The Emerging God of Emergent Theology (with Intro)

"People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived,

reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone." - Anon

 

 

Introduction

Today's article reflects a good portion of what we've been working through at Relevancy22.  Hence, I would like to submit some emergent statements eliciting our previous body of thoughts these past 18 months. Please do not deem this list as in any way complete, but as a cursory reading to an evolving topic daily challenging us towards a newer, more relevant perspective than is presently being found in today's church dogmas and practices.

By way of introduction, I do often think of God through the eyes of the Reformed author AW Tozer in his classical expressions of God's Greatness, as an All-Powerful Being, All-Knowing, Everywhere Present, and so forth.... But even as I do, I do also realize that these are classic expressions of God not fully connected to the God of the Bible, but more historically entrenched in early  Aristotelian (Greek) thought of the early church (cf. Wikipedia re Aristotle) that proceeded into the ensuing Middle Ages till modified in the cultural enlightenment of the Renaissance Age. Which then gave birth to the Reformation Age and the Reformed Theology of Luther, Calvin, Wesley, from which AW Tozer emerged to speak warm insights of God's transcendency into our (existential) mortal lives.

As such, I wish to temper those cherished, classic Christian expressions of God, our faith, and worship, by relating them to the postmodern experiences of today's faith expectations and beliefs. By speaking to the frailty of our mortal life as caught between the traces of life and death; its unknowing and uncertainty, its despairs and laments; its awfulness and tragedy; its beauty and grace; its mysteries and elegance. Though these experiences have not changed from biblical times till now, it seems that our perception of God has changed, making Him less relevant, less real, less involved in our lives... even removed from our lives and societies.

Backing up a bit, you find this type of reality when casually reading the Bible through the ancient's eyes - that of a people and a God in relational juxtaposition with one another - each asking of the other the deeper questions of existence, meaning, survival, and legacy. What we don't find are doctrinal expressions of God particularly laid out in logistic arguments and dunning syllogisms, that would reframe God's work and grace between us and Him, like we do now.... Enacting a wall of dogmatism and church folklore that would prevent us from beholding the fullness and the reality of God. Even so, what we do find in the biblical story are running narratives of peoples lives before an ever-present God who intercedes vigorously into our desperate lives by works of grace and judgment, helps and assists, and sundry other matters. Similarly, the ancients had their own philosophical walls of beliefs and practices as evidenced to their strong reaction against the proclamations of the OT Prophets. And later, during the Gospel Era, as also evidenced by the rejection of God's NT prophets from John the Baptist, to Jesus, to the Apostles.

Albeit, even in these postmodernistic times God does vigorously intercede through the Holy Spirit into the daily lives of mankind, however mundane we think His efforts may be. For the truths of our mortal experiences are all too well known to those seeking help, or release, from the trials and dilemmas portending life's thin veil of promises too easily ripped away from our world-weary hands and doubting hearts. Who, like trusting aspirants,  would brave life's many vagaries as despairing disciples, or as faith-filled seekers, to God's promised keeps and eternal watch, despite all harm and waste  and moiling struggles. This can only be done by revisualizing the God of the Bible, and not the God of our Aristotelian dreams and stricter transcendent Reformed doctrines. By remembering that God is in an everyday relationship with humanity, and especially with His children of faith, with whom He provides helps, assists, enlightenment, empowerment, daily wisdom, grace, mercy and forgiveness (to mention a few).

And when we see Him not, nor feel God's presence, we do not despair in the harm and defeat that life can often bring. But remember that God's presence and advocacy is a moment-by-moment applied reality to our lives to which our trust and faith so proclaims through the words of the Bible. That this God is not the product of our hands, like some idol or idolized idea, who may instantly gratify or miraculously deliver when deep trouble comes. But to remember that even still, He is present with us in the valleys of shadows and death, as much as at the feast-laden tables spread before us. He is an emerging God to our life's daily complexities merging His promises of renewal and redemption where He can by our allowance and insistence in obedience and faith.

In the meantime, we are to work through the challenges of today's church doctrines too-easily conflicted by our human expectations and idolized dreams of what God must do and be, so as to present to our hearts a more realistic idea of God's promises within the post-modernistic demands of humanity's cynicisms, defeats, hopelessness, and denials. Yes, I do want a strong God who can defeat sin and temptations, the devil and injustice, selfishness and greed. But this process is as much a "within" problem as it is a "without" problem. That God's love and peace begins with us first before it can affect others beyond ourselves.

While also realizing that with our submission reconciliation and goodwill are not guaranteed but does put into action outlying eddies of gathering strength and will through the Holy Spirit. Who takes what we give Him and blesses it as He can in this world of sin and woe. Even so, it is to God's heart that we daily practice forgiveness and mercy - despite failures and defeats, lack of progress or certainties. To defeat sin is to share God's love. There are no further magic formulas than this.

As such, what may we expect from an Emergent Theology for the postmodern church today as it recasts a transcendent God into the vernacular comportment of our lives so that we behold this same God as our Incarnational Present and Future. Who no longer inhabits the heavens above (according to ancient cosmologies) but the earth below in His incarnational presence (begun with the birth of Jesus who was the very essence God not only in reflection but in substance of being). And upon Jesus' physical ascendance empowered His divine Godhead to be lived out through the embodiment of His living church and indwelling Holy Spirit within the everyday presence of mankind?

Whose Spirit courses through the veins of humanity and speaks to our lives words of grace and truth, justice and wisdom, forgiveness and mercy, to all men everywhere. This is the God that the Bible speaks of. Who comes and makes His dwelling among men. Who, in the distant past, envisioned His creational presence into relational relevancy. Who understood the need for restoring, redeeming, renewing, reclaiming, reviving His wayward creation unto Himself by His Incarnational presence and ministry. No, we are not left alone. God is a very present help to all who cry out or yearn for His presence. Though God may feel far away during times of great trial He is the nearest to us in presence and fellowship, comfort and peace, hope and resurrection.

So then, what do we mean by "The Emerging God of Emergent Theology?" Just who is this God?


The Emergent God of Emergent Theology

First - Emergent Theology requires that we think of God in (i) non-classical terms; (ii) in non-dualistic categories (the past era of modernistic Enlightenment majored in these themes); and (iii) in open and relational terms of growth and evolvement as a Spiritual Being who is in an open and evolving relationship to the cosmos, the environment, mankind, and even Himself (this is known as relational theism as versus classical theism).

Second - we are evolving (or, becoming) within our being, our senses, our knowledge, our understanding, and our fulfillment or destiny. Even so is the Creator of the universe evolving (or becoming) within these same faculties. We know this upon the basis of God's relationship with us. And vice versa upon our relationship to Him. Because God is relational (sic, the Trinity), so we are relational. Hence, God's image is reflected in us as much as our image is reflected in Him (though in a limiting, more finite sense). And it is through His image we may commune each with the other relationally.

Accordingly, we each are evolving. And evolving together. In becoming. And becoming together. Both God and humanity (and His creation by extension) are emerging towards some greater resolution of completeness. And until that time of restoration is complete, God is incomplete. Despite classical theism's assertion that He is complete in Himself. Relational theism says that this cannot be so, so long as the cosmos is incomplete to which the Creator-God is infinitely bound.

 

Third - God's knowledge of the future is incomplete because of the indeterminacy that He has placed within the heart of the cosmos... and, within that of humanity itself by free will. The opposite of this (in dualistic terms!) is Determinism which would annul the idea of free will. If we lived in a mechanistic creation being automatons ourselves than there is no idea of completeness, or hope of renewal, or teleology of redemption. For all is complete within a deterministic environment to which we may only live out our mean parts as puppet to the universe's meticulous rule (some agnostic evolutionists and cosmologists like to posit this strategem; an evolutionary creationist/theist will not).

However, if all is indetermined than we have another type of future - an unknown future. Both to us and to God. Making the enterprise of the operation of creation unpredictable and surprising to God each and every day (this is known as Open Theology compounded by the problem of sin). To which God may hold within Himself such emotions as dismay, disappointment, hatred, anger, joy, delight, satisfaction, hope, love and forgiveness. Even as these same emotions may be present within our breast to each day's trials and turmoils, beauty and grace.

This position does not make God less Sovereign, but it does make God more open to possibilities and probable outcomes based upon a studied wisdom applied to situational events and social intricacies. Since creating-granting-instilling free will to creation and mankind, God's applied Sovereignty must work in-and-around this creational blessing both terrible and glorious (this dilemma sounds almost Shakespearean doesn't it?). Hence, not only do we live with the complexity of open futures, so does God - but on a much, much larger cosmic/human scale.

