Interrogating the Emergent Church: II

If we are to take a postmodern critique seriously, what does the church look like? Postmodernism does not really tell us and that is both its own shortcoming as a theoretical basis to launch our own reconstruction of ecclesiology and therefore the shortcoming of its continual reference among emergents as it were. I have written on this before in relation to why it is not a good thing to be overly zealous about postmodernism regarding a critique of education. Both education and the church cultivate similar aspects of what it means to be human and do so on similar pragmatic organizational fronts. So what I want to do for the remainder here is to reference myself, but in a very postmodern way, redirect the focus by changing references in the piece from education to the church.*

“That postmodern critique has at least left a dent in modern assumptions of reality and truth fostered by modern discourse seems well documented enough (Rorty 1979; Baudrillard, 1984; Giroux, 1988; McLaren 1988; Jameson, 1997; Harvey, 1990; Bloland, 1995; Best & Kellner, 1997; Schrag, 1992). However, the question remains: what has the critique meant to the curriculum?

Understandably, there are misgivings about … raising the flag of postmodernism in ecclesiology. Peter McLaren has written quite extensively that postmodern theory, while it makes suggestive arguments that challenge modernist assumptions and exposes the power/knowledge problem in modernist hegemony, suffers from a profoundly anemic abstraction from the political and social context of the very issues it raises (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2000, 2002). “(P)ostmodern theory has failed to provide an effective counterstrategy to the spread of neoliberal ideology that currently holds … policy and practice in its thrall” (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2000, p. 28). As Habermas argues, the problem with postmodern theory is that it makes purchases on modern subjectivity and self-relationality as argued first by Hegel and then responded to through Nietzsche, Horkheimer and Adorno, Bataille, Derrida, and Foucault (Habermas, 1996). According to Habermas, Hegel in a sense created the direction for the later postmodern turn as he opted to argue in terms of subject-centered rationality rather than communal praxis. Habermas’s project is therefore to correct Hegel’s direction in favor of a praxis-oriented “communicative reason”. Habermas has been employed by theorists such as Jack Mezirow in transformative learning theory (Mezirow, 1991, 1995). However, McLaren & Farahmandpur argue for a revitalization of Marxist theory to correct postmodern theory’s “strategic ambivalence about capital” (p. 26, 2000). They acknowledge the positive contributions of postmodern theory in terms of “helping educators grasp the politics that underwrite popular cultural formations, mass media apparatuses, the technological revolution’s involvement in the global restructuring of capitalism from Schumpeter to Keynes, and the reconciliation of schooling practices in the interest of making them more related to (racial, gender, sexual, and national) identity formation within postcolonial geopolitical and cultural spaces” (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2000, p. 26). However, McLaren & Farahmandpur throw the baby out with the bathwater in their argument for a “critical reflexive Marxist theory” (2000, p. 28) in order to solve the problem of postmodern theory’s social anemia.

Both Jean-Francois Lyotard and Richard Rorty share criticism for universals or “metanarratives”, in Lyotard’s terms, that have a penchant for dominating and radically conditioning discursive activity along the lines of Kant’s project of determining necessary conditions of knowledge and ethics. Lyotard views difference as leading ultimately to further fragmentation and incommensurability. This occurs through delegitimation of knowledge.

With the removal of foundations in terms of metanarratives or discourses that can adequately legitimate the existence of the university as a unified body of discursive activity, the notion of what any organization looks like and what its function serves is at stake – especially those of the church. If the church as the bastion of spirituality and the body of Christ to transform society and culture no longer can lay claim to that function, what then legitimates its existence? The answer is in its performative role in society as one among many organizations that contribute to and sustain the socio-economic system of the marketplace. “The moment knowledge ceases to be an end in itself – the realization of the Idea or the emancipation of men – its transmission is no longer the exclusive responsibility of scholars and students” and theologians we might add (Lyotard, 1993, p. 50). Truth, beauty, and goodness are no longer the foundations of the university but have given way to marketability and the efficiency of the socio-economic matrix.”

The problem with any zealous adoption of postmodernism for the reformation or reconstruction of an organization or a system is that it does not in itself offer any basis for reconstruction. The aims of so many postmodernist theories is deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction. Or it results in critique just for the sake of critique. In this way postmodernism becomes as faddish as that which it critiques. Because it ends up having no pragmatism suggestive of reconstructing something that does not work for whatever reason, it suffers from this social anemia that McLaren notes in his Marxist critique. So my question to emergents who talk about postmodernism as if it is as common as the Super Bowl, filing taxes, the Iraq situation, or health care ethics is what does the church look like after that critique? My contention is that postmodernism cannot really tell us, it is not a monolithic or consistent basis for critique, its theories do seem to lack the pragmatism necessary to reconstruct something after deconstructing it, and the assumption that we are in a "postmodern" world is not accurate at best and likely misleading.

It seems that the emergent use of postmodernism as a basis for its theoretical assertions ends up as no more than a buzz word or a fad in itself. It comes out as meaningful as saying that there is a postmodern science or a postmodern God. There really are no such things as either of those, but perhaps if our discourse focuses on those concepts intently enough we will believe it. Discourse will be there for the sake of discourse itself about those things, but neither has changed except in our imaginations.

So what does this look like and what does it mean? In my last piece on this I want to offer an alternative move in which emergents ought to be grounding their theoretical and intellectual basis. This finds it home in pragmatism and in critical theory. If you want to critique something, have an alternative that works without dissolving into another way to be “relevant” to the normative culture of 18-35 year olds. When this happens we have proven Lyotard right and the church simply exists as another arm of market performativity rather than as an agent of social change.

*See Tatusko, A. (2005). “The tacit media pedagogy as praxial critique: A critique of postmodern theory for higher education”. Teacher’s College Record, 107(1), 114-136.

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