Within the postmodern world it is 
feelings that count, 
not rational arguments.

Christianity, modernity, postmodernity

By John Navone

Contemporary intellectual discourse concerns the foundations of knowing and being. The project of the last few centuries, sometimes known as “modernity,” has given way in many quarters to “post-modernity.” Modernism, at least in principle, claimed to know things objectively. Postmodernism applies a radically suspicious understanding to all such claims, attempting to show in case after case that, as Nietzsche argued a century ago, claims to knowledge are in fact claims to power. The correlate of this was that modernism claimed that there was a real world independent of the knower. Post-modernism collapses this claim, insisting that all we are left with are the prejudices of the would-be knower.

Similarly, modernism told a great story of progress, enlightenment, and development, and insisted that this story — in which, of course, the Western world of the eighteenth century and subsequently was the hero — be imposed on the rest of the world, in a secular version of the Christian missionary enterprise that was flourishing at that time. Postmodernity affirms that all such large stories — “metanarratives” is the word generally employed to denote the stories that stand behind or above the smaller stories people tell and live — are destructive and enslaving, and must be deconstructed. All we are left with are the various smaller stories by which individual communities order their lives, and even they are constantly under suspicion.

What about the individual? Modernity vaunted the great individual, the lonely and lofty “I” —”the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.” Postmodernism has deconstructed this figure, too. Each of us, we are now told, is a shifting masses of impulses and feelings, without a stable center that can be held up and inspected. Impressions to the contrary are just so much posturing. These key elements of postmodernity filter through into popular thinking in endless ways even among those who know nothing of the technical terms of the discussion.

How can Christians, in the light of Scripture, address these questions? With Paul’s letter to the Galatians, for example, we have a reliable guide for an authentically Christian response; for Galatians is concerned with truth (2:5, 14; 4:16; 5:7). It is concerned with claims and counterclaims to knowledge, including knowledge of God (e.g., 4:8-9); with a great story that began with Abraham, climaxed in Jesus the Messiah, and is moving outward to embrace the world (3:6 — 4:11; etc.). The basic answer is that in Galatians Paul is concerned with breaking the bonds of slavery and the setting free of captives. He retells the exodus story (4:1-7), showing how in Jesus the Messiah and by his Spirit those who had been enslaved to nongods have been liberated (4:8; cf. 1:4). His account is a grand overarching narrative, beginning with Israel and reaching out to embrace the world, but it is a story that leaves no human being, organization, or ethnic group in a position of oppressive power over others. It is a Jewish story, but it is not the typical Jew who says, “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” This is the story precisely of how those who were kept as second-class citizens are now welcomed in on equal terms. This is a metanarrative like no other.

The same text (2:19-21) is Paul’s answer to those who would see the individual deconstructed into various shifting forces and impulses. Paul goes further. The individual, especially those who glory in their status, must die in order to live. And the new life they are given is not their own, is nothing to give them status over others; it is the life of the crucified and risen Messiah.

The result of this good news is that those who are liberated from bondage have come “to know God” (4:9) — or rather, as Paul quickly modifies it, to be known by God (cf. 1 Cor. 8:1-6). Just as the Israelites were granted a fresh revelation of the true God in the exodus, so the events of the new exodus have truly revealed this same God in a new way. But the idea of “knowledge” or truth itself is hereby set on a new footing. No longer is it the arrogant and brittle knowledge of the post-Enlightenment world, making the hard sciences its primary paradigm and “relationships” simply a matter of “feeling.” Nor is it the soft and fuzzy knowledge of the postmodern world, where “feeling” and “impression” are all that there is. The primary knowledge, for Paul, is the knowledge of God. God’s knowledge of you, and yours of God in grateful and joyful answer. This is a relationship, one that gives rise to the deepest feelings ever known, but it is a true knowledge nonetheless — both in that it is knowledge of the truth and in that it constitutes the truest mode of knowing. All other knowing is first relativized and then, when and as appropriate, reaffirmed in new ways from that point. This is a knowing like no other, because it is knowledge of a reality like no other.

The issues that Paul addresses in Galatians provide a starting point for our addressing the major issues of our day. Paul’s opponents were seeking to establish a way of being, a grand story, a form of knowing, a type of identity, upon the converts. The pressure to get circumcised was an insistence on establishing one kind of ethnic identity over against others. Paul deconstructs these claims, showing that they themselves are dehumanizing, based on “the flesh.” He shows that the moment in which history is changed forever is the moment when Jesus the Messiah died and rose again. Modernity, post-modernity, and various sorts of millennial speculation all offer their own counter-eschatology, but to take Galatians seriously is to insist on the radical transformation and liberation of human history that occurred not with some great cultural shift in the Western world of the last few centuries, but when Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, having “given himself for our sins” (1:4). It is this event that enables Paul to affirm the Son of God “loved me and gave himself for me” (2:20); “faith working through love” is the sign of true life (5:6); love is the first fruit of the divine Spirit, a love that inspires mutual respect and service (5:22, 13).

Paul does not offer encouragement to those who want a world without God, whether they are modernists or postmodernists; rather, he rejoices that God is creating in Christ a new world built on and characterized by the love of those who walk by the Spirit (5:18).

