The Christian Church in Postmodern Culture

The Christian church today finds itself in a situation that is unlike any other in its history. The world, once fractured into numerous independent nations and cultures, has by contrast become global and interconnected. This interconnectedness is easily seen in the global economy, the rise of multiculturalism in popular culture and in education, in communications technologies, and in the global political landscape. In this global environment, it is an irony that the Christian church, which was commanded by Christ himself to make disciples of all the nations and to baptize in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, has found itself to be but a single voice in a global chorus of pluralistic religions and belief systems.

The church universal, both as an institution and as individual believers, has not fully grasped its newfound environment. In an age of multiculturalism, the belief in a single, universal path to God, by way of his Son, Jesus Christ, has come to be seen as an antiquated anachronism by many; a well-meaning but outdated hubris of a narrow-minded Judeo-Christian culture. The criticisms of Christianity abound: cultural relativism, alternative spiritualities, multiculturalism, skepticism of various sorts, concerns about fear-based theology and proselyzation tactics, the observation that Christians can be judgmental and intolerant, fear of fundamentalism and extremism (along with their twin towers of anti-intellectualism and violence), along with countless examples in history of evil being perpetrated in God's name, ranging from the Crusades to child sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church.

To the Christian believer, these charges often will seem to be unfounded attacks upon their sovereign faith; but the reality is that to the nonbeliever these items are the backdrop against which any attempt to evangelize or share the Christian faith is evaluated. "How can a belief system that has caused so much pain and suffering in the world be something worth believing in?" the nonbeliever asks. To minimize the reality of these factors is both insulting and degrading to the intelligence and moral sense of those who critique the Christian faith from without. Nonetheless, the Christian church must remain committed to its view that to walk with Jesus is the one true path to God and to salvation, and the highest Earthly good. To deny this would render the Christian faith pointless and unnecessary. So there is a tension today between the pluralistic and skeptical environment in which the church finds itself and the need for the church to meet these challenges head-on if it is to have any credibility and to have any hope of reaching a world that is global and international in its concerns but which is basically hostile to traditional belief systems in general, and to the Christian faith in particular.

Hand in hand with this hostility is the popular acceptance of the view that it is impossible to be an intelligent, rational person and to be a Bible-believing Christian. This charge is not entirely unfounded due to the rise of anti-intellectualism in the Existentialist movement of the 19^th and 20^th centuries and the acceptance of this anti-intellectualism by the fundamentalist Christian denominations, many of which still insist on the strong division between faith and reason as incompatible adversaries. The Christian believer today has a heavy burden to demonstrate the rationality of his or her faith in light of the many intellectual challenges brought against the church from academia, from science, and from supposed common sense; these range in scope from the Problem of Evil (how an omnibenevolent God could allow evil and suffering to take place) to the creation/evolution debate that has captured so much of the popular thought on Christianity in the popular mindset and in the media. I will state my own position up front, which is that there are good and convincing responses to each and every one of these challenges, criticisms, and critiques of the Christian worldview. This is not to say that there is no basis for the critiques, for certainly any honest and self-reflective believer must admit that there is something to these charges. But the Christian worldview is robust enough to provide adequate answers and responses, some moral and some intellectual, to those challenges.

In former times it was enough to reason purely from scripture since the popular culture was one, with only slight exaggeration, that revolved around the Judeo-Christian worldview. The shift in popular culture to multiculturalism (what some authors, including Dan Kimball, have referred to as "postmodernism") has undercut the effectiveness in reasoning entirely from scripture. Thus it is not enough to appeal to Genesis to defend creationism against the challenges of evolutionary biology, for the evolution theorist is unwilling to accept the basic premises underlying the creationist's position. I argue therefore that a more constructive means of dialogue must be found to promote healthy discussion and debate between believers and nonbelievers, in the popular mindset, while simultaneously remaining true to the central tenets of Christianity.

Traditional outreach and evangelism methods are largely ineffective in this new multicultural climate, and the metaphorical battle is being waged on many fronts both moral and intellectual. I hesitate to call this a culture war, though, since although there are issues of good versus evil in the world, I am thinking here of those with whom we do not wish to fight but to reach out to; to show those living in this postmodern, skeptical world that it is possible to know the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ while simultaneously being an intelligent, well-reasoned, respectful, moral, culturally aware, globally concerned human being. It is a sad state of affairs when nonbelievers are less judgmental than the Christians who are bound to love by creed and by command of their savior. It is a sad state of affairs when nonbelievers are able to out-reason Christians who have a proud tradition of philosophical, theological, and apologetic resources at their disposal. It is a sad state of affairs when genuine and sincere faith is given a bad name by those who pursue evil in the name of God while the rest of us sit by silently and idly without shining God's light on the injustice and evil.

And yet the danger is the danger of arrogance. To make the mistake the Pharisees made in thinking that we ourselves as believers are clean while those outside the fold are unclean; for clearly the universal nature of the Christian faith has rendered us all equal in the eyes of our creator. We as believers must remember the words of the Apostle Paul that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We must remember that we speak of sinfulness not out of judgment but out of love and reproof; and we must be sincere and repentant about the sinfulness in our own hearts and in our own Christian institutions if we are ever to have hope of reaching a world who shares neither our worldview nor our premises but does share our desire for goodness and love in a difficult and struggling world.