Burning Bridges (Post-Modernity)

Burning Bridges (Post-Modernity)

Descarte and John Caputo

 

Scriptures: Matthew 5:1-11 and 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

          What does blessing mean, if it is for the poor? How can mourners and those who are persecuted be blessed? Happy are those, in the most unhappy of plights?

What is wisdom, if it does not see God in the world? What is strength, if it is only used to slam a boot on the messiah’s shoulder? What too is folly or weakness, if it lays flat all that this world holds dear? How does all political and religious might stack up to God on a cross?

Both of these texts short-circuit expectations and give such nuance to words like wisdom and blessed that they make language weird. If you think you have power, you don’t have power. If you think you understand blessing, you don’t understand blessing. The prevailing stories of political might and religious holiness—that the crucified are criminal and those that die upon a cross cursed—aren’t true or God ordained, in light of the God who is revealed to us on the cross.

          Likewise, the post-modern project seeks to weird language, and short-circuit unreflective expectations; it punctures big stories societies tell themselves and looks at the world from its underside.

Legos a Metaphor:

          Legos are amazing. On one hand, they are a really neat way to make a model, be it an airplane or fire house, castle or pirate ship. On the other hand, they are an amazing way to let your imagination go wild, the pieces of a pirate ship can be rearranged and made into an RV or multiple little boats or a cave. For that matter, the firehouse and the castle can be combined in ways that don’t look anything like what’s on the box.

          And those two ways we play with Legos, as model kits and as building blocks for the imagination, are a good way to think about modernity and post-modernity. Modernity would say the building blocks of life fit in a particular way, Post-Modernity would say, “The connection between things is not clear.”

          Just to build out from that model:

-Modernity would say, “I think, therefore I am.” Reality can be ascertained by an individual mind looking at the world and gathering data. Observation is how we build knowledge.

Post-modernity would say, “There are eyes and minds that you can not know.” It would question and “deconstruct” the observations of Modernity.

-Modernity sees Truth as universal and objective.

Post-modernity sees truths as relative and subjective.

-Modernity tries to tell a grand narrative, a big story about the world.

Post-modernity declares, as I stated before and I’ll state again, “The connection between things is not clear,” and so telling a larger story about them is an act of power and will.

 

Descartes:

Rene Descartes lived during the brutal wars of religion in Europe. He wondered, quite sincerely, which Dogma that people are killing one another over, is true? How do you ascertain truth at all?

Eventually he came to a novel solution. Truth comes from an individual mind observing the world. “I think, therefore I am.” Our observations of the world are the starting place for finding truth.

It is from this set of assumptions that the modern world is born. With enough observational power big stories can be told, grand narratives that are universal in scope. The surety of dogma can be replaced with the surety of observation and measurement.

           

Caputo:

          John Caputo is a post-modern theologian who sees the post-modern rallying cry, “The connection between things is not clear!” as one deeply in line with the Christian faith.

In fact, for Caputo, deconstruction—taking apart the Lego model and wondering if the pieces could be put together differently; noticing the ways that the choices that went into the construction were not done in a dispassionate and objective manner, but indeed were filled with biases and passions—is an act of idol smashing. Any story, Caputo would say, that is big enough to be totalizing, is also big enough to be an act of idolatry.

Caputo’s ultimate example of deconstruction is the cross. God is executed by our big totalizing ideas. God is executed, and when you realize that’s the case, everything else in this world, the way we’ve fashioned the world that allows for our killing of God incarnate, is suspect, is fair game to be questioned, called out as subjective and relative, unmasked as acts of power and will. If the powers of observation can’t see God at work in the world, perhaps they can’t apprehend a universal truth as well as they would claim.

 

Conclusion:

          There is a chasm between the modern world and the post-modern world. It seems that once you cross that chasm you can not help but burn the bridge behind you. The act of deconstructing big stories and protestations of objectivity are alienating. Yet it is worth noticing that both modernity and post-modernity can come out of faithful longings. Descartes desired a way to know truth in the face of an explosion of dogmas, and Caputo wields deconstruction against the many idols of the modern age.