James H. Olthuis⁠Institute for Christian Studies

“ Whereas for Modernism, the fact that God is unthinkable, unprovable and unpresentable proved the irrationality, inadequacy and irreality of faith and God, for Postmodernism, the same features point to an excess beyond the reaches of reason. Suddenly the reality of God in the universe is no longer so outrageous. Suddenly there is authentic space for faith, miracles and grace. No longer, in a postmodern world, can people of faith – in our case the Christian faith – be dismissed curtly as prejudiced because they champion their faith. ”

“ For the big question for all of us as world-citizens, whether Christian, Buddhist, Moslem, Marxist, Humanist, Hindu, Atheist, whatever, is how to sort out good worldviews – justice serving, mercy-effused, difference-embracing, life-affirming visions – from worldviews that do not serve justice, that exclude the other and different, that fuel discontent and feed greed. The sustainability of our planet, with its flora, fauna and peoples depends on such inter-faith negotiation. ”

“ Modernism’s hope and faith in the power of reason and science to deliver freedom, security and happiness withered and wilted. Despite unparalleled advances in almost every field of human endeavour, especially technology, our city streets are filled with the hungry and the homeless, violence and war continue to plague us, we are running out of the basic elements necessary for life: clean air, good food, stable currencies, caring families, intimate friendships, vibrant churches. Underneath we are at un-ease, running scared, something, we fear, is seriously amiss. ”

“ The ethos of Modernism is mastery, control and independence. Modernism asks: ‘What’s the problem?’ And then it says, ‘Let’s solve it! After all, we have the technology and knowhow. Any and every mystery – including the mystery of God – will eventually yield its secrets if we persevere.’
Postmodernism not only considers the claims of Reason illusions that need to be unmasked, but marks them as dangerous to people everywhere. ”

“ And today South Africa is continuing to live out that miracle of forgiveness, truth and reconciliation, however imperfectly, in fragility, with lapses, on the way. The rest of the world stands in awe of the courage, dedication and grace that South Africa exhibited. ”

“ Whereas Modernism seems fixated on its need to control, dominate and exploit reality with all its attendant oppression and injustice, Postmodernism, with all of the positive features that I have noted above, is nevertheless so impacted by the unspeakable atrocities that afflict us, so mesmerised by the human penchant for evil, that, even as it works for and longs for the coming of justice, it seems captive to the fear that, finally, we live only by Chance and, in the end, there is only death. ”

“ Indeed, even if it is implicit, operating largely beneath our conscious awareness, we sense our way through the world as much, if not more, than we think our way through. Thus, what we have called a worldview is as much a matter of the imagination as of the intellect, as much unconscious as conscious, involving world-feeling, world-touching, world-smelling and world-hearing. ”

“ That slow, often tedious, back and forth process of coming to know and respect each other which belongs to an economy of love, does not, as we only know too well, eliminate the risk of violence. The risk factor is inherent in the dynamic of love. However, an economy of love – risky and precarious as it is – provides the only alternative for meeting in the middle, for non-violent connections. Thus, although in our broken world it is difficult and risky to walk humbly and justly with those who are different and strange, it is not and need not be, in God’s grace, impossible. ”

“ Through their eyes, children not only learn to take in the world as they learn to focus, identify and recognise a host of shapes and things, but simultaneously, they develop expectancy filters that crucially affect not only how and what they identify and recognise, but how they respond and react to what they see. In other words, a worldview is not only a vision of the world, but it is at the same time a vision for the world. ”

“ God is Unoriginate Origin because God ‘alone can begin to love without any reason, and always has begun to love’. God alone, as creator, does not have to be loved in order to love. God as Love is the origin of love. Love is therefore not a property of being. Love is the very mode of God’s existence. If God is love, creation will be. If God is love, God could not be God without creating. ”

“ It is my prayer that we can together go forth with a daring and tender love. And whatever we do, may we do it in the name of Love. Let Love come again and again. Viens, oui, oui. The world is waiting! ”

“ God’s cosmic love – is the energy creating all things, sustaining them, drawing everything together. It is the gracious healing process at the heart of reality, making and remaking connections. Love is happening, and continues to happen in the world. ”

“ There comes a limit to the reach of rational knowledge. Whereas for Modernism, being neutral, without presuppositions or prejudices, was the order of the day, Postmodernism champions the fact that we all begin somewhere, from someplace, with a certain fix on reality. None of us begins from a position of innocence. ”

“ However, no matter how promising the idea of non-oppositional difference, in our fallen world the ever-present economy of violence makes it extremely difficult, often virtually impossible, to put into practice. For it is only when we are secure in our own identities, firm in our faith, that we are enabled vulnerably to run the risk of suffering violence that attends all efforts to respectfully connect with the other and different. ”

“ There is only one order, the Order of Love, with reason as one of its dimensions.
Faith and things unseen
Postmodernism attends to and makes room for the invisible, the unconscious, the emotional, all the non-rational ways of knowing; not as second-rate, subservient, irrational forces to be repressed, feared or discounted, but as necessary, indispensable co-contributors in the multidimensional process of human development. That includes faith, or, as I like to say, in order to indicate its functioning as a process, faithing. Postmodernism recognises that everyone lives by faith. ”

“ Right at this juncture in human history, it strikes me that there is a novel and abundant opportunity for Christians to confess anew, that because God is Love and that Love is stronger than death, we live, not by Fortune or Blind Chance, but by Grace and Truth. ”

“ Putting our ears to the ground, opening the cockles of hearts in acts of respect, vigilance and longsuffering, we are to listen for the cries of the heart – for what is being witnessed to and confessed in and through words, views, and concepts that may be very strange or upsetting – that can lead to the miracle of connection. ”

