The Story in Economics

Economics seems to have a great deal to do with our new world - maybe it always has. I've posted a few times on the pervasiveness of the consumerist mindset and the dangers it poses to discipleship. Having lots of money and stuff makes it harder to follow Christ. Or as Jesus put it in Luke 18:25 "Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

Well I was reading some stuff over at the The Church and Postmodern Culture blog and came across this interesting take on it. The whole post is a bit tough to get your head around but if you like thinking about postmodernism and philosophy. it's a pretty interesting read. Here's a quote from one of the commenters"

"The hyper-modernists have realized that the royal road to (private) riches comes not in making things, but in making stories, narratives; or rather, in making symbols upon which we can project our stories. What, for example, does Nike manufacture? Not one thing! They make no shoes or shirts or anything you can touch. Rather, they manufacture a symbol, the swoosh, and their task is to associate that symbol with fashion, with athleticism, with what-have-you. To actually make a useful product, to have factories and to deal with real workers, would be considered crass and vulgar; there are slaves enough in the East to perform those tasks. No, Nike makes a symbol, and markets it, and contracts with slaves to make products to which the symbol can be attached."

This puts marketing and consumerism into perspective. Nike hires "swoosh" missionaries to evangelize the world with the good (?) news of Nike. Then people flock to the Nike store to worship and come out with things that identify them with the swoosh. (you can insert your own brand - Apple seems to fit a little too well here!)

It really is a scary proposal. We are built to live by a story that guides our lives or at least the helps us make sense of this world. If the one that is true doesn't seem to fit, or we have grown tired of it, or other stories are being told more convincingly, we can see the result in our world. I wonder if we've forgotten how to tell His story or how to link it with symbols that make sense to our world.

This stuff will require more thought.

The Culture of Death

A couple of weeks ago I attended a breakfast hosted by the Canadian Urban Institute - a group that hosts regular forums on issues that affect urban life. The one I attended was geared towards how to make faith more a part of the urban landscape and they talked about ways to value, support and include the "social capital" provided by churches.

In the USA the conversation is about funding and valuing "faith based initiatives." Canada has marginalized faith based organizations to a much greater degree even though we have a strong history of co-operation between church and state. For example the church has run native schools, the provinces have funded Catholic schools (in Ontario) and Pentecostal and Salvation Army schools (in Newfoundland). Much of the work with the poor is done by faith based organizations like the Salvation Army (homeless shelters, rehab centres, etc.)

One of the presenters was Rob Joustra from the The Work Research Foundation whose mission is to influence people to a Christian view of work and public life. They seek to explore and unfold the dignity of work, the meaning of economics, and the structures of civil society, in the context of underlying patterns created by God. They have a great website with lots of resources and a very interesting report that should be out in a month called Stained Glass Urbanism.

One of their resources is called "Think." Here they have a number of podcasts about urban, work and cultural issues. I listened to one of them last week (by a guy named John Seel) and I have been thinking about it ever since. Fred Petross at Abductive Columns posted about it and gave me a link to a hard copy. That is great because I was ready to actually transcribe it word for word from the podcast because I feel it is such a significant resource in understanding our current culture.

I've quoted a few sections of below. The links to look at all of it are in the previous paragraph.

On Postmodernism

Identity, morality, and society itself are impossible to maintain unless they are premised on an existing sacred order.

Philip Rieff. (Sacred Order/Social Order: My Life Among the Deathworks), a non-practicing Jew, argues that identity, morality, and society itself are impossible to maintain unless they are premised on an existing sacred order. Cultural formation is a process of translating the sacred order into the social order. Until recently, all societies depended on a vertical relationship with the sacred. All social and individual life made this assumption. This is not true today.

Rieff identifies three historical epochs or worlds, captured in words: fate, faith, and fictions. The first world is the classically pagan, based on fate; the second world is theistic, based on faith; and the third world is postmodern, based on fictions. The third world differs radically from the former two. For the participants in this third world, which represents our culture, “transliterate no sacred order into social order but instead propose a world in which there is no truth and no sacred order, only fictions and various rhetorics of power and self-interest.” This is unprecedented. “Every world, until our third, has been a form of address to some ultimate authority,” Rieff warns.

