pomo

a time  for retrieving drafts - here is another. Partly sparked by a current discussion. 

Originally began as a facebook discussion -  strange source but sometimes social media gets into something that's maybe worth capturing  beyond the moment.

in this case, was a discussion of that over used term; post modernism.  I think a useful and perhaps definitional way to think of this is - (though such things resist simple definition)  is against the false dawn of modernism; even a judgement against its over promise. 

One hears people say the big picture narrative has broken down - and perhaps it has. But which big picture narrative was it, anyway?  Christians who see the past as somehow more aligned to the faith, might have something correct.  But they also need to ask if post modernism  is uncomfortable - well  that begs the question - what was modernism?    And what sort of Christian narrative could be comfortably tied to the progress narrative of modernism, anyway?

And perhaps, if modernism gave a false meta-narrative - an illusory big picture, then the fragmentation of post modernism - with its insistence on relative value  - was a necessary judgment on the illusory organising story of modernism. The arrogance of the tower of babel is met with a scattering and fragmentation of language.  The hand of the Lord raised against the false narrative - and the scattering is not always bad.

I know something about this - i grew up in a house of science and engineering - was schooled in such, with a little dose of religion  - and found the assumed optimism behind this far too shallow - soon swept away in the weltering confusions of enlightened education, which for all its power had no ultimate reasons, no stabilising center of faith.

So my take on explaining these terms went like this:

Do you ever hear someone say - in high moral tones, in a comment on the The Age website about the Iraq war for example - 

"I just can't believe in the 21st Century we still bomb other people" 

Now whatever the outrage at the undeniable tragedy of the whole thing, a question always emerges for me-  what is the date doing in there?   Was it less wrong in the 20th Century?  Tolerable in the 19th?  

It often seems many still hold, at heart, that some version of progress was meant to make us more enlightened, we are meant to be improving on some moral pathway, in tandem with a progress narrative. The  modernist dream does not die easily. 

And of course the temptation to this is strong because progress does seems to work, at least in part;  we have been caught up an era where science and technology did bring change for the better, in some ways. The relative levels of economic wealth for increasing portions of the population,  one has to concede,  have brought large scale improvement to many. Not, by any means, evenly spread or without cultural loss, but the large scale data on say life expectancy, has increased in vast regions of the world in the last hundred years. 

So there is something to that progress narrative - and seems to me that the high points of that story  still inform the modernist dream; progress will deliver us to a new world order. 

This was a large scale narrative  of many- and yet a false one when taken as the overarching story  - since whatever material benefits have been delivered, the moral case is quite another story. Human nature turns out not to have  changed - and technology is a lever that partly ameliorates, but also partly magnifies our folly. 

And so on closer inspection, science and technology, for all their good, turn out to create almost as many problems as they solve.

So a 'post modern' view highlights that - sees the over promise of the science and technology, and that it didn't deliver - or not cleanly; is abused as well as used. Knows we face nuclear war or ecological disaster or economic collapse or digitised sexual abuse - all from the same technological sources that gave penicillin and high yield wheat. And like the melting image of da Vinci's iconic man which a discerning artist drew in large scale in the melting ice caps, a fragmenting perception of self is tied to that sense of failure of the humanist project. 







The frontal assault on that naive progress narrative should surely have been the massive and deadly wars of the 20th century - waged among the 'Christian' nations.  Yet naivety springs eternal.  The progress narrative is still a sweet song many  want to believe - who are still shocked when the hearts of humanity prove as retrograde as ever - no matter the advances in quantum computing or medicine. 

 And so this mood of disillusion with what was seemingly promised, this sense of dis-ease, underwrites,  like a festering swamp, any number of other strains of  post modernism. Once the culture has got in that mood everything seems suspect.   Every narrative is suspect, is deconstructed and disbelieved. Academia cultivates versions that seem to have nothing to do with the false god of progress, but simply target any variety of modernist certainty, including many expressions of Christian faith which do not fare well in this environment (where truth has become a matter of propositional certainties, majoring on the "what" of assertions - a system of stand alone theological axioms - rather than majoring on the "Who" that they are predicated on, it is vulnerable to this deconstruction. What is truth? is the wrong question, ultimately. Who is truth? is the reality that makes and re-orders the universe. Secondary assertions may hold, but not as ultimate truths in their own right, as deconstructionism knows, even if that's all it knows.)

