PREACHING TO POSTMODERNS: Changing Worldviews 2

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PREACHING TO POSTMODERNSChanging Worldviews 2
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POST-MODERNISM In Brief

• Thomas Oden defines the modern period
• As the period from 1789 to 1989, from the
  Bastille to the Berlin Wall.
• Postmodernism is used in a chronological sense,
  that which comes after the modern period.
  Erickson, PTF, 53
• Postmodernism is that which follows modernity
  modernity has run its course and is exhausted,
  intellectually and spiritually bankrupt
• Oden argues for paleo-orthodoxy, a return to the
  classical orthodoxy of the early undivided church

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POST-MODERNISM In Brief

• David Wells argues
• Somewhere between the middle of the nineteenth
  century and the middle of the twentieth century
  we moved from a Eurocentric world to a world
  centered on America, a period he calls Our
  Time. Wells, No Place for Truth, 53-54
• Our time is based on urbanization and democratic
  tendencies it is dependent upon technology and
  capitalism

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POST-MODERNISM In Brief

• For Wells, powerful forces bring about
  sociological modernity which leads to
  intellectual postmodernism. Wells, NPFT, 61
• Belief in progress, in transcending the past,
  leads those who are sociologically modern to
  become intellectually postmodern. Erickson, PTF,
  27

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POST-MODERNISM In Brief

• Francis Schaeffer
• A line of despair bisects history
• Occurring in Europe around 1890
• In the U.S. after 1935
• Schaeffer, The God Who is There, in The Complete
  Works, 18
• Above this line we find men living with their
  romantic notions of absolutes (though with no
  sufficient logical basis). This side of the line
  all is changed. Ibid.

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POST-MODERNISM In Brief

• The roots of despair began with Hegel and his
  dialectic, an attack on the older rational model
  (Flux)
• The meaning of life can no longer be dealt with
  in terms of a rational explanation, but instead
  the real things of life must be dealt with by
  a nonrational leap of faith. Erickson, PTF, 67

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POST-MODERNISM In Brief

• Chronologically a development beyond the rational
  worldview fostered by the Enlightenment
• Represents a dissolving of an orderly, structured
  view of reality
• Represents the abandonment of a metanarrative
  and the embracing, instead, of many (mini)
  stories (in community)

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POST-MODERNISM In Brief

• Is thoroughly anti-foundationalist and suspicious
  of the objectivity of knowledge
• Rejects the secularized notion of progress (a
  Christian heresy) and questions if knowledge is
  good
• Embraces ways of knowing, other than by reason
  intuition, experience, feeling

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POST-MODERNISM Impact

• Ideas have legs! It is impossible to understand
  postmodernism without noting its impact on our
  culture
• What begins in the ethereal realm of the academy
  eventually show up in popular culture
• The Arts
• Architecture
• Literature
• Popular Worldview

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POST-MODERNISM the Arts

• Blue Man Group Music and Performance Art
• Warhol, Christo
• Karen Finley
• Robert Mapplethorpe
• Andres Serrano

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POST-MODERNISM the Arts

• Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA

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POST-MODERNISM Film and TV

• Field of Dreams (from the book, Shoeless Joe)
• Groundhog Day
• Pulp Fiction
• Seinfeld, a show about nothing
• Jackass (MTV)

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POST-MODERNISM Architecture

• Disney Hall, Los Angeles, CA
• Shopping Malls
• Theme Parks

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POST-MODERNISM Architecture
Modern
Postmodern
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POST-MODERNISM Literature

• Jacques Derrida, poster child for
  Deconstructionist Postmodernism

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POST-MODERNISM In Brief

• The Western intellectual tradition, and
  especially Western modernity, claims to reflect
  and represent reality so accurately that it
  simply mirrors the way things really are. It is
  this mimetic (i.e., imitative) theory of truth,
  with its assumption of a substantial convergence
  between reality and our description of reality,
  that Derrida and other deconstructionists
  attack.
• Walsh and Middleton, Truth is Stranger Than It
  Used to Be, 33

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POST-MODERNISM In Brief

• What is concealed in the realism of the
  metaphysics of presence reality as what is
  present and revealed by deconstructionism is
  the impulse to mastery and ultimately to
  violence. What is really at stake in our
  intellectual rhetoric about scientific
  objecivity, nonbiased observation and universal
  maxims . . . is nothing less than the typically
  Western desire to master the world once and for
  all by enclosing it within an illusory but
  absolute system.
• Walsh and Middleton, Truth is Stranger Than It
  Used to Be, 34

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POST-MODERNISM In Brief

• Deconstructionism, in other words, potentially
  clears the ground for the possibility of doing
  justice to the marginal, for the liberation of
  those excluded or oppressed under the hegemony of
  modernity.
• BUT- since it is precisely the function of a
  social construction of reality to shield us from
  the abyss of meaninglessness by providing us with
  a sacred canopy of meaning and order, the
  realization that this canopy is humanly
  constructed (not an inevitable given) leaves us
  with a sense of vertigo, unprotected before the
  abyss.
• Walsh and Middleton, Truth is Stranger Than It
  Used to Be, 36

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POST-MODERNISM In Brief

• Becoming aware of our worldview as a worldview,
  of its particularity, subjectivity and
  limitations, can have a profoundly anomic effect.
  An arbitrarily chosen worldview can scarcely
  function as a worldview anymore. We are left
  without a buffer against chaos, worldless and
  disoriented.
• Walsh and Middleton, Truth is Stranger Than It
  Used to Be, 36

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POST-MODERNISM In Brief

• We in North America live in a Disneyworld
  culture, a Cool Whip society, in which we engage
  in autoerotic telephone sex in place of real
  intimacy, splash in simulated lakes and
  waterfalls at recreational waterparks rather than
  risk the pollution at the local lake or river,
  shop in climate-controlled malls that attempt to
  look like old-fashioned shopping neighborhoods
  and even watch the horrors of war carefully
  sanitized on television to give us a sense that
  we are really there, yet not leave us
  uncomfortable with what we have seen.
• Walsh and Middleton, Truth is Stranger Than It
  Used to Be, 39

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POST-MODERNISM In Brief

• Postmodernism is like a carnival. Unlike classic
  theater, in which one show is going on,
  postmodern culture seems like a carnival with a
  never-ending array of sideshows. There is no
  center to this production. Unlike even a
  three-ring circus, this carnival offers only the
  clamor of multifarious sideshow hawkers calling
  out for momentary attention.
• Walsh and Middleton, Truth is Stranger Than It
  Used to Be, 42

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PREACHING TO POSTMODERNSChanging Worldviews 2