Fourth - our classical statements of God give to us not the God of the Bible, but a God of our classical systems. Against this temptation comes the aide of postmodernism to help us become accountable to all previous church statements of God that are un-God-like (known as bounded-set categories of thought and doctrine as versus open-set categories). Consequently, any would-be postmodern theologian must re-adjust classical theologies of God so that they may become more biblically described and backfilled with theological potentiality than the static, closed frameworks that do now exist (whether admitted or not).

As example, these boundaries may apply to ourselves as much as to the church. For God is not dead, nor irrelevant, unless we make of Him that idea. If God is dead it is we ourselves who have made God dead. To declare an ignorance of God, or a disbelief in God, does not remove God's existence. Only the application of His existence to the one who declares such beliefs. However, an evolving, emerging theology of God will allow doubters, disbelievers and even the faithful as one people to whom God embraces. I speak in the sense of the corporate, human solidarity of mankind, where doubt and disbelief is commonly found, even amongst God's faithful.

More often this phrase "one people" is understood to apply to the church itself when telling of a biblically covenanted remnant of obedient souls who are redeemed by faith. Here, I wish to use it to describe the solidarity of God to mankind. To a humanity whom God blesses with His presence; Who tarries before man's questions and doubts, disbeliefs and sarcasms; Who will not leave us to ourselves however much we would wish it. Though assuredly there are consequences to our actions and speech, even still, God can, and will, redeem by faith's acceptance. Even the irredeemable, the unreachable, the deep skeptic and cynic. Emergent theology says that God is a God to all men and women, not just to the faithful, or the religious believer, but to all men and women of whatever color or stripe, shape or condition (speaking metaphorically). This is the solidarity of God with humanity. This is the promise of God as man's Creator who has placed upon Himself the further burden, or responsibility, to redeem, reclaim, revive, renew, rebirth, restore.

As such, God's work of salvation is unbounded by man's sinful heart, whom He would commune with in grace and mercy, love and forgiveness, until the disbelieving heart doubts no longer. Though no arguments can prevent a disbelieving heart, even still, at the heart's end will be the God disbelieved. A God who will never abandon us to ourselves. Who will be present with us even when refused. Lo, Jesus promises that He will never leave us nor forsake those that seek after Him. But that He will redeem as He can, if allowed to do so. It is that simple, regardless of the restrictions many churches seem to place upon the liberating gospel of Christ. It is God Himself who will stand as man's ultimate Advocate and Mediator. Not the church. Nor its dogmas. Nor its faith practices. Faith is the only one requirement to redemption's release into the lives of the penitent, the seeker, the broken. God is everywhere found regardless of our Christian formulas of election and judgment. Let then the gospel of Jesus be as unbounded. And let us see the value of humanity from the heart of the Savior and not from the heart of the religious, the legalist, the perfectionist, or the circumspect. These are unnecessary barriers before the God of all souls.

Fifth - a more literary reading is required for searching and studying Scriptures than the normative literal reading that is now occurring to the obscurity of Scriptural understanding. To refuse recognizing the meaningful categories of literary genre within the Bible will only continue the fiction of believing a historical-grammatical hermeneutic is being utilized when in fact it is neither historical, nor grammatical, when reduced (or omitted) before the larger dogma of reading the Bible "literally." Consequently, God remains unrevealed to such a readership. Hence, God becomes static and closed. As is the Bible. As is worship and faith. However, a literary reading of the Bible will produce a dynamic, open theology of God, the Bible, worship and faith (this is known as an Open Hermeneutic).

Sixth - sin, death, destruction, evil, harm and injustice do continue against the will and very pleasure of God. And yet, God is no less Sovereign, as He threads His plans for renewal, recreation, restoration, reclamation, rebirth, and redemption for both the cosmos and for humanity. This in incomprehensible to us but nonetheless true. We might classify this as an open problem to the dilemma of living but the category of Incarnational Revelation and Redemption may sufficiently speak to this area. Or put another way, God's Incarnational presence gives to us our Incarnational future.

Seventh - An open theology will work towards reducing our conception of God in dualistic categories. God is neither strong nor weak, perfect nor imperfect (which is one of my complaints per the accompanying article below), passive nor impassive, decisive nor indecisive. When we do this it limits our perception of God while also imperfectly describing God. We would do better to obtain an open description of God than a closed, classic description of God.

The article I've included below shows how a contemporary Jewish theologian uses biblical grammar, context, and linguistics, to arrive at a more appropriate contextual theology of God as versus later arising classical statements of God based upon presumptive logic. Which in this case seems attributable to the earlier Greek paradigms of thought and logic, cosmology and nature, gods and men, from which derived the Early Church's Hellenistic doctrines of God as Judaism dimmed in its backview mirror.

As such, efforts are underway in revisioning the New Testament in Jewish (non-Hellenistic) terminology, and is known as the "New Perspective of Paul" by which classical theism derived from Pauline doctrine is re-expressed into the Jewish terms that Paul once preached. The gospel of Jesus should be as integral to Paul's teachings as Paul's thoughts were to Jesus' day of ministry. Together, both Jesus and Paul were revisioning Judaism's theology of God to a theology more appropriately pertinent to the God that the Jewish priests and organized temple professed to worship. We would do well to do the same today with our church systems and dogmas in reflective light lest we ignore God's postmodern day prophets burdened to preach God's revelation of light, light, grace and glory.

Eighth - in all of this, Emergent Theology can be said to be evolving. Or, emerging. That it is willing to critique past theological judgments, and in the presiding, perhaps deliver a fuller, more comprehensive concept to those same judgments using the helps of more up-to-date tools found in today's evolutionary sciences and advanced studies of philosophy, linguistics, behavioralism, archaeology, and anthropology, to mention a few. Especially as set within the framework of a reconstructive postmodernism that provides both ground-and-base to attempt these formidable tasks.

To realize that each age of the Bible had its own perspectives and spiritual needs is to understand that no one "-ology" can cover all these differences. Emergent theology will allow for the application of postmodern studies into each historical social application without prejudicing the outcome to a set standard of expectations. The Bible is not so simple a book as to be comprehensively read or understood by any one individual or view. In the preponderance of submitted studies will arise a currency of theological thought that cannot be reflective of any one view but a reconstruction of all applicable views into that of our own philosophic needs and wants. As such, emergent theology is an evolving, emerging theology.

Ninth - Our concept of God must be open. To grasp the concept that God "Will Be what He Will Be" is exciting because it gives to us hope that we "may be what we may be" by God's help. And by the Holy Spirit's guidance, as we are borne along on the wings of each new-day to the dusks of the setting sun in reconstructive vision and amplitude within God's rectifying sovereignty. Simply said, we have an open future underlain by the promises of the God who restores and renews.

 

Like ourselves, God is not a static being either. In the popular orthodox understanding of the biblical description of God as the One who Is ("I Am that I Am") we sometimes complete this statement by telling of a God who "Completes what He has started." Which is true enough, but a closer reading of the imperfect tense of the biblical expression tells us that God "Will Be what He Will Be." Which I take to infer that even God Himself is being challenged in His grace and glory to provide the promise of His salvation regardless of the corruption of sin and causality of free will divinely imparted in both nature and humanity.

Significantly, the one is a result of the latter - that is, sin is a result of free will as given and exercised. As such, each have been seeded into the fabric of the universe - one purposefully (free will). The other affectively (sin). And within this complex tapestry God will redeem what He has set in motion without hindering the very operation of free will that created the problem of sin in the first place. To this God tells us that "He will Be what He will Be." It is an ontological expression with functional (or teleological) import.

 

Tenth - regardless, of how we understand sin's origin, God will be what He will be,  which humbly tells us that even God Himself is emerging (like ourselves) towards a completeness we may only find by God's grace and mercy as foundationally secured through Jesus. Consequently, God's redemption of mankind will provide even His own "redemption" towards completeness and order (as found in the Jewish concept of Shalom).

Finally - the application of the metaphysical categories of perfection do not overlay well with the ontological categories of being. This is a human foible of misunderstanding as illustrated below by Hazony's argument which is more in line with Jewish hermeneutical interpretation than it is with Emergent theology (though it does exhibit Emergent-like rhetoric as noted in our list above). Even so, God is God, and His Being does overwhelm our senses and our knowing. It is enough to know that God is our Redeemer. And that we are His through Christ Jesus, our Savior and Lord. Rest in this therefore, and be at peace.

