Gotta Serve Somebody

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David Wells marks a difference between postmodernism and postmodernity. “As we try to understand our contemporary world, it is necessary, I believe, to distinguish between postmodernism and postmodernity. The former is the intellectual formulation of postmodern ideas on the high end of culture. It is their expression in architecture, in literary theory, philosophy, and so on. Postmodernity, by contrast, I am taking as the popular, social expression of the same assumptions but in ways that may be unselfconscious and often not intellectual at all, making this a diffuse, unshaped kind of expression” (Above All Earthly Powers, p. 64).

Although he may be drawing the boundary lines in a slightly different place, in his fine discussion, Peter Leithart makes a similar distinction here. The only thing substantive I think I differ with is Peter’s attempts to describe his writing on this stuff as “amateurish.” But while I am on this subject, let me describe what I take to be the basic difference between Peter and me on this question of pomoism. Whenever Peter makes a point that is absolutely devastating to the pomos, as in annihilationaltudinous, he never does the little touchdown dance afterwards. This confuses some observers, who don’t really understand the game of epistemological football, and don’t realize what actually gets points on the board. When Peter doesn’t do the little shuffle in the endzone, they conclude that he must have secret yearnings to be playing for the other team. Anyhow, Peter’s observations are, as usual, just great. But I would have done a little dance, and would probably have gotten myself fined, especially after that one about the difference between distinctions and violence and Trinitarian distinctions and harmony. But they are his touchdowns, not mine, and he can do what he wants.

However we slice it, some such distinction between postmodernism and postmodernity is necessary. And in that light, now that the smoke has cleared, let me make just a few notes in this paragraph on the ways that I am at home in postmodernity — not postmodernism. It should become obvious soon enough that I am not writing this as a peace offering or anything, but simply in the interests of advancing the Truth. I was born in America in 1953, was affected in many ways by decent rock and roll, I think Far Side cartoons are funny, and tonight my wife and I ate dinner in a nice restaurant that had a big television going behind the bar with the sound turned off. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list or anything, but I think you get the drift. I live here, just like the rest of you do. I want to be a faithful Christian in my generation, and that does not mean that I have to go around speaking Aramaic. It actually means that I may not. One of things that is odd about some of my pomo-friendly critics is that they take issue with my use of “rhetoric” in these exchanges, as though there is some kind of distinction between rhetoric and substance. The metaphors are my point, man. I don’t sprinkle figures of speech on top of my substantive argument, like so many sprinkles on the frozen yogurt. And in a very real way, the way I write shows that I am a native of postmodernity. Some of the things I say or write would have been incomprehensible or shocking to B.B. Warfield, and if I showed some of it to Jonathan Edwards, I might have gotten my ears boxed. But I am a Trinitarian conservative, fighting in this terrain, and I grew up here. I know the woods and the backroads, and I won’t tell you what kind of decal I have on my pick-up truck. So let us not have any more cries for solemn and dignified academic discourse. That gentleman, that Enlightenment paragon of scholarship for attaining to pristine truths, reached by all his friends the pristine scholars, here in the pristine library in the farmhouse of detachable knowledge, has been gone for a couple of hours. I think he went to use the outhouse, and the hogs et ‘im.

Now, here is the basic deal. I do not come to the Scriptures with pristine eyes. I have been loved, spanked, conditioned, taught, catechized, rebuked, instructed, helped, and discipled, and throughout this entire process I have been given eyes to see what the Scripture teaches. And of course, overarching the whole thing is the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, the instruments that He has used to teach me how to read the Scriptures were not just limited to my immediate environment, but would include the historical developments of Nicea on the Trinity, Chalcedon on the Incarnation, Anselm on substitutionary atonement, Calvin on worship, and so on. The people who taught me directly were teaching downstream from these great gifts to the Church, and were influenced by them, directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously. So I do not read the Bible raw, but I read in the midst of, and because of, the communion of saints. Knowledge is corporately given, by the Spirit, and individually apprehended, also by the Spirit.

