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.