Keeping my promise to hit all the hot buttons in PostModernism, I started bookmarking articles relating to my thesis that PoMo denies Absolutes by absolutizing the Process. Today, as I began the compilation, I realized that the first 3 bookmarks all dealt with PoMo within the Church, within theology. Taking that as a sign, then, this first post will not deal with the easy targets, the Clintons and Harvards of post-processed truth-food, but something closer to home, the conceits of theologians and progressive religious institutions.

The Modernist Challenge

Now let me restate the characteristics of PoMo as applied to religion. The idea that religion is about absolutes, led to conflict in the early 20th century, as modernist historians / scientists / philosophers made counter-claims to the accepted truths of religion. From the left side of Kant's divide, we had modernist claims that the virgin birth could not possibly be true, nor walking on water, ex nihilo creation, Noah's flood, etc. From the right side, we had claims that animal sacrifice was barbaric, that expiation and propitiation were horribly primitive distortions of the God of Love, that sex and guilt were the origin of religious taboos no longer relevant for today, etc. Under this onslaught, the Orthodox hunkered down, demanding that Scripture be infallible, inerrant (in the original manuscripts), that orthodoxy required creedal faith, unchanged down the centuries. The battle lines were drawn, with the Progressives, the Broad Church, the mainstream on one side, and the Fundamentalists, the Independents, the Bible Churches on the other. (Similar lines appeared in the Catholic church, though with different labels.)

Lest you think that these dividing lines were artificial, there is no doubt that observers at the time saw the conflict as real and significant. Chesterton's brilliant Orthodoxy, was a prophetic critique  in 1911 of Modernism's eventual outcome. Here is Eric Miller, a professor at a Christian college, writing at Touchstone magazine, on the purposeless world Modernism bequeathed:

We’re not just disoriented, we’re barren. We don’t know to whom or to what we belong, or should belong. In Aristotle’s useful way of framing it, we know neither our formal end nor our final end.

We awaken and find that we have jumped into a culture moving at breakneck speed, powered by great economic forces dedicated to expanding and servicing the appetites of the voraciously hungry selves we’ve become, and we eat and eat and eat and we’re just as hungry as before, so we eat and eat . . . and we’re still empty. Hungry. Alone.

So after 80 years, or roughly 3 generations, it is time to assess the outcome. Who won the battle of absolutes? How many churches are being founded today with the word "fundamentalist" displayed prominently, or even discretely? What has become of formerly "fundamentalist" schools: Wheaton College, Fuller Seminary, Bob Jones University? How many churches still have the venerable KJV bible in their hymn racks? (How many still have hymn racks?)

In response to this Modernist onslaught, many churches and schools began to bend with the wind. Fighting over absolutes was considered a lose-lose situation, far better to talk about directions, motivations, attitudes, than concrete objects of our worship. Guilt replaced sin, and therapy replaced absolution.

A Protestant Example

But before you say "yes, yes, it's all going to hell in a handbasket; we should all return to literalism.", let's look at some historical situations when we all said abandoning absolutes was a good thing.  Here's Victor David Hansen explaining the motivation behind indulgences.

What do leftist, mostly secular elites share with medieval sinners?

They feel bad that the way they live sometimes doesn't quite match their professed dogma.

Many in the medieval church were criticized by internal reformers and the public at large for their controversial granting of penance, especially to the wealthy and influential. Clergy increasingly offered absolution of sins by ordering the guilty to confess. Better yet, sometimes the well-heeled sinners were told to pay money to the church, or to do good works that could then be banked to offset their bad.

Of course, critics of the practice argued that serial confessions simply encouraged serial sinning. The calculating sinner would do good things in one place to offset his premeditated bad in another. The corruption surrounding these cynical penances and indulgences helped anger Martin Luther and cause the Reformation.

What could possibly have convinced the Church that indulgences worked? The idea that sin was a concrete thing (an absolute) that existed apart from man's proclivity toward it, a literal thing that required atonement, penal substitutionary atonement. The rest is bookkeeping.

So Luther and the Reformers went after this concept in a big way, arguing that sin was an attitude, and all the penance in the world was worthless if the attitude didn't change. And whereas the Reformers had a much more nuanced (dare I say balanced?) view of intent and deed, the progeny of the Reformation simply learned the supremacy of process over deed, act over action. After all, was it not Luther who said "Sin boldly", indicating that the attitude justified the outcome?

