..:://Mission in the (Post)Modern Context: Renovating the Structure//::..
i've been doing alot of writing lately... just none of it here.
here is a partial product of my toils and troubles....
The Gospel as Post-Modern
The task of the church has always been to personify the message of the gospel within the context of the surrounding culture. In response to this, I feel that it would be fitting to examine how the contours and longings of the postmodern ethos might affect how we articulate (don’t read regulate) the message of God’s saving love. How might the gospel meet the deepest needs of the world?
First, any postmodern expression of the gospel will be post-individualistic. We must move beyond the Cartesian emphasis upon an individual certainty focused upon objectivity, and see that the gospel ought to be lived out within a community. The modernist focus upon the importance of the individual has left us alienated from others and ourselves. The church must reclaim the gospel as being that which binds us together as one: individuals within community.
Within this, we shall rediscover that the influence one’s community has upon our beliefs is unavoidable. Through socialization and participation in our community we inherit a cognitive framework by which we come to knowledge and faith. The narratives of individuals will always find themselves told from the perspective of communal life. As God is in fact the social Trinity, we are called to bear that same image in our interpersonal relationships. The Good News of Christ’s redemptive love will find itself being expressed by individuals in community. We must not shy away from proclaiming a gospel that is meant for more than (but always including) individuals. As Lesslie Newbigin puts it, “The Church is called to bear witness to the gospel not only as truth for the personal life, but as public truth.”
An inherited flaw of the Enlightenment has been the church’s tendency toward a strict separatism of the soul and the body. I believe that we need to welcome the postmodern rejection of this Greek dualism. In missions I think this means that we should renounce our tendency toward allowing the gospel to perpetuate a false-distinction between “humanitarian service and spiritual salvation” and rediscover the biblical message of the shalom of God being all-pervasive in the entirety of human experience. By dividing the human person into mind and matter, the gospel has been plagued by our evangelistic inclination to care only for the eternal security of the soul and forsake the present state of one’s physical existence. Postmodernism urges missions to become biblically holistic.
Finally, in our venture to be spurred on by the sympathies of postmodernism, the mission of the church in the proclamation of the gospel must dethrone the myth that the goal of our existence is the accumulation of knowledge. “We must declare that the purpose of correct doctrine is to serve the attainment of wisdom.” In harmony with postmodernism we declare that the ascertaining of knowledge is not the chief end of humanity. Yes, gaining knowledge about the world and God are inherently good things, but if it is not coupled with a good result then our efforts are fruitless. Faith is passed on as more than an intellectual endeavor in which we convince people to believe in mere propositions. Rather, a commitment to Christ must effect the heart as well as the mind. Such a realization revolutionizes the impetus behind our mission. The church does not “go” simply because some abstract proposition extracted from the biblical data declares it our duty, but we go because the reality of Christ has transformed us so much so that we can do no other.
The Gospel as the Clue to History
While much of postmodern thought can be welcomed into our manner of proclaiming the gospel, some of it must be rejected outright. As mentioned previously the message of the one God who reveals himself in the person of Jesus is alarmingly antithetical to the emerging pluralistic worldview. We now find ourselves in a pluralistic society in which “the freedom to believe whatever one chooses to believe has ended in no belief at all.” The abandonment of the universality of truth has resulted in world that is devoid of any unifying truth that speaks to the purpose of our existence. Each human thus becomes a maverick ion left to its own faculties.
However, the church simply cannot accept this, and we must stand against the loss of our unifying center. By definition the message of the gospel opposes the postmodern denial of the metanarrative, because Jesus Christ is the one unifying reality of all history and the gospel is to be a proclamation of that truth. Tim Conder speaks to this effect when he writes, “Mission in the emerging culture needs to address the immediate reign of God in our world and culture as much as the promised eternal kingdom of God.” The church is to awaken society to the reality of the kingdom of God as present and yet to come. The clue to the history of the world is the gospel. It is “the universal history, and therefore the history of each person, and therefore the answer that every person must give to the question, who am I?” The life, death, resurrection, and imminent return of Christ are the driving telos of all creation. In missions we are called to live out this reality, and proclaim it as the history to which all people belong and are welcome.
We now live in an era in which the rules of engagement have drastically changed. The faith of our fathers must take on a different shape or the church risks becoming just one more religion amongst numerous others. All around us people are looking for real meaning in life, and it is our joy and our task to proclaim the love of God, which is more than just Good News for us, it is Good News for all.
here is a partial product of my toils and troubles....
