Contours of Culture
Trinity & Modernity
by Ken Myers
We have been told that to be postmodern is to approach metanarratives—the Big Stories that explain Life, the Universe, and Everything—with incredulity. Of course, this raises the question of whether or not this definition of the postmodern temperament is itself a metanarrative, but I'll leave that for finer minds than mine to explore.
Possible paradoxes notwithstanding, I have to give grudging credit to Jean-François Lyotard for making this observation, because I do detect among most younger people a yawning indifference to efforts to explain history or theology or ethics or art in terms of grand and arching chronologies or chronicles. I suspect their minds and hearts have been colonized by thousands of what Lyotard called petits récits, small accounts of highly particular and often idiosyncratic episodes, all blithely disconnected from any framework, all resistant to organization in any structure of meaning. Perpetual exposure to a numbing torrent of bewildering bursts of narrativish fragments—increasingly in fewer than 140 characters—leaves little time or mental space for attending to connections and causality.
I remain unrepentantly pre-modern in my love of metanarratives. If the gospel has any power, it is only because it tells a great story that explains all things. It is a very particular story and it makes universal claims, which makes both card-carrying moderns and postmoderns nervous. It was foolishness to the Greeks as well.
Modernity's Plight
Modernity has a story about human life. It is embedded in the way we live. It happens to be very different from the story Christians tell, though much of contemporary Christian ministry seems content to add a "gospel epilogue" to modernity's account of who we are and why. Learning to tell the story of modernity from the standpoint of the gospel is an important way of deepening our sense of the differences between our story and the modern story.
I can think of few books that do a better job at telling the story of modernity from within the framework of Trinitarian Christian faith than Colin Gunton's 1993 book, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. Gunton (who died suddenly in 2003 at the age of 62) insists on the very first page of the book that
[m]odernity is like all cultures, in being in need of the healing light of the gospel of the Son of God, made incarnate by the Holy Spirit for the perfecting of the creation. But it is unlike some in that the distinctive features of its plight derive from its rejection of that gospel. . . . The gospel will therefore not be served by the mere denunciation of modern rejection, but by probing how it came to happen.
The book (the contents of which were first delivered at Oxford in 1992 as the Bampton Lectures) is in two parts. The first explains how it happened, under the title "The displacement of God." In it, Gunton looks at ways in which philosophy, social and political thought, and theology have all nurtured a sense of fragmentation, displacement, and disengagement. Relying on the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Taylor, Michael Buckley, Michael Polanyi, and (above all) Irenaeus, Gunton argues that modernity's confusions are in large measure a function of weakness in the understanding of the doctrine of Creation. Neither ancient nor modern thought has correlated well the relationship between the one and the many—between unity and particularity. In modern culture, this failure has issued in the displacement of God from engagement with Creation and in a corresponding exaltation of human willing as the source of meaning.
Relationality & Communion
The second half of the book, "Rethinking createdness," presents Gunton's response to modernity's various displacements by insisting that the relationality of the Trinity is essential to our understanding of Creation and human identity. He considers, for example, how the patristic idea of perichoresis—of the "dynamic mutual reciprocity, interpenetration and interanimation" of the Holy Trinity—might be applied to our thinking about Creation. The world, he argues, is "an order of things, dynamically related to each other in time and space. It is perichoretic in that everything in it contributes to the being of everything else, enabling everything to be what it distinctively is."
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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