Don’t Know Pomo

Many people have heard about "postmodernism" but don’t get a clear picture of what it is. Many promoters of pomo give us a lot of punchy "meant to shock you" verbiage about some of the trappings of postmodernism, but never quite get at its essence.

Many of the things often mentioned by pomo promoters are not unique to pomos. You don’t need to be a pomo to want to share rich experiences and relationships. Images and visual aids were around and useful for decades before most people had ever heard of postmodernism. And anyone can write really short sentences. Really.

A key element of postmodernism, sometimes never carefully explained, is the matter of truth. The over-used little story about umpires, in which the pomo umpire thinks he makes a strike a strike by so calling it, leaves the pomo view of truth looking a little more innocent than it really is.

For pomos truth is not and cannot be universal. We can have no glimpse of "the big picture" of the universe and our place in it. This is one reason why "pomos" are unconcerned with arguments and reason and enamored with stories and images. Images and stories can be kept vague and uncertain; they can be invested with different meanings by different observers. That means we don’t have to worry about those bothersome "big pictures" - it leaves plenty of room for the "whatever" attitude.

If you realize that Christianity is a big picture and that built into it is the claim that it is the only correct "big picture" then you can begin to see the problem with trying to make Christianity accommodating to postmodernism. Not all stories are equal. The Christian faith offers His story as the only story of ultimate importance.

It seems there are attempts in every age to accommodate the Christian faith to the spirit of that age. Thomas Jefferson attempted to adapt the Christian faith to one version of Enlightenment thought by producing a Bible with any mention of the supernatural excised from the text. The result was something not at all Christian.

Advocates of pomo ministry have used their own scissors on the Christian faith. They would like to cut the propositional truth content from the Christian faith and replace it with images - maybe, for example, a single image for each point in the sermon, as some have suggested.  Focus on the word "replace" here. That is very important key to what is being attempted.

If that kind of replacement is accomplished the result will be no more Christian than Jefferson’s Bible.