I Used to Be Smart.

Harry Burns: You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Sally Albright: Why not?
Harry Burns: What I’m saying is - and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form - is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
Sally Albright: That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.
Harry Burns: No you don’t.
Sally Albright: Yes I do.
Harry Burns: No you don’t.
Sally Albright: Yes I do.
Harry Burns: You only think you do.
Sally Albright: You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?
Harry Burns: No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with you.
Sally Albright: They do not.
Harry Burns: Do too.
Sally Albright: They do not.
Harry Burns: Do too.
Sally Albright: How do you know?
Harry Burns: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally Albright: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
Harry Burns: No. You pretty much want to nail ‘em too.
Sally Albright: What if THEY don’t want to have sex with YOU?
Harry Burns: Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.
Sally Albright: Well, I guess we’re not going to be friends then.
Harry Burns: I guess not.
Sally Albright: That’s too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York.

I think it’s time to get back on a horse that I haven’t touched in a long time.

Common Christian rhetoric surrounding the war in Iraq suggests that the war is something ordained by God and that the actions of America in the war are something laudable. There is a view that America is working on behalf of God to achieve some means that God wishes to have achieved. Romans 13 is a text commonly used to justify such a position. Government, it says, has been put on Earth by God, and governmentes recieve their right to rule from God. Governments are instruments of God’s good, and because of that, we should obey those governments. However, when Americans read that, a strange thing happens. When they read “governments” and “authorities,” their lenses filter that into “America.” America is the force for good and justice in the world. There is no concept that there is a distinct possibility that Romans 13 refers to something other than America.
If Romans 13 is taken seriously, then there are two options. Either the government in question is strictly contextual and refers only to the Roman government of the first century, or that Romans 13 means every government in the world is God-ordained (the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle). If the former is true, then we’ve nothing to do with the passage, its comments died with the raids of barbarian tribes from central Europe. If it’s the latter, we’re stuck in quite a conundurm. Every government is ordained by God, yet America has seen it fit to overthrow a government. There is a heinous implicit assumption happening: the American government is the only government ACTUALLY ordained by God, and the American government must somehow act on God’s behalf to do what is obviously God’s will (but looks strangely like an American agenda). If all governments are the hand of God, why does the need exist to overthrow any government?
The answer is often chimed up quickly — because the United States is a force of peace and justice in the world. Backing up such a claim proves to be nearly impossible. The absurdity of assuring peace by the means of violence has been well documented. Furthermore, the idea that the propogation of the American dream is the propogation of justice is an argument that can be debated on many points, and that argument alone proves the presence of true justice to be dubious at best.
The fact of the matter is that the United States of America is no clear-cut bastion of peace and justice. Its incursions in the world may change the way things are. However, they also have the effect of exchanging one set of injustices and violences for another set of justices and violences that the American conciousness deems more acceptable. However, the arrogance of Americanizing Romans 13 does not allow the American conciouness to see such a fact.
The truth of the matter is this. Paul was not writing to America when he was writing Romans. Paul was writing a letter to a small community of Believers in Rome. This community was disenfranchised, and lived in a world that was hostile to its every move, and under a government that, if it was not already, would soon start to persecute this community. Paul was telling a disenfranchised community how to deal with a government that was hostile to its very existance. Paul was not telling that community to act in place of God to establish a skewed vision of justice in the world. Paul was telling that community to obey the government as well as it could. Paul had no thoughts of that disenfranchise community becoming the establishment, and thus his letter does not adress such ideas. Using the letter to support and justify the establishment is a horrible misuse of Paul’s epistle.
History is clear. Human government has always failed to bring peace and justice. Human government continues to fail to bring peace and justice. It is only God who brings peace and justice. Being so arrogant to believe that some country has the ability to bring peace and justice is an arrogance that we cannot afford. The world must be approached with such humility that admits that God and God alone can be the force of peace and justice in the world.

Lately, the more I think about it, the more trouble I have convincing myself that Jesus and Christianity have anything to do with one another.

Most Christianity has become nothing more than a mimic to bolster how things are, and has completely lost any counter-cultural edge. It’s a far cry from the Jesus we read in the gospels.

Baptist scholar Bill Leonard wrote a book called God’s Last and Only Hope. In this book, Leonard chronicles a belief that is often encountered in Southern Baptist circles — that Southern Baptists are God’s last and only hope.
I have not read Leonard’s book, so I am not aware of everything Leonard says. However, I do not this. This last and only hope phenomenon does not only occur on the institutional level, but also on the individual level. People begin to think that they are God’s last only hope. Whether it as a kind of arrogance, or a genuine sense of duty, I do not know. I suspect that it is a combination of the two. However, people fall into the trap of believing that they are God’s last and only hope. The mentality is something like, “If I don’t do something about this, then nobody will.” Or, “If I don’t say something about this, nobody will.” It is their role, they believe, to act as the last line of defense. If they do not speak out against something, they do not believe that the problem will ever be resolved. They are God’s last and only hope.
The question is whether any of us are God’s last and only hope, or whether God needs a last and only hope. I believe both notions are false. God is God, and God will work out what God will. If someone is plagued by a particularly offensive or visible sin, none of us are God’s last and only hope to rid that person of that sin. God is God! The idea that we’re God’s last line of defense is frustrating, and leads to arrogance and elitism, and loses the proper perspective on who we are. Nobody is the last and only hope.

