This evening I read Brian McLaren’s open letter to Chuck Colson. Colson had apparently done a radio spot on his view that postmodernism is on its last legs, and that now would not be a good time for Christians to clamber on board. This is a reasonable point, in my mind, but the radio spot moved McLaren, not normally inclined to debate, to write his open letter. A number of the points raised come out (obviously) in McLaren’s other writing, which I have addressed previously, but there were a few ends and odds here that I thought warranted comment. And these really are fragments — I have said the substance of what I think needs to be said about the main points of the emergent conversation.
McLaren said, near the beginning of his letter, that “many of the people who think they understand postmodernism and write or speak about it lack the time, energy, or historical and philosophical understanding to begin to understand what they don’t understand about it, so it’s fruitless to even try to dialogue with them. It’s better just to let things slide.” McLaren then combined this with some comments about all that he did not understand as well, just to keep his patronizing attitude toward Colson appropriately humble, but the patronizing still came through, and was woven throughout the letter. Disagree with these guys and it is quite clear to them that what you need is a pat on the head, and an exhortation to read a little Wittgenstein in the original Klingon.
McLaren asserts his commitment to some kind of “ultimate” truth a number of times in this letter — far more clearly than he does elsewhere. “I can agree with you that the ‘no transcendent truth’ kind of postmodernism is dead, because as I said, it never was very alive. At most, it was an early, reactionary phase in a yet-embryonic movement that has much more mature, constructive, and positive voices emerging.” The problem is this: given what McLaren says (repeatedly) about the limitations of all “down here” truth claims, what basis do we have for exempting such fine-sounding statements about “transcendent truth?” You cannot saw off the limb you are sitting on and stay off the ground. The issue is not whether or not some kind of transcendent truth exists. The issue is whether or not we can genuinely know something of what it is, and say something true about it. If God created us to have fellowship with Him, and gave us language (among other things) as a means for us to do so, this language is not a barrier to our fellowship with Him.
McLaren goes on to claim that metanarrative is a highly nuanced term. “In fact, by reflecting on how you feel about ‘postmoderns’ and what you think they stand for and against, you can begin to understand how real postmodern people feel about Christians like us, and things they think we stand for . . . things like ‘metanarratives.’ That term, by the way, is a highly nuanced term.” McLaren goes on to say that metanarrative carries with it the connotations of oppression and violence, just like propaganda carries with it connotations of disregard for truth. We wouldn’t want to call our evangelistic work propaganda, would we? So what can be the problem if some Christians want to say, simply to avoid the negative connotations, that the Christian faith is not a “metanarrative?” If the tactic was just the rejection of a word — especially a philosopher’s word like metanarrative — then be my guest. Say something like this: “Christians reject calling the gospel a metanarrative because of the connotations of violence. We want to maintain that the gospel is an example of a Trintarian harmony that overarches all the created order, with Christ as the arche, the point of integration of all things in heaven and on earth, as well as beneath the earth, that every knee should bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Christians of differing theological schools call this by different names, but all of us, to a man, reject the label of ‘totalizing metanarrative.’ Ick. We use terms like uber-narrative, bigstory, glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so on.
McLaren sought to give the development postmodernism a little historical context. “But try to understand this parallel reality: In the late 20th century, postmodern thinkers looked back at regimes like Stalin’s and Hitler’s. (One must never forget how postmodern thought developed in the aftermath of the Holocaust, as deeply ethical European intellectuals like Michael Polanyi reflected on the atrocities their peers had perpetuated or acquiesced to.) Postmodern thinkers realized that these megalomaniacs used grand systems of belief to justify their atrocities. Those systems of belief – which the postmodern thinkers called ‘metanarratives,’ but which also could have been called ‘world views’ or ‘ideologies’ – were so powerful they could transform good European intellectuals into killers or accomplices. They thought back over European history and realized (as C. S. Lewis did) that those who have passionate commitment to a system of belief will be most willing, not only to die for it, but to kill for it.”
And to this I have a few questions. First, if something like Nazism were sweeping Europe again, would you, Brian McLaren, be willing to kill in order to stop it? Is that the basic indicator of the presence of metanarrative? If you would be willing to do so, on what basis? If not, on what basis? If you want to take a decided stand against a deadly foe (which incidentally includes Islamofascism), you need something more than philosophical parsing and vaporing to get a gun into your hand. And this relates to the choice of someone like Polyani, who really did have some valuable things to say, and who was consistent in his opposition to the totalitarians. But why not bring up some of the others who contributed greatly to the current morass of goo-thought? Why not totalitarian lickspittles like Heidegger the Nazi or Sartre the friend of Mao? European intellectuals did not just analyze what led many of their peers to follow the false absolutists into mass murder; they actually continued to invent rationalizations for continuing to do so, down to the present.
But McLaren continues, believing the overarching story that postmodernists have told about their faction: “They looked at powerful belief systems of the twentieth century – world views (extreme Marxism is one such world view), grand stories (anti-Semitism is one such story, White Supremacy is another, American manifest destiny is another), ideologies (such as the industrialist ideology that the earth and its resources are not God’s creation deserving care through reverential stewardship, but rather, are simply natural resources there for the taking by secular industrialists), and they were horrified. These dominating belief systems were responsible for so many millions of deaths, so much torture, so much loss of freedom and dignity, so much damage to the planet, that they sought to undermine their dominance. They advocated incredulity or skepticism toward such stories or belief systems.” Well, some of them were horrified. The others joined up, and did their bit for collaboration. A man who does not stand for something will fall for anything. If there are no absolutes to govern the idolatrous absolutists, then it follows that anything goes, including the worst forms of absolutism. So here’s a grand strategy! McLaren is giving a pep talk to the boys in the trenches, about to go into battle against those totalizing absolutists (over there), those advocates of “powerful belief systems.” “Now boys, the problem with those guys is that they believe in what they’re doing! This causes them to commit horrendous outrages! They commit crimes that blacken the sky and smoke to the sun! We are not like them, are we boys? No, we don’t believe in what we’re doing . . . Now get out there, and don’t hesitate to bleed for what we all recognize to be problematic language games. And don’t let the flag with the big question mark on it touch the ground!”
McLaren presses the point home. “Anyway, Chuck, you’re legitimately worried that ‘postmoderns’ will use their relativism as an excuse to do anything they want. But they’re worried that you and other ‘moderns’ will use your absolutism as an excuse to do anything you want. (If you can’t see any validity to their concern, then I’m truly speechless, and it’s hardly worth your reading the rest of my letter.)”
Of course there is legitimacy to the concern that idolatrous absolutists will continue to rebel against the Word that God gave us in the Scriptures, and will continue to commit their outrages. The answer to this is not to go soft in the middle, and develop an allergy to scriptural absolutes. Let me illustrate the point by changing the word absolutists to the word worshippers. Is there a danger that false worshippers will continue to perpetrate their crimes upon humanity — Islamic fundamentalists, communists, Nazis, terrorists, etc.? There is most emphatically a danger of this. And if we follow the structure of McLaren’s argument, we must therefore abandon worship (or, at the least, be extremely cautious about it). Look at all the damage that “worship” has done. This is nothing, more or less, than confused thinking on stilts.
In this letter, McLaren claims a number of times to reject relativism. Two questions. Why? And the second question is like unto it. Since you reject relativism, then you must affirm certain verities. What are they?