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Baker Publishing Group - Carl Raschke

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112 pages

English

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Can evangelical Christianity be postmodern? In The Next Reformation, Carl Raschke describes the impact of postmodernism on evangelical thought and argues that the two ideologies are not mutually exclusive. Instead, Christians must learn to worship and minister within the framework of postmodernism or risk becoming irrelevant. In this significant and timely discussion, Raschke demonstrates how to reconcile postmodernism with Christian faith.This book will appeal to readers interested in the relationship between postmodernism and Christian faith as well as church leaders and pastors wrestling with the practical implications of cultural changes for worship and ministry.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Christianity

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 novembre 2004
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441206770
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0749€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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T HE N EXT R EFORMATION
T HE N EXT R EFORMATION
Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity
CARL RASCHKE
2004 by Carl Raschke
Published by Baker Academic a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakeracademic.com
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-for example, electronic, photocopy, recording- without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Raschke, Carl A. The next reformation : why evangelicals must embrace postmodernity / Carl Raschke. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8010-2751-9 (pbk.) 1. Theology-History-20th century. 2. Postmodernism-Religious aspects- Christianity. 3. Evangelicalism. I. Title. BT28.R35 2004 261.5p1-dc22
2004012193
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from The New English Bible . Copyright 1961, 1970, 1989 by The Delegates of Oxford University Press and The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission.
Scripture quotations marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked NIV are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION . NIV . Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
C ONTENTS
Preface
1 Postmodernism and the Crisis of Evangelical Thought
2 The New French Revolution: Derrida and the Origins of Postmodernism
3 The Religious Left Bank: Origins of Religious Postmodernism
4 Sola Fide : Beyond Worldviews
5 Sola Scriptura : Beyond Inerrancy
6 The Priesthood of All Worshippers: From Hierarchy to Relationality
7 Thoroughly Postmodern Ministry: Postmodern Revivalism
8 Dancing with the Lord: Charismatic Renewal and the Deconstruction of Worship
9 The End of Theology: The Next Reformation
Notes
P REFACE
T HE CURIOUS THING ABOUT WRITING prefaces is that one always accomplishes the task after writing the book. Thus, a preface is really an afterword, or at least a thoughtful survey and careful reflection concerning what one has actually accomplished with the text. This preface is no different, but it provokes some considerations that were definitely not apparent in the first conception of the project.
In many ways this book was not really conceived. It was laid upon me in quite a few circumstantial ways, though undertakings of this sort are never accidental. They appear to have been God-intended. In the late summer of 2001, only a few weeks before the momentous day of September 11 (which happens to be my birthday), I honored a request to attend the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in November of that year-something I had never done before. I was asked to appear on a panel to discuss postmodernism and give a brief paper. Countless times over the years I had appeared on similar panels outside the evangelical setting, and my initial instincts were to honor the request merely out of a sense of obligation to the one making the request. Nothing elaborate was involved. The meeting was only seventy miles away from my office at the University of Denver. I thought of the assignment as nothing more important than preparing another hour of graduate lectures.
But on that day in November something funny happened on the way to the Broadmoor Hotel, where the meeting was held. The idea came to me that I needed to evangelize a group of evangelicals. That comment should not be taken wrongly. Throughout my own odyssey of personal doubt and faith, I have always considered myself an evangelical in the biblical sense of the term. Baptized a Lutheran in a very German Lutheran church in Philadelphia, I was raised a Presbyterian and almost ordained a Presbyterian minister in the 1960s until, as I am fond of saying, God called me out of the Presbyterian ministry to be an academician. I taught for years in a Methodist school (my mother had been raised a Methodist), but in the early 1980s I joined the Christian Reformed Church in an effort to recapture my Calvinistic faith, because the Methodists I was familiar with, who were historically always trying to get right with God, did not seem to get it very well.
