Postmodern
From Neoredemptive
Whatever you might say about today's cultural milieu, to call it postmodern stretches beyond any formal meaning of the word.
Postmodernism, properly, is a fairly small and fading school of thought among the (predominantly European) over-educated elite. In a nutshell, postmodernism emphasizes the use of the intellectual tools of modernity (reason, logic, and humanism) to deconstruct all concepts of universal truth, morality, or conceptual coherence. All thought is therefore reduced to contextualized language games with only the most tenuous connection with that which is "out there" (i.e., anything beyond the mind of the thinker).
The reason we talk about postmodernity so much in church circles is because the emerging church conversation has, for better or worse, hijacked much of the evangelical press's attention by becoming obsessed with a term and a niche philosophy with an (at best) questionably connection to the actual content and structure of our cultural context.
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Postmodernity and Language
One attribute of formal postmodern philosophy that the postconservative and emergent theological camps have picked up on is the emptying of all meaning out of language.
- But people today hear of these seeds of correction and say, not so fast. We now know that if all of our views are conditioned by our cultures, then that also includes our views of the Word of God. In other words, they say, the Archimedean point is once again swallowed up by human relativism. There is no outside perspective. When even the church's view of the Word falls captive to some mistaken view of the Word, her view is timebound and earthbound again. Such a distorted view will wake up no one; the church will be condemned to perpetual captivity. There is no escape. (Prophetic Untimeliness, p.108-9)
Postmodernity, Hypermodernity, Consistent Modernity?
See particularly Michael Horton's chapter of Church in Emerging Culture, in which he makes the case that what is popularly called "postmodernism" is better labeled "hypermodernism", or (in my words) "consistent modernism", and David Wells' works in which he argues there is very little discontinuity between modernity and postmodernity.
Pop-Po-Mo
See David Wells' skillfull disection of high- and low-culture postmodernity in Above All Earthly Pow'rs, in which he argues that the intellectual postmodernism of Focault has very little to do, causally, with the pop postmodernism of Madonna. Instead, he argues that both are symptomatic of a common phenomenon infecting the whole swath of western culture, high and low: /TODO/
Postmodernity, Postmodernization, and Postmodernism
The postmodern is an example of what we call a "Wells triplet", a constellation of phenomena comprised of postmodernity, postmodernization, and postmodernism. There are subtle but important distinctions between the three.
Postmodernity is a name for our current cultural vacuity, nihilism, rampant consumerism, and distaste for truth and authority. Postmodernization is the set of cultural and economic forces that give rise to postmodernity and give it credibility in the popular mind. Postmodernism is an attempt to put together a coherent philosophical account and justification for our cultural vacuity, nihilism, rampant consumerism, and distaste for truth and authority.
This distinction is important in that we believe in postmodern churches in the "postmodernity" sense but not in the "postmodernization" or "postmodernism" senses. We believe in encarnating Jesus Christ in the midst of our present-day postmodern culture, and using its forms, ideas, and arts as they may be useful to the gospel (much as Paul did in Athens) -- thus, churches in postmodernity. It is a very different thing, however, for a church to infuse itself with the values of postmodernization; and it is a deadly thing when the church allows itself to be coopted by yet another hopeless, meaningless, anthropocentric "-ism".