Now I've had some who think I am overly critical of the Reformers here, but let me state this problem in a very contemporary way. Several British Evangelicals wrote a book last year called,  Pierced for our Transgressions, which was provocatively subtitled "Rediscovering the glory of penal substitution". Now I remind you, that is the view that justified the practice of indulgences above, which viewed the main consequences of sin as being some thing outside ourselves. N.T. Wright, an Anglican Evangelical, Bishop of Durham, and a New Testament scholar takes umbrage, and let's loose with several missives where he tries to reinstate the Reformed perspective. Rather than bore you with the infighting of godly men, let us cut to a NT Wright essay on CS Lewis that preceded the debate.
We all project ourselves into our heroes, and Wright does the same here. So what are the things he likes about Lewis? A risky commitment to process, to evolution, though of a 2nd order kind (think "recursion"):

He is happy to affirm basic biological evolution, but then suggests that if the world, and the human race, have advanced in the way they have so far, we are maybe due now for a different kind of advance, a new step in which evolution itself will evolve, producing a new human race, a new kind of human being, but by a new type of step. Lewis is here, of course, stealing not only Darwin’s clothes, but Nietzsche’s, and he is well aware of that.

I did wonder how dangerous a position it was to take, but he disarms potential objections by making his New Humans not a powerful race of the species Übermensch, but actual children of God, those who have caught the “good infection” from being with Jesus Christ and who are thereby changed from being toy tin soldiers into actual warriors, from mere creatures to newly begotten sons like the Son himself.

This is where he locates his powerful and moving (and of course biblical) material about dying and rising with Christ, a major theme here and in several of his other works. I don’t know that anyone else has either advanced this synthesis of regeneration and a kind of second-order evolutionism, but it remains evocative and suggestive.

And what does the good bishop dislike about Lewis? A Platonic belief in absolutes:

Thus he can say, in a moving but I think deeply misleading passage, that “the anaesthetic fog which we call ‘nature’ or ‘the real world’ [will] fade away”; I regard this as a substantial hostage to Platonic fortune. This problem emerges particularly in his repeated insistence that all human beings have an immortal soul, which is the “real” part of them, and which is to be one day either a creature of loathing and horror or one we might be tempted to worship.

I simply don’t think this is either biblical or helpful, and I fear that those who read Lewis will at this point have their traditional expectations of a kind of Christianity-and-Plato reinforced where they should have them undermined.

Independent of what you think of Lewis, Wright is clearly  bothered by absolutes, especially Platonic ones, and seems enamored of process, particularly recursive ones. All these mark him as a man who has eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of PoMo.

A Catholic Example

Now that I have slandered Protestants, let me address the PoMo in Catholics.  The scientist who inspired the previous post, Guillermo Gonzalez, is catholic, and reviewed a book on the history of George Lemaitre, a Catholic cosmologist who introduced Einstein to the "Big Bang" solution of his gravitational equations. Here is Gonzalez' review:

To understand why Lemaître objected to Pius’s statement [that the Big Bang supports the Genesis account of creation], one must understand his theology. Farrell quotes from a telling 1933 interview of Lemaître on this topic:

The writers of the Bible were illuminated more or less—some more than others—on the question of salvation. On other questions they were as wise or as ignorant as their generation. Hence it is utterly unimportant that errors of historic or scientific fact should be found in the Bible, especially if errors relate to events that were not directly observed by those who wrote about them.

“The idea,” he concluded, “that because they were right in their doctrine of immortality and salvation they must also be right on all other subjects is simply the fallacy of people who have an incomplete understanding of why the Bible was given to us at all.”

So Lemaître maintained that God preserved those truths in Scripture related to salvation. But Scripture had nothing to say on specific scientific questions, and might even be full of scientific errors.

So the claim made by Lemaitre, the Vatican, and perhaps even Pope John Paul II himself, is that the Bible is only authoritative on issues pertaining to salvation. This, of course, is a "bend with the wind" approach to the secular onslaught of Modernism, and requires the careful compartmentalization of religion from science. This makes the process by which one extracts theology from the text more important than the text itself.

It is a bit like saying the assembly instructions for your new grill are only correct about this model and are not intended for any other grills that might be built by the same manufacturer. But would you trust the instructions if the picture on the cover doesn't match the one in your box? Or if they call a pair of pliers, a "wrench"? And then give you two pages of legalese that say if the grill explodes and you didn't follow the instructions to the letter it will be all your own fault? No text can be interpreted without establishing some sort of trust, some sort of relationship between the text and the reader, and Lemaitre's trust doesn't even extend to his own supreme Papa.

If the "Truth will set you free", then Lemaitre is the final arbiter of the truth of scripture, setting himself free, thereby saving himself. Although Lemaitre is an unreconstructed Modernist, his attempted solution to faith and science leads directly toward PoMo.

An Evangelical Example

What then is the way forward for Evangelicalism in a post Modern world? (I leave the future of Catholicism to B16 and EWTN)  Many have suggested PoMo.

Last year before his death, leading evangelical Bob Webber proposed that Evangelicalism become more inclusive of ancient Christianity, incorporating more Orthodoxy and Catholocism in its worship. He wrote his "Call to an ancient evangelical future" in Christianity Today. The ecumenical Touchstone magazine brought in a collection of editors to review it. Their critique sheds light on the PoMo roots of Webber's call.  Here's D.G. Wilfred McClay in Touchstone :
So to summarize the critique of the Call,  it changes language in a postmodern way,  despising form, emphasizing attitude, disdaining reason, cherishing a simulacrum legacy, but one without a concrete connection.  I couldn't have described PoMo better.

