Brokenness: A Personal and Corporate Opportunity
Have you ever given any serious thought to the usually selfish reasons for our initial turning to God? It's an issue that many Christians don’t contemplate much, but many non-Christians do—the correct perception that most people who have come to accept Christianity do so at a time in their lives when they have little to loose, when they are at the end of their rope.
Non-Christians see this fact as evidence that Christianity is for the weak, the desperate, and the broken. In a sense, a very important sense, they are right. The reason that we Christians tend to downplay this reality is that it reflects poorly on us, back within the standards of the real world where weakness, desperation, and brokenness are states to be pitied, to be avoided at all cost. They are states to be pitied and avoided at all costs. But that’s not the point. The fact that God comes to meet us at the precise moments when we selfishly ask Him to save us from our own demise is a fact that should be relished, shouted from rooftops, because although it reflects poorly on us, it reflects gloriously on the magnificent breadth of God’s love. It is He, not ourselves, that we are trying to glorify, right?
But there is another reason we should amplify that usually-marginalized aspect of our faith. We live in a world, in a culture, that has been decimated over the last few decades by the postmodern critique. Postmodernism has effectively pulled the curtain off of the 200+ year-old rhetoric of the Western world, a rhetoric that sought to convince humanity that we had reached the focal point of human existence, that we were on the verge of putting everything right, that by our reason and objectification, we could reach as state of true enlightenment, true Utopia.
Then along came Postmodernity and showed that all our righteousness was as filthy rags, that all our efforts were simply building the Tower of Babel. In the words of N.T. Wright, the God-given role of Postmodernity was to announce the Doctrine of the Fall to arrogant modernity.
And it succeeded.
And it is that world in which we live. A world that has recently rediscovered its weakness, desperation and brokenness.
Imagine the opportunity to tell that world that it is already forgiven.
Imagine the opportunity to embody redemption.
Imagine the opportunity to tell this broken world about hope.
Imagine...
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
Thanks for sharing this post. I very much enjoyed it. It seems you are right that postmodernity will debunk many of the lies of enlightenment--but ultimately I think it also is skeptical of all claims to truth. It seems to me possible that a postmodern will be more likely than a modern enlightenment person to accept depravity as a human condition; my question is whether that translates into a field ripe for harvest or if the story of grace will be scratched as well.
Eric,
Thanks for your kind words and your thoughtful comments. One thing I glimpsed from this comment, and the one to my previous post, is your sense that I'm putting too much hope in postmodernity. And it's probably my fault for not explaining in more clearly, so let me give it another shot.
My point about postmodernity is that it has served a useful purpose. An extremely useful purpose. It has blown a gap in something that had become entrenched. Our role, as followers of Jesus Christ, is to move through that gap and out the other side. In other words, my vision is not of a postmodern Christianity, a postmodern gospel. It is, rather, of a post-postmodern gospel, one that acknowledges the gap created by postmodernity and fills that gap with the message of the gospel, with an epistemology based on love, not on the divinization of objective truth, which postmodernity has revealed is a cloaked quest for power.
Grace and Peace.