 

R.E. Slater

December 15, 2012

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 

An Imperfect God

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/an-imperfect-god/?smid=fb-share

 

The Stone: By Yoram Hazony

November 25, 2012

Comments

 

A God who is perfectly powerful can not also be perfectly good

 

 

Is God perfect? You often hear philosophers describe “theism” as the belief in a perfect being — a being whose attributes are said to include being all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly simple, and necessarily existent (among others). And today, something like this view is common among lay people as well.

 

There are two famous problems with this view of God. The first is that it appears to be impossible to make it coherent. For example, it seems unlikely that God can be both perfectly powerful and perfectly good if the world is filled (as it obviously is) with instances of terrible injustice. Similarly, it’s hard to see how God can wield his infinite power to instigate alteration and change in all things if he is flat-out immutable. And there are more such contradictions where these came from.

 

The second problem is that while this “theist” view of God is supposed to be a description of the God of the Bible, it’s hard to find any evidence that the prophets and scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”) thought of God in this way at all. The God of Hebrew Scripture is not depicted as immutable, but repeatedly changes his mind about things (for example, he regrets having made man). He is not all-knowing, since he’s repeatedly surprised by things (like the Israelites abandoning him for a statue of a cow). He is not perfectly powerful either, in that he famously cannot control Israel and get its people to do what he wants. And so on.

 

Philosophers have spent many centuries trying to get God’s supposed perfections to fit together in a coherent conception, and then trying to get that to fit with the Bible. By now it’s reasonably clear that this can’t be done. In fact, part of the reason God-bashers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are so influential (apart from the fact they write so well) is their insistence that the doctrine of God’s perfections makes no sense, and that the idealized “being” it tells us about doesn’t resemble the biblical God at all.

 

So is that it, then? Have the atheists won? I don’t think so. But it does look like the time has come for some rethinking in the theist camp.

 

I’d start with this: Is it really necessary to say that God is a “perfect being,” or perfect at all, for that matter? As far as I can tell, the biblical authors avoid asserting any such thing. And with good reason. Normally, when we say that something is “perfect,” we mean it has attained the best possible balance among the principles involved in making it the kind of thing it is. For example, if we say that a bottle is perfect, we mean it can contain a significant quantity of liquid in its body; that its neck is long enough to be grasped comfortably and firmly; that the bore is wide enough to permit a rapid flow of liquid; and so on. Of course, you can always manufacture a bottle that will hold more liquid, but only by making the body too broad (so the bottle doesn’t handle well) or the neck too short (so it’s hard to hold). There’s an inevitable trade-off among the principles, and perfection lies in the balance among them. And this is so whether what’s being judged is a bottle or a horse, a wine or a gymnastics routine or natural human beauty.

 

What would we say if some philosopher told us that a perfect bottle would be one that can contain a perfectly great amount of liquid, while being perfectly easy to pour from at the same time? Or that a perfect horse would bear an infinitely heavy rider, while at the same time being able to run with perfectly great speed? I should think we’d say he’s made a fundamental mistake here: You can’t perfect something by maximizing all its constituent principles simultaneously. All this will get you is contradictions and absurdities. This is not less true of God than it is of anything else.

 

The attempt to think of God as a perfect being is misguided for another reason as well. We can speak of the perfection of a bottle or a horse because these are things that can be encompassed (at least in some sense) by our senses and understanding. Having the whole bottle before us, we feel we can judge how close it is to being a perfect instance of its type. But if asked to judge the perfection of a bottle poking out of a paper bag, or of a horse that’s partly hidden in the stable, we’d surely protest: How am I supposed to know? I can only see part of it.

 

Yet the biblical accounts of our encounters with God emphasize that all human views of God are partial and fragmentary in just this way. Even Moses, the greatest of the prophets, is told that he can’t see God’s face, but can only catch a glimpse of God’s back as he passes by. At another point, God responds to Moses’ request to know his name (that is, his nature) by telling him “ehi’eh asher ehi’eh” —“I will be what I will be.” In most English-language Bibles this is translated “I am that I am,” following the Septuagint, which sought to bring the biblical text into line with the Greek tradition (descended from Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato’s “Timaeus”) of identifying God with perfect being. But in the Hebrew original, the text says almost exactly the opposite of this: The Hebrew “I will be what I will be” is in the imperfect tense, suggesting to us a God who is incomplete and changing. In their run-ins with God, human beings can glimpse a corner or an edge of something too immense to be encompassed, a “coming-into-being” as God approaches, and no more. The belief that any human mind can grasp enough of God to begin recognizing perfections in him would have struck the biblical authors as a pagan conceit.

 

So if it’s not a bundle of “perfections” that the prophets and scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible referred to in speaking of God, what was it they were talking about? As Donald Harman Akenson writes, the God of Hebrew Scripture is meant to be an “embodiment of what is, of reality” as we experience it. God’s abrupt shifts from action to seeming indifference and back, his changing demands from the human beings standing before him, his at-times devastating responses to mankind’s deeds and misdeeds — all these reflect the hardship so often present in the lives of most human beings. To be sure, the biblical God can appear with sudden and stunning generosity as well, as he did to Israel at the Red Sea. And he is portrayed, ultimately, as faithful and just. But these are not the “perfections” of a God known to be a perfect being. They don’t exist in his character “necessarily,” or anything remotely similar to this. On the contrary, it is the hope that God is faithful and just that is the subject of ancient Israel’s faith: We hope that despite the frequently harsh reality of our daily experience, there is nonetheless a faithfulness and justice that rules in our world in the end.

 

The ancient Israelites, in other words, discovered a more realistic God than that descended from the tradition of Greek thought. But philosophers have tended to steer clear of such a view, no doubt out of fear that an imperfect God would not attract mankind’s allegiance. Instead, they have preferred to speak to us of a God consisting of a series of sweeping idealizations — idealizations whose relation to the world in which we actually live is scarcely imaginable. Today, with theism rapidly losing ground across Europe and among Americans as well, we could stand to reconsider this point. Surely a more plausible conception of God couldn’t hurt.

---

Yoram Hazony is president of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author of, most recently, “The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture.” He will be giving a lecture at The New York Public Library author series on Monday.

Continue to -

 

Index to past articles on "An Open Faith and Open Theology"

 

 

 

 

 

 

And The World Cries For Ones Now Lost

 

Heal the World Lyrics  - Michael Jackson

 

 

 

 

 

Heal the World by Michael Jackson

 

Send "Heal The World" Ringtone to your Cell

 

 

"Heal The World"

 

 

There's A Place In
Your Heart
And I Know That It Is Love
And This Place Could
Be Much
Brighter Than Tomorrow
And If You Really Try
You'll Find There's No Need
To Cry
In This Place You'll Feel
There's No Hurt Or Sorrow

There Are Ways
To Get There
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Little Space
Make A Better Place...

Heal The World
Make It A Better Place
For You And For Me
And The Entire Human Race
There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

If You Want To Know Why
There's A Love That
Cannot Lie
Love Is Strong
It Only Cares For
Joyful Giving
If We Try
We Shall See
In This Bliss
We Cannot Feel
Fear Or Dread
We Stop Existing And
Start Living

Then It Feels That Always
Love's Enough For
Us Growing
So Make A Better World
Make A Better World...

Heal The World
Make It A Better Place
For You And For Me
And The Entire Human Race
There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

And The Dream We Were
Conceived In
Will Reveal A Joyful Face
And The World We
Once Believed In
Will Shine Again In Grace
Then Why Do We Keep
Strangling Life
Wound This Earth
Crucify Its Soul
Though It's Plain To See
This World Is Heavenly
Be God's Glow

We Could Fly So High
Let Our Spirits Never Die
In My Heart
I Feel You Are All
My Brothers
Create A World With
No Fear
Together We'll Cry
Happy Tears
See The Nations Turn
Their Swords
Into Plowshares

We Could Really Get There
If You Cared Enough
For The Living
Make A Little Space
To Make A Better Place...

Heal The World
Make It A Better Place
For You And For Me
And The Entire Human Race
There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

Heal The World
Make It A Better Place
For You And For Me
And The Entire Human Race
There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

Heal The World
Make It A Better Place
For You And For Me
And The Entire Human Race
There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me

Heal the world we live in, save it for our children
Heal the world we live in, save it for our children
Heal the world we live in, save it for our children
Heal the world we live in, save it for our children

Ed Dobson's Story of ALS - Preaching With My Son in His First Pulpit At Mars Hill Church

Ed Dobson preaching at Mars Hill, Grand Rapids, MI | 2011

Pastor Ed Dobson says survival with ALS is mixed blessing;

he's sustained by faith and hope

http://mobile.mlive.com/advgrapids/db_/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=gCegZoKy&full=true#display

Charley Honey | The Grand Rapids Press

Email: honeycharlesm@gmail.com; blog: soulmailing.com

Posted: 12/11/2012 4:38 PM

Ed Dobson is on the podium, preaching the gospel as only he can.