A Religious Litmus Test

And now, perhaps, you are thinking I am against liberalism and all that squishy PoMo language introduced as a way around modernism. But I leave you with one last example, an example much closer to home--those pesky funeral home expenses. Russell Moore from Touchstone again:

A Christian burial seems, in this culture, more and more nonsensical: a waste of money, a waste of otherwise usable land, a waste, perhaps, even of emotion, as we try to “hold on to the past” and fail to “move through our grief and get on with life.” But if someone had asked any previous generation of Christians or of pagans if cremation were a Christian act, the answer would have seemed obvious to them, whether they were believers or infidels: Christians bury their dead.

For you see, the best gauge of one's metaphysics is a wallet. People spend money on things they really believe in, not things they are indifferent about. Is the extra $5000-$10000 for a casket worth it? What is this whole thing about graves and bodies anyway? The Vikings had funeral pyres, as did the wealthier Hindus, though even today, I'm told, there are many in India who drop their dead in the river. Why did Christians insist on burial?

The early first-century church collected 12 assertions that they felt clearly identified one as a follower of Christ. The number 12 was significant, one for each of Jesus' disciples, and hence this earliest known collection of assertions became known as the Apostle's Creed. One of those "fundamental" assertions was: "I believe in the resurrection of the body (or flesh)."  Now you may be forgiven for thinking that it is merely peasants who believe that a buried body is intact enough to be resurrected after 100 years, much less 2000. You may even indulge in a little nominalism, that responds "but surely God could raise ashes as easily as bones", (which raises the question why He used any matter at all.)  But ask yourself why this clause was so important it had to be put in the Creed? Why did the early church emphasize this point about bodily death and resurrection? Why did the early church (and of course, the Jewish faith) emphasize whole body burial?

I can see what you are thinking. "Rituals. Taboos. Proper burials were supposed to prevent ghosts from haunting you. Improper burials were punishment for suicide. All superstition and gothic novel rot."  And you are also undoubtedly thinking "It's the process that is important. The rite of passage. The symbolism. The need to grieve. Not the form of the burial."  [For a breathless, right-brain riff on the significance of the burial process, drop everything and read Joseph Bottum's essay Death & Politics. And when you get back, ask yourself if your remember anything pertaining to form.]

But now, suppose there is a very good reason, though not recorded for us directly, for the form. I discuss the burial practice of ritualistic cannibalism among the Fores people of Papua New Guinea in an earlier booklet, but here I summarize.  The Fore suffered from a wasting degenerative brain disease called kuru, which turns out to be nothing else than mad cow disease. And mad cow disease was spread by enriching cattle feed with meat scraps, cooked of course. It was the modern understanding that all parasites and germs would be destroyed by cooking, by pasteurizing this feed, guaranteed to scramble every bit of DNA in all known living organisms. It failed to stop the spread. Why? Because kuru and mad cow disease had no DNA. What they had, was a most unusual protein that was heat resistant, untouched by digestive enzymes, found in great quantities in the brain, and which perversely auto-catalyzed the normal brain version into swiss cheese. (And you wondered why science needed final causes?)

Now suppose, just suppose, that there is something about cremation that similarly spreads a virus, a disease that can survive 1000 degree cremation ovens. For the sake of argument it could be the element selenium, or if you are anti-materialist enough, a singed soul. And the practice of burying the dead while waiting for the resurrection of the body, is the solution to this plague. Is the Apostle's Creed telling us that forms matter?

"But", you may object, "if this were true, wouldn't the Bible give us the reason for the form?" 

To begin with, no scientist would have believed you had you described mad cow disease before 1999. For that matter, no scientist would have believed you had you described germs before 1860 and Louis Pasteur's work.   Even the existence of microbes wasn't established until 1670 by Leeuwenhoek.  But the Bible still told you to wash your hands before you ate, oh, 3500 years ago or so.

This is not to say that process is irrelevant, there may still be plenty of good symbolic reasons for the washing of hands. I'm sure Joseph Bottum can write a long essay on the significance of hand washing for the establishment of motherhood and civilization. But surely, surely, the form matters as much as the process. Surely, it requires water, and some modicum of soap. Surely the microbes must be physically removed, and not just their evil intents. Even when we do not understand it, even when bodily burial seems wasteful, the form is important.

Let's be humble, we don't do explanations very well, we're not even very good at following directions. PoMo assumes that the directions aren't significant, as long as the process of reading maps is properly taught, after all, maps change, but the process remains the same.  Fundamentalism assumes that map reading is a first grade skill in "literality", all that is needed is an eye for landmarks, which never change, except like the Reformation, when they do.

Let's be honest. We don't do directions at all. And in that sense, we are all PoMo.