Does Postmodern Theology Risk Becoming What It “Hates?”
I’ve been getting ready to head out to speak at the Subverting the Norm conference this past week or so, and in preparing, I’ve been talking though my presentations with my wife, Amy. Basically, the conference is a dive into the roiling waters of postmodern theological thought, with the aim of addressing the question of whether such theology can exist within the structure of organized religion. I’m a big fan of much of what is being discussed by the forefront thinkers in this area (like Peter Rollins, John Caputo and others), such as critically examining what we believe about God and why. More to the point, perhaps, is the endeavor to free people from the damaging, or at least limiting, religious strictures and conscious constructs that they have built up around God and their faith.
I’m no postmodern theology expert, so I’ll leave it to the pros to explicate more about what’s what in postmodern thought. But for me, the exciting work revolves around supplanting things like binary, propositional “truths” about God with more inductive, open-ended notions of the Divine that transcend religious doctrine or even our own mental constructs of God. This is both a necessary and a liberating process, I think, that indeed can lead the Church (big C Church, that is) toward something far more reconciling and healing for humanity than the modernist approach to faith we’ve employed for many decades now, if not some centuries.
It’s helpful to look back a little bit at where we’ve come from in our religious and theological evolution of thought and practice. At the risk of geeking out on something that puts everyone to sleep, I’ll try to make this quick and fairly painless. Interestingly, it can be argued that the more fundamentalist strain of Christianity can trace its origins back to the “liberal” thinking following the Enlightenment that suggested all things – faith, God and religious thought included – could be explained by rational means. This hyper-rationalism sought to build up rhetorical constructs that made a case for God, so to speak, as well as buttressing the doctrines of the Church.
But it also led to division, power struggles and the kind of other-izing that has opened the gate to religiously-fueled violence in the past. We may be a bit more subtle about it today than they were back during the Salem witch trials or the crusades, but the attempt to hyper-rationalize faith still leaves much human colateral damage in its wake. Just ask one of the millions who claim emotional abuse or neglect when a religious leader or even a family member placed their belief above the humanity of the “other.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christianpiatt/2013/04/does-postmodern-theology-risk-becoming-what-it-hates/
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