“ When world-viewing is acclaimed as fundamentally an activity of faith, playing a valuable role in the formation of God-and-neighbourhonouring embodied practices and habits in which the goal is not right thinking but right living, worldview is still a crucial and serviceable concept. Understanding a worldview as a faith-qualified, psychically founded configuration places the emphasis on its sensory foundation rather than on ideas and concepts. ”

“ As God suffers with those who suffer, we are called to suffer-with. In contrast to involuntary suffering from that we all undergo, it is crucial to understand that we are called to a suffering-with. Suffering-with is a voluntary act in which there is the liberating power not only to resist suffering, but also to redeem creation. With-ing is the way to be, it is the way of love (Olthuis 2006) . Right in that sentence, I see the beginning of a Christian post-postmodern worldview. ”

“ In Sartre’s worldview, the other person is hell because the gaze of the other person turns us into an object. For Freud, love of neighbour is only possible at the expense of love of self. There is either inclusion in sameness or exclusion in otherness.
In ethical Postmodernism, difference is not the enemy, a threat, defect or deficit which needs to be controlled, bracketed, or eliminated, but a challenge to connect with, attend to and honour. The proper relation to the other person is deference, rather than domination, condescension, dismissal, or persecution. ”

“ The second is that with a postmodern understanding of the existence of limited rational knowledge (Reason and Science) and of the crucial role of faith, worldviews need to be seen, not in the first place as conceptual systems, but as faith-oriented, sensory expectancy filters, operating implicitly and largely beneath our conscious awareness. The third is the recognition that responsibility-to the other rather than freedom-from the other needs to be emphasised. Such responsibility involves recognising that voluntary sufferingwith the other is crucial to a post-postmodern biblical worldview. ”

“ These attachment filters, acting below our conscious awareness, giving shape to how we feel about ourselves, helping us make sense of our lives, God and others are, in fact, what we call worldviews. When, as a young infant, I feel seen and heard as lovable and worthy, I develop a secure attachment and I am primed to be open to the world. However, when things go seriously wrong developmentally, I do not feel seen and heard and negative attachment filters develop which make me ‘naturally’, reflexively, even if unawares, pre-occupied, dismissive, or fearful. ”

“ In contrast to Modernism’s suppression of difference, the most distinctive feature of Postmodernism is its desire to embrace difference. For Modernism, difference is by the nature of the case always oppositional, in Hobbes’s words, ‘the war of all against all’. ”

“ These two ‘roads’, the conscious and unconscious, relate and interrelate in a knowledge spiral. For example: one can end up feeling totally stuck in efforts to solve a problem logically, only to experience a breakthrough when turning away, letting go and giving up. Letting go lets the unconscious do its work, prepared by all the analytic work. Then, one takes the breakthrough and works it through consciously, testing it, calibrating it in a process of integration. And even as there is implicit and explicit knowledge, there is implicit and explicit memory. ”

“ Moreover – and this is our main point – it is important to recognise that world-viewing and worldviews are about much more than seeing and vision. All of our senses are involved. We see, but also feel, touch, smell our way through the world. ”

“ However, a post-postmodern biblical worldview needs to be hospitable to and respectful of difference. That is the biblical mandate:
When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him or her. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him or her as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. ”

“ Life, says Postmodernism, is more than logic. Not that there is no place for science and reason; there is, lots of space, and there are many accompanying benefits. But there is a limit to knowledge and knowledge is never disinterested, neutral, atemporal, or aspatial. ”

“ In this context, it seems imperative to me that worldview theorists and worldview educators need to give more substantial and focused attention to the role and function of our attachment filters, not only in explicit conceptual worldview elaboration, but in how they act to support or work against living out the confessed explicit worldview in the push and pull of daily life. For if the early emotional injury and the attendant fearful filter formation is not attended to adequately, people can easily be thrown into easily into bouts of depression, guilt, shame, or numbness. ”

“ There are no knockdown, airtight logical arguments that go all the way down, proving a certain position as the unvarnished Truth. Grand narratives that claim to explain everything have lost credibility. No theory, no science will ever be able to encompass reality.
I think it is important to note the significance of the postmodern limitation of knowledge for our advocacy of a biblical worldview. ”

“ We have long known that a worldview crisis can be brought about by the gap between worldview and experience. Now we are in a better place to appreciate that a worldview crisis can also be brought about in the clash or lack of fit between our implicit emotionally based worldview and our explicitly confessed and articulated worldview. ”

“ On the other hand, the recognition that all knowledge is perspectival, worldview-ish, rooted in a particular historical and cultural setting, rather than universal or absolute has raised fears of an ‘anything goes’ relativism. ”

“ Rather, the fact that creation is in process, on trial, on the way – and this deserves underlining, indeed headlining – is an ethical call to increased vigilance. Every decision we take makes a difference – whether for good or for evil. ”

“ If early formation is good enough, if the attachment filters are ‘secure’, there will tend to be a good-enough, continually recalibrating, mutually interactive fit between the explicit knowledge of a love-oriented, other-affirming worldview and our implicit gut knowledge. ”

“ The expressed and confessed worldviews will not only find embodied resonance in the implicit gut knowledge, but they will act to encourage, direct and support explicit rituals, routines and rhythms in daily life. In that way, worldviewing can play an indispensable role in the coming into being of liturgies of love, both personally and interpersonally in marriage, family and friendship, but also interpersonally, nationally and internationally. ”

“ The upshot has been that the ruling elites have passed off their own agendas as the voice of reason, often with the insidious consequence that the different and other, the less positioned and unprivileged, particularly the weak, the marginalised and the poor – those whom the Bible calls the strangers, widows and orphans – are set aside and, if they resist, face discrimination and retaliation. ”