post-what?

It's my birthday, I was born 54 years ago. Though that makes me technically 'post-modern' most of the 'baby boomers' tend to be more modernist. I'm not sure if I have always been post-modern (I think I probably have) or whether I have grown more that way as I have grown older. Whichever, I am now who I am. Sometimes I wish I was more modernist and able to be more sure of 'facts' rejecting 'dialogue' or 'narrative'.

Years ago I had a Nigerian friend who took me through another post-*, this one slightly more complex. We  had been talking about colonialism and the rejection of this concept, hence colonial and anti-colonial. Timothy's perception was that we should now be embracing post-anti-colonialism. What he meant was colonial = white man boss, anti-colonial = black man boss, post-anti-colonial = white and black man partners.

I think in using the term post-modern we may be missing similar logic.

Modernism tends to have a mechanistic or deconstructionist approach - everything can be known even if we don't know now and that everything is fitted together into a giant mechanistic entity. Life, the world and the universe are all rule driven. Modernist theology is propositional and using it we interpret the Bible in terms of it being a rule book for life. I remember as a teenager that people described the Bible in terms of a 'manual' like a  car maintenance manual.

My perception is that some of what we call post-modernism is actually anti-modernism; a rejection of the modernist propositional logic in favour of a fuzzy, wooly 'we can't know anything really'. However, in reality, I believe most people who are labeled post-modernist are actually post-anti-modernist. In other words, they live in partnership between ambiguity and propositional reality. Narrative and propositional are not the antithesis of each other but are complementary ways of looking at life.

This lack of understanding the complementary nature of modern and post-modern is why some modernists totally reject post-modernism. Take 'Why we're not Emergent' by Deyoung and Kluck, for example, a book my son Daniel, who incidentally shares the same birthday, showed me today. The authors see the 'Emergent Church' as being the 'liberal' rejection of the Evangelical Church. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As a teenager I was wooed to the Evangelical Church not by the modernist approach of Evangelicalism but by the 'God can be known' experiential approach of the the Evangelical church which was antipodal concept to the idea that 'God is a hope'. Thus the certainty of approach, which is very modernist, was appealing not because of the empirical but because of the relational. God can be known. As person to person.

This relational aspect of Evangelicalism seems to be more and more diminishing in light of the increasing post-modern, so called emerging or emergent church. The modern Evangelical is reacting to the post-modern which they perceive to be anti-modern. If we had approached it not as post-modern but post-anti-modern, I think at least some of this dichotomy could have been reduced.

To some degree the dichotomy is one sided - the modernist Evangelical rejecting the post-modern Emerging whereas post-moderns tend not to reject the modernist so out of hand. They embrace Information Technology, which is in some ways the ultimate expression of modernism. Most post-moderns readily enjoy computers, Androids, iPhones and iPads. Thus in reality, unless they wish to return to yellow slips of paper for aid-memoires, post-moderns are not mandating exclusively using post-IT notes! (I'm sorry, I couldn't avoid using that one, it has been haunting me all day.)

Nor are they mandating post-evangelical, though many might embrace post-conservative evangelical. God can still be known. God was, is, and is to come. The dialogue continues... as does the narrative.

Egypt, Israel and the USA

Listening to the BBC World Service late tonight was interesting. Obviously the number one news story were the protests in Egypt in 'Liberation Square' (Tahir), a place I know well and have spent many hours sitting in the cafe in the Nile Hilton Hotel overlooking the square. But the story was developing because

President Obama's special envoy to Egypt, Frank Wisner, told the international security conference in Germany, that Mr Mubarak was needed to oversee a transition to democracy. 

What made the story top news was that the USA was disowning his comments. Meanwhile BBC News Hour interviewed an Israeli representative saying that they didn't actually want democracy in Egypt because it might result in a government that was hostile to Israel and therefore wanted Mubarak to stay because he was friendly towards them. So, who is supporting Mubarak? Israel?

Alongside this I am getting emails from Christians in Egypt, some with prophetic tone:

I sensed a strong urgency from the LORD saying: "As the people of Egypt presented their requests to Mubarak, I am calling on My people to rise up before me and present their requests to me for their nation".  I went on to hear the LORD: "Let the Holy Council assemble".

The email then went on to become more political in nature telling of huge demonstrations, in a Mustapha Mahmoud Square which is somewhat smaller than Tahir:

The numbers had grown even more, POSSIBLY OVER A MILLION. As we drove home we saw the same slogans on banners all over the city, on cars, on walls, on shop windows. 

Claiming there were banners all over the place saying things like:

- yes to stability, yes to Mubarak

- give change a chance

- we are sorry Mr. president

- we accept dialogue, we trust you

And then asking why the BBC and CNN and Al Jazeerah TV were not filming this. Good question and I asked the sender why these people had not uploaded video to You Tube to show the size of these demonstrations.

But that was not the end. I then got a second email from another source also claiming to have first hand evidence of these  pro-Mubarak protests. The interesting thing about this second email from a different person was that some paragraphs were word for word identical to the first source. Hmmm... now that is facinating. I wonder if I will get a third and a fourth eye witness also with word for word identical paragraphs. I guess the more I get the more credible it will be.

Which brings me back to the BBC interviewing a representative of the US administration who was looking for a 'credible democracy' in Egypt. I guess like the credible threat of nuclear or chemical attacks from Iraq before the Gulf war. In English, when we hear credible in that context, we translate it to mean 'believable but untrue'. I don't think that's quite the way it is intended in American!

So where does that leave followers of Jesus? What does our Father want in this situation?

Paul in one of the epistles talks about being 'in the world, not of the world' and the early followers of Jesus really confused people. They were totally integrated into society, more so that other groups, yet at the same time they were obviously separated and didn't fight wars etc. They saw the 'Kingdom of God' as a present reality not a future hope.

Down through the centuries other Christians have take alternative positions: fighting wars (the infamous 'Crusades', which was the same word George Bush once used about the invision of Iraq), taking radical political positions (eg Desmund Tutu and Jim Wallis) and so on.

Jesus wept over Jerusalem, and I am sure our Father weeps today over what is happening in the world He has leant us. I believe we somehow need to get back to being 'relational Christians', totally engaged with the men and women in the society we live and expressing our Father's love for them, yet somehow separated from the political and other battles around us. The Kingdom of God is both present reality and future hope.