Despite comparisons with Laura Marling (who sold out Bristol Cathedral earlier this month) and her music being featured as the theme tunes for two BBC dramas (The Shadow Line and Wallander) it seems like the word about Emily Barker and the Red Clay Halo playing The Fleece last week didn’t get out to the right people.

Despite the venue offering free tickets through the mailing list and Twitter, the size of the audience would probably be classed as “slightly disappointing”. It’s a shame because those of us that were there were treated to a set full of whimsical lyrics sung in beautiful harmonies by Emily and the three other women that make up The Red Clay Halo. On the plus side the small crowd in attendance were certainly appreciative (with none of the murmur of chatter from the back that usually plagues quieter Fleece gigs) and the enthusiasm of the applause after each song felt almost apologetic that Bristol hadn’t been able to turn out a few more punters.

Musical highlights for me were Pause and Bones and generally I preferred the slightly heavier songs for which Emily switched to electric guitar (a rather pretty semi-hollow Tele). Bristolian Jo Silverston’s cello playing also made me wish I hadn’t given up on that so easily at school!

I appreciate the diversity of acts that The Fleece tend to put on but I don’t think it was the right place for this band. I suspect somewhere more likely to appeal to the Radio 2 crowd, like St George’s or the Folk House, would be a better choice of venue for a return visit. I would have preferred to have been sitting down with a coffee for this one rather than standing up drinking Red Stripe!

Last night’s entertainment was a sold out Benjamin Francis Leftwich gig at The Fleece with support provided by Daughter. I would’ve liked a longer set from Daughter and actually was in the mood for something a bit heavier overall but here’s my two highlights… (there’s more Daughter here if you want it!)

Daughter – Landfill

Benjamin Francis Leftwich – Atlas Hands

I saw Dave Hause and others on The Revival Tour at the Academy last week. Since then I’ve been enjoying his album, Resolutions. Here he is with Chuck Ragan’s fiddler and double bass player (who has an awesome moustache)…

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In part 2 I looked at some of the challenges of postmodern thought to parts of the church or particular faith constructs. We should certainly pause to consider these challenges and indeed to push back at the validity of postmodernism’s challenges (as the underlying thought itself allows us to) but in part 3 I’d like to consider some of the positive ideas and affirmations coming from the application of postmodern thought within the church…

Orthopraxis over Orthodoxy

After the postmodern challenge to the concept of right belief and the potential disempowerment that comes with it there has been a focus on the idea of orthopraxis (right practice). If we can’t know what we’re supposed to think, perhaps we can at least find a way to live that is in some way self-consistent. Søren Kierkegaard, one of the early existentialist philosophers, and a Christian, expressed it as follows…

“What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. … I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.”

- Søren Kierkegaard ^[1]

Faced with the suggestion that we cannot make objectively right decisions, we can either be paralysed by unknowing or allow ourselves to be freed and empowered to choose our values, beliefs and priorities, in the knowledge that we will probably do so unconsciously anyway^[2], and then focus on how our behaviours are to follow in a way that’s doesn’t betray our professed beliefs. Instead of wondering about the theology of generosity, we can focus on being generous, instead of discussing “who is my neighbour?”, we can go outside and meet our neighbours. It has been said before that perhaps the church should say nothing for a year and just go out and do good works.

It seems that Jesus had a lot of time for people with practical needs and generally didn’t get on that well with the people who had (or claimed to have) the right theology. Yes, I recognise the irony of me sitting here writing thousands of words about all this!

A Universal(ist) Priesthood?

The doctrine of universal priesthood or “The Priesthood of All Believers” seems very much in keeping with postmodern thought. If we all struggle to access truth (seeing as through a glass, darkly), then we should certainly value everyone’s contribution, and humbly offer our own, knowing that together we can grow our understanding beyond where we could go alone.

I’m tempted to extend this thought to suggest that perhaps Christianity might not have a monopoly on understanding or experience of God but that crazy suggestion has recently got certain famous preachers in trouble so I won’t go there!

