From: Steve Hayes <03.fmlynet.planetc.com>
To: Mailing list family.missiology
<>
Subject: IAMS: Modernity & postmodernity
Date: Saturday, 2 January 1999 18:22

This message was distributed by the mailing list family.missiology

Barry Linney wrote in a message to Family Missiology:

 BL> In response to the article (NEW AGE AND COLONIALISM from
 BL> Missionary conquest by George E. Tinke) and Steve Hayes
 BL> subsequent response I would like to ask what approach to
 BL> such native Indian spirituality and New Age seekers should
 BL> Christians take? 

A good starting point for that is Tinker's comments. 

One of the things I find useful about Tinker's comments is that he
distinguishes between them, and he helps to clarify the differences in the
premodern and postmodern approaches to tradition. 

One of these differences is that in premodern societies there is a single
dominant body of tradition, and that the tradition is a seamless garment.
You cannot arbitrarily pick and choose among the different strands of the
tradition, because if you try to  do that, you will destroy the whole. As
Jesus said, you cannot put a new patch on an old garment. 

One of the things that distinguishes postmodernity from modernity is that
modernity largely rejects tradition. One could say that one of the
characteristics of modernity is rejection of tradition; conversely,
rejection of tradition is a symptom of modernity.

Postmodernity evaluates tradition more positively than modernity, but unlike
premodern traditionalism , it tends to be highly eclectic. People pick and
choose different elements from a wide variety of traditions,
reinterpreting them as they go. Tinker's point is that such eclectic reinterpretations can
destroy the original traditions, as the reinterpretations are fed back
into the societies from which the traditions have been borrowed. 

And even calling such traditions "spirituality" can have the effect of
misinterpreting them. Actually, I'm not sure what "spirituality" means
myself, and am rather suspicious of the term. It's a kind of buzz word
that has crept into the language, with no  clear definition or meaning. I notice
that it is not listed in "The Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church"
for example. 

As I noted in my other comments on Tinker, there are quite a number of
Western Christians who profess an interest in Orthodox "spirituality",
but Orthodox Christians don't usually use the term, except perhaps in trying
to interpret Orthodoxy to the West,  and many of those who do so are the "plastic
medicine people" that Tinker speaks of. 

Concerning the approach that Christians should take to "native Indian
spirituality", apart from my reservations about calling it "spirituality"
I would say that the answer would depend on whether the Christians
concerned are inside the culture or outside.


Many Christians from outside such cultures, like modern missionaries going to
premodern societies (such as was common in the 19th century) can easily
misinterpret such cultures. Part of their "modern" outlook includes the
idea of "religion" as a clearly identifiable component of life that can be
separated out. Some had a view of society as a kind of modular system,
where you could take out the old religion module and slot in a new one, like
upgrading your computer by taking out your old card and putting in a new one
with a faster modem, or bigger memory or whatever.

But in premodern societies it doesn't work like that, because "religion"
(as Richard Jordan has pointed out) does not exist there in that "modular"
sense.


Not all modern missionaries made that mistake to the same extent. But
many did. Another, and more serious mistake that was sometimes made was to try
to replace the whole culture with the culture of the missionaries, or to
replace major elements of it, leaving perhaps a few quaint customs as survivals for
their tourist potential.

If the Christians are *within* the culture concerned, the problems are
different, but not unrelated. They can make the same mistakes as the
modern missionaries, and can insist on making them, even when the missionaries
have reservations. Sometimes they *want* the whole cultural package. Their
becoming Christians was part of a more generalised desire for modernisation.
If foreign missionaries have reservations about that, they might accuse
the missionaries of paternalism, and of trying to keep them "primitive" and "backward". 

Sometimes the Chrsitians within the culture take the gospel more
seriously than the foreign missionaries, somewhat to the consternation of the
latter. The Calvinist missionaries among the Ewe people of West Africa, for
example, caused some consternation among the missionaries when they saw the primary
attraction of Christianity  as being deliverance from witches and unclean
spirits rather than deliverance from God's anger at their personal sin.
The missionaries thought they had failed in their primary object, which was to
induce an awareness of guilt for sin -- yet if you read St Mark's gospel,
it seems that the Ewe grasped the main point more accurately than the
Calvinist missionaries -- there's a lot more in there about deliverance from
unclean spirits  than there is about the importance of guilt for sin.

Another example is St Vladimir of Kiev, the apostle of the Russians, who
disconcerted the Greek missionaries by abolishing capital punishment in
his principality when he became a Christian. The missionaries, brought up in
Byzantine statecraft which was to  some extent inherited from the
pre-Christian Roman empire, which had still not been completely
Christianised, thought that such an unrealistic application of Christian
principles was simply impractical. Secular historians, particularly
Russian Marxist on es, have emphasised St Vladimir's statecraft and political
motives in adopting the Christian faith, yet have sometimes overlooked its
personal significance to him, in that he changed his approach to government,
abolishing capital punishment and setting up a welfare state. 

This brings up another point -- that if Christianity is introduced into a
culture and takes root, it *will* transform the culture. It will not
remain unchanged by the encounter. The choice is really between whether the
changes transform the culture or destroy it. Also, some changes do not last.
Later Russian rulers reintroduced capital punishment, for example. 

One could, of course, try to "preserve" cultures form any change whatever.
That was the line taken by some apartheid apologists, and by some of the
"fourth world" movement today. But they also overlook the fact that if
you try to preserve cultures unchanged, then you also kill them. The only
things that do not change are dead. You can pickle something in formaldehyde to
keep it from changing. But by definition it has to be dead. 

This message has mostly dealt with the modern/premodern interaction -
I've hardly got on to the question of the postmodern or New Age bits of your
question. 

Perhaps that should wait for another message, or perhaps someone else
will respond!

Keep well

Steve Hayes
  WWW: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734
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