A century ago many in the West believed that war was a necessary part of human development, leading through conflict at the societal level to the survival of the fittest, on a loose analogy with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Two world wars and hundreds of smaller ones later, few believe this anymore; and the “Cold War” that hung over the world for nearly half a century reflected this growing uncertainty. But the modernist paradigm still remained in place, and when the West effectively won the Cold War, a victory symbolized by the destruction of the Berlin Wall, there was a widespread assumption that this would mean the worldwide triumph of so-called “Western” values. What has happened, of course, is very different. The Balkans, the Middle East, many African countries, and many other parts of the world are a grim reminder that hatred and violence based on tribe, race, and geography have not disappeared overnight, and remain deep-rooted. The world evidences Paul’s warning: “If you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not destroyed by one another” (5:15). The powerful message of Paul is that only through faith in Jesus the Messiah can these apparently irreconcilable racial, tribal, or social animosities be overcome. The grace and call of God in Jesus the Messiah enables the forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace that a world without God can never know.

We cannot have reconciliation without also having the exclusion of evil. The older liberal agendas that insisted only on the former, and the tribal agendas that name as “evil” all that the other tribe does or seeks to do, must be challenged by the vision and agenda of God in Jesus the Messiah. The old rules of modernity have failed the world that counted on them. The Church is called to be the sacrament of God’s victory in Jesus the Messiah over all the powers of evil that keep peoples locked in their own separate stories, fighting all others. The church is called to be the sacrament of God’s universal love and peace for all mankind. The Jerusalem — “city of peace” that is God’s gift is “the mother of us all” (4:26). Paul affirms that “the Israel of God” (6:16) consists of all those, Jew and Gentile alike, who believe in Jesus the Messiah.

How can Christians speak truly and appropriately about God within a world that has forgotten most of what it thought it knew about God and has distorted much of the rest? How do we speak to people who assume that when we talk about God becoming man in Jesus, this must be a matter of God’s “intervening” from a distance, as if we possessed our origin and ground and destiny apart from God? How do we speak of God to persons who think about God, under the critique of Marx, who said that talking about God was what those in power did to keep the rest quiet; of Darwin, who said that we were all descended from the apes anyway, and that the world could be understood without the gratuitous assumption of a creating or sustaining God, since it works on the basis of competition; of Freud, who said that God-language was projection of a latent father image; and of Nietzsche, who despised Christianity for being wimpish while also exposing its truth claims as power games. Such persons assume, not least because the media tell them so, that “God” and “religion” are out of date. Within the postmodern world it is feelings that count, not rational arguments; and there is a general feeling in much of Western culture that all that sort of thing has had its day.

The God of whom Paul speaks in Galatians is not a private God, to be worshipped by initiates but kept secret from the outside world. This God must be proclaimed in the public arena. This God claims the allegiance of all, because this God is the creator and lover of all. This God is the reality of which the idols of this world are parodies (4:8-11). But how can we speak of this God without being misunderstood? When we use the word “God,” many will suppose we are speaking of the detached, deist spectator God.

As we know from Acts, Paul faced similar problems, and he got around them by telling them the story of Jesus (3:1). The story itself, climaxing with Jesus’ death and resurrection, and his enthronement as Lord of the world, carries its own power (Rom. 1:17; 1 Cor. 1:18 — 2:5). Paul obtained a hearing for his story by living in a way that differed from that of other teachers and wandering philosophers. He embodied the good news that he was announcing. His life recapitulated the story of Jesus, communicating the power of the Spirit of Jesus at work in him. The fruits of the Spirit in Paul’s life evidenced the truth of his good news about Jesus the Messiah: “Then, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. But now that you know God, or rather have come to be known by God, how can you turn back?” (4:8-9). The fruits of the Spirit of Jesus at work in Paul’s life communicated to those with ears to hear what it meant both to know God and to be known by God.

The incomparable success of Paul’s evangelization was not a question of old or new techniques of communication, but rather of what kind of person he was. It was not primarily a question of his letter-writing skills. Paul was the good news that he communicated as a person inspired by and living in the Spirit of Jesus Christ and his Father. Paul evangelized by irradiating that radiant Spirit in all the particularities and concreteness of his life story. The radiant goodness of his life in that Spirit overwhelmed, inspired, and transformed all who recognized that Spirit within the depths of their own hearts and minds. The beauty of that Spirit is implicitly what Dostoievsky meant when he affirmed that “Beauty will save the world.” The Transfiguration of Jesus reveals and communicates the Beauty that saves the world.

Evangelization, for Paul, was the hallmark of a spiritually vibrant and healthy community of faith. By the same token, the lack of evangelization evidenced a lack of spiritual vitality or a spiritually unhealthy community. Goodness is self-communicating; it diffuses itself. The Spirit of God, Goodness Itself, is where it acts in diffusing Itself. The joy and goodness of life in the Spirit is, likewise, too good to keep to ourselves, whether as individuals or as communities. Our knowing God in the biblical sense is always our enjoying God with a joy that we cannot keep to ourselves. Evangelization is the contagious radiance of persons and communities who enjoy God above all and, therefore, are free to enjoy others as they enjoy themselves in the Holy Spirit of Happiness Itself/God.

There is a sense in which we are inevitably “evangelizing” whenever we enthusiastically tell others the “good news” of someone or something or some place that we enjoy and want them to enjoy. We want them to see a film or to read a book or to hear some music that we thoroughly enjoyed. Persons incapable of joy cannot “evangelize” in any sense because nothing moves or touches or inspires them. They have eyes but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear. The radiant goodness of creation and, implicitly, its Creator escapes them. The joy of Life Itself eludes them. The New Testament describes them as the refusers of the banquet of Life Itself. Not even God can make them happy.

Reverend John Navone, S.J., is professor of theology at the Gregorian University in Rome. He has written scores of articles for various publications, and is best known for his contributions to narrative theology. The author of thirteen books, his most recent is Enjoying God’s Beauty (The Liturgical Press, 1999). His last article in HPR appeared in August-September 2000 issue.