Dressed in a gray cardigan and loafers, he’s preaching to Mars Hill Bible Church on the first Sunday of Advent. His son, Kent, Mars Hill’s pastor, listens as his father speaks of the comfort that Scripture, his wife and family give him in times of despair.

Kent Dobson preaching with his father Ed

“I find my greatest hope comes from the people around me,” says Dobson, who’s surrounded by thousands right now.

Then he takes a seat in an easy chair at the corner of the stage. He tells Kent, “I’m going to sit down and go to sleep. So if you want me to say something, wake me up.”

Without missing a beat, Kent replies, “Well, I went to sleep in many of your sermons.”

The Mars Hills crowd roars with laughter. This Abbott-and-Costello bit comes amid a father-son preaching lesson at the church where Kent this fall was named pastor. They make a great tag team, Kent preaching with the biblical insight and restless energy his dad displayed in his 18 years at Calvary Church, Ed interjecting plain-spoken wisdom.

But the comic moment doesn’t disguise the hard reality that everyone in the room realizes: Ed Dobson has ALS, and one day it will take his life.

It has been a dozen years since Dobson was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, which generally claims people within two to five years. Why Dobson has survived so much longer is as much a mystery as why he got it in the first place.

But his survival is a mixed blessing. As he tells the Mars Hill crowd, his arms don’t work well. His wife, Lorna, helps feed and dress him. His breath is shorter and he speaks more slowly than he used to.

That may be so, but what I hear from Dobson this morning reflects the strength and unwavering faith he’s exemplified from the day I met him nearly 20 years ago. Picking up on Kent’s Advent theme of hopeful expectation, Ed admits that silently waiting on God is a struggle for him.

Ed Dobson with son Kent

“I spent most of my life working hard at helping people rearrange the furniture in their lives,” says Dobson, who retired from Calvary in 2005. “But now, I have no agenda. I am weak. And waiting on the Lord is a challenge. [It's] a lot easier to say ‘get ready’ than it is to wait on the Lord.

“But this one thing I know: God has brought me this far,” he says, his voice quavering slightly. “The God who brought me this far will deal with today and tomorrow. So I can rest in his coming into my life to rearrange my furniture.”

He sits back in his easy chair, and the congregation sings “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus.”

A few days later, he’s sitting on the couch of his and Lorna’s Kentwood condominium. Out the window they admire three deer grazing around the ravine of Plaster Creek. Their airy two-level is filled with photos of their grandchildren, framed biblical quotes and the aroma of Lorna’s baking shortbread.

Always wiry, Ed’s frame has been thinned by ALS. He was a star soccer player growing up in Northern Ireland. A coach at Liberty University, where Dobson was an administrator, once told him he could have turned pro.

As a man of deep faith, Ed Dobson believes God could heal him of ALS. So, I ask, why do you think God hasn’t done that?

“There is no good answer, so I’ve never asked it,” he replies. Adds Lorna, “If you’re always obsessed about having to have answers, you can’t really live.”

But Dobson grapples with the question in his new book, “Seeing Through the Fog: Hope When Your World Falls Apart” (David C. Cook). In its 145 pages, which he dictated by voice to his computer, he recounts his journey with ALS from the moment he first felt a twitching in his eyelid on his 50th birthday. Nearly a year later, just before Thanksgiving 2000, a University of Michigan doctor told him he had probable ALS.

As Lorna drove him back to Grand Rapids, he writes, “I felt like my life was over. I felt like I had been buried alive.”

With such unstinting detail, Dobson traces the painful path he’s walked since, as well as scenes from his life before ALS. Through it all, with Lorna ever at his side, he’s held fast to faith and “a hope that comes with strength: the strength to keep living life, despite its challenges, and to continually give thanks for the blessings we have, even in the darkest of times.”

It’s easy to lose hope when he thinks about his future, Dobson says. So he thinks about today, counsels other ALS patients and watches “The Three Stooges” to make sure he laughs. When he gets down, he repeats God’s assurance from Hebrews: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”

Most of all, he gives thanks for the many blessings he still has -- especially Lorna, their children Kent, Daniel and Heather, and their six grandchildren. Soon they all will gather for the holidays.

After he was diagnosed 12 years ago, Dobson thought that Christmas would be his last. This year, he looks forward to another one – and hopes for many more.

continue to past articles

listed in date order from last to first - 

Ed Dobson - What He Has to Say About His Life-Threatening Illness Will Shake You to Your Core

Ed Dobson's Story of ALS - Preaching With My Son in His First Pulpit At Mars Hill Church

Book Review: Ed Dobson, "Seeing Through the Fog"

Ed Dobson 2012 CNN Interview, "Rethinking What It Means to be Christian"

Ed Dobson's Story - A Film Series About Hope (re: Suffering, Illness and Healing)

Ed Dobson - Faithfully Facing Mortality

Ed Dobson - What Do You Do When You Know You Are Dying?

The Demands of Postmodernism upon the Emerging Church

Today I've added a couple of new emergent links - the Ooze and the Center for Process and Faith. They both bear the hallmarks of a radical Christianity willing to revisualize the Christian faith and the church around the centrality of the person and presence of Jesus. However, both will depart somewhat profoundly from the church's traditional understanding of Christianity, God and the Bible.

 

Curiously, the Ooze will tend to be the more conservative of the two, whereas the Center for Process and Faith will bring with it a more liberal approach to religion and theology in general as it works towards reconceptualizing the meaning of God between the various religions of the world using Process Theology (or, Process Theism).

 

Process Thought brings a lot of good with it, and certainly it will help in uniting God-conscious believers from around the world in their faiths with one another. However, as stated here time-and-again at Relevancy22 we've elected for the position of Relational Theism (or Relational Thought) and not for its more liberal tendencies while recognizing the benefits of Process Thought in its attempts to unify the world's faithful and that of the church in general.

 

Even so, though faith is a beginning point for many (however it is found or experienced), for faith to be ultimately pivotal and expressive the personage of Jesus must be the culminating experience of salvific faith in God. Certainly God will use every experience and awareness that we have of Him in this world - whether Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Animist, or whatnot - but it is through His Son Jesus that we find God's ultimate expression of redemption to mankind.

 

Certainly we may have warrant to disagree with the church's portrayal of Jesus - but like us, the church is fallible and tries as it can to revisualize the infinite God of love and forgiveness. For now, it is what it is, as the all-too-common colloquialism goes. Which is where the Ooze comes in to help searching Christians. Here we may find a collection of Jesus followers who wish to express their Christian faith in a thousand different ways. And as you read along you will discover by their journey that their faith in Jesus is anything but institutional.

 

As an older Christian wishing to impart assurance and peace in these times of radical personal displacement and uncertainty, I find the Ooze mimicking the spirit of today's media outlets that is found in TV, film, newspapers and journals. Hence, this website may appeal to a less cautious readership ready to judge any-and-all-things through the harsh spectacles of specious words and hypocritical lifestyles. They have high standards for the Christian faith. And well they should.

 

And though I could sympathize a hundred times with the spirit I observe at the Ooze, I still would wish that we as Jesus follower's develop other habits that are more reconstructive than deconstructive. Statedly, too often we cannot move forward without sometimes burning down the past. But not all the past needs to be burned down (if even a little bit) for the problem oftentimes lies with us, not others!

 

Admittedly, there is enough good to hold onto in the church's history and doctrines that it is unnecessary to go back and recreate a whole new set of Christian experiences. And although this has been done in the past under various sects and religions, and will be done again, one may well then imagine a repeat of errors and misrepresentations of God to arise as well. But Emergent Christianity is not one of these movements. Though it is true that it does seek to reimagine the Christian faith - to revitalize, and repurpose, it - in order to show Jesus' relevancy to today's pluralistic societies and multi-ethnic cultures. But this is a different matter than heresy.

I would also expect that as the strong paradigm shifts of postmodernism and emergent theology ingresses into the church's culture and experiences that many of the church's beliefs and tenets, practices and traditions, will accordingly change in response. Which is a good thing. It shows an active recognition to the presence and purposes of God through His Son Jesus by the Spirit of God. And in a way, the traditions and customs of both the church and of the gospel will likewise change upon reflective posturing when met with the demands of today's postmodern needs and wants, apathy and anger, emptiness and disappointment.