Consequently, the culture war we face today is not like that of the past. Past conflicts were between competing sacred symbolic systems. They were in effect family feuds. Not so today. Sociologist James Davison Hunter, in his introduction to Rieff’s book, writes, “What makes the contemporary culture war distinctive is that it is a movement of negation against all sacred orders and directed, in its particulars, against the verticals in authority that mediate sacred order to social order.” The third world cultural elites are insistent on instructing society in this “higher illiteracy.” This world, anticipated by Nietzsche, Rieff calls a “deathwork.” “Deathworks are battles in the war against second culture and are themselves tests of highest authority.”

Abandoning the wrong approach

Our past efforts at cultural renewal have not been effective in part because the faith perspective is underrepresented in many of the institutions of cultural leadership. Consider geography. There are four main centers of national cultural influence: Boston, New York, San Jose—representing the Silicon Valley—and Los Angeles. Evangelicals are concentrated instead in places like Wheaton, Colorado Springs, and Orlando. Institutional evangelicalism serves institutional evangelicalism, but rarely the wider culture.

Politics reflects culture; it doesn’t direct it.

Culture is shaped by a small number of gatekeepers. Majority perspectives have little bearing on culture formation. Instead, elites dominate. Neuhaus notes: “Even though [these elites] may be a minority of the population, they succeed in presenting themselves as ‘mainstream’ through their control of powerful institutions in the media, in entertainment, in the arbitrations of literary taste, in the great research universities and professional associations, and in the worlds of business and advertisement that seek the approval of those who control the commanding heights of culture.” Increasingly, grassroots political efforts to reverse the current cultural direction are proving futile. Politics reflects culture; it doesn’t direct it.

Moreover, by focusing on mobilizing majorities and legislative coercion, these faith communities have alienated their opponents while squandering their cultural and biblical capital. They have failed because the convictions that underlie culture cannot be coerced. They can be proposed, never imposed. Culture changes when a society’s assumptions and aspirations are captured by new ideas and images that are developed by thinkers and artists, expounded in both scholarly and popular forms, depicted in innumerable works of art, literature and entertainment, and then lived out attractively by communities of people who are committed to them. By narrowly focusing on Washington and state legislatures, faith communities have forgotten how to assert cultural influence. Today, most Christians in America are known for self-serving power politics rather than humble service for the good of others.

That many faith leaders are now viewing “the culture” as a new strategic goal is laudable, but such recognition also needs a deep theological perspective and appropriate cultural discernment to have any renewing effect.

Living Well in the Emerging Milieu (DMin)

Once we look closely at the philosophical foundations of much of what passes as popular culture today it is easy to become discouraged. When one is hoping and praying for a transformed city it is difficult to hear of fathers killing their children (as I heard this morning on the news in my community) and of characters in movies trying to kill God (as in the upcoming Golden Compass movie coming out - what a "great"?!? Christmas movie - do you think that timing was coincidental?) But is this cultural situation too difficult for God? Is the Gospel irrelevant to this emerging culture? Obviously not! God is at work and part of our role is to participate in the Missio Dei and the incarnation. The next section of my paper addresses some of the responses to our current cultural milieu.


How shall we then live?

"Ivan Illich was once asked what is the most revolutionary way to change society.
Is it violent revolution or is it gradual reform? He gave a careful answer. Neither. If you want to change society, then you must tell an alternative story."

The ongoing challenge is to recover and retell the original story of Jesus in the midst of a culture that thinks it already knows the story and believes the story is irrelevant. The challenge is also to realize that our understanding of the story has been clouded by the history of the church and our experience of that story. Alan Hirsch asserts: “I have become absolutely convinced that it is Christology, and in particular, the primitive, unencumbered Christology of the NT church, that lies at the heart of the renewal of the church at all times and in every age … Christology determines missiology; missiology determines ecclesiology.” In The Forgotten Ways, Hirsch maintains that a missional model must be incarnational. This is absolutely fundamental to effective ministry in this cultural milieu.

1. Incarnation
Incarnation is one of the key elements to understanding how to change our system and recover a New Testament ethos and praxis. God’s coming to the world is the incarnation — that is how God is missional. Therefore, true missional activity participates in the missio Dei, the mission of God. Jesus’ incarnation was an act of identification with others, taking up residence among others, and functions as clear revelation for us in our current situation. Hirsch contends simply this: God’s missional move is to find its counterpart in our similar incarnational missional move. And he sees a good theme in 1 Cor 9:22-23: “To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.”

