THE SHIFT FROM PLURALISM TO MULTICULTURALISM
THE GREATEST CHALLENGE/OPPORTUNITY FOR
CHRISTIAN EDUCATION IN THE POSTMODERN WORLD
“. . .men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do“
I Chronicles 12.32
The brilliant work of George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford, 1997) and the reprint of J.A. Newman’s, The Idea of The University (Yale, 1996), address a Christian view of education in our postmodern culture. Since methodological naturalism dominates most academic curriculums, it is important to expose the conflict between Christianity and science. Why was “multiculturalism” chosen to replace the already established expression “cultural pluralism.?” Cultural pluralism was invented by supporters of liberal democracy who strongly believed in “American civilization.”
Our greatest challenge in our postmodern culture is for the Church to recover the ministry of the Discipleship of the Mind. If this is to become a reality, we must be critically aware of three crucial issues: (1) We live in the 21st century world which is dominated by cultural and epistemological relativism. (2) We dwell in the arena which has moved from Pluralism to Multiculturalism. (3) This evaluation applies only to less than 10% of the world’s population.
All Postmodern efforts in Christian Education must be fully aware that narrative methodology reigns in the field of religious and historical studies. It is not God who is the object of investigation. It is the “belief in God.” In our cafeteria of belief systems it is pluralistic diversity that orders the academic agenda. There is, of course, a diversity of world views, but Animism, Buddhism, Hinduism, all forms of Pantheism cannot both describe and explain and produce predictive power to attain new data. All idealistic structures (al’la’ Hegel) are pantheistic. Internal consistency is “vital” but without predictive capabilities it cannot produce advancement of knowledge (e.g., Animism is consistent but. . .).
Since the Enlightenment (18th century), Western man has been enamored by “modernism” (19th/early 20th century) which claims that the privileges of physical science over the “spiritual” dimension of reality (e.g., Soul, Holy Spirit, Mind, etc.) Divine intervention into the Newtonian World Machine fused with Kant’s removal of the cosmos as rational consideration and Hume’s distortion of the so-called ubiquitous capabilities of the scientific method, i.e., empiricism, every category of classical Judaeo/Christian belief was called in question. By the 18th century, Christianity was condemned as ignorant superstition, by the 21st century classical Christianity is condemned as being too rational (we must never confuse between rational and rationalism, all “ism” phonemes in English are clues to world views).
In the postmodern anti-science mode, it is the humanities (art, literature, history, visibility vs. audibility forms of communication) that control the academic agenda (i.e., the rejection of any search for “truth” in cyberspace (see my essay, “Search for Truth in Cyberspace” on web)
William James, one of the prophets of pragmatic pluralism, was strongly attached to the American melting pot which contained adventurous openings to individuality—it was the self creating person who dwelt on the Western Frontier (see Wm. Turner’s, Frontier Thesis on the Marxian Analysis of the American Experience (on the web site).
John Dewey was another spokesman who gave credence to “cultural pluralism” (see my essay, “Darwin’s Influence on Dewey’s Pragmatism”). Christian Education must constructively confront the post modern meta narrative of a new “Jack, the Giant Killer” who has supposedly slain the boring Old Giant, Modernism. It is clear to all but postmoderns, who reject grand meta narratives, that postmodernism has one itself. All postmodern beliefs are eschatological. It is the secular version of Wagner’s epic opera, “Gotterdammerung“, i.e., the Twilight of the gods. The so-called Millennium bug is at the level of postmodern mythology. The New Age of Aquarius dawned with Cinderella on the stroke of midnight.
To attempt to avoid death by jargon, perhaps a brief escape through the lexical caldron of the worlds of modernity and postmodernity will shed more light than heat. By modernity we mean the European Enlightenment, which was ultimately grounded in Kant’s perspectivalism, at the intellectual level, and the Industrial Revolution at the social level, produced the greatest changes in Western culture since the coming of Christianity. The impact covered how society worked and how people thought. The Enlightenment exposed the autonomous individual, separated from tradition and all social institutions. The enormous feat was accomplished by the Scientific/Technological revolution, i.e., the Newtonian “world machine” fused with Hume’s critic of miracles were brilliantly addressed in Kant’s First Critique. The new godhead is composed of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, and Freud which gained control of all Western educational citadels.
The master of most European universities, especially Germany along with the scientific revolution came the hermeneutical and historiographical revolutions. In this maze man became the master of his soul, science alone produced certain objective knowledge, the new mythology of inevitable progress, the inherent animality of man, the perfectibility of man, the and the ultimate reality of nature. These new intellectual forces divided up into “facts” and “values;” facts were objective and values were subjective, with the developments in cultural anthropology, sociology, economics, politics, psychology, history, and psychology of religion. These later developments were grounded in the “assured results” of Darwinian theory of natural selection and social Darwinianism. The naturalistic structures were now in actual concrete. Lessing’s “Ugly Ditch” and epistemology carved up the world of knowledge into “truths of reason” and “empirical truth.” Lessing’s Ugly Ditch futility attempted to bridge the gap into two separate categories of Truth Claims. Ultimately we live in our postmodern culture of epistemological and cultural relativism (e.g. multicultural pluralism where only tolerance remains in our postmodern world of conflict of power encounters).