Faith is simple. It is rare. It is profound. Throughout all I believe God will actively guide His church. Whether through the younger, more discriminating, generations interested in reapprising their faith in Jesus. Or through scholarly circles seeking to find God in its pervasive, world-wide experience of the Spiritual Other. Still, God is there. He has come to recreate and renew. Today's postmodernism will be as much a part of God's benevolence as were the ages past - though now we realize that even God Himself, like ourselves, must adapt and change with humanity's growth and evolvement.

 

My confidence in God is strong. And I thank Him for the strong spirits and minds that He has burdened to tell us of Himself however they can. And in whatever ways they can. For its part, Relevancy22 will provide what guidance it can during this intense time of global seismic change. Trusting that it may lend a common-sense voice to the church of God, to its histories and historic institutions, as the church interacts with the paradigm shifts occurring under the prismatic glasses of postmodernism.

At the same time, we must also work towards revisioning what an emergent theology is (and can mean) to the church set within a very difficult postmodern age of nihilism, disbelief, skepticism and denial. To that end, let's then add to the Christian faith the salt of belief, faith, obedience, and optimism, in reconstructive efforts of revisioning our future with the God of the Ages.

R.E. Slater

December 12, 2012 (12-12-12!!)

 

the Ooze

http://theooze.com/

 

 

 

 

the Center for Process and Faith

http://processandfaith.org/

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Postmodernism and Its Critics

  

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES

A GUIDE PREPARED BY STUDENTS FOR STUDENTS

http://anthropology.ua.edu/cultures/cultures.php?culture=Postmodernism and Its Critics

The guides to anthropological theories and approaches listed below have been prepared by graduate students of the University of Alabama under the direction of Dr. Michael D. Murphy. As always, !Caveat Retis Viator! (Let the Net Traveller Beware!)

Select a Theory: American MaterialismCognitive AnthropologyCross-Cultural AnalysisCultural MaterialismCulture and PersonalityDiffusionism and AcculturationEcological AnthropologyFeminist AnthropologyFunctionalismHistoricismMarxist AnthropologyPostmodernism and Its CriticsSocial EvolutionismStructuralismSymbolic and Interpretive AnthropologiesThe Manchester School Go

OR

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Postmodernism and Its Critics

Daniel Salberg, Robert Stewart, Karla Wesley, and Shannon Weiss

(Note: authorship is arranged stratigraphically with the most recent author listed first)

Basic Premises

As an intellectual movement postmodernism was born as a challenge to several modernist themes that were first articulated during the Enlightenment. These include scientific positivism, the inevitability of human progress, and the potential of human reason to address any essential truth of physical and social conditions and thereby make them amenable to rational control (Boyne and Rattansi 1990). The primary tenets of the postmodern movement include: (1) an elevation of text and language as the fundamental phenomena of existence, (2) the application of literary analysis to all phenomena, (3) a questioning of reality and representation, (4) a critique of metanarratives, (5) an argument against method and evaluation, (6) a focus upon power relations and hegemony, (7) and a general critique of Western institutions and knowledge (Kuznar 2008:78). For his part, Lawrence Kuznar labels postmodern anyone whose thinking includes most or all of these elements. Importantly, the term postmodernism refers to a broad range of artists, academic critics, philosophers, and social scientists that Christopher Butler (2003:2) has only half-jokingly alluded to as like “a loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party.” The anthropologist Melford Spiro defines postmodernism thusly:

"The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object, anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth. Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science according to the ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics, third-world peoples." [Spiro 1996: 759]

Postmodernism has its origins as an eclectic social movement originating in aesthetics, architecture and philosophy (Bishop 1996). In architecture and art, fields which are distinguished as the oldest claimants to the name, postmodernism originated in the reaction against abstraction in painting and the International Style in architecture (Callinicos 1990: 101). However, postmodern thinking arguably began in the nineteenth century with Nietzsche’s assertions regarding truth, language, and society, which opened the door for all later postmodern and late modern critiques about the foundations of knowledge (Kuznar 2008: 78). Nietzsche asserted that truth was simply:

"A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are." [Nietzsche 1954: 46-47]

According to Kuznar, postmodernists trace this skepticism about truth and the resulting relativism it engenders from Nietzsche to Max Weber and Sigmund Freud, and finally to Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and other contemporary postmodernists (2008:78).

Postmodernism and anthropology - Postmodern attacks on ethnography are generally based on the belief that there is no true objectivity and that therefore the authentic implementation of the scientific method is impossible. For instance, Isaac Reed (2010) conceptualizes the postmodern challenge to the objectivity of social research as skepticism over the anthropologist’s ability to integrate the context of investigation and the context of explanation. Reed defines the context of investigation as the social and intellectual context of the investigator – essentially her social identity, beliefs and memories. The context of explanation, on the other hand, refers to the reality that she wishes to investigate, and in particular the social actions she wishes to explain and the surrounding social environment, or context, that she explains them with. In the late 1970s and 1980s some anthropologists, such as Crapanzano and Rabinow, began to express elaborate self-doubt concerning the validity of fieldwork. By the mid-1980s the critique about how anthropologists interpreted and explained the Other, essentially how they engaged in “writing culture,” had become a full-blown epistemic crisis that Reed refers to as the “postmodern” turn. The driving force behind the postmodern turn was a deep skepticism about whether the investigator could adequately, effectively, or honestly integrate the context of investigation into the context of explanation and, as a result, write true social knowledge. This concern was most prevalent in cultural and linguistic anthropology, less so in archaeology, and had the least effect on physical anthropology, which is generally the most scientific of the four subfields.

Modernity first came into being with the Renaissance. Modernity implies “the progressive economic and administrative rationalization and differentiation of the social world” (Sarup 1993). In essence this term emerged in the context of the development of the capitalist state. The fundamental act of modernity is to question the foundations of past knowledge, and Boyne and Rattansi characterize modernity as consisting of two sides: “the progressive union of scientific objectivity and politico-economic rationality . . . mirrored in disturbed visions of unalleviated existential despair” (1990: 5).

Postmodernity is the state or condition of being postmodern. Logically postmodernism literally means “after modernity. It refers to the incipient or actual dissolution of those social forms associated with modernity" (Sarup 1993). The archaeologist Mathew Johnson has characterized postmodernity, or the postmodern condition, as disillusionment with Enlightenment ideals (Johnson 2010). Jean-Francois Lyotard, in his seminal work The Postmodern Condition (1984) defines it as an “incredulity toward metanarratives,” which is, somewhat ironically, a product of scientific progress (1984: xxiv). Postmodernity concentrates on the tensions of difference and similarity erupting from processes of globalization and capitalism: (i) the accelerating circulation of people, (ii) the increasingly dense and frequent cross-cultural interactions, and (iii) the unavoidable intersections of local and global knowledge.

Some social critics have attempted to explain the postmodern condition in terms of the historical and social milieu which spawned it. David Ashley (1990) suggests that “modern, overloaded individuals, desperately trying to maintain rootedness and integrity . . . ultimately are pushed to the point where there is little reason not to believe that all value-orientations are equally well-founded. Therefore, increasingly, choice becomes meaningless.” Jean Baudrillard, one of the most radical postmodernists, writes that we must come to terms with the second revolution: “that of the Twentieth Century, of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. Whoever lives by meaning dies by meaning” ([Baudrillard 1984:38-39] in Ashley 1990).

Modernization “is often used to refer to the stages of social development which are based upon industrialization. Modernization is a diverse unity of socio-economic changes generated by scientific and technological discoveries and innovations. . .” (Sarup 1993).

Modernism should be considered distinct from the concept of “modernity.” . Although in its broadest definition modernism refers to modern thought, character or practice, the term is usually restricted to a set of artistic, musical, literary, and more generally aesthetic movements that emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century and would become institutionalized in the academic institutions and art galleries of post-World War I Europe and America (Boyne and Rattansi 1990). Important figures include Matisse, Picasso, and Kandinsky in painting, Joyce and Kafka in literature, and Eliot and Pound in poetry. It can be characterized by self-consciousness, the alienation of the integrated subject, and reflexiveness, as well as by a general critique of modernity’s claims regarding the progressive capacity of science and the efficacy of metanarratives. These themes are very closely related to Postmodernism (Boyne and Rattansi 1990: 6-8; Sarup 1993).

