Living Theology in the Metropolitan
Volume 10, Number 2
Winter 2006
Worship and Culture
As I See It…
The Challenge of Modern/Postmodern Culture
by Frank
C. Senn
I have deliberately chosen the
terms “modern” and “postmodern” as opposed to “contemporary” culture. This is because “modern” and “postmodern” are
specific. Modern can be understood to
refer to the culture generated by the mindset of the Age of Enlightenment,
which gained momentum in the Age of Romanticism and came to a head in the early
20th century. Postmodern is a reaction to modernism (or
positivism) without proposing an alternative to it. In this brief essay I suggest that the major
controversies over human sexuality and contemporary worship that we are dealing
with in our churches have to do with responding to the challenge of
modern/postmodern culture.
Modernism was a complex movement embracing
literature, art, music, and science. As
it emerged in the 19th century, this movement was animated by the idea
that “traditional” forms of art, literature, music, social organization and
daily life had become outdated, and that it was therefore essential to sweep
them aside and reinvent culture. Modernism encouraged the idea of re-examining
every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of
finding anything that was “holding back” progress, and replacing it with new,
and therefore better, ways of reaching the same ends. In essence, the Modern Movement argued that the
new realities of the 19th and 20th centuries were
permanent and imminent, and that people should adapt their worldview to accept
the new ways as good and true and beautiful.
Permeating this movement was a
new attention to the individual human being in terms of one’s unique identity
and personal development. Pre-modern
“man” was identified in relation to his or her social group and status in
society. Personal development in traditional
societies was equated with acquiring the learning and tools needed to pursue
one’s assigned vocation. G. K.
Chesterton introduced his 1908 book Orthodoxy—and the concept of
orthodoxy in opposition to modernism—with the observation that, while he was
challenged to state his own philosophy after having challenged everyone else’s
in a series of essays called Heretics, “I will not call it my
philosophy; for I did not make it. God
and humanity made it; and it made me.”
T. S. Eliot lamented “The
Waste Land” of modern culture and proposed reappropriating
the values of a Christian culture. But postmodernists have given up on all
grand narratives and totalizing schemes because of their perceived ill effects
on individuals and societies. Life is
not necessarily made better through chemistry, and what is good or true or
beautiful is in the eye of the beholder.
Therefore we must each affirm each other’s reality, including each
person’s assessment of his or her relationship with God, which can only be
deeply personal. The judgment of one’s
community is not allowed.
The challenge to orthodoxy of
modern/postmodern culture is that tradition has been debunked by the use of
critical tools and perspectives developed in the Enlightenment and no critical
assessment of the consequences is acceptable.
All that notwithstanding, I offer the following critical assessments of
two of the cultural developments that are currently impinging on the ethics and
worship of the church.
A new book titled Marriage:
A History, by the behavioral scientist Stephanie Coontz, shows how this cultural development applies to
marriage and human sexuality. Contra
both liberals and conservatives, she shows how, for most of history, marriage
was not a relationship based on a loving relationship between a breadwinning
husband and a stay-at-home child-rearing wife.
This view of marriage was a product of the mindset of modern culture
that marriage is a means of self-fulfillment as opposed to the traditional view
that it is a social institution designed to provide economic security within
which a family can be protected. The
relationship between husband and wife entails a lifelong commitment (fidelity),
but it is a partnership that while hopefully ending in love need not
necessarily begin there. Coontz’s thesis is that laying on marriage the requirement
that it meet one’s need for personal intimacy, combined with the breakdown of
traditional norms and expectations, has contributed to the crisis of marriage
in our time, signaled in the high percentage of
divorces and the high percentage of cohabiting couples.
The increasing demands for
recognizing same-sex unions or even homosexual marriages takes place within
this context. Coontz
writes: “Some of the agitation on the issue of same-sex marriage strikes me as
a case of trying to lock the barn door after the horses have already gone. The
demand for gay and lesbian marriage was an inevitable result of the previous
revolution in heterosexual marriage. It
was heterosexuals who had already created many alternative structures for
organizing sexual relationships or raising children and broken down the primacy
of two-parent families based on a strict division of labor between men and
women” (p. 274). The issue before this
church is whether we have the will to propose any norms in our teaching on
marriage and human sexuality based on what our confessions called “the magnum
consensus that is taught in our churches,” which includes the teaching on
marriage and human sexuality in our catechisms.
Religion since the 18th century has been progressively experiential (which is the
religious equivalent of scientific empiricism—truth claims should be
verifiable). Reason and revival have
gone hand-in-hand. Religion must play a
role in forming good citizens (Immanuel Kant); but it can make its contribution
to civil society only by converting or transforming individuals (John
Wesley). Revivalists have understood
this partnership of reason and renewal.
That’s why great awakenings and social reform movements have been yoked.
Social leaders have also understood this partnership. That’s why there has often been support for
the revivalists from leaders in business and government.
The revival service has a
social end, but it must appeal to individuals.
Tapping into the American entrepreneurial spirit, great revivalists
since Charles G. Finney have believed that one is free from traditional
liturgical orders to do whatever is necessary to save souls. This has always included the partnership of
music and musicians with preaching and preachers: the Wesley brothers John and
Charles, Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey, Billy Sunday
and Homer Rodeheaver, Billy Graham and Cliff Barrows
with George Beverly Shea. In The
Purpose-Driven Church, Rick Warren counsels that the first thing a founding
pastor should do is secure a good musician.
The revivalists have also tapped into the genres of popular music,
whereas the liturgical churches have used genres of chant, art music, and folk
music. Popular music is itself a modern
phenomenon. It could not exist without
mass entertainment; it has expanded exponentially through the electronic
revolution of the 20th century so that its sounds are now ubiquitous.
We will bracket here the
question of whether certain styles of music are inappropriate for worship. Such assessments have been made before. The church fathers, for example, clearly
thought that musical instruments associated with pagan cults could have no
place in Christian assemblies in which Christians were being weaned away from
paganism (even though they recognized the presence of the Levitical
orchestra in the books of Chronicles and the psalms). But even though we bracket that issue, we
cannot bracket the fact that much contemporary Christian music is written for
soloists and ensembles and that this kind of music has not often worked well
for congregational singing. We cannot
bracket the fact that much of this music is intended to be disposable and
therefore has limited value for long-term faith formation. We cannot bracket the fact many of the lyrics
reinforce a personal relationship with God, couched in the first personal
pronoun, and therefore do not communicate the doctrines of the faith. We cannot bracket the fact that the lyrics of
many of the songs express a personal devotion to Jesus but not the public
praise of the Holy Trinity. We cannot
bracket the fact that the order of worship promulgated in Pentecostal
traditions such as the Vineyard and adopted in many mainline churches aims at
bringing individuals into a personal, intimate relationship with God (even Holy
Communion is used for this purpose) rather than celebrating word and sacrament
as means of grace and expressing liturgically the response of the community of
faith.
These are serious issues. As one congregation after another adopts the
styles and even the orders of contemporary worship, this church is going to
have to decide whether there are norms of faith and practice, based in
ecumenical creeds and catholic liturgies, that this
church expects of its congregations.
The issue is ultimately a question of whether a community of faith
can exercise a magisterial or teaching authority and how it can do so, if it
desires to do so at all. The last option
is no option at all since there has to be something that holds a denomination
together besides the clergy pension plan.
To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, is there something that God and humanity
have made that has a claim on individual Christians, congregations, even
denominations? It is truly a “culture
war” we are waging, but that war transcends the battles over particular
issues. The larger issue is
orthodoxy—indeed, a Christian worldview—in relation to the modern/postmodern
worldview.