This goes too far; but its perhaps partly a reaction against the false picture in the first place. Babel is judged and all are scattered. 

And then as that picture breaks down people are left in a more ambiguous state.

Some of its kind of interesting - mix and match of cultural influences is more interesting than a bland monoculture. I like parts of that. But extends beyond that. How many now want to roll their own version of religion or morality etc - bits and pieces of whatever.

All fine till something like London riots shows its all on shaky ground now.

Seems to me we're likely to be influenced by this - i know i grew up with some of this - moving from one to the other.

I know when i came to God, verses like Jeremiah 6:14 

They dress the wound of my people
   as though it were not serious.

were actually a relief- finally a way to stop pretending and hoping all will be ok.  Its not.  Things are deeply wrong - not least within me - and a realisation that i had to own that first - and across creation.  A story that could go that deep, spoke to the true condition of both, so we are both worse than expected, but also drawn into a common story before God ("my people")  offered true hope. How much deeper can it go, than identifying with the death of God. And not in the way of nausea of lack of all bearings  - but beyond all the false dawns that had been offered, the very entry to life; the doorway to life itself - and one of the huge blessings, is the commonality of brothers and sisters walking in such things - this is not just my private spirituality, or peculiar personal view of the world, but a common and shared story runs under all this.  

lasers and rainbows (3) - metaphors for faith in the workplace

this is also an early post that i reverted to a draft status for a couple of years as being a bit lopsided. trimmed it a bit - hopefully sings better now

in part 1 of this little debrief i introduced the idea of lasers and rainbows to describe tight or more distributed faith cultures, and then in part 2 looked at how some of that played out in family and devotional issues

This post unpacks how some of this has been in workplace - which has been a very real issue for me. Indeed the mismatch and tension here - as experienced across several styles of church (and types of work) - probably generated much of the rainbow/laser reflection in the first place ... i guess you could call it an inadequate conception or theology of work, which led to the need to thrash out some working idea of how the more 'laser like' focus needed to be diffracted into this domain - moving away from a centre to the particular incarnate details of what one might be uncovering in the context of a life, even perhaps, a calling

So as well as rainbows and lasers, there are half a dozen other metaphors that i've found myself using to think of church and faith (in the workplace in particular) etc...

i'll start with two related ones

(i) church can be like an engine of faith and prayer - and i have at times said to myself I will drove that engine beyond the church culture, and empower whatever vehicle i'm called to drive down whatever unique road seems to be the path of life i've been placed in

(ii) i will tap into the slipstream of dynamic faith here, 'spiritually, but not culturally'"

This all sounds quite individualistic, but its in reaction to a tendency for church to imply, perhaps not intentionally, that the main sphere of activity is in its programs and official ministries

so the common theme here in possibly moving beyond 'God in a box'

That is, i value my ongoing church based experience of God as valid and real, but have needed to integrate into other dimensions of life; notably the workplace. Even though I see the deposit of faith and teaching as precious - priceless - and significant, as well as the faith and relationships that are inculcated, i have still needed to sketch out some thinking that released me from a restrictive assumption that easily develops. That is, "the more significant places and times and agendas must therefore be located in connection with church or in its orbit of its programs". Without diminishing them, they are not the whole story, or perhaps even the main story, for most of us.

Perhaps we need a way to change that orbiting metaphor - to see that all is truly in the orbit of the God who made all.  Jesus at the centre of the ornate complexities of creation-  not the gathered church and its activities - although He is there in a different and more present sense. Seeing the earth go around the sun, rather than being a fixed point at the center, made much sense of the heavenly data - and lead to a simpler and cleaner approach to what was already observed.  Shifting that cultural center - away from Christendom with church at the center - might be like the Copernican revolution - the earth is still there, but we have re-thought what is actually happening at sunset and sunrise - or in this case,  between those times. Similarly here we rethink the daily round of work - shifting some of the centrality out of the church. And find that while losing that fixed point of is less intuitive on one level, it explains a lot of other events much more effectively.

