Post-Charismatics, Neo-Evangelicals, Gunslingers And Zombies

Jason Clark is stir­ring up the pot on the ques­tion of apply­ing post/neo/radical tags to exist­ing branches of the church, like cha­ris­mat­ics and evan­gel­ic­als. For the most part, I like what Jason is saying, as well as the points Sivin Kit and the his­tor­ical con­text Next Reform­a­tion puts this into.

It is seduct­ive to try and drive a wedge between cul­ture and ideas, because it tempts us with the belief in the pos­sib­il­ity of reform­a­tion. If only we could be true to the ideas (be they evan­gel­ical or cha­ris­matic in this instance), then we would change the cul­ture. How­ever, it never works out that way. Our prac­tices shape our ideas (or maybe, our prac­tices are our ideas), so the ingrained habits of church, the ideas of faith and the cul­ture they breed form a three strand rope we cannot easily unwind.

That is part of why I always feel skep­tical about post/neo/radical tags being applied to aspects of church. How­ever, there is some­thing stronger that drives me; I just don’t feel that defin­ing the church and faith in terms of a narrow set of 20thC debates is help­ful. A crit­ical moment in this was the birth of my daugh­ter in 2001. Attend­ing church with her, I became acutely aware of the number of debates and issues which shaped the churches we par­ti­cip­ated in. Some were, of course, time­less dilem­nas and para­doxes. But others were, to borrow a phrase from Bauman, zombie-debates; dead-ideas and dead-controversies that were not really rel­ev­ant to life and mis­sion in this cen­tury and were only kept alive because we chose to keep fight­ing about them, choose to keep debat­ing them.

The use of post/neo/radical tags per­forms a kind of theo­lo­gical dark magic that keeps these zom­bies alive. Moreover, it con­nects to one other aspect I do not like of the p/n/r-tags, the theo­lo­gical swag­ger. I sus­pect the two may be related (we will see both in the coming theo­lo­gical scramble), per­haps because the swag­ger uses well-worn past debates as a way if estab­lish­ing suprem­acy (after all the first task of the new supreme gun­slinger is to defeat the exist­ing supreme gunslinger).

Hope­fully, we can move past the p/n/r-tags (as well as the zom­bies and gun­slingers), with a focus on both a new cul­ture of faith and a healthy appre­ci­ation for all that the past has to teach us.