Beyond the Postmodern

It has been fashionable of late in the circles where I find myself to discuss postmodernity. It’s hard to carry on a conversation without someone dropping the word “Pomo” in hopes of sounding hip. ‘the pomo church…’ ‘pomos want community, authenticity, blah, blah blah…’ there’s also the flip-side of the conversation, those in my church community who are trying to stem the tide as the culture flows downhill into the perceived abyss that postmodernity creates. several sermons in the past year have railed against postmodernity. ‘it denies all absolute truth.’ ‘it tells our young people that everything is relative.’ and on and on the criticism goes.
problem is, postmodernity as a project has come and gone.
Jeremy Rifkin writes “What we end up with at the end of the post-modern deconstruction process are modernity reduced to intellectual rubble and an anarchic world where everyone’s story is equally compelling and valid and worthy of recognition.
“If the post-modernists razed the ideological walls of modernity and freed the prisoners, they left them with no particular place to go. We became existential nomads…forced to find our own paths in a chaotic and fragmented world that is even more dangerous than the all encompassing one we left behind.”
pardon the long quote, but Rifkin beautifully captures what some in the church are saying about post-modernity. surprisingly, his purpose is not to destroy post-modernity. Rifkin argues that Europeans have already done that. Europe has moved beyond post-modernity in favor of a global quest for human rights and sustainable quality of life (according to Rifkin). meanwhile, many Americans are still stuck in modernist assumptions about the world.
so, who are we (my church community) speaking to when we engage ‘the post-modern’. Europeans? no, they’ve moved beyond us. Our fellow Americans? well, maybe the few who are ‘hip’ enough to cling to an ideology that the rest of the world has exposed as inadequate.
and we wonder why the rest of the world views us the way they do. they don’t hate us. they just kind of hold us in bemused contempt.