Thus in my case, I will be a better teacher, for example, in Catholic or state schools, if i happen to be there. I will be more faithful in the execution of complex tasks, bring more vision and clarity here, have better endurance here; be better at the inevitable relational challenges, explore particular dimensions and complexities of educative thinking; be more effective in planning and strategy; tune into God's words and impression in more diverse and complex settings than the default church culture seemed to imagine.

These examples of the principle of empowering a vehicle that seems largely off the church radar; while nevertheless drawing on an engine of faith discovered there, could no doubt be multiplied endlessly in other lives and and settings, through other personalities and careers etc.

And perhaps something about this actually fullfills the Ephesians 1 mandate of the church to be 'all in all'

A related and similar image, "i will tap into the slipstream of dynamic faith here, 'spiritually, but not culturally'" - is simply giving oneself the necessary permission to follow the dimensions of God's calling away from the assumption that all is in church and its programs- to take the release of an empowered life, and  run across cultural spaces.

That is, by tuning into the genuine faith of meetings etc, and dynamism of worship, the impartation of meaning in teaching, there is renewal and healing and vision; yet the outworking is well beyond the walls of the church and its religious markers, and expressed in entirely other cultural spaces. To take my education example again, the church might see the local school as a place to run an 'outreach program'; which is no doubt a good thing, but extension of church program, as good as it may be, might not really coincide with what other Christians might be doing at the school. So they might perhaps attend the little breakfast club as token of good will - and one certainly hopes it will reach some kids - but it is possible that the volunteers will not really understand the issues the full time teacher faces there; one is not necessarily a good lens for what the other is doing; for what  the maths teacher is trying to do in rethinking the original constructivist heritage of  educational IT, for example - similarly in every other subject area and cultural dimension of the school - and these explorations also reflect creation mandates - to explore and name the content under redemptive leaven, and work the garden. (In passing, a Christian pedagogy that just wants to teach known facts and content, and not invite some exploration, seems to me to misrepresent the original biblical - as in Genesis - mandates which are restored in Christ- even as we still wrestle with thorns).

Again the point of this is not my own story, but that we all are called to spheres like this, and its not always visible or celebrated in a gathered community. Does this matter? Well, can we celebrate the diversity of what the people of God are called to? As an example, which Christians will be upheld as having a ministry, supported in prayer meetings for evangelistic success etc?

In several churches, i've noticed that in addition to the pastoral staff, it is the volunteer group (eg the occasional RE teachers) who are cited- and i think its right that they are supported like this, as they try to get to the point of sharing their faith. But should the complexity and heavy demand of the other roles be invisible - seeing as they are also bringing the redemptive leaven of the kingdom in other ways? Or do they just have a job - a 'secular job' at that?

If we have this problem with teaching - which must be one of the most obvious (and in Christian circles, still quite valued) roles in the community - what of other roles...

We're dimly aware that health professionals and doctors and parents and business people 'do good' : not really seeing the fullness of a call worked out there

For more obscure examples, i have felt creative solutions come in technical areas ... in both software and science - have felt pieces drop into place in timely ways - one can sense at times the guidance over key pieces - even though many hours or days of precursor work or subsequent refinement is needed,- the slipstream of faith helps, although  operating beyond the thinking of a church service where it might have been incubated.

Thus the instinctive rubric "i will tap into the slipstream of dynamic faith here, 'spiritually, but not culturally'" (formulated in a particularly intense church : but applicable in many)

Having said this, a clerical response might say, of course; faith is meant to be leaven in your life; bringing vision and integrity to whatever it is you do ....

agreed ... but perhaps more could be done to open up the stories of this in church communities; the models of what it means to follow God tend to be silent on such things ... to default either to silence, or more linear ideas of evangelism. Perhaps something more of the diversity and glory of what God has called us all to would be celebrated and empowered.  Silence does tend to privilege entire realms and model the 'ministry' as the fulltime church worker. Dubious theology i think, inheriting a dualism that struggles to include the fullness of what God has made, the very good spoken over creation, the redemptive agenda that reaches to it all.