On his blog, Al Mohler has written a three part indictment of postmodernity. Besides believing Mohler is wrongly motivated, I think Mohler has fundamentally misunderstood postmodernity. This is my response to Mohler. Reading his series first would probably be beneficial.

Postmodernity does not question truth and universals simply because it wishes to wriggle out of truth and absolutions and slide into a relativism that allows people to do whatever they please. There are actually a lot of things that postmodernity takes fairly seriously.
Postmondernity questions the way that modern society has constructed truths and universals because they see the things that modernity has done at the hands of its claims to universality and absolute truth. One cannot help but take seriously the kinds of atrocities and oppressions that have occured because a powerful group of people believes that it has found something that is universal. Even conflicts as recent in Rwanda are rooted in this hubris.
Postmodernity is better viewed as a reaction, not as an entity itself. As Brian McLaren says about the “post” prefix, and the inclusion of “modernity,” it is best to see postmodernity as something emerging from modernity. It is not something entirely new, but a reactiion to what has gone wrong in modernity.
Any individual, and especially any Christian, must be serious about reflecting upon modernity, and attempting to sort out the utter horrors that have been caused by the worldview of modern humanity. This reflection is the birthplace of postmodernity.
Because of these beginnings, there is an important nuance in postmodernity. Postmodernity is not a monolith. (I might be stealing that line from someone.) Postmodernity cannot be viewed as melting pot of names like Rorty, Derrida, Foucault, and Lyon. If postmodernity is primarily reactionary, as I have said, then it is better to think of postmodernity in terms of individuals reactions. There are many people who react much differently to modernity. They are united in their distrust (and often contempt) of modernity, but they are often unified by little else. Treating postmodernity as a monolith whose edifice must somehow be chipped away because it threatens our truth claims is the incorrect strategy for dealing with modernity. Such a strategy will only infuriate those who are postmoderns. It is not enough to react that way, and to throw our hands in the air, saying, “Well, I tried!” Any true, thoughtful reaction to postmodernity will not stand above or outside it. A thoughtful reaction to postmodernity will get down into the dirt and muck of postmodernity, see things through its eyes and take seriously the same things that postmodernity takes very seriously.

The primary critique by most Christians of postmodernity is that postmodernity will not assent to any universal truth, and I hope that I have illustrated why. Christians are very threatened by such a thing, because they feel that the very basis of their system is universal truth. However, there is a great misconception between this critique and the meat of the postmodern distrust. Gradually, this will became a segue into the discussion of metanarratives. In modernity, many, many people claimed to have absolute truth. Karl Marx thought he had found a universal solution to the woes of humanity. Capitalism placed itself on the same pedastal, humanism, colonialism, any number of ideologies sought to be that one universal which had an answer for all of humanity. However, each of those has failed. It would take to long to give a history lesson, but each vision of a universal way of constructing the world has failed. This sends a clearn message to postmoderns — universals do not work. The issue isn’t that there is no universal truth and that there cannot be truth. Stating the issue in that way turns into a self-defeating dogma! Rather, if there IS a universal truth in the world, it is clear that we do not have access to such a truth. Furthermore, so much blood has been spilled over the pursuit of that truth that is best if we just stop trying.
That may shake many Christians to the core. However, Christians must be aware that many of the atrocities that postmodernity has direct conflict with were committed in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The postmodern distrust of dogma and the universal is not without merit.
Thus, the grand slaughter of the metanarrative. The big stories that claim to be true for everything are shot through with the arrows of their own failure.
Where does that leave Christians? Are we not saddled with our own metanarrative? Is it not impossible to understand the gospel and Biblical eschatology as anything but a metanarrative? No, it is not impossible. In fact, it may be better to NOT understand the Bible as a metanarrative at all.

In this discussion, I am highly indebted to the Croatian scholar Miroslav Volf, whose own homeland feel victim to the universal idea of communism and the aftermath of its destruction.
Volf does not shy away from the problem. He seeks to go the the most meta-narrative event in the Bible. The great marraige supper of the Lamb. Volf’s question is whether such an event must be a meta-narrative. Is there any way for Christianity to escape the meta-narrative? (At this point, we may be doing things a little backwards. This discussion assumes that postmodernity has a point about metanarratives that must be taken seriously. I am fine with making that assumption. It may make the reader uncomfortable.) Surely this great marraige supper at the end of all things, in which all of God’s people in all nations are gathered together for this great supper is a meta-narrative. How can it not be?
The event is only a meta-narrative if it is an ending. If this is the consummation of all things, and the order of “things” will be set in static, never to change again, it is a meta-narrative. However, is there any reason to think it is an ending? Perhaps I’m a fanciful dreamer, but the great marriage supper and eschatology in general appears to me to be the greatest of beginnings. The beginning of things as they actually should be. Such a great beginning moves things from meta-narrative back into the realm of small stories. Christian eschatology is not a final solution, but a grand liberation, wherein people are freed to be as they actually should be. That makes all of the difference in the world!

Postmodernity most certainly does change the landscape of the intellectual world, and it most certainly does effect the task of truth-telling. However, if we can realize that truth-telling is less about being right than it is about consistently reflecting what is good news for all people, we will be able to speak with postmodernity rather than believing we must fight with postmodernity.