Postmodernism - Sarup maintains that “There is a sense in which if one sees modernism as the culture of modernity, postmodernism is the culture of postmodernity” (1993). The term “postmodernism” is somewhat controversial since many doubt whether it can ever be dignified by conceptual coherence. For instance, it is difficult to reconcile postmodernist approaches in fields like art and music to certain postmodern trends in philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. However, it is in some sense unified by a commitment to a set of cultural projects privileging heterogeneity, fragmentation, and difference, as well as a relatively widespread mood in literary theory, philosophy, and the social sciences that question the possibility of impartiality, objectivity, or authoritative knowledge (Boyne and Rattansi 1990: 9-11).

The following are some proposed differences between modern and postmodern thought: Contrast of Modern and Postmodern Thinking
	Modern	Postmodern
Reasoning	From foundation upwards	Multiple factors of multiple levels of reasoning. Web-oriented.
Science	Universal Optimism	Realism of Limitations
Part/Whole	Parts comprise the whole	The whole is more than the parts
God	Acts by violating "natural" laws" or by "immanence" in everything that is	Top-Down causation
Language	Referential	Meaning in social context through usage

Source: http://private.fuller.edu/~clameter/phd/postmodern.html (note: this link is no longer working as of 4/30/2012)

Points of Reaction

"Modernity" takes its Latin origin from “modo,” which means “just now.” The Postmodern, then, literally means “after just now” (Appignanesi and Garratt 1995). Points of reaction from within postmodernism are associated with other “posts”: postcolonialism, poststructuralism, and postprocessualism.

Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism has been defined as:

1. A description of institutional conditions in formerly colonial societies.
2. An abstract representation of the global situation after the colonial period.

3. A description of discourses informed by psychological and epistemological orientations.

Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993) uses discourse analysis and postcolonial theory as tools for rethinking forms of knowledge and the social identities of postcolonial systems. An important feature of postcolonialist thought is its assertion that modernism and modernity are part of the colonial project of domination.

Debates about postcolonialism are unresolved, yet issues raised in Said’s Orientalism (1978), a critique of Western descriptions of Non-Euro-American Others, suggest that colonialism as a discourse is based on the ability of Westerners to examine other societies in order to produce knowledge and use it as a form of power deployed against the very subjects of inquiry. As should be readily apparent, the issues of postcolonialism are uncomfortably relevant to contemporary anthropological investigations.

Poststructuralism

In reaction to the abstraction of cultural data characteristic of model building, cultural relativists argue that model building hindered understanding of thought and action. From this claim arose poststructuralist concepts such as developed in the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1972). He asserts that structural models should not be replaced but enriched. Poststructuralists like Bourdieu are concerned with reflexivity and the search for logical practice. By doing so, accounts of the participants' behavior and meanings are not objectified by the observer. (For definition of reflexivity, see key concepts). In general postructuralism expresses disenchantment with static, mechanistic, and controlling models of culture, instead privileging social process and agency.

Postprocessualism

Unlike postcolonialism and poststructuralism, which are trends among cultural anthropologists, postprocessualism is a trend among archaeologists. Postprocessualists “use deconstructionist skeptical arguments to conclude that there is no objective past and that our representations of the past are only texts that we produce on the basis of our socio-political standpoints (Harris 1999).

Leading Figures

Michael Agar Agar is critical of traditional scholarly studies related to the social world for two reasons. Firstly, he feels that it is far too difficult to reconstruct human interactions based on notes in a meaningful way. Secondly, he feels that American anthropology tends to draw a barrier between “applied” and “practiced” work (Agar 1997). This effectively means that those who are currently paid to teach anthropology in an academic setting have become out of touch with the current state of scholarship being done by “practitioners” whose positions within academia are far less secure, having not yet attained status in a university setting. To define this distinction he uses the terms “slave labor academic instructors” and “practitioner civil servants.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929 - 2007) Baudrillard was a sociologist who began his career exploring the Marxist critique of capitalism (Sarup 1993: 161). During this phase of his work he argued that, “consumer objects constitute a system of signs that differentiate the population” (Sarup 1993: 162). Eventually, however, Baudrillard felt that Marxist tenets did not effectively evaluate commodities, so he turned to postmodernism. Rosenau labels Baudrillard as a skeptical postmodernist because of statements like, “everything has already happened....nothing new can occur,” and “there is no real world” (Rosenau 1992: 64, 110). Baudrillard breaks down modernity and postmodernity in an effort to explain the world as a set of models. He identifies (i) early modernity as the period between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, (ii) modernity as the period at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and (iii) postmodernity as the period of mass media (cinema and photography). Baudrillard states that we live in a world of images but images that are only simulations. Baudrillard implies that many people fail to understand this concept that, “we have now moved into an epoch...where truth is entirely a product of consensus values, and where ‘science’ itself is just the name we attach to certain modes of explanation,” (Norris 1990: 169).

Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004) Derrida is identified as a poststructuralist and a skeptical postmodernist. Much of his writing is concerned with the deconstruction of texts and probing the relationship of meaning between texts (Bishop 1996: 1270). He observes that “a text employs its own stratagems against it, producing a force of dislocation that spreads itself through an entire system.” (Rosenau 1993: 120). Derrida directly attacks Western philosophy's understanding of reason. He sees reason as dominated by “a metaphysics of presence.” Derrida agrees with structuralism's insight, that meaning is not inherent in signs, but he proposes that it is incorrect to infer that anything reasoned can be used as a stable and timeless model (Appignanesi 1995: 77). According to Norris, “He tries to problematize the grounds of reason, truth, and knowledge...he questions the highest point by demanding reasoning for reasoning itself,” (1990: 199).

Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984) - Foucault was a French philosopher who attempted to show that what most people think of as the permanent truths of human nature and society actually change throughout the course of history. While challenging the influences of Marx and Freud, Foucault postulated that everyday practices enabled people to define their identities and systemize knowledge. Foucault is considered a postmodern theorist precisely because his work upset the conventional understanding of history as a chronology of inevitable facts. Alternatively, he depicted history as existing under layers of suppressed and unconscious knowledge in and throughout history. These under layers are the codes and assumptions of order, the structures of exclusion that legitimate the epistemes by which societies achieve identities (Appignanesi 1995: 83, http://www.connect.net/ron). In addition to these insights, Foucault’s study of power and its shifting patterns is one of the foundations of postmodernism. Foucault believed that power was inscribed in everyday life to the extent that many social roles and institutions bore the stamp of power, specifically as it could be used to regulate social hierarchies and structures. These could be regulated though control of the conditions in which “knowledge,” “truth,” and socially accepted “reality” were produced (Erikson and Murphy 2010: 272).

Clifford Geertz (1926 - 2006) Geertz was a prominent anthropologist best known for his work with religion. He was somewhat ambivalent about Postmodernism. He divided it into two movements that both came to fruition in the 1980s. Geertz describes these as follows:

The first led off into essentially literary matters: authorship, genre, style, narrative, metaphor, representation, discourse, fiction, figuration, persuasion; the second, into essentially political matters: the social foundations of anthropological authority, the modes of power inscribed in its practices, its ideological assumptions, its complicity with colonialism, racism, exploitation, and exoticism, its dependency on the master narratives of Westerns self-understanding. These interlinked critiques of anthropology, the one inward-looking and brooding, the other outward-looking and recriminatory, may not have produced the ‘fully dialectical ethnography acting powerfully in the postmodern world system,’ to quote that Writing Culture blast again, nor did they exactly go unresisted. But they did induce a certain self-awareness and a certain candor also, into a discipline not without need of them.. [Geertz 2002: 11]

Ian Hodder (1948 - ) Hodder is one of the founders of postprocessualism and is generally considered one of the most influential archaeologists of the last thirty years. The postprocessual movement arose out of an attempt to apply insights gained from French Marxist anthropology to the study of material culture and was highly influenced by a postmodern epistemology. Working in sub-Sahara Africa, Hodder and his students documented how material culture was not merely a reflection of sociopolitical organization, but was also an active element that could be used to disguise, invert, and distort social relations. Bruce Trigger (2006:481) has argued that perhaps the most successful “law” developed in recent archaeology was this demonstration that material culture plays an active role in social strategies and hence can alter as well as reflect social reality.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1944-) Scheper-Hughes is a professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. In her work "Primacy of the Ethical" Scheper-Hughes argues that, "If we cannot begin to think about social institutions and practices in moral or ethical terms, then anthropology strikes me as quite weak and useless." (1995: 410). She advocates that ethnographies be used as tools for critical reflection and human liberation because she feels that "ethics" make culture possible. Since culture is preceded by ethics, therefore ethics cannot be culturally bound as argued by anthropologists in the past. These philosophies are evident in her other works such as, "Death Without Weeping." The crux of her postmodern perspective is that, "Anthropologists, no less than any other professionals, should be held accountable for how we have used and how we have failed to use anthropology as a critical tool at crucial historical moments. It is the act of "witnessing" that lends our word its moral, at times almost theological, character." (1995: 419)

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924 – 1998) Lyotard was the author of a highly influential work on postmodern society called, The Postmodern Condition (1984). The work was a critique on the current state of knowledge among modern postindustrial nations such as those found in the United States and much of Western Europe. In it Lyotard made a number of notable arguments, one of which was that the postmodern world suffered from a crisis of “representation,” in which older modes of writing about the objects of artistic, philosophical, literary, and social scientific languages were no longer credible. Lyotard suggests that:

The Postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations--not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.[Lyotard 1984]

Lyotard also attacked modernist thought as epitomized by "Grand" Narratives or what he termed the Meta(master) narrative (Lyotard 1984). In contrast to the ethnographies written by anthropologists in the first half of the 20th Century, Lyotard states that an all-encompassing account of a culture cannot be accomplished.

