The Challenge of Modernity and Postmodernity to Preaching

[역사학도]

The Challenge of Modernity and Postmodernity to Preaching

Author: Dae Ryeong Kim

Published on: March 20, 2005

Lesslie Newbigin describes the faith commitment within the modern secular western culture as the belief that the scientific method – which has been so enormously fruitful for human life – is the only reliable way of understanding the total human situation.  When Christians are unwilling to challenge that, then it will affect the gospel proclamation of the Church because the gospel becomes either: (a) just something that is helpful, 'It helps me in my personal life'; or (b) something which degenerates into mere moralism – 'This is what you ought to do' – so that preaching becomes either telling people what they ought to do, or lambasting people because of what they do; or (c) something which just offers people some kind of personal 'spiritual' consolation, but does not challenge people's understanding of what is the real world they have to deal with (Walker 1988). 

To put it in plain words, one may apply this insight of Newbigin to the question of life problem.  One's attitude to faith may differ depending on whether one seeks to find the answer from the Bible or one relies on the scientific method.  What Newbigin notices is that most modern people have the faith commitment.  In this situation, and if Christians do not challenge that, Christian faith is marginalized within the modern secular western culture.  This is a very different paradigm from that of the Puritan period.  In modernity, preaching is reduced to the matter of advice, moral discourse or consolation.  Thus, there is a challenge to preaching that comes from modernity.

Another challenge to preaching comes from postmodernity.  According to Lesslie Newbigin, there are a group of biblical scholars who have come to terms with the postmodernist development of modernism.  It is characteristic of the postmodernists, following Nietzsche, that they do not expect answers in the form of eternal truths. They practice rather the “hermeneutic of suspicion” which leads the student of an ancient record to ask not What is the truth which is here articulated? But what is the interest which is here being advanced?  The biblical material is thus interpreted in terms of the various power struggles in Israel and in the church. For example, a passage in the Old Testament is really an assertion of the claims of the northern kingdom against those of Judah or of the kingship against democratic forces.  In the New Testament, the Pastoral Epistles are an attempt to assert the authority of the developing episcopate against the more prophetic and charismatic traditions of the early church (Newbigin 1995b:83).  Thus, the “hermeneutic of suspicion” represents the case of theology assimilated to postmodern assumptions.  As a result, their Bible interpretation becomes the reflection of their postmodern worldview.

While repudiating both "historical criticism" from modernity and  "hermeneutic of suspicion" from postmodernity, Newbigin introduces what he calls “healthy skepticism.”  All human thinking takes place within a “plausibility structure” which determines what beliefs are responsible and what are not.  Now, it is a Christian congregation as a community of truth that has the missionary task to challenge this plausibility structure.  The Christian community is eligible for this task in that the reigning plausibility structure can only be effectively challenged by people who are fully integrated inhabitants of another.  Every person living in a “modern” society is subject to an almost continuous bombardment ideas, images, slogans, and stories which presuppose a plausibility structure radically different from that which is controlled by the Christian understanding of human nature and destiny.  Now, a Christian congregation is a community in which, through the constant remembering and rehearsing of the true story of human nature and destiny, an attitude of “healthy skepticism” can be sustained.   By “healthy skepticism” Newbigin denotes a skepticism which enables one to take part in the life of society without being bemused and deluded by its own beliefs about itself.

To summarize this discussion, the faith commitment in the scientific method in modernity affects preaching in the way the proclamation of salvation is reduced to the level of an ethical discourse.  In postmodernity, preaching may not be challenged by the faith commitment in the scientific method.  Postmodernism does not marginalize faith and the spiritual truth.   But the postmodernists the postmodernists expect answers in the form of eternal truths.  Thus, while modernity affects the contents of preaching, postmodernity affects the hermeneutics of the Bible.  What is required in this situation is a new understanding of preaching.  Traditionally, it is the preacher who alone assumes the task of preaching.  But for the mission of the Church in a postmodern world, the Christian congregation has an important role as a community of truth.  A Christian congregation is a community in which an attitude of “healthy skepticism” can be sustained.

In addition, Newbigin presents narrative theology for alternative Bible interpretation without the influence of the Enlightenment on both liberal and fundamental theologies.  Narrative theology makes it possible to interpret the Bible without fragmentation.  While historical criticism tends to make fragments of the biblical account, narrative theology focuses on the whole picture of the biblical stories.