At least we can accept that there are signposts to God outside the church. The idea of separation of sacred and secular is one that would seem quite odd to the early church. Either everything is sacred or nothing is sacred. Sure, there are spheres of life where it’s good to create something that stands apart from any individual’s faiths but I’m talking about valuing the conversations about meaning, life, love and God that are constantly going on within our culture and sub-cultures rather than dismissing anything that isn’t explicitly Christian or faith-based. How awful to restrict ourselves to only finding God in “Christian” music or “Christian” films.

Perhaps taking on the idea that truth is not as easily accessible as we might hope could at least protect us against complacency that we’ve worked out some kind of formula for God. At the point where we think we’ve figured it all out, we might close our minds and stand still and how could the pursuit of God be anything but a life-long one?

The Theology of Catastrope and The Restoration of Mystery

Outside the church, people are fairly ok with the idea that sometimes crazy, unexpected things happen in life. Shit happens. For Christians, these events have often posed a problem – why would God allow this? – and so we’ve come up with a whole theology of disaster – a way to make excuses for God on his behalf for the things that happen that we don’t like or that don’t fit in with the plan we thought he had for us. Again, this is orthodoxy vs orthopraxis – if we can let go of having to have explanations for the inexplicable, we can focus on dealing with the consequences. I suspect that the feeling within church that we have to justify God in the midst of catastrophe comes from the classic question of why God allows bad things to happen to good people (or good things to happen to bad people). To me the only answer to this question that doesn’t feel like sleight-of-hand these days is “I don’t know”. Postmodernism certainly gives us permission to say that without denying any other of our beliefs.

As I said in part 1, if we see God only as a way to explain life’s mysteries then we’ll find our God continually shrinking. Saying that though, there is still something good about being aware that there’s still a whole lot we don’t know. In a society where we, our politicians, our scientist and our colleagues are constantly trying to convince each other that we have all the best answers to all sorts of questions, accepting that there are answers we don’t have can be quite a relief! Of course I’m not advocating intellectual laziness, just saying that we should be honest about the things we don’t know rather than bluffing and blagging our way around them.

The Paradox and The Grey

The church has sometimes been afraid of not having all the answers. I suppose this comes from the problem that as soon as we start making suggestions about some of the answers there will be a pressure to come up with a set of answers to all life’s difficult questions and the questions will certainly escalate further than our answers ever can. Just like anything complex, there are things we understand, things we think we understand and things we don’t understand. If one thing we thought we knew turns out to be wrong, that doesn’t necessarily negate everything.

We commonly hear the phrases “both…and…” or “now…not yet” or “hold these things in tension” within the church these days. In wider culture we’ve become fairly comfortable with holding two ideas that are seemingly contradictory and working in the grey area between them. The church is catching up on this but there’s still a significant element within and outside of the church who find it more comfortable to compartmentalise everything into discrete categories rather than any kind of spectrum. This certainly isn’t exclusive to Christians but for people who profess humility and love as guiding values, we’re often very quick to put those values aside so that we can persecute those who don’t agree with us.

An Affirmation of Doubt

If we can get away from the “house of cards” mentality that if we struggle with one part of our faith then the whole thing risks tumbling down then we can start to be a bit more honest about the doubts that we do have and church can become the place where we are able to bring those out into the open. The tighter we cling to our certainty, the further we have to fall when the unexpected comes along and shakes our foundations. As I said in part 2, perhaps our church can become the place where we encounter our brokenness and our doubts, not so that we may conquer them necessarily but so that we may share in them and deepen our relationships through them – the place where we can say to each other “I want to believe – help me with my unbelief” and where we encourage each other to act on those things for which we would live and die.