This means that I am situated, to use the language I used before. I am in a particular place, with particular loyalties. Those loyalties are not only there, but I am making no effort whatever to get free of them, as though they were gum on my shoe. My loyalties are not a hindrance to knowledge of God. God gave me what He gave me, and He did so in order that I would trust and believe Him where I am, and fight for the truth of God as an unabashed partisan. The central error of those pomo-friendly Christians who want us all to be less “certain” is that they want me to acknowledge that I have been given the gift of particularity, but instead of unwrapping it and saying thank you, they want the fact of having received a gift to be grounds for being unsure of having received it. If you didn’t follow that, don’t worry — it is not your problem.

Now why is this important? One of the things that pomos have done is point out, using a reductio, that Enlightenment johnnies cannot really sustain the claims they have made. A reductio is where you climb into the car of the other guy’s argument, and drive it into a nearby tree. This is quite true, and the pomos can wreck modernity’s car. But it is equally true, that if folks around here are allowed to do that, the Enlightenment guys can climb in the pomo car, and wreck that one just as well. This is why the Trinitarian answer is so necessary.

Apart from the Lordship of Jesus Christ, there is absolutely no reason to privilege postmodernism’s claims over modernity, or modernity’s claims over postmodernism. So they can each wreck the other guy’s car. So what? But while I do not privilege one over the other, if anything, I am more wary of the claims of postmodernism. To change the metaphor, I think we should be more leery about bog ahead of us than the bog is all just got out of.

Now, not only am I a partisan advocate of what I believe to be the truth of God, everyone else in the world is equally partisan. Some flaunt their allegiances, while others pretend not to have them. This means that when a pomo critic climbs into a nice shiny new modern car, with wheels made out of that rubbery hubris stuff, and wrecks it in front of us all, I can admire the effort. But the first thing I want to know afterwards is “what allegiances does the driver have?” Who is he serving? And by this, I want to know if he is baptized, if he is a communicant member of a Trinitarian church, if he sang psalms last Sunday, if he catechizes his kids, and if he loves Jesus. If the answer to all the foregoing is yes, then I cheer him on further. And I don’t call it postmodern anything — I call it something else, like incarnational apologetics. But if he says, “Oh no. I don’t know what I believe. I am agnostic, or even atheistic. All I know is that something had to be done about that proud scientist’s car. All I was doing was stepping into someone else’s premises and driving them into the tree of the necessary conclusions.” But the scientist can do this to a deconstructionist’s car, and do it just as well — if the driver doesn’t have to have credentials. Now if I have two pagan neighbors, each with the ability to wreck the other guy’s car, why on earth should I take sides in that squabble? They both write big fat books about how to do this to the other guy, but without Jesus, their books are nothing but brain farts.

Why not read Derrida? or Rorty? Well, I might someday, if I get more time, or more patience. But as it is, I have read a good-sized wheelbarrow load full of books on postmodernism in the church, the emergent church, all these particular cultural shifts and transformations and how they affect the church, and I have read it all from both sides — peppy, blonde cheerleaders for emergence and the prune-faced geezer critics like myself. On all the essentials, both sides are acknowledging the same realities and it is simply naive to argue that some lonely Frenchman in an ivory tower somewhere is getting himself misunderstood. Even if this were the case, past a certain point, the misunderstanding becomes the understanding, and that is what we as pastors have to deal with. If the world is blowing up into a jihad-like conflagration, skyscrapers coming down like they were made out of paper, roadside bombs blowing up in Des Moines, and every other plane getting highjacked, it won’t do to discover a lonely fundamentalist imam in a basement somewhere in Jordan, saying, “No, no! I meant we were to give them all hugs.” At some point, the misunderstanding becomes the reality — even granting the reality of misunderstanding. But as a partisan, I do not see any reason to allow postmodern writers to deck themselves out in the garb of a pretended neutrality, a neutrality and detachment that they got from modernity’s closet.

Every serious thinker should be able to answer the question — “Say, what’s your game? Where do you stand?” If he answers with a shrug, I have absolutely no reason to pay any more attention to him. I can shrug too. If he tells me that he is a fellow Presbyterian minister, and isn’t the Lord good to us all, and isn’t it grand to have an infallible Bible, a sure word from God in a crooked generation, then off we go together, joy-riding in Enlightenment cars, especially the red ones. But if he says that all he is doing is wrecking modernity’s cars, because that’s what he does, but that he doesn’t have to have a particular agenda in doing this, I would simply reply with one of Bob Dylan’s wiser songs. “Friend, ‘you gotta serve somebody.'”

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