. Since then, it's been 'every man for himself' when it comes to interpretation, and the Protestant church has fractured into uncounted pieces as a result. Like this is better?"

"So is there any recognition of this among Evangelicals, and is there any attempt underway to sort of 'herd the sheep back into the pen' and come to some agreement on interpretation that can put at least some of this missing guidance of the Church back in place?"

He said, yup, there is. In the last few years, Protestant theologians have realized what they are missing by being disconnected from the centuries of believers that have gone before us, and the great insights that formed the creeds and liturgy and ministry of the Catholic Church. The Reformers focused so much on the excesses of the 16th century Church that they threw out all the good things that a consistent faith tradition brings to the individual Christian.

Then he went in a fascinating direction. He said that it's much like what is being realized in our culture today. Post-modernism is starting to long for a connection to the past, an appreciation of traditions. He put it like this: "Postmodernity is the ultimate result of modernity's despair at its rootlessness, with angst laid on top." The angst comes from the perceived relativity of truth ever since Einstein upset Newtonian physics - no anchor, no roots, no stake in the ground.

And even the advances in science since the 1500s, which seemed to portend an upward trajectory for mankind (evolving to something better and better, if you will) and reinforce the idea of mankind's essential goodness... even all this positivity has been shown to be false hope as progress resulted in the design and use of more and more horrific means of destruction and death.

Man is not getting better. The Enlightenment has crashed and burned. And what it has reaped in postmodernity is.. despair. Modernity with a broken heart. And no "family", no home to go back to, since the Enlightenment and the Reformation burned those bridges - the chafing teenagers yelled at Mom and Dad and all their "rules", and stormed out of the house never to return. :( Now they realize, like the Prodigal, that maybe it's time to go home.

And I think, if they do, that to the Protestants the Catholic Church will be like the Dad in the story.. they'll welcome the Prodigal home. And for the Humanist children of the Enlightenment, the community of faith will welcome them home, too.