So, this is part 2 of the Pomophobia posts. Part 1 was broadly setting the scene with a bit of relevant history from the “God debate”. …

As I said in part 1, the term “postmodern” has been applied in all sorts of arenas to express a general movement away from the accepted ideas that have gone before. From now on I’ll largely be referring to postmodern philosophy or the particular part of postmodern philosophy that Christians most often mean when using the term – the suspicion of meta-narrative and the existence of absolute or objective truth (or our ability to know it). In this post I’ll be looking briefly at some of the reasons that the church and others have been concerned by the rise of postmodern thought (pomophobia) and have tried to discredit it.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t quote from Wikipedia’s article on post-modern philosophy at some point so here’s a thought…

Post-modernism is arguably the most depressing philosophy ever to spring from the western mind. It is difficult to talk about post-modernism because nobody really understands it. It’s allusive to the point of being impossible to articulate. But what this philosophy basically says is that we’ve reached an endpoint in human history. That the modernist tradition of progress and ceaseless extension of the frontiers of innovation are now dead. Originality is dead. The avant-garde artistic tradition is dead. All religions and utopian visions are dead and resistance to the status quo is impossible because revolution too is now dead. Like it or not, we humans are stuck in a permanent crisis of meaning, a dark room from which we can never escape.

- Kalle Lasn (founder of Adbusters, author of Culture Jam)

Right and Wrong

Moral relativism has long been something of a go-to bogeyman for all sorts of people – the financial crisis, the holocaust, communism, liberalism – plenty of terrible things apparently wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t allowed those darned philosophers to question our secure ideas of what is right and what is wrong (ignoring, of course, the terrible acts committed by those who were very secure in their belief that they were right and someone else was wrong!).

The Pope has a particular dislike for moral relativism blaming it for (amongst other things) the recent riots in the UK. Perhaps “The German Shepherd” (as I recently heard him called) has a point – the idea that, for example, whether or not murder is wrong is only a matter of taste is certainly problematic – but it doesn’t take too long to think of examples of beliefs and practices that at certain times in history or in certain cultures have been seen as wrong but that now would be seen as acceptable or that used to be acceptable but are now seen as definitely wrong – suddenly things become a little more complicated. A number of the most divisive “conversations” in the church at the moment are around issues where the debate is very much about what is right or wrong – homosexuality, abortion, etc – but we don’t have to look to far into church history to see similarly polarised debates that have since become unimaginable – slavery, for example.

Moral relativism is a step too far for many people of faith and no faith alike but if we could at least let it encourage to be a bit more humble in the way we assert our opinions and a bit more careful about making pronouncements about what is “right” and what is “wrong”, I think that’d be quite a valuable lesson for us all.

Everything Is Smoke

Perhaps the most troubling idea that comes out of this line of thought is that if every event, every interaction, every person only has the meaning that we subjectively ascribe to them, does anything have any inherent value? When we deconstruct the very idea of “significance”, what are we left with? This of course is where the existential nihilists went with there thinking – their answer? – we are left with nothing – everything just is, life is just a series of events that happen – none of it “means” anything and any significance we ascribe to it is purely construct.

Pretty depressing stuff and with the rise of this mode of thought it is no wonder that there has been a focus in the church on the theology of significance, purpose and self-esteem that has been pretty successful – just look at the marketing of the Alpha Course^[1]. Despite this, we only have to look as far as the book of Ecclesiastes to find a pretty compelling piece of existential literature. How did that get there?!

A Call to Inaction

As Kalle Lasn is insinuating above, once we fully deconstruct the narratives by which we live our lives and see everything as essentially meaningless (objectively) we may fall into a paralysing despair that there’s no point in doing anything because none of it matters – all our passions and dreams, our relationships and loves will all die, as will we – ultimately all that we build in our lives (and all that we, the human race, ever build) will in the end be wholly inconsequential.

Again, it’s at this point that many people of faith and no faith want to get off this line of thought and return to something a bit more warm and fuzzy but with all the loneliness and depression that seems to be an unfortunate side-effect of the society we’ve built, we must not live in denial of this viewpoint and we need to be comfortable naming it and wrestling with it.