The Gospel as Post-Modern
The task of the church has always been to personify the message of the gospel within the context of the surrounding culture. In response to this, I feel that it would be fitting to examine how the contours and longings of the postmodern ethos might affect how we articulate (don’t read regulate) the message of God’s saving love. How might the gospel meet the deepest needs of the world?
First, any postmodern expression of the gospel will be post-individualistic. We must move beyond the Cartesian emphasis upon an individual certainty focused upon objectivity, and see that the gospel ought to be lived out within a community. The modernist focus upon the importance of the individual has left us alienated from others and ourselves. The church must reclaim the gospel as being that which binds us together as one: individuals within community.
Within this, we shall rediscover that the influence one’s community has upon our beliefs is unavoidable. Through socialization and participation in our community we inherit a cognitive framework by which we come to knowledge and faith. The narratives of individuals will always find themselves told from the perspective of communal life. As God is in fact the social Trinity, we are called to bear that same image in our interpersonal relationships. The Good News of Christ’s redemptive love will find itself being expressed by individuals in community. We must not shy away from proclaiming a gospel that is meant for more than (but always including) individuals. As Lesslie Newbigin puts it, “The Church is called to bear witness to the gospel not only as truth for the personal life, but as public truth.”
An inherited flaw of the Enlightenment has been the church’s tendency toward a strict separatism of the soul and the body. I believe that we need to welcome the postmodern rejection of this Greek dualism. In missions I think this means that we should renounce our tendency toward allowing the gospel to perpetuate a false-distinction between “humanitarian service and spiritual salvation” and rediscover the biblical message of the shalom of God being all-pervasive in the entirety of human experience. By dividing the human person into mind and matter, the gospel has been plagued by our evangelistic inclination to care only for the eternal security of the soul and forsake the present state of one’s physical existence. Postmodernism urges missions to become biblically holistic.
Finally, in our venture to be spurred on by the sympathies of postmodernism, the mission of the church in the proclamation of the gospel must dethrone the myth that the goal of our existence is the accumulation of knowledge. “We must declare that the purpose of correct doctrine is to serve the attainment of wisdom.” In harmony with postmodernism we declare that the ascertaining of knowledge is not the chief end of humanity. Yes, gaining knowledge about the world and God are inherently good things, but if it is not coupled with a good result then our efforts are fruitless. Faith is passed on as more than an intellectual endeavor in which we convince people to believe in mere propositions. Rather, a commitment to Christ must effect the heart as well as the mind. Such a realization revolutionizes the impetus behind our mission. The church does not “go” simply because some abstract proposition extracted from the biblical data declares it our duty, but we go because the reality of Christ has transformed us so much so that we can do no other.
The Gospel as the Clue to History
While much of postmodern thought can be welcomed into our manner of proclaiming the gospel, some of it must be rejected outright. As mentioned previously the message of the one God who reveals himself in the person of Jesus is alarmingly antithetical to the emerging pluralistic worldview. We now find ourselves in a pluralistic society in which “the freedom to believe whatever one chooses to believe has ended in no belief at all.” The abandonment of the universality of truth has resulted in world that is devoid of any unifying truth that speaks to the purpose of our existence. Each human thus becomes a maverick ion left to its own faculties.
However, the church simply cannot accept this, and we must stand against the loss of our unifying center. By definition the message of the gospel opposes the postmodern denial of the metanarrative, because Jesus Christ is the one unifying reality of all history and the gospel is to be a proclamation of that truth. Tim Conder speaks to this effect when he writes, “Mission in the emerging culture needs to address the immediate reign of God in our world and culture as much as the promised eternal kingdom of God.” The church is to awaken society to the reality of the kingdom of God as present and yet to come. The clue to the history of the world is the gospel. It is “the universal history, and therefore the history of each person, and therefore the answer that every person must give to the question, who am I?” The life, death, resurrection, and imminent return of Christ are the driving telos of all creation. In missions we are called to live out this reality, and proclaim it as the history to which all people belong and are welcome.
We now live in an era in which the rules of engagement have drastically changed. The faith of our fathers must take on a different shape or the church risks becoming just one more religion amongst numerous others. All around us people are looking for real meaning in life, and it is our joy and our task to proclaim the love of God, which is more than just Good News for us, it is Good News for all.
