Let me be honest — I am post-challenged this morning, so I’m digging way into the archives. God has deemed me to be ‘disconnected,’ not emotionally but technologically, so I’m at Panera (YES, FOR THE SECOND TIME THIS WEEK) to munch a bagel and borrow their connection…I discovered this in a paper on Postmodernity and the Gospel that yes, I wrote back when the word ‘post-modern’ was the big buzz…that seems like ages ago. But — I smile — the gospel seems to have outlasted the p-m buzz. Read and think:)
Go there where you cannot go, to the impossible. It is indeed the only way of going or coming.
Jacques Derrida, Sauf le Nom[i]
How odd that one of the originators of postmodern thought, Jacques Derrida, should express the paradox of Christianity in such eloquent language. Not that he intended to. Or did he? After all, he himself would say that we can’t really get at the origin. But this original thinker has encouraged me to play with language, so I will dare to suggest that Derrida’s words answer the Christian question: “What do I do with culture, or “the world” as the Bible names it?”
The Bible offers no easy solutions to the difficult question of what it means to live out our commission: “Go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations.” If we take the ‘world’ to mean ‘culture,’ we discover all sorts of mixed messages. We are told to be “in the world but not of the world,” and at the same time, we are told to “go into all the world.” We are told to be all things to all people, while we are also told that everything is permissible but not everything is good. Our great commission is coupled with the greatest commandment, to love God and to love our neighbor. What in the world are we to do?
It seems God has given us an impossible commission and an impossible commandment. And yet, as followers of Christ, we can and must go where we cannot go, to the impossible, because he went first – to the culture and to the Cross. As we ponder the most difficult, but not impossible question, of how to communicate the gospel to a postmodern culture, we are called to do as Christ did, to enter the culture and engage each individual as a person made in God’s image, to speak to the central story of the human heart, of loss and longing, of sin and failure, of redemption and glory. We have a story of great good news to tell to a broken and fragmented world that has lost its story. When Christians become “impassioned by the impossible” (to borrow another Derridean phrase), we are most ready to bring this story to a postmodern world.
[i] Quoted in John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 41.
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