The Fabric of Faithfulness

Premodern, Postmodern, Anti-ultra-infra modern, blah blah blah I have long discounted the tendency in the evangelical church to "pine away for the good old days" whether that be 1950 or 1780. David Koyzis thoughtfully comments:

The old cliché has it that we cannot turn back the clock. Too often this is an excuse to do nothing about a particularly odious development commonly, albeit erroneously, thought to be progressive. Yet a number of biblical scholars and commentators have noted that while paradise began with a garden, redeemed humanity will live in a glittering city. As my esteemed colleague, Al Wolters, puts it, redemption in Jesus Christ means the restoration of creation, not its repristination. We should not wish to repeal millennia of cultural development, even if it has occurred under the influence of pagan and secular worldviews. This is why I believe neo-Calvinism represents such a significant advance in our understanding of God's world. We cannot simply be content to drag our feet in conservatistic fashion. We cannot return to the old ways -- at least not all of them. God's world is an intrinsically dynamic world; creation order includes within its very structure the possibilities of further development, under the obedient guidance of his image-bearers.

So then the question becomes what we make of our current situation? How do we react to the modernism around us? Again Koyzis makes a helpful distinction:

I believe it is necessary to distinguish between what might be called spiritual and structural components of modernity. The former category would include the likes of the social contract, with its assumption that all communities and the obligations thereto can be reduced to voluntary associations; the idolatrous esteem for human autonomy and the concomitant denigration of all heteronomous authority; the belief that human beings are capable of saving themselves; and the deprecation of creation as a source of evil. This spirit of modernity we must definitively reject. The latter category would include the rise of political democracy; the post-westphalian consolidation of national states; technical advances in the fields of communications, transportation and economics; and the softening (but not the elimination) of gender roles. These structural components we can cautiously affirm as products of legitimate cultural development, even if such development has occurred under the misguided influence of a secular worldview.

I agree - In so many structural ways, the cultural (structural, political, technological) developments of our day represent advances that I do not want to turn by back on - even if they were brought about through spiritual means I can no longer accept. However, and this is where the teasing gets tough - I see the evangelical church reacting very strongly to the postmodern theorists who are trying to move beypond the limitations of a modern spiritual construct. WHY? Evangelical pining for the good old days will simply not move us positively toward viable cultural change. The desire to see pristinization of our culture that seems to emenate from cultural organs like Focus on the Family (just thaink about the logo!) seems completely implausable. My standard line has been that this rejection usually emerges because of postmodern treatments of truth and authority. Evangelical language is still structured to fight logical positivism, and anything that sounds different gets rejected. While I agree that the destructive postmodernism of - say Foucault - simply advances the negative elements of spiritual modernity toward total skepticism. But others, even the Christians (Newbiggen formost in my mind) says lets move beyond autonomy and recover community. So -- How the church teases this apart, how the neo-calvinistas move this forward - that is the blah blah blah...