Hirsch suggests that there are four elements of Incarnation: presence; proximity; powerlessness; and proclamation. These are all significant for the development of experimental models of church.

Presence is living among others in their space for a long time if need be. We rarely consider the significance of Jesus spending thirty years living among the people of Palestine before he began his “official ministry.”

Proximity means being genuinely available to those among whom you live. How many live in a neighborhood but rarely interact with their neighbors? How many have accepted the ethos of suburbia that polite interaction and good fences are all that is needed to be a good neighbor?

Powerlessness describes how Jesus laid aside his majesty to live among us. “He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” Isaiah 53:2. He did not come in power to wield power. He allowed himself to be crucified and God raised him up and justified him. Too often we desire to control our mission and our culture to conform it to our image. This coercive style of ministry has been noticed and rejected by the culture.

Proclamation implies our preparedness to tell the story at all times and in all ways. We are a “message tribe” and we exist to communicate and live out the message – given the other three elements of incarnation.

One Response to Postmodernism - DMin

As I continue posts from my DMin paper, we get to the point where I list some of the responses to the current situation the church finds itself in. The church is found in the midst of a post-Constantinian, post-Christendom, postmodern world where few of the old church rules and norms apply. One of the reactions to this situation is what has been called the Emerging Church Movement - which some people call "the conversation." In the paper I quote some of Scot McKnight's material which I have found quite helpful. He blogs at Jesus Creed. Here's the next section of the paper ...


Gibbs and Bolger, define emerging in this way: "Emerging churches destroy the Christendom idea that church is a place, a meeting or a time. Church is a way of life, a rhythm, a community, a movement. Emerging churches are communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures.”

This definition encompasses nine practices. The core practices of emerging churches are then illustrated in their book with comments from those who are "practitioners" of contextualizing the gospel of the kingdom of God in the postmodern world. The nine core practices are:
1. Identifying with Jesus (and his way of life)
2. Transforming secular space (overcoming the secular/sacred split)
3. Living as community (not strangers in proximity at a church service)
4. Welcoming the stranger (radical and genuine hospitality that is inclusive)
5. Serving with generosity (not serving the institution called "church," but people)
6. Participating as producers (not widgets in the church program)
7. Creating as created beings (releasing God’s creativity inherent in each one)
8. Leading as a body (beyond control and the CEO model of leadership)
9. Merging ancient and contemporary spiritualities.

Although it has not yet become a formalized institution (and actively resists becoming one) there are a number of distinct commonalities in this emerging movement or “conversation” as many prefer to call it. Not all of them are positive.

Scot McKnight, in an article for Christianity Today, has summarized five themes that characterize the emerging movement.

1. Prophetic (or at least provocative). The emerging movement is consciously and deliberately provocative and provides a sometimes scathing critique of the Christendom tendencies of modern Evangelicalism. Emerging Christians believe the church needs to change, and they are beginning to live as if that change had already occurred.

2. Postmodern. Living as a Christian in a postmodern context means different things to different people. Some will minister to postmoderns, others with postmoderns, and still others as postmoderns. The vast majority of emerging Christians and churches fit these first two categories. They don't deny truth, they don't deny that Jesus Christ is truth, and they don't deny the Bible is truth. The third kind of emerging Postmodernity attracts all the attention. Some have chosen to minister as postmoderns. That is, they embrace the idea that we cannot know absolute truth, or, at least, that we cannot know truth absolutely. They speak of the end of metanarratives and the importance of social location in shaping one's view of truth. They express nervousness about propositional truth.

3. Praxis-oriented. A notable emphasis of the emerging movement is orthopraxy, that is, a focus on right living. The contention is that how a person lives is more important than what he or she believes (although belief is also needed). Experience does not prove that those who believe the right things necessarily live the right way. No matter how much sense the traditional connection makes, it does not necessarily work itself out in practice. Public scandals in the church—along with those not made public—prove this point time and again. "By their fruits [not their theology] you will know them."

