(by Kim Thoday)

We are increasingly aware that we live in a postmodern world. The notion of postmodernity is a difficult one. It is slippery from all viewpoints. For instance, is not 'post' a modernist linear view of history? And if we accept 'post', 'post what' exactly? Perhaps the terminology of post-age is helpful. For an age is defined by a particular dominant grand story of existence that all elements of human affairs participate in. Postmodernity is characterised by competing, fluid and evolving life-perspectives. At least in the Western world an authoritative or doctrinaire understanding of life no longer exists.

Our post-age will be, I believe, the greatest challenge yet for Christian theology and ultimately for the Christian Church as a whole. For especially since the time of Augustine, Christendom's identity has been built upon a logocentric epistemolgy, that is, a Platonic view of essential, immutable truths. Christianity, therefore, is challenged on every side by our post age: the erosion of ethnocentricism, the proliferation of possible belongings and identities, the relativisation of social, sexual and cultural norms, radical pluralism, the collapse of the grand narratives or mega-narratives: the efficacy of science, reason, ideology, Western superiority, male supremacy, historical inevitability, and so on. The British postmodern thinker, Sue Cartlege, says of our contemporary experience: "we live between worlds, between a world of habits, expectations and beliefs that are no longer viable, and a future that has not yet been constructed."

As we witnessed the stunning collapse of the Berlin Wall late in the twentieth century, so we have seen the dismantling of the great ideologies and doctrines and the un-ravelling, critique and re-invention of culture, political and economic systems, even the most revered god of the Enlightenment - Science. Collapse may be too strong a word, for it is indicative perhaps of failure. Yet collapse is correct in the sense of the meltdown of previously independent, self-serving, self-governing, self-determining, self-evident, epistemological systems. The meltdown began to really take affect after the Reformation but it was only in the twentieth century that Alvin Toffler and many others began to make money out of noticing. What began with the Church at the centre has come to pass with the Church in many ways on the periphery or alongside or between the gaps of other competing and/or syncretising cultural and religious forces, as it was before the time of Constantine. So now we are doing theology in an altered state, doing theology in the unstable fissures of human existence, being forced to recast, in Tillich's terms, our 'ultimate concerns.' In our post-age there exists the spaces between narratives of meaning to consider and experience the possibilities of the sacred, the numinous, the spiritual, the mysterious and the eternal.

Grace and Peace in Jesus' name,

Kim Thoday, Hewett Community Church of Christ, South Australia http://www.hewett.com.au