What Language Shall I
Borrow
Old
Testament Reading: 1 Samuel 26:17-25
New Testament Reading:
Mark 8:34-35
We have just completed a spiritual
retreat. I was quite happy not to be the leader of it. I was able to
participate as one more congregant, like in the old days before I dared
don the pastoral mantel. I would like to continue in that role this
morning, not so much as a preacher as a confessor. Let me give a
testimony, a statement of where I stand. Not so much an exhortation as a
witness.
You know the difference between the
two. At least ostensibly a sermon is admonitory, hortatory: it sets forth
a notion or a course of action that the preacher feels you ought to
embrace. A sermon, then, is more presumptuous. But a testimony has less
hubris. The giver of a testimony, on the other hand, merely says, "I will
attest what the Lord has done for me." "This poor man cried and Yahweh
heard him and delivered him out of a miry pit." The testifier knows that
his testimony may have absolutely no validity beyond the range of the end
of his nose. Hearing it, one might be emboldened to seek great things from
God on one's own behalf, but one would not necessarily expect the same
things. We are told that the people rejoiced in the miracle births of
Isaac and John the Baptist, but not that all the barren women of the
neighborhood concluded God would work the same miracle for them. They
learned a more general lesson, namely, that nothing shall be impossible
for God.
So I want to testify today. I am
speaking strictly for myself. But if you should find anything worthy,
anything true, anything noble or worthy of emulation, I welcome you to
think on these things. If not, just hear me out. I want to share with you
the rudiments of a postmodern spirituality. A rudimentary spirituality, if
not a postmodern one, is the only kind I know.
You know by now that postmodern and
Deconstructive thinking have shaped my approach to a great degree. I have
talked with some of you on various occasions about these matters. I want
to open a window to the impact of these ideas on my religious thinking and
preaching.
There are, as I see it, three main
conditions of post-modernity, three realizations that lead to the
postmodern perspective. The first of these is the loss of any objective,
neutral standpoint outside us, between us, in which one might hope to
stand in order to evaluate all the competing doctrines and religions and
ideologies. There is no court of appeal, no way to definitively settle
arguments and debates. Any set of criteria you advance in order to
establish your view as the best one actually are the product of
your viewpoint. They do not stand outside it at all.
Do the other religions seem deficient
to you because they lack the atonement of Christ or the doctrine of
salvation by grace through faith? Well, these things seem indispensable to
you only because you are already a Christian. Or to take another example,
we have always judged the author's intention to be the definitive,
authoritative reading of the Biblical text. But there can be no definitive
reading. No doctrine of authority can stand as long as it is based on the
will-o-the-wisp of an objective, "correct" interpretation of the Bible.
Postmoderns realize there is no such beast available.
The second trait of postmodernity is
what the French Jewish philosopher Edmond Jabes, followed by Derrida,
calls "the death of the Book." Lyotard calls it the breakdown of the
Master Narrative. Each culture and religion is defined by a distinctive
story. That story may be myth or history. It says what we are all about.
Or what we think we are all about. The master narrative, the
defining story of America is that of the Revolution of 1776, the
Declaration of Independence, the Civil War as an atonement for the
national crime of slavery, Manifest Destiny, Immigration and the Melting
Pot, the dominance of the English language and the Judaeo-Christian
tradition.
The master narrative of the Christian
religion is the story of the Creation, the Fall in Eden, Original Sin, the
choosing of the Patriarchs, Moses and the Exodus, Joshua and the Conquest,
King David, the Prophets, the Exile, Jesus Christ, his cross and tomb,
Easter, the Apostles bearing witness to the nations, the ossifying of the
church into legalism, Martin Luther, Wesley, Billy Graham, and someday the
Second Coming.
The Epics of all the nations, the
Mahabharata, the Siegfried Saga, etc., all these are narratives that
create and justify and govern cultures and their twins, religions. Each
story once seemed infallibly true and noble to the adherents of it. It was
easy to be sure the world was defined the way your scriptural epic said
when the only time you encountered readers of a rival epic was on the
battlefield. You could not take seriously their story. It would be like
taking Axis Sally seriously!
All these cultural and religious master
narratives were like so many self-contained books in a vast library. Or
like competing titles on the shelf at a bookstore. But now the
self-contained Book is gone. The boundaries between the different
histories and worldviews of different cultures and faiths are rapidly
collapsing. We do live in the Global Village. You cannot simply choose to
remain ignorant of all the other stories told by your neighbors. You
cannot love your neighbor without coming in some measure to love that
story that makes him who he is. And as this happens, all the
narratives are becoming blurred, losing their sharp out lines, blending
together.
The Jew and Christian begin to
dialogue. Can Jews accept Jesus as a prophet? Can Christians accept
Muhammad as a prophet? Can Christians accept that God has a separate
covenant with Israel? Christians are beginning to try on the Eastern
doctrine of Reincarnation, or the secularist doctrine that there is no
life beyond death. Liberal theology long ago assimilated many of the
rationalist assumptions of the
Enlightenment. The stories, the worldviews, the heritages, all blend into
one another. One cannot keep them apart. Textmerge, intertextuality, is
the result.
The third mark of postmodernity is the
disappearance of the self as what Richard Rorty calls the Mirror of
Nature. We once thought knowledge was just as simple as beholding the
truth in the light of consciousness. Now we realize that what we call
self-evident is anything but! What seems clear and distinct is a highly
censored and edited amalgam. What seem to us "first principles" are
actually the end product of hidden processes. Even the self itself is the
visible tip of a much greater iceberg that we can never know. It is a
lens, a looking glass, and no one can say who is the looker through the
glass. Is it the subconscious self that we can never know?
