The Fundamentalist Turn?

Amos Yong on Carl Raschke's GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn.

GloboChrist: Chapters 3 and 4

Below is Amos Yong's engagement with chapters 3 & 4 of Carl Raschke's GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn. Chapter 3 is entitled "Utter Holiness or Wholly Otherness: Finding Fidelity among the Infidels" and chapter 4 is entitled "A Closer Look through the 10/40 Window." For those of us who are unfamiliar with the term "10/40 window," Raschke helpfully defines this term thus:

The expression 10/40 Window has been often used by evangelical Christians, and even more frequently by evangelical missionaries, to refer to the sprawling region running east to west across the African and Asian continents that lies between the tenth and fortieth parallels. The area contains the largest population of non-Christians in the world. It reaches from ten degrees to forty degrees north of the equator and spans the globe all the way from North Africa across to China. But from the faith perspective, it is best known as an entrenched "window of resistance" to Christian missions and evangelism. In contrast to what Jenkins and others term the "Christian South," it is barren ground for church planters. It is a trackless desert of counter-Christianity (p. 94).


Chapters 3 and 4 of GloboChrist almost read like two different proposals for engaging “the infidels.” The former presents Raschke’s suggestions for the Christian mission in a pluralistic world. The key moves he makes here are summarized by the notion of incarnational mission wherein Christian faithfulness takes on as many vernacular forms as need be in order to “indigenize the gospel” (the first section title of ch. 3). Thus in a pluralistic society, Christian faith and Christian mission take the “postmodern turn” (in the subtitle of GloboChrist) precisely through their (potentially infinite) malleability and translatability into the many local “icons, values, and cultural practices” of our times, just as the first century followers of the GloboChrist themselves also absorbed the mystery religions of their world into the Christian framework.

In chapter 4, however, such an incarnational strategy seems to retreat to the background when confronted by “globo-Islam” inside the 10/40 Window. In this context, Raschke repeatedly emphasizes instead – all against the liberal penchant for dialogue in quest for a common denominator – the “clash of revelations, “collision of eschatologies,” and “irreconcilability of differences” separates Islam from Christianity. There appears to be only opposition instead of the call to incarnational mission vis-à-vis Muslims. What has happened? Why emphasize the “monumental differences” (p. 143) between these two global faiths but approach Buddhism dialogically (pp. 83-84)?

Peeking ahead to the last three chapters does not quite resolve this apparent discrepancy. Perhaps we can interpret Raschke as saying that only a relational and rhizomic form of Christian faith will be suitable for engaging Islam. So, if the goal of the “increasingly radicalized Muslim umma” is the “emancipation for the Muslim world [that] is equivalent to Islamization” (p. 113), then might a relational-rhizomic approach in the 10/40 Window be more successful in our postmodern times? More concretely, however, if political (and I use the word broadly here) Islamization is the goal for Muslims, what does incarnational mission look like in a Muslim context? If the indigenization of Christianity involves taking on the values and cultural practices of the “other,” how is this possible with regard to a politically constituted and expressed Islamic faith? Does not Christian incarnationalism and indigenization, relationalism and rhizomism, in this case involve – even require – some form of alternative “politics” which absorbs the thrust of Islamic political philosophy, economy, and theology?

I suspect that Raschke would be very nervous about any such “politicizing” of Christian faith. After all Christian relationalism and radicality includes a transcendental dimension that is neither “right” nor “left” as measured by contemporary “Christian” options. Instead, the church is a communion of radical disciples or saints, loving one another, and living out the dynamic power of the risen Christ to one another. Raschke’s radicalism is thus a fundamental retrieval of the early forms of Christian community that, paradoxically, both absorbed the world while standing out apart from it, imbibing and transforming some of the world’s icons, values, and practices, while sharing with one another so that none had any need. In the end, then, maybe different “infidels” require different responses so that our evangelism of Buddhists is or should be different from our mission in the 10/40 Window; maybe this is simply Raschke’s way of responding to our postmodern situation: to propose that the pomo-appeal of the GloboChrist in the power of the Spirit will be manifest pluralistically and received differently depending on the context.

On the other hand, maybe Raschke has given up too quickly on his incarnational principle. Might it not be possible that a thoroughly relational-rhizomic Christian approach to Islam will produce a form of “Muslim Christianity” (or even “Christian Islam”) even as a messianic form of Judaism has arisen over the centuries? If this is the case, then the blurring of the lines between Christian and non-Christian that Raschke observes in a missional context (p. 65) may also happen vis-à-vis Islam such that the incommensurability – theological, eschatological, or otherwise – that now appears insurmountable will be overcome. If so, then perhaps the clash of revelations is diffused not via louder and more convinced proclamation, but, as GloboChrist suggests, performatively, through a thoroughgoing vernacularization of Christian faith in Muslim garb. Along these lines may lie the reconciliation of the proposals sketched in chapters 3 and 4 toward a more coherent understanding of GloboChrist and the Great Commission after the postmodern turn.

