Search This Blog

Friday, November 18, 2011

Walking to Emmaus in a Postmodern World

Two serious-minded unbelievers are walking home together, trying to make sense of the world of the mid-1990s. The dream of progress and enlightenment has run out of steam. Critical postmodernity has blown the whistle on the world as we knew it. 
Our two unbelievers walk along the road to Dover Beach. They are discussing, animatedly, how these things can be. How can the stories by which so many have lived have let us down? How shall we replace our deeply ambiguous cultural symbols? What should we be doing in our world now that every dream of progress is stamped with the word Babel
Into this conversation comes Jesus, incognito. (It is a good thing they don't recognize him because modernity taught them to disbelieve in all religions, and postmodernism rehabilitated so many that Jesus is just one guru among dozens.) "What are you talking about?" he asks. They stand there, looking sad. Then one of them says, "You must be about the only person in town who doesn't know what a traumatic time the twentieth century has been. Nietzsche, Freud and Marx were quite right. We had a war to end wars, and we've had nothing but more wars ever since. We had a sexual revolution, and now we have AIDS and more family-less people than ever before. We pursue wealth, but we have inexplicable recessions and end up with half the world in crippling debt. We can do what we like, but we've forgotten why we liked it. Our dreams have gone sour, and we don't even know who 'we' are anymore. And now even the church has let us down, corrupting its spiritual message with talk of cosmic and political liberation.
"Foolish ones," replies Jesus; "How slow of heart you are to believe all that the Creator god has said! Did you never hear that he created the world wisely? and that he has now acted within his world to create a truly human people? and that form within this people he came to to live as a truly human person? and that in his own death he dealt with evil once and for all? and that he is even now at work, by his own Spirit, to create a new human family in which repentance and forgiveness of sins are the order of the day, and so to challenge and overturn the rule of war, sex, money and power?" And, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, and now also the apostles and prophets of the New Testament, he interprets to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. 
They arrive at Dover Beach. The sea of faith, having retreated with the outgoing tide of modernism, is full again, as the incoming tide of postmodernism proves the truth of Chesterton's dictum that when people stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything. On the shore there stands a great hungry crowd who had cast their bread on the retreating waters of modernism only to discover that the incoming tide had brought them bricks and centipedes instead. The two travelers wearily begin to get out a small picnic basket, totally inadequate for the task. Jesus gently takes it from them, and within what seems like moments he has gone to and fro on the beach until everyone is fed. Then the eyes of them all are opened, and they realize who he is, and he vanishes from their sight. And the two say to each other, "Did not our hearts burn within us on the road, as he told us the story of the creator and his world, and his victory over evil?" And they rushed back to tell their friends of what happened on the road and how he had been made known in the breaking of the bread.   - N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus, p.171-172

No comments:

Post a Comment