Several years later a move to a small mountain community in Colorado, where there are no Christian Reformed churches, led me to join a community church, which hired an evangelical Methodist minister, which resulted in a split in the church, mainly over the style of music. It is ironic that these days music splits churches more than doctrine. I followed half of the split church to a new storefront praise-and-worship ministry-the forerunner of what we are now calling postmodern ministry-which lasted as long as the pastor, who left to go to a larger church. When I moved to Texas a year or so later, I became a Methodist again for a while, then totally unexpectedly became involved in the charismatic movement, where I stayed for about four years. Then in Dallas I joined an urban, truly postmodern, noncharismatic Generation-X church with a Baptist and dispensationalist background. I am currently a member of a nondenominational-or perhaps postdenominational, the new nomenclature-Bible church in North Texas that defines itself officially as noncharismatic, but not anticharismatic. It has the postmodern format of worship. This Bible church is next door to the Methodist church to which I once belonged. The long and short of it is that I have been around.
The Lord seems to have given me a tour of much of the entire evangelical spectrum, preparing me to write a book such as this one. I have been confident of my postmodernism, into which I stumbled philosophically in the 1970s, longer than my evangelicalism, mainly because I assumed wrongly that one could not be simultaneously an evangelical and a postmodernist. I had the wrong notion of evangelicalism, even though I really was evangelical, because I thought the word really meant what the people who bashed postmodernists said it meant. We all were wrong. God had a plan.
When I gave my little talk in Colorado Springs, I expected people to throw stones at me. The opposite was the case. God was working. I met my current publisher a few days later at the American Academy of Religion meeting in Denver. I had walked into the wrong reception, started stuffing myself with hot hors d oeuvres, realized I was not where I thought I was, and sheepishly headed out the door. Then an editor for Baker Books accosted me. He said he had heard me in Colorado Springs: Would you write a book? I said yes.
The purpose of this book is threefold: (1) To acquaint evangelical thinkers and ministers with what postmodernism really is and what postmodernist thinkers-especially philosophers-have really said, as opposed to what the polemicists are telling us too glibly it is and says. (2) To offer a historical analysis concerning how evangelical Christianity made its own unholy alliance with Cartesian rationalism and British evidentialism as far back as the seventeenth century, taking the wrong turn at a decisive juncture and thereby compromising the original spirit of the Reformation. And (3) to explore and suggest how embracing, rather than simply villifying, the postmodern turn in Western thought widens the prospects for evangelical Christianity to flourish once again as a progressive rather than reactionary force in the present-day world.
The prospects are staggering and the vision is breathtaking. I have summed up these prospects with the label the Next Reformation, which is admittedly more a slogan than an incisive caption. On the other hand, reformations are historically propelled by slogans. For the Next Reformation I have appropriated two that are just as valid in this new, postmodern reformation as they were in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Those slogans are sola fide and sola scriptura - by faith alone and by Scripture alone. The postmodernist turn in thought is an opportunity for Christian thinkers to claim and seize these slogans at this revolutionary moment in history. It allows us finally to wrest thought away from all those surly habits of reasoning that Francis Schaeffer, in his passionate but fruitless diatribes, contended were eroding the Christian worldview. It is time for Christian intellectuals to regain the offensive after more than three hundred years of cravenly throwing incense before the statue of the modernist intellectual Caesar. It is time to say confidently, Back to the Bible, back to the Mount of Olives, back to Sinai!
Books, like lives, are impossible without submitting oneself to the direction of the God whom we always meet, not only as the postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida says, at the end of the book, but also at the end of our lives. This book is really about theology, or what in 1979 I called the end of theology. It is also about ministry, which requires theology, or the end of theology. But my book on the end of theology was only a beginning. When we are in the living presence of the Lord of history, there is really no end. In the doxology we say world without end. Amen. That is what this book is really about.
Books, like wives, are impossible without love and patience. My first acknowledgment of thanks is to my wonderful wife, Sunny, who took care of five cats and four dogs-which she loves to do-while I finished this manuscript in the summer of 2003. When I first met her, I wrote her a poem that said, You have more faith than in a thousand anthems. My thanks to my partner, a woman of deep and abiding faith and love for the