Everything’s Not Lost

Well, this has all been a little bit miserable and hopeless! I don’t think pomophobia is the right approach – as I say, I think it’s important that we allow these difficult and troubling ideas to be out in the open, especially within church – they’ll be far more damaging if we try to keep them buried. Perhaps church should be the place where we encounter our brokenness – where we remove our masks of “I’m a successful human being who’s got it together” and come face-to-face with ourselves (and each other) as we are, not as we’d like others to think we are (that is how God sees us anyway and he’s OK with it – that is what we mean by “grace”) and perhaps that place of imperfection, of raw humanity is also a place of freedom and of intimate community.

In part 3 I’ll be looking at some of the more positive or affirming things that can and have come out of postmodern thought. I think it’s gonna be a good one…

With the grandly-titled retrospective exhibition “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990″ opening at the V&A next weekend there’s been a bit more talk than usual about postmodernism in the press over the last couple of weeks. Though, appropriately, even the label “postmodern” itself is fluid and without clear boundaries, I presume the V&A exhibition will focus on postmodernism’s influence in art and design which is essentially short-hand for irony, ambiguity, juxtaposition, elevation of the mundane, frivolity and many other things you might want to apply the label to.

Interestingly the fact that the V&A have a “retrospective” and have chosen to put a neat end date on postmodernism of 1990 suggests that, at least in art and design, we have progressed to something new worthy of finding a new name for. That may well be the case (though I don’t know what that name is – I hope it’s not post-postmodernism) but I’m more interested in the core of postmodernism (at least if you look it up on Wikipedia) – the rejection of meta-narrative and the objective truth – particularly with regard to Christianity (and faith and philosophy in general). Here the postmodern conversation still seems very relevant and current though there are signs, as I shall discuss, that in some places the conversation is moving on. First though, let’s talk a bit of history…

The God of the Gaps

Back in the day, it used to be quite easy to sell God (or a particular conception of God or gods) – whenever there was something we couldn’t explain we could use God to fill in the gaps in our understanding and, conversely and simultaneously, use the gaps in our understanding as evidence for the existence of God. Answering the question “why?” was as easy as “because that’s the way God made it”. Fortunately for human progress, some people didn’t find that a satisfactory answer so they began to dig deeper into the nature of things and so science and philosophy began the long process of filling in the gaps. Nevertheless, there are still those who are obsessed with finding gaps in the hope that they’ll find god within.

The Provable God

Obviously, with the gaps that god was inhabiting shrinking and disappearing all over the place, something had to be done before god was squeezed out completely. Taking a lesson from the scientists and philosophers (or in an attempt to meet/beat them on their own terms), so began a long campaign of trying to “prove” the existence of god with the tools developed by the scientists and philosophers – logic, experiments, etc.

On the logic/philosophy side, far too much anger and energy is wasted on debating this every day by people who have very solid meta-narratives, believe theirs is the right and, for people engaged in a debate, aren’t very interested in an 2-way exchange of ideas!

On the experiment side, occasionally academic papers claiming such things as “people who pray live longer” make it through to be reported in the mainstream media but I’m not sure anyone takes such things seriously who’s not already chosen a side (I don’t mean the science is necessarily bad – just that I’m not sure the papers published on either side have much/any impact on the debate).

As with the god-of-the-gaps, the search for the “provable god” remains with us and is very much alive on the internet!

Can We Have Our Ball Back?

The argument continued on these terms for some time and some interesting ideas developed within the conversation but then, somewhere around the 1920s, just in case we thought we were making progress in proving anything on either side, along came the beginnings of postmodern philosophy which eventually threw up the disturbing question “what if we, as subjective humans, can never access (or perceive) objective truth?”^[1]. It didn’t move the goal posts – it tore up the rulebook, demolished the pitch and ran off with the ball.

The impact of this for the very idea of god (some would say the ultimate meta-narrative) and for the process of seeking god (a search for some kind of truth) is obvious but the conversation has by no means ended and indeed has been going in some interesting directions and it’s the current conversation and where it might go in the future that I hope to look at in future posts (hence ambitiously labelling this Part 1).