Postmodernity, Emerging Church, Technological Revolution = Reverse Reformation?
Posted on September 9 2009
Posted by:
Dave Hughes
There is so much discussion around at the moment about church planting, postmodernity, reformed theology, missional communities, the use of technology, and more generally about how the church has failed to respond to the sweeping changes in our world.
But is it really a reverse reformation?
Robert Webber seems to think so:
The current communication revolution is a shift away from the didactic nature of the print media to a more experiential form of communication based, ironically, largely on participatory experience. This turn of events is, in a sense, a “reverse Reformation.” Faith is no longer nourished exclusively by doctrine and intellectual speculation, but by imaginative immersion in participatory Christian communities.[1]
There seems to be this kind of thinking that all we need to do is to change the 'form', or the vessel, or the container that the message is presented in, and that will then ensure that the Christian faith is accessible to a whole new world:
The current communication revolution obviously raises questions about the future of the Church. How can we expect a positive future for Christianity if it returns to a form of communication that was all but stamped out by the Reformation? Form is an agent of message. The Church must learn to distinguish between the message of faith and the form in which it is communicated. Late medieval Christianity experienced a corruption of its message through the accretion of numerous cultural additions to the faith. The Reformers repudiated both the corrupted message and the form in which it was being communicated. The cultural changes being introduced by contemporary communication calls Christians to find new wineskins for an unchanging wine. Consequently, it is not the historic content of worship that needs to change but the form and style that delivers the content.[2]
What we seem to miss is that the medium is the message. Yes, the Reformers changed the form that the message was being communicated through, but they also changed the message. What makes us think that the message won't change in this new cultural revolution fueled by the rapid surge in new technology? You change the medium you change the message, you change the message, you change the medium - the two are intrinsically and irreversibly linked.
The Christian faith is full of paradoxes, where if you emphasise one thing, you risk abandoning another, when both need to be held in tension. There seems to be two things at work: a reaction against the imbalance of that which has come before us (postmodernists vs modernists), and a gradual building and acceptance of Christian orthodoxy over-time. Church History seems to attest to the ongoing development of Christian orthodoxy b. Perhaps the core theological debate of the next couple of hundred years will be on gender? Undoubtedly us postmodernists will knee jerk react too far one way on certain issues, others will then knee jerk react against us, and yet over the course of time, within the context of debate and experimentation, orthodoxy will ensue.
It's not a 'reverse reformation'.
It's another counter reformation, in a series of reformations, that started with the early church and will continue until the very end of time. The message will further develop, where truth is retained and built upon, and the form forever adapts to the surrounding culture.
[1] Robert Webber, Planning Blended Worship: Creative Mixture of Old and New, Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1998, 26.
[2] Robert Webber, 28.
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