The radical cultural revolutions only swapped agricultural serfdom for the industrial wages of slavery. The Brave New World of modernism’s demise was symbolized by the
architecture, music, art, and politics of the counter culture of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The new modern utopian world, promised by scientific and technological advances, seemed empty and hollow. This in the context of the rise and development of post modernity. Any positive-constructive effort to develop a Christian view of education must creatively engage the very foundations of the Enlightenment/Modernism and Postmodernism.
The Scriptures in Modern and Post Modern Context
The Biblical tradition and authority must be overthrown. These concepts had been weighed and found wanting! The Jesus Seminar debated the resurrection of Jesus and then went public with a press conference to announce that they had concluded that the resurrection did not happen, part of their evidence was a young woman who worked in a mortuary in Los Angeles. She testified that all the dead bodies that she worked with stayed dead. This is, of course, the issue—all dead persons stay dead, but Jesus was raised from the dead. The biblical claim would be meaningless if dead people did not stay dead. But the historical evidence must be explained! In spite of the fact of all the historical data (e.g. but after Hume’s critic of miracle which rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of Scientific Knowledge claims), the modernist hermeneutical stance necessitates the position espoused in the Jesus Seminar... the historiographical, epistemological as well as the scientific revolution is “foundation” of rejecting all efforts to “recreate” a bygone age as normative. After the Hegelian revolution, no individual or historical epic can be employed to ground a meta narrative. The end result of the Hegelian and Darwinian revolutions was the rejection of all historical evidence to support the Christian truth claim. The tidal wave of modernity has reached our shores. Anyone who questions these “assured” results is an ignorant, superstitious, legalistic pietist.
The Modernist position has been under attack since Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, Plank, Heisenberg, Creek, Monad, et.al. The masters of suspicion were all nurtured in the bosom of modernity. The radical cultural change has precipitated a “change” in the methods and presuppositions of the way we live and think. The rhetoric of postmodernists has been disseminated in our culture from the work force to our homes, schools, etc. Much work is now done by telephone, fax and modem.
The microchip has all but replaced the factory, the secretary; communities that continue to depend on 18th century ways of doing things have been reduced either to mass unemployment or the status of the theme park. Instead of production of “things”, entertainment is the order of the day.
The industrial and sociological change fits neatly into the vision and reality which characterizes post modernity. Instead of “objective facts” we have impressions, attitudes and feelings floating around in the cyberspace. “Truth is stranger than it used to be” according to Yogi Berea; all truth claims are made by somebody or some group (i.e., the community), and that all persons and groups have agendas, which only a postmodern Gnostic guru can locate and encourage participants on the planet to accept the hermeneutic of suspicion generated by Marx, Freud, Lyotard, DeMan, Fish, Gadamer and all who have been trained in the school of Deconstructionism and now post Deconstructionism in a constant attempt to escape solipsistic irrationalism. The 18th/19th centuries attacked Christians for espousing irrational superstition; while the 20th/21st centuries reject classical Christianity for being too rationalistic. In the vast scope of journalism, facts are not important; spin is everything; reality is no longer divided as by modernity, into facts and values, or truths of reason and truths of science. Reality is only the virtual reality of each interpreter.
If reality is deconstructed, then so is the “story.” Postmodernism is the death of the meta narrative (big story); there remains only disjointed “stories”, the modernist myth of inevitable progress does not play well in the theater of multiple stories (e.g., East/West, the Balkans, Rwanda, Zambia, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Palestine). In our 21st century maze of “stories,” everybody’s liberation turns out to be someone else’s slavery. Economic boom turns out to be at someone else’s expense. The Christian controlling narrative of the “Promises of God” is broken down into little conflicting stories. Our pluralism of stories is often internally authentic, but in our global village only power seems to be able to unify the contradictory stories. In our cyberspace world we can create our own private story which is “virtual reality.” (e.g. a major voice in “the French Connection”, Emmanuel Levanas, “Ethics as First Philosophy” in A Levanas Reader edited by S. Had (Oxford/Blackwell, 1989, i.e., seeks the recovering of Greek thought as rationalistic contra “Systems” and “Theories.” This represents the Liberalism debate regarding the conflict between Hebrew and Greek thought).
The ultimate consequences of postmodern deconstructionism is the destruction of the “Individual.” (See my essay ”The Demise of the Person in the Neurobiological Revolution” We are no longer “captains of our souls.” We are only a mass of floating signifiers, impulses and impressions, changing all the time and creating new selves by the most recent spin that we encounter. The meaning of any text, poem, work of art, is not determined by the intention of the author, but radically changes according to each reader/observer. When meta narratives are rejected, so are the authors where intentions are opaque “behind” the text and besides, there is no text. Authorial intentionality is a myth, which is unavailable according to Postmodern interpreters.
