Reframing Hope, Part 2
History Matters
Steven P. Miller
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| Carol Howard Merritt (not Steven P. Miller :) |
At the risk of being self-centered, here are a few autobiographical disclaimers: I read this book as a student of recent American evangelical history, not as someone much invested in postmodern missionality. By way of laying my non-scholarly cards on the table, I am a Mennonite by upbringing and affiliation but readily confess to having the kind of tepid spirituality stereotypically associated with mainline Protestantism. Since I came to the book with very little background knowledge about Carol Howard Merritt, I incorrectly assumed that her remarkable book was an effort to save American evangelicalism from itself. It is not; but the evangelical moment in recent American history does give Reframing Hope life. Below are a few thoughts on the book’s relationship to that history.
Merritt
positions Reframing Hope as a
contribution to the supposedly lukewarm mainline tradition. However, the recent hegemony of evangelicalism
means that “mainline” now sometimes means little more than
“non-evangelical.” Merritt is able to
use this contrast to her advantage. She writes
with candid ambivalence of efforts “to create a Christianity that makes sense
in a new generation” (5). The
evangelical version of doing so usually comes down to marketing. The liberal Protestant approach often has
more to do with re-mythologizing.
Merritt is aware of the pitfalls of both aspirations for relevance. At the same time, she is not a primitivist. She consciously departs from those “who hope
to ‘begin at the beginning’” (5). Reframing Hope offers no paeans to
first-century Christianity and little in the way of biblical proof-texting.
When encountering
materials from the broader emergent world, I am struck by how “postmodernism”/“postmodern”/“postmodernity”
functions both as a challenge and a solution. Postmodernity, as Merritt uses it, appears to
refer to a crisis of intellectual authority brought on, first, by the
philosophical awareness that language and reality are indivisible and, second,
by the technological achievement of mass access to knowledge. Like the Internet itself, postmodernity
contains both centripetal and centrifugal forces; but the center clearly has
shifted.
Importantly,
Merritt’s use of postmodern is not purely clinical. Rather, the challenge of postmodernism for
Christians is more like an invitation or opportunity. Postmodernism seems to be the Darwinism or
higher criticism of the early twenty-first century. In good liberal Protestant fashion, Merritt
perceives not a threat, but rather “the breath of the Holy Spirit” (11). At the risk of over-analysis, I detected in
the book a comic, somewhat celebratory stance toward postmodernity, an acceptance
of messy outcomes because nothing is ever quite so clear. Hope is the new progress. Embracing postmodernity helps us to live in a
fragmented world. In Merritt’s reimagining
of practical pastoring, “[t]ime on the computer is real ministry” (52).
Embracing
the postmodern is, at heart, a historical move.
The word itself suggests a point of departure. This is where Merritt’s book is embedded in
an evangelical moment. The sunset of
that moment is her point of departure for a fully functional postmodern
Christianity. What Merritt advocates is
as much a reaction against the suburban megachurch as it is a solution for the
empty downtown church. The megachurch
represents suburbia, a frontier of new construction. Merritt writes for the church in the
post-industrial city, a repurposing of those old sanctuaries that have not
already been converted to advertising agencies or craft breweries. Here is a theology to ring out the evangelical
renaissance and ring in an urban one.
The latter is postmodernism as it should be, even if (as Merritt no
doubt would concede) few things seem more generically postmodern than Rick
Warren at a TED conference.
In the
broad swath of recent American history, Reframing
Hope can be seen as a response to a time “when our country was in the
passionate throes of evangelicalism” (110).
The assumption is that the evangelical moment has spent itself. But Merritt’s approach to history is more
nuanced than that. She is one of what I
imagine to be millions of non-evangelical Christians in the United States who
have vaguely evangelical backgrounds. To
her great credit, Merritt does not excessively milk that background, even
though it obviously informs her critique of megachurches.
Merritt’s
fidelity to the mainline tradition shapes her sense of history. In emergent circles there is sometimes an almost
glib celebration of the collapse of American Christendom, because it allows the
remnant church to be more prophetic. Good riddance, Constantine. Hello, Anabaptism, where have you been all
our lives? In contrast, Merritt
recognizes the importance of custodial Protestantism (and not only because, even
if she does not put it quite this way, it remains a gateway to institutions,
endowments, and urban real estate). One
thing the mainline tradition has going for it these days is its eminently
reasonable posture toward the rest of the world. This posture involves being at peace with the
fact that one does not need Christianity or religion in general to arrive at a
social vision that features 99% of what most liberal Protestants think the “reign
of God” might entail. The twentieth
century’s examples of secular ideological excess made the missing 1% look
comparatively good. However, in the
present century, as Merritt concedes, it is hard to fault the late Christopher
Hitchens or anyone else for believing that “[r]eligion poisons everything” (7).
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