4. Post-evangelical. The emerging movement is a protest against much of evangelicalism as currently practiced. The vast majority of emerging Christians are evangelical theologically. But they are post-evangelical in at least two ways. i. Post-systematic theology: The emerging movement tends to be suspicious of systematic theology because God didn't reveal a systematic theology but a storied narrative, and no language is capable of capturing the Absolute Truth who alone is God. ii. In versus out: Even if one is an exclusivist (believing that there is a dividing line between Christians and non-Christians), the issue of who is in and who is out pains the emerging generation. Most prefer a centered-set approach where salvation is measured by the direction one travels (toward the center/Jesus) and proximity to the center as opposed to a clear in or out distinction.

5. Political. A final stream flowing into the emerging lake is politics. Put directly, they are usually Democrats – in the faith-based, activism style of the Catholic Worker or of Sojourners. And that spells "post" for conservative-evangelical-politics-as-usual.

The Church Still Stuck in Christendom

Ready for another quote from my DMin paper? Here it is.

This demise of Christendom is hardly a new phenomenon. “Taken as a sociopolitical reality, Christendom has been in decline for the last 250 years, so much so that contemporary Western culture has been called by many historians (secular and Christian) as the post-Christendom culture. Society, at least in its overtly non-Christian manifestation is “over” Christendom. But this is not the case within the Western Church itself. Christendom, as a paradigm of understanding, as a metanarrative, still exercises an overweening influence on our existing theological, missiological and ecclesiological understandings in church circles … Constantine, it seems, is still the emperor of our imaginations.”

As the demise of Christendom continues and its influence in the world wanes, many in the church still continue to oppose any change in the status quo, as though buttressing the system will somehow make it more relevant to our society. It is not just that we need a new style of ministry to attract a new generation. What the Church needs is that revolutionary new/old (ancient-future?) approach that fundamentally reforms its Christendom structures. Trying to make the Christendom system work in our current milieu is like trying to fly to the moon with a twin engine Cessna. It’s a good airplane but it won’t get us where we want to go. We need a flying machine of a different order.

So to attack secularism and pluralism as contrary to “the Christian values this country was built on,” seems to miss the point. In fact, Clapp maintains that the church is actually responsible for secularism because it has sponsored the system, it privatizes faith (Jesus as my personal Savior) and trivializes vocation (only full-time workers are “in the ministry”) and then calls on its members to be model citizens while it allows the state to determine the laws and the norms for what it means to be a good citizen. To quote Albert Einstein: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Not the End of Christianity

Just to clarify, when I suggest that Christendom is at the point of expiring, I don't mean that Christianity is dead - not at all! Christianity is actually the one religion that is quite fluid and amazingly able to adapt to changing circumstances. When I reflect on some of the conversations I have with some of my Jewish friends or neighbours I realize that they are quite proud of the heritage of their religion that has not changed very much for three millennia. They look back to Moses or David or the Maccabees confident that the way they celebrated their religion was much the same as it is celebrated now. The clothing, the food, the scrolls, the layout of the buildings can all be traced back centuries if not millennia. It is a religion that resists culture and maintains its traditions in spite of cultural shifts.

I think that Christianity is for the most part very fastidious about maintaining its Scripture but has tended to adapt many other things that at various times seemed more or less important. The list of changes I mentioned in the last post is an illustration of how significantly the focus of Christianity has changed over the centuries. The changes at times are so significant that the true faith becomes almost unrecognizable at time - hence the need for renewal movements and reformations to bring the church back to the few core basic of the faith. A call back to the centrality of Scripture, to the Lordship and divinity of Jesus Christ, to simple and humble worship, and to an authentic love for one another.

There really are very few clear guidelines about what church should look like. However the people who make up the church should always look and act like Jesus. If we are not doing that then someone needs to call us to account. Do I hear a voice calling out in the wilderness?

3-5Thunder in the desert! "Prepare for God's arrival!
Make the road straight and smooth, a highway fit for our God.
Fill in the valleys, level off the hills,
Smooth out the ruts, clear out the rocks.
Then God's bright glory will shine and everyone will see it.
Yes. Just as God has said." Isaiah 40:3-5

That has always been a guideline for me. I really believe that pastors should be doing what Jesus did - walk around, gather disciples, feed the poor, heal the sick, tell stories and make pompous religious people mad. It may mean you get crucified for it but what a way to go.