Key Works

• Baudrillard, Jean (1995) Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Derrida, Jacques (1997) Of Grammatology. Corrected ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon.
• Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Marcus, George E. and Michael M. J. Fischer (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique. An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Norris, Christopher (1979) Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge.
• Scheper-Hughes, Nancy (1993) Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Tyler, Stephen (1986) Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult To Occult Document. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Vattimo, Gianni (1988) The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics. In Post-Modern Critique. London: Polity.

• Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics. In Post-Modern Critique. London: Polity.

Principal Concepts

“Culture” in Peril - Aside from Foucault, other postmodernists felt that “Culture is becoming a dangerously unfocused term, increasingly lacking in scientific credentials” (Pasquinelli 1996). The concept of Culture as a whole was tied not only to modernity, but to evolutionary theory (and, implicitly, to euro centrism). In the postmodernist view, if “culture” existed it had to be totally relativistic without any suggestion of “progress.” While postmodernists did have a greater respect for later revisions of cultural theory by Franz Boas and his followers, who attempted to shift from a single path of human “culture” to many varied “cultures,” they found even this unsatisfactory because it still required the use of a Western concept to define non-Western people.

Lament - Lament is a practice of ritualized weeping (Wilce 2005). In the view of Wilce, the traditional means of laments in many cultures were being forced out by modernity due to many claiming that ritualized displays of discontent, particularly discontent with the lost of traditional culture, was a “backwards” custom that needed to be stopped.

Metanarrative Lawrence Kuznar describes metanarratives as grand narratives such as the Enlightenment, Marxism or the American dream. Postmodernists see metanarratives as unfairly totalizing or naturalizing in their generalizations about the state of humanity and historical process (2008:83).

Polyvocality - Paralleling the generally relatativst and skeptical attitudes towards scientific authority, many postmodernists advocate polyvocality, which maintains that there exists multiple, legitimate versions of reality or truths as seen from different perspectives. Postmodernists construe Enlightenment rationalism and scientific positivism as an effort to impose hegemonic values and political control on the world. By challenging the authority of anthropologists and other Western intellectuals, postmodernists see themselves as defending the integrity of local cultures and helping weaker peoples to oppose their oppressors (Trigger 2006:446-447).

Power - Foucault was a prominent critic of the idea of “culture,” preferring instead to deal in the concept of “power” as the major focus of anthropological research (Barrett 2001). Foucault felt that it was through the dynamics of power that “a human being turns himself into a subject” (Foucault 1982). This is not only true of political power, but also includes people recognizing things such as sexuality as forces to which they are subject. “The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others. Which is to say, of course, that something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist” (Foucault 1982: 788).

Radical skepticism - The systematic skepticism of grounded theoretical perspectives and objective truths espoused by many postmodernists had a profound effect on anthropology. This skepticism has shifted focus from the observation of a particular society to a reflexive consideration of the (anthropological) observer (Bishop 1996). According to Rosenau (1992), postmodernists can be divided into two very broad camps, Skeptics and Affirmatives.

• Skeptical Postmodernists – They are extremely critical of the modern subject. They consider the subject to be a “linguistic convention” (Rosenau 1992:43). They also reject any understanding of time because for them the modern understanding of time is oppressive in that it controls and measures individuals. They reject Theory because theories are abundant, and no theory is considered more correct that any other. They feel that “theory conceals, distorts, and obfuscates, it is alienated, disparate, dissonant, it means to exclude, order, and control rival powers” (Rosenau 1992: 81).
  
  
• Affirmative Postmodernists – Affirmatives also reject Theory by denying claims of truth. They do not, however, feel that Theory needs to be abolished but merely transformed. Affirmatives are less rigid than Skeptics. They support movements organized around peace, environment, and feminism (Rosenau 1993: 42).

Realism - “...is the platonic doctrine that universals or abstractions have being independently of mind” (Gellner 1980: 60). Marcus and Fischer note that: “Realism is a mode of writing that seeks to represent the reality of the whole world or form of life. Realist ethnographies are written to allude to a whole by means of parts or foci of analytical attention which can constantly evoke a social and cultural totality (1986: 2323).

Relativism – Relativism is the notion that different perspectives have no absolute truth or validity, but rather possess only relative, subjective value according to distinctions in perception and consideration. Gellner writes about the relativistic-functionalist view of thought that goes back to the Enlightenment: "The (unresolved) dilemma, which the thought of the Enlightenment faced, was between a relativistic-functionalist view of thought, and the absolutist claims of enlightened Reason. Viewing man as part of nature...requires (us) to see cognitive and evaluative activities as part of nature too, and hence varying from organism to organism and context to context. (Gellner in [Asad 1986: 147]). Anthropological theory of the 1960s may be best understood as the heir of relativism. Contemporary interpretative anthropology is the essence of relativism as a mode of inquiry about communication in and between cultures (Marcus & Fischer, 1986:32).

Self-Reflexivity - In anthropology, self-reflexivity refers to the anthropologists in the process of question, both theoretically and practically, themselves and their work. Bishop notes that, “The scientific observer's objectification of structure as well as strategy was seen as placing the actors in a framework not of their own making but one produced by the observer, “ (1996: 1270). Self-Reflexivity therefore leads to a consciousness of the process of knowledge creation (1996: 995). There is an increased awareness of the collection of data and the limitation of methodological systems. This idea underlies the postmodernist affinity for studying the culture of anthropology and ethnography.

Methodologies

One of the essential elements of Postmodernism is that it constitutes an attack against theory and methodology. In a sense proponents claim to relinquish all attempts to create new knowledge in a systematic fashion, instead substituting an “anti-rules” fashion of discourse (Rosenau 1993:117). Despite this claim, however, there are two methodologies characteristic of Postmodernism. These methodologies are interdependent in that interpretation is inherent in Deconstruction. “Post-modern methodology is post-positivist or anti-positivist. As substitutes for the scientific method the affirmatives look to feelings and personal experience. . . the skeptical post modernists most of the substitutes for method because they argue we can never really know anything (Rosenau 1993:117).

Deconstruction - Deconstruction emphasizes negative critical capacity. Deconstruction involves demystifying a text to reveal internal arbitrary hierarchies and presuppositions. By examining the margins of a text, the effort of deconstruction examines what it represses, what it does not say, and its incongruities. It does not solely unmask error, but redefines the text by undoing and reversing polar opposites. Deconstruction does not resolve inconsistencies, but rather exposes hierarchies involved for the distillation of information (Rosenau 1993).

Rosenau’s Guidelines for Deconstruction Analysis:

• Find an exception to a generalization in a text and push it to the limit so that this generalization appears absurd. Use the exception to undermine the principle.
• Interpret the arguments in a text being deconstructed in their most extreme form.
• Avoid absolute statements and cultivate intellectual excitement by making statements that are both startling and sensational.
• Deny the legitimacy of dichotomies because there are always a few exceptions.
• Nothing is to be accepted, nothing is to be rejected. It is extremely difficult to criticize a deconstructive argument if no clear viewpoint is expressed.
• Write so as to permit the greatest number of interpretations possible.....Obscurity may “protect from serious scrutiny” (Ellis 1989: 148). The idea is “to create a text without finality or completion, one with which the reader can never be finished” (Wellberg, 1985: 234).
• Employ new and unusual terminology in order that “familiar positions may not seem too familiar and otherwise obvious scholarship may not seem so obviously relevant”(Ellis 1989: 142).
• “Never consent to a change of terminology and always insist that the wording of the deconstructive argument is sacrosanct.” More familiar formulations undermine any sense that the deconstructive position is unique (Ellis 1989: 145). (Rosenau 1993, p.121)

Intuitive Interpretation - Rosenau notes that, “Postmodern interpretation is introspective and anti-objectivist which is a form of individualized understanding. It is more a vision than data observation. In anthropology interpretation gravitates toward narrative and centers on listening to and talking with the other, “(1993:119). For postmodernists there are an endless number of interpretations. Foucault argues that everything is interpretation (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 106). “There is no final meaning for any particular sign, no notion of unitary sense of text, no interpretation can be regarded as superior to any other” (Latour 1988: 182-3). Anti-positivists defend the notion that every interpretation is false. “Interpretative anthropology is a covering label for a diverse set of reflections upon the practice of ethnography and the concept of culture” (Marcus and Fisher 1986: 60).

