Photo by Jonathan Assink
THE ADVENT OF POSTMODERNITY
Throughout history, significant periods of cultural transition have radically affected our outlook of the world and correspondingly, our view of the church. Philosophers and sociologists call these observations our epistemology or worldview – the basis upon which our life’s value and purpose are based. Many believe that we are now experiencing the next eminent cultural shift known as postmodernism.
In his book, A Primer on Postmodernism, Stanley Grenz expresses that writers and architects desiring to break out modern forms and patterns of thinking and inventiveness used the phrase postmodern in the 1930s. Historian Sir Arnold Toynbee also used the term postmodern in the 1940s to portray his opinion of the start of a new period of Western history.
Some say that official threshold for postmodernism started at the fall of the Berlin Wall; others contend for 1969, the year of Woodstock. Dan Kimball, author of The Emerging Church, suggests the year 2000 as a transitional point due to the large degree of postmodern philosophy palpable in culture at that time.
This new era represents a shift in worldview moving from values and beliefs of the modern era to the new postmodern era, which discards many modern ideals and beliefs. Pure modernism held to a lone, universal worldview and ethical standard, a belief that all understanding is decent and undeniable, truth is fixed, independence is valued, and thinking, learning, and beliefs can be determined nonlinearly.
In postmodernism, its epistemology is a self-determined, pluralistic view of culture and religion. Contradictory truths and beliefs are received as normal as seen at www.belief.net, a smorgasbord of articles on God, faith, and prayer, the nature of spirituality, society and ethics, with numerous resources where all religions are respected and/or tolerated. Additionally, authority and faith is in individual experience. Internet and media accelerate at an instantaneous global communication revolution. There exists a misgiving of authority. And the Bible is open to many interpretations and is but one of several religious writings.
Emergent Village claims that postmodernism is “an emerging culture that is characterized by having passed through modernity and pursuing something beyond modernity…We do not believe it yet exists in its fully developed forms, but it is in its early formative steps…†Kimball says the progression of postmodernism supplanting modernism has progressed in these arenas as follows: from academia to architecture to pop culture to everyday life and thinking to spirituality to the Church. Dave Tomlinson, author of The Post-Evangelical, says this:
Those who think that postmodernism is a figment of the academic imagination, a passing fad, could not be more wrong. Postmodernism has flowed right out of the musty corridors of academia into the world of popular culture; it is on the pages of youth magazines, on CD boxes, and the fashion pages of Vogue.
