The Problem/Mystery of Preaching: Part 3—Postmodernism, Secularism, and Pluralism

The following excerpts from the introduction of David’s new book, see Preaching at the Crossroads: How the World—and Our Preaching—Is Changing (December 2013), are used by permission of Augsburg Fortress.

[There are] three dominant ways of describing the changes that have shaped and continue to influence our culture and world over the last half century:  postmodernism, secularism, and pluralism.

My guess is that we all have at least a passing familiarity with these terms and wouldn’t dispute that they are central elements of our current culture and world. But getting a handle on the challenges they present is another matter altogether. It’s one thing to say we live in a postmodern world, but it’s another to allow that knowledge to shape our preaching so as to respond to that world.

Help from Tillich

To help us embrace and respond to these three dimensions of our time, I want to hearken back to an observation made by Paul Tillich. Tillich once divided world history into three distinct phases based on the dominant question of the age. For the ancient world, Tillich argued, the question was one of life and death: How does one escape the finality of death to enjoy life eternal? In the Middle Ages, the question changed to one of guilt and forgiveness: Given original sin, how do we rnd a merciful God who will overlook our guilt and oqer us forgiveness? In the modern era, in which and for which Tillich wrote, the conversation had moved to existential questions of meaninglessness and meaning: How do I make sense of my life and my place in the world?^{3 [1]}

What I like about Tillich’s approach is that it invites us to look at the evolving history of the Christian tradition not as a series of solutions to different problems but rather as an ongoing, curious, and lively engagement with the questions that people living at particular times were asking. Tillich, in other words, was suggesting that Christian theology, at its best, embraces the mystery of the culture in which it finds itself so it can understand, appreciate, and ultimately speak into that mystery in ways that are appropriate and helpful.

Postmodernism

When it comes to postmodernism, the primary question is epistemological: How do we know for certain whether anything is true? Hence, the primary challenge that postmodernism presents is whether we can speak honestly and intelligibly about truth in a world of competing truth claims….

Postmodernists are fairly skeptical about our ability to do so. Indeed, it is precisely this skepticism about discovering, let alone describing, objective truth—the goal that coalesced in the Enlightenment and was prosecuted across modernity—that marks the period as postmodern. The casualty of such skepticism has been certainty, the belief that we can know anything for sure. But the possibility latent in such loss is the rediscovery of a vibrant faith that rests not on objective data but on the confessions, truth claims, and shared experiences of the Christian community.

Secularism

Contrary to postmodernism, secularism has not rebelled against the notion of truth but rather against the idea that truth is rooted in God. Secularism accepts the modern impulse to consign religion to the private sphere of our lives and takes that to its natural conclusion—determining that religion, and therefore the God that animates it, has little to no place in the public sphere.

Hence, secularism is marked first and foremost by a loss of transcendence and the conviction that what we see around us, the material and physical world, is finally all there is. This materialism, while it flourished for a few decades, has more recently induced a crisis of hope, a growing conviction that whatever our advances, we cannot validate our material pursuits as legitimate, let alone worthwhile. The questions of the secular age are therefore more existential: Where do we find hope? Do my life and my labor have any enduring value or meaning?

The challenge Christian preachers have faced since the Enlightenment and increasingly with the full blooming of the secular age in the late twentieth century has been to justify the transcendent claims of Christianity in light of the more immanent standards of human reason. But as the secular story has fallen short, providing a too-limited view of human life, preachers have the opportunity to offer hearers hope rooted in the audacious claims of the biblical story, in this way not only recovering a palpable sense of hope but also reclaiming much of our ordinary lives as arenas in which we can experience the ongoing work of God to love and bless the world.

Pluralism

Pluralism, the third element of our cultural landscape I [explore in Preaching at the Crossroads], emerged as the great paradox of a secular age that ended up being, against most predictions, highly religious age. But that religiousness is of a distinctly different character than the one our parents knew. Faced with a plethora of religious and spiritual options, as well as a host of other meaning-making narratives, Christians who could not adopt a conservative isolationism in relation to the pluralistic culture in which we live have developed a more cosmopolitan outlook that stresses the value of all religious views.

Whatever the intrinsic value of such an open-minded position, the downside has been an increasing inability to name the distinctiveness of Christianity. This has resulted in a corresponding loss of Christian identity that has had grave consequences for church attendance. As people find themselves nearly overwhelmed by the number of opportunities and obligations presented to them, and absent a sense of the distinctiveness or utility of the Christian narrative, they have increasingly chosen to do something other than worship at church on Sunday morning, something presumably more meaningful to them than listening to well-crafted sermons and singing classic hymns.

The pressing questions of the pluralistic age therefore take shape around identity, both individual and communal: What does it mean to be Christian? How does the Christian story help me make sense of and navigate my life? In a world saturated by meaning-making stories, how do we pass ours on? Despite the numerous challenges that arise from living in a world of many faiths and stories, there are also significant opportunities for preachers. In particular, if we take seriously the possibility that preaching is not only called to proclaim the hope-creating promises of the gospel but also to help believers own and articulate those promises for themselves, we may not only reconfigure preaching but also fashion a useful and compelling Christian identity for this and future generations.

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Photo Credit: “navigator” by tabsinthe – CC by 2.0

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