It might seem churlish or selfish to expand all this - but the risk is we can limit significant roles and ideas of calling and God's activity to a small subset of people or a small subset of activity

I'm not anti church, anti institution - quite the contrary really - i like the laser events -  just have needed to question the assumption that easily sets in - 'what happens here (church based activity) is of most significance' ; when perhaps its just the clearest encoding of a message that needs to live in wider spheres.

Lastly, these are homespun reflections and intuitions, not necessarily well formed statements of philosophy, let alone theology. But if they are an inadequate or impressionistic method for mapping the territory, i should perhaps plead that 20 years of regular church attendance has rarely strayed into discussing how the connections should be conceived.  We sat in leadership in a church once, one of four lay couples, meeting regularly, and even then we never managed to table the stories and challenges and callings of our full time work, much less model that integration to others; such is the gravitational pull of that centre.   A small group is somewhat more agile perhaps. One wants the laser of focussed worship and teaching when together, of course...   yet the rainbow also beckons over wider realms.

lasers and rainbows - home domain

(i reverted this to a draft for a couple of years, as being a bit unbalanced - happier with it now  - balanced it out a bit more - so my son's example has moved on a bit)

(having previously looked at the basic metaphor of tightly focussed lasers against wider rainbows, this post looks at how some of that plays out in a family life; how tightly is faith conceived around church etc)

my son chooses, for his nightly bed time story; whatever he wants ...superheroes, school readers, maybe a recorded book, and sometimes something from his children's bible

there is faith going on in that child

He was happy to miss church this morning and go sailing  ... yet spontaneously asks as we drive out....do we love God? we do don't we dad?

i know him well enough to sense that this is not any anxiety at missing church  ... don't think we've managed to instill that religiosity in him :)

no, its the same impulse i see in him sometimes when he is touched by the experience of worship; when the music and sense of Gods presence draws him in; a response that is genuine ...and i can see that something of that personal intimacy is occuring as drive out under a sunny sky; the relaxed nature of what we are doing has evidently helped opened things for him, and a touch of God is upon him

back to his night time reading : he has asked for a story of Moses recently; likes the little section titled God's rules....and i quite like how it is done; very simplified for a first grader of course

until we get to the 'follow up questions' which are placed at the end of every little chapter:  

"God spoke to Moses and gave him some special rules" (pictures of Moses on mountain)

"How does he speak to us now?" ... pictures of :

of what.....? what should go in there?

the book has chosen to show bibles and church

(not children driving out to sailing boats under sunny skies, relieved to avoid church for the day...experiencing Gods touch and affirmation as we drive)

no, the creation frame is absent ...no mountains...

and other things are absent ...

evidently Moses experienced God in powerful and unusual ways ...but "how does God speak to us now?"

cue, echoed through all evangelical sunday schools : "through the bible and by going to church"

so the experiential dimension of God is relegated to times past; and the New Testament experience is codified as (a) textual, and (b) church centered

of course there is truth in both - studying the Word and assembling together is significant

but something is lost too

where is the prophet on the mountain experiencing God face to face? - the one God calls a friend - in this version

while we don't need to suggest amazing or primitive personal experiences of God are the rule, neither should we rule it out

I feel part of the church's pact with modernism - we will subscribe to belief in a God who is sufficiently transcendent that we can attribute all sorts of attributes to Him, who is distantly conceived of as Author and Judge, and also ascribe some limited personal private experience; he might stir us with a little encouragement.

In between these two extremes ...distant eminence and muted personal presence, we won't expect too much; not a God who actually turns up in biblical dimension.

we call ourselves biblical by knowing the text; but read through the idea of his distant greatness and his general local mildness; no flames of fire.

ironically, though the reformation restored many of the experiental truths of faith, it lost some as well; although the Catholics still preserved an open-ness to supernatural dimension (mixed with various other strange things i know - but my point is they never ruled out the supermatural the way many Protestants effectively have)

(its helpful to not rule life into spiritual and non spiritual bits in arguing against this omission though - the lived experience of life is a spiritual thing - and God's gentle presence and guidance is more often pressed quietly into our hearts in this way; but if He wishes to rain gold dust, i'd like to be there)

next : part (3) lasers and rainbows in the workplace