The "Other"

I am continuing to post some of the writing I have done in conjunction with my DMin course. This section is about postmodernity and metanaratives. [A metanarative is story that explains all the elements of life with one overarching thesis or paradigm. All the world religions presuppose a metanarative. Christianity's metanarative has been at times been summed up with John 3:16.] Postmodernity will get lots of press as my paper continues. Enjoy.


We are facing a changing view of life itself that challenges many of the things that have been part of the understanding of society for centuries. We live in a postmodern world, where people “embrace pluralism and place value in the diversity of worldviews and religions that characterizes contemporary society.” Also, Postmodernity certainly influences Christianity, and may in some ways actually be interpreted as a reaction to Christendom.

Among numerous definitions of Postmodernity, Paul Lakeland provides a succinct description. The basic tenets of Postmodernity are:

1. No standpoint is neutral or above suspicion. All are rhetorical.
2. Metanarratives erase otherness by including the other within “my” metanarrative, thereby removing its otherness. Therefore all metanarratives are suspect.
3. The task of understanding or interpreting society, if attempted at all, must be conducted through piecemeal, tactical, pragmatic, and tentative means.
4. The task of changing society if attempted at all, must be conducted through grassroots, localized (though sometimes networked) tactical, pragmatic and incremental means. The social activist must be committed to dialogue and consensus building.
5. Postmodernity contains within it elements both of the emancipatory and the demonic. No theoretical grid is available that will easily allow the discernment of which elements are which, though the kinds of totalizing impulses that would reject points 1-4 provide important hints.

One of the predominant characteristics of Postmodernity, according to Lakeland, is the explosion of communication technology that has, for the first time in history, created a world culture. This world culture allows us to be in contact with many divergent viewpoints and has contributed to a pluralism that challenges Christianity’s exclusive claims – at least in the public forum. It has also contributed to the “small world” phenomenon whereby we are much more closely connected to every other person upon the earth.

Similarly, communication technologies shift how our society views people in leadership positions. With instant and mass communication leaders are now under much closer scrutiny than ever before. This concept of globalization (or a global spirit) will continue to present challenges to the understanding of the exclusive claims of Christianity.

Also a world culture creates scrutiny of metanarratives. One of the main problems with metanarratives, whether or not they are consciously adapted or unconsciously reflected, is that they shape a singular view of the world and its peoples. It is only when the metanarrative is abandoned that voice can be given to people who are marginalized – who are defined as the “Other.”

Lakeland gives this example: “… the privileged citizens of any developed Western nation, and that of course meant a white male, and probably a Protestant, did not have to confront the Other … Women, slaves, native peoples, and homosexuals were of course not invisible, but were successfully deproblematized, incorporated into a monological schema of untroubled serenity. So, while they were undoubtedly “others,” their status as “Other” was unrecognized.” Therefore in a postmodern world, the minimized other is genuinely accorded the status of “Other” and is to be heard. This shakes some of our Evangelical certainty and must be considered as we examine the church’s sensitivity to existing paradigms of power, exclusiveness and inclusiveness, the role of laity, women, children, language and other religious systems.

In the midst of the challenges to Christianity, interest in spirituality in general and more specifically Jesus, is actually increasing. The popularity of a postmodern Jesus is the result of the perception that “he’s a pluralist, he welcomes outsiders. He welcomes women, he is against organized religion, he’s for economic justice. Jesus comes dressed up in the clothes of our own culture.”

Evidence of this interest in spirituality finds expression in New Age events like psychic fairs or like the Burning Man Festival , and in movies like David Fincher’s Fight Club (based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk). In describing the attraction of the movie, Frost and Hirsch say: “Theirs is a community of male empowerment with a strongly anti-consumerist sentiment. Like the Burning Man festival, it is also about belonging, liberation, rebellion and the rejection of middle-class American values.

There is an untamed energy about Fight Club. It has a dissident wildness about it … both are prime examples of the desperate yearning that has been unleashed in the Western world … (raising) within the West many expectations for an experiential, activist form of religious, mystical experience. The Christian church has not met these expectations.” Even though Jesus may be attractive, the Church is seen as the LEAST likely option for those seeking an “artistic, politically subversive, activist community of mystical faith.”