Here's what postmodernity means for me
in terms of spirituality. Number one: my experience as a Christian can not
be exalted over the other religious options. They are all beautiful,
picturesque continents on which one may dwell, through which one may
journey. For me the Bible is an ocean in which we may all swim, no longer
a weapon which I may wield to prove I am more orthodox than you. A true
doctrine is something I no longer claim to have, and which I do not even
seek. I am persuaded that I will make greater progress on the assumption
that the truth is the whole, and that if I start dividing it between
affirmations and denials, I will have sundered the truth into half-truths,
all lies.
Number two: the Books, the narratives,
of all the religions have merged into a super-epic. The order of the
chapters is not clear, nor which one is the conclusion. The great joy of
the journey of spiritual learning may in fact be the game of reshuffling
the chapters and reading them in a different order each time. Does the Old
Testament find its fulfillment in the New? Does the New find its fullness
in the Old? Or in the Koran? Can I understand the Sermon on the Mount
without having read the Bhagavad Gita first? I do not think so. The Book
of Christian exclusivism is dead. It has burst the bonds of those tight
black covers and melded itself with the coverless texts of all the other
books. And all are holy scripture.
But number three is the greatest
realization for me. The death of the self as judge and infallible
observer, the shattering of the self as the mirror of truth gives new
meaning to the saying of Jesus, "Whoever would save his life shall lose
it, and whoever will lose his life, the same shall save it." How can it be
the Christian thing to do to agonize over the salvation of one's soul? Is
this not the clinging to the self that Jesus warns is sure to be
counterproductive in its results? Bonhoeffer explained that the would be
disciple who is ever looking to his own spiritual progress, is equally for
ever looking away from Christ and therefore ever regressing. Forget that
self! Only so can you let him save it who can! Christ, not you!
I would put the problem a bit
differently. Ever since the dawn of liberal, Modernist theology,
theologians have been asked, and asked themselves, whether they could
still claim the name Christian. Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen
felt that Modernists had so redefined Christianity that they had made it
into some thing else. They were only confusing the issue by still calling
themselves Christians. Our illustrious former pastor, Harry Emerson
Fosdick, argued on the other hand, that the central and abiding core of
Christian religion was the experience of God as shown forth by Jesus. As
long as Jesus remained a beacon, a catalyst for the type of piety he
embodied, we who strive to share it may call ourselves Christians
unashamedly. Machen and his fellows, Fosdick implied, were the real
innovators, invoking as shibboleths a raft of doctrines of which Jesus had
certainly never heard.
Fosdick and Machen, the Modernist and
the Antimodernist, battling over the name "Christian," were like two men
on a windy day fighting over a single hat. There were two cold heads that
needed covering. But as a postmodernist, I say there is no head, no peg,
to hang the hat on! There is no stable entity called a self that need
agonize over it's identity, as if it could possess one!
What am "I"? Am "I" a Christian? A
secularist? A Buddhist? What would it mean for me to claim any of these
titles? Would it not mean hat I have at length decided to bestow my
imprimatur on one of the options as the true one? What presumption! How
dare I make such a judgment?
And how could I learn enough in a
lifetime to become competent to make such a choice? Am I a contestant on a
game show, where I have a limited time to decide which is the right
religion?
The great traditions loom up before me
like a Himalayan range. I am the merest gnat buzzing idly about their
foothills. It makes no difference to the mountains as to which of them I
buzz about today or tomorrow. For me to think that it matters which
mountain is this gnat's favorite is the most extravagant Narcissism! My
choice between them is utterly insignificant.
It is for this reason, to change the
metaphor, that I personally have come to view the great religious
traditions as a well-laid Smorgasbord from which I may sample greedily. I
am like an independent voter, caring not to commit myself to the
ideological line of any particular party. And this is not because I view
myself as an Enlightenment Individualist, a lone wolf, the captain of my
fate. Just the opposite! I know that my selfhood is merely a role. It is
not a valuable vote to be cast in favor of some dubious candidate for the
truth. I do not have such power. My vote will not make any truth more
true. My endorsement will not benefit the truth as if it were a product I
might influence others to buy.
I view myself as having set forth on a
long journey through many exotic lands. There are things to do in each
place, goods to be gained. And in order to learn what may be learned in
each place I must learn the language spoken there. I must change languages
as I move on, from Buddhism to Liberal Christian Theology, to
Deconstruction, and so on. I must adopt the working models and the
assumptions of each, or I will not learn what each has to teach me. I
borrow each language in turn.
Where am I now? Where are we? We find
ourselves in a Christian church. We are speaking the Christian language
and discussing the things that are available only in that language. Are we
Christians? Let me turn to a new use one of Billy Graham's images: being
in a church doesn't make you a Christian any more than being in a garage
makes you a car.
It seems to me that to be a genuinely
free spiritual community, and yet a Christian community, one in which the
Christian language is spoken, requires some such stance. The very analogy
implies one might have some legitimate business in the garage other than
being a parked car. As long as I am pastor of this church, my only
question will be, not "Are you a car in good standing? Let's see your
inspection sticker." I'm not sure I would pass inspection myself! Rather
the question is "Do you have any business in the garage? Yes? Then come on
in."
Copyright©2009 by Robert
M Price
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