Accomplishments

Critical Examination of Ethnographic Explanation - The unrelenting re-examination of the nature of ethnography inevitably leads to a questioning of ethnography itself as a mode of cultural analysis. Postmodernism adamantly insists that anthropologists must consider the role of their own culture in the explanation of the "other" cultures being studied. Postmodernist theory has led to a heightened sensitivity within anthropology to the collection of data.

Demystification - Perhaps the greatest accomplishments of postmodernism is the focus upon uncovering and criticizing the epistemological and ideological motivations in the social sciences, as well as the increased attention to the factors contributing to the production of knowledge.

Polyvocality – The self-reflexive regard for the ways in which social knowledge is produced, as well as a general skepticism regarding the objectivity and authority of scientific knowledge, has led to an increased appreciation for the voice of the anthropological Other. Even if we do not value all interpretations as equally valid for whatever reason, today it is generally recognized (although perhaps not always done in practice) that anthropologists must actively consider the perspectives and wellbeing of the people being studied.

Criticisms

Roy D’Andrade (1931-) - In the article "Moral Models in Anthropology," D'Andrade critiques postmodernism's definition of objectivity and subjectivity by examining the moral nature of their models. He argues that these moral models are purely subjective. D'Andrade argues that despite the fact that utterly value-free objectivity is impossible, it is the goal of the anthropologist to get as close as possible to that ideal. He argues that there must be a separation between moral and objective models because “they are counterproductive in discovering how the world works.” (D’Andrade 1995: 402). From there he takes issue with the postmodernist attack on objectivity. He states that objectivity is in no way dehumanizing nor is objectivity impossible. He states, “Science works not because it produces unbiased accounts but because its accounts are objective enough to be proved or disproved no matter what anyone wants to be true.” (D’Andrade 1995: 404).

Ryan Bishop - “The Postmodernist genre of ethnography has been criticized for fostering a self-indulgent subjectivity, and for exaggerating the esoteric and unique aspects of a culture at the expense of more prosiac but significant questions.” (Bishop 1996: 58)

Patricia M. Greenfield Greenfield believes that postmodernism’s complete lack of objectivity, and its tendency to push political agendas, makes it virtually useless in any scientific investigation (Greenfield 2005). Greenfield suggests using resources in the field of psychology to help Anthropologists gain a better grasp on cultural relativism, while still maintaining their objectivity.

Bob McKinley - McKinley believes that Postmodernism is more of a religion than a science (McKinley 2000). He argues that the origin of Postmodernism is the Western emphasis on individualism, which makes Postmodernists reluctant to acknowledge the existence of distinct multi-individual cultures.

Christopher Norris - Norris believes that Lyotard, Foucault, and Baudrillard are too preoccupied in the idea of the primacy of moral judgments (Norris 1990: 50).

Pauline Rosenau (1993) Rosenau identifies seven contradictions in Postmodernism:

1. Its anti-theoretical position is essentially a theoretical stand.
2. While Postmodernism stresses the irrational, instruments of reason are freely employed to advance its perspective.
3. The Postmodern prescription to focus on the marginal is itself an evaluative emphasis of precisely the sort that it otherwise attacks.
4. Postmodernism stress intertextuality but often treats text in isolation.
5. By adamantly rejecting modern criteria for assessing theory, Postmodernists cannot argue that there are no valid criteria for judgment.
6. Postmodernism criticizes the inconsistency of modernism, but refuses to be held to norms of consistency itself.
7. Postmodernists contradict themselves by relinquishing truth claims in their own writings.

Marshall Sahlins (1930 - )- Sahlins criticizes the postmodern preoccupation with power. "The current Foucauldian-Gramscian-Nietzschean obsession with power is the latest incarnation of anthropology's incurable functionalism. . . Now 'power' is the intellectual black hole into which all kinds of cultural contents get sucked, if before it was social solidarity or material advantage." (Sahlins, 1993: 15).

Melford Spiro (1920 - ) - Spiro argues that postmodern anthropologists do not convincingly dismiss the scientific method (1996). Further, he suggests that if anthropology turns away from the scientific method then anthropology will become the study of meanings and not the discovery of causes that shape what it is to be human. Spiro further states that, “the causal account of culture refers to ecological niches, modes of production, subsistence techniques, and so forth, just as a causal account of mind refers to the firing of neurons, the secretions of hormones, the action of neurotransmitters . . .” (1996: 765).

Spiro critically addresses six interrelated propositions from John Searle’s 1993 work, “Rationality and Realism":

1. Reality exists independently of human representations. If this is true then, contrary to postmodernism, this postulate supports the existence of “mind-independent external reality” which is called “metaphysical realism”.
2. Language communicates meanings but also refers to objects and situations in the world which exist independently of language. Contrary to postmodernism, this postulate supports the concept of language as have communicative and referential functions.
3. Statements are true or false depending on whether the objects and situations to which they refer correspond to a greater or lesser degree to the statements. This “correspondence theory” of truth is to some extent the theory of truth for postmodernists, but this concept is rejected by many postmodernists as “essentialist.”
4. Knowledge is objective. This signifies that the truth of a knowledge claim is independent of the motive, culture, or gender of the person who makes the claim. Knowledge depends on empirical support.
5. Logic and rationality provide a set of procedures and methods, which contrary to postmodernism, enables a researcher to assess competing knowledge claims through proof, validity, and reason.
6. Objective and intersubjective criteria judge the merit of statements, theories, interpretations, and all accounts.

Spiro specifically assaults the assumption that the disciplines that study humanity, like anthropology, cannot be "scientific" because subjectivity renders observers incapable of discovering truth. Spiro agrees with postmodernists that the social sciences require very different techniques for the study of humanity than do the natural sciences, but while insight and empathy are critical in the study of mind and culture, intellectual responsibility requires objective (scientific methods) in the social sciences (Spiro 1996)

Comments

Schematic Differences between Modernism and Postmodernism
Modernism	Postmodernism
romanticism/symbolism	paraphysics/Dadaism
purpose	play
design	chance
hierarchy	anarchy
matery, logos	exhaustion, silence
art object, finished word	process, performance
distance	participation
creation, totalization	deconstruction
synthesis	antithesis
presence	absence
centering	dispersal
genre, boundary	text, intertext
semantics	rhetoric
paradigm	syntagm
hypotaxis	parataxis
metaphor	metonymy
selection	combination
depth	surface
interpretation	against interpretation
reading	misreading
signified	signifier
lisible (readerly)	scriptible
narrative	anti-narrative
grande histoire	petite histoire
master code	idiolect
symptom	desire
type	mutant
genital, phallic	polymorphous
paranoia	schizophrenia
origin, cause	difference-difference
God the Father	The Holy Ghost
Metaphysics	irony
determinacy	indeterminacy
transcendence	immanence

(SOURCE: Hassan "The Culture of Postmodernism" Theory, Culture, and Society, V 2 1985, 123-4.)

For more information on the foundational theories of Postmodernism, Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Marxism, you may wish to reference such philosophers as Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, and Kant. This information may be accessed easily from the this Web site, http://www.connect/net/ron

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Relevant Web Links:

• Postmodernism Generator:: A little fun with postmodernism. And yes, some of it is almost this bad.
• Postmodern Thought (U of Colorado, Denver): A great source for weblinks on postmodernism.
• After Postmodernism (U of Chicago): What happens after postmodernism?
• The PoMo Page (U of Georgetown): A solid overview on postmodernism.
• Anthrobase Postmodernism Page: An encyclopedia-like description of postmodernism with relevant links.
• Writing, General Knowledge, and Postmodern Anthropology: An essay by Paul Smith.
• Dinosaur Comic on Postmodernism: Pretty self explanatory.
• Postmodernisnm and Psychology