When we understand how this irrational confusion enters other spheres, i.e., politics, marriage, sexuality, and education, we are then prepared to evaluate the place of Christian Education for the effective witness of 21st century disciples. Postmodern deconstructionism is in a serious dilemma. The great meta stories have fallen on evil days. We live in a pick-and-mix culture, i.e., if it feels good, “do it” context (whatever turns you on). The counter culture of the 1960’s appears in the emperors new clothes with nowhere to go in our constantly changing world of violent sound and the pornography industry, cyberspace sex. We are surrounded by near perfect symbols of this confusing, ambitious, yet “rootless culture.”
Theology of Promise: The Hermeneutical Unity of Scripture
How are the scriptures to be communicated in this dark milieu? We must ground the encounter with the Big Story of the Biblical Canon. From Genesis to Revelation the story is intact. No amount of Deconstruction can remove the enduring power of The Promises of God, from creation to consummation. Post Modernity totally rejects the biblical meta narrative as oppressive (e.g. Jewish story as oppressive in the Middle East), while the Palestinian communities comprise most of the native Christians in that cultural structure.
Promise in the Biblical Meta Narrative of the Created Universe
The biblical perspective is under attack because it is inflexible in the eyes of the Postmodern opponents. The Bible is criticized as a literature of the conqueror (e.g., see Graham Shaw’s work, The Cost of Authority; it presents a polemic against Paul’s supposed manipulation of his readers (esp. II Corinthians). Paul emphasis on the cross is a cynical manipulation of his readers. Paul is only on a power trip, according to Shaw).
The Biblical world view is grounded in creational monotheism, but is under severe attack in our postmodern, deconstructionist academy. From the First Scientific Revolution, biblical creational monotheism had been under attack. Only the biblical narrative sets forth absolute creation (Genesis 1.1) in the contexts of Pantheistic perspectives. (See my essays, “Eastern Antecedents to the Development of Western Science: From Eastern Narratives to Chaos, Non-Linear Physics, Postmodern Anti science; “Prolegomena to Theories of Scientific Revolutions: From Kant, Lakatos, Carnap, Popper, Kuhn”)
The Postmodern cafeteria/smorgasbord culture has also attended the funeral of the “death of man.” The “person” has been rejected specifically by the neurobiological revolution, where the mind has been reduced to brain, and the brain reduced to a computer analogue, i.e., the death of the self. There is no acceptable meaning to the biblical claim of man being created in the image of God to postmodern auditors. Any biblical preaching/teaching of this matter is reduced to “power trips.” The authority of the scriptures has no place in the postmodern academy (see my essay, “The Demise of the Person in Postmodern Neurobiology”). We must be aware that neither the scriptures nor Augustine or any of the reformers call the tunes. The pipers are Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Fish, Lyotard, Popper, Kuhn, Polanyi, Feyerabend, et.al. Without critical encounter with these genius minds we are in no position to ground Christian Education for the generations from the counter culture of the 1960’s to 2005.
An awareness of the agenda of 19th century biblical criticism is also essential curriculum for Christian Education in the 21st century. The radical deconstruction of the music revolution from classical, biblically grounded hymnology to jazz and postmodern musicology wars exposes the fascinating contradiction between two postmodern agendas: (1) the need to tell “my story” rather than “anyone else’s;” and (2) inseparably confused with the perpetual deconstruction of the self, The bible has a reply to our confusion
The unity of the canonical scriptures is affirmed by the Promises of God from Genesis to Revelation. The biblical meta narrative is the Promise of God from beginning to consummation. From the creator to creation “The Story” centers on the healing of the world and “the chosen” are themselves in need of rescue and restoration.
The New Testament scriptures consistently declare with one voice that the meta narrative (story) reached its climax in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the promised Messiah of Israel. Israel’s Messiah was always supposed to be the Lord of the whole creation (John 3.16—God so loved the “cosmos”). Therefore our Lord’s final commission was the “proclamation” to the whole world for its Lord and King. The early heralds of the Gospel saw themselves living between the first days and the last days. The entire structure of Acts unfolds the divine narrative which undergirds all the Epistles. No critical rearrangement of the biblical literature can remove the unifying narrative of God’s Promise (“All the promises of God are yes in Jesus, II Corinthians 1.20). From Genesis to Revelation, from creation to re-creation, from the call of Abraham to the New Jerusalem, the consistent message is the truth in which all counterfeits are mere parody. All forms of paganism, past and present, worship creation, not the creator. All forms of Pantheism—Shemetic, Graeco/Roman, Modern or Postmodern—are mirror images of the radical dualism, i.e., the belief that eternal matter is shaped by all forms of lesser gods who are always locked in mortal combat for control. “Here lies the real search for control/domination, not the biblical meta narrative of God who created heaven and earth.