Amos Yong
Professor of Systematic Theology
Regent University School of Divinity, Virginia Beach, Virginia




SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

GloboChrist: Chapter 7

Don't miss Carl Raschke's response to Jamie Gates' engagement which can be found below. Then, please turn your attention to the final engagement with Carl Raschke's GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn. Deirdre Brower-Latz, a Nazarene pastor in Manchester, UK, has engaged the seventh and final chapter entitled "A Concluding Unacademic Postscript."

Over this summer in the community I serve as pastor we had reason to ask several questions about how our relationships as Christ’s disciples shape and form our real-life, day-to-day relationships with our neighbours. I suppose that this falls into the ‘performative’ understanding of faith. In a multi-faith, multiracial community we want our lives alongside our Muslim neighbours (and those of a range of other faiths and none) to have more meaning than simply whether or not we serve halal meat at the fairs we host for the community. So, my interest was piqued by the title ‘GloboChrist’ and the strap line, “the Great Commission Takes a Postmodern turn.” As an urban practitioner, at points I confess the undistilled ideas of postmodernism and the discussions that often surround it can seem like a retelling of the emperor’s new clothes, yet I find myself gripped by the equation of postmodernity and globalisation, and recognising Raschke’s world of ‘heterogeneity and social pluralism’ as one I share. Having been asked to focus on Chapter Seven (fittingly for my situation, the ‘concluding unacademic postscript’) I found much that resonated with the reality we face.

The first part of the chapter, from my UK perspective, struck me as a particularly internal, almost sectarian, North American argument (something Raschke seems to deplore when other people do it, see p. 159). And I read it as an eavesdropper might listen to an interesting conversation across the room at a party – interested, but not sure that I’m as caught up in the debates between fundamentalism and the threats they see in postmodernity as I would be if I were in the thick of the debate. Nevertheless, I sensed the balances being articulately redressed and said a hearty ‘hear, hear’ to the statements that “In Christian thought, and historically, in evangelical thought, salvation has ultimately been about the heart, not the mind” and “...we need to open our hearts and minds into an authentic relationship with the Lord.” (158) Recognising, of course, that in a book of this sort all the caveats that might accompany such statements have already been made by the sustained arguments themselves. Though what an ‘authentic relationship with the Lord’ might mean still raises the questions of ‘who decides?’ and ‘what is authentic?’

In the second section I succumbed to what probably would put me in the Brian McLaren camp– I was initially struck and frustrated by the statement that ‘we know fundamentalist Islam is much worse [than Christian fundamentalism]’. Pausing there to allow the internal debate to rage was hazardous to my mental health, for I wanted to read more awareness that Christian fundamentalism has its own logs-in-eyes (state-sanctioned violence, capital punishment, support for unjust wars and so on). I was reassured then, by Raschke’s willingness to recognise just that in the following paragraphs, and struck by the persistent challenge to resist “betray[ing] the gospel by confusing ideology with faith”. Of course, I later realised that I was also falling into the category of type that Raschke calls ‘bobopomo’, by my very engagement with the discussion on the terms of anti-fundamentalist stances.

The broad point that a “hypertolerant and indiscriminate acceptance of everything happening in our culture” (159) and the suggestion that we face up to the inherent tension between inclusivity and meaningful calls to discipleship is a pertinent ‘on the ground’ discussion in our setting. What does it mean to hear a call to Christ, and respond, and become like Christ? How do we grapple with the type of tolerance and openness that misses the mark, and ignores Jesus’ demands of discipleship (163)? How does true discipleship manifest itself in the community called to be the community of saints? Certainly, the intellectual and moral courage needed to think through the labyrinthine theological issues is not for the faint of heart. The tension between being Christ-centred and not causing offense, or being willing to have the intellectual rigour and courage to allow the ‘Other’/ meaningful-and-true-difference to exist is challenging for someone in my/ our setting. I would be amongst those who saw in Amos’ critique something I too want to ask – what about person to person engagement? What about a politics (small p) of Christianity-rhizomically encountering Islam? I too would be amongst those who would want Raschke to further explore the relative flaws or merits in indigenising forms of faith - the possibilities, for instance, of Easter Mosques. I would be keen to hear more about the way of being Christ.

I am not sure that Raschke does justice either to McLaren, or to the development of the creeds; however, the point of his section ‘Burger King Christianity’ seems to hint strongly at the need to reconsider the essence of the call to discipleship. It surely is true to say that we need “To be incarnational in the most radical and eschatological sense” ... but I was left asking questions about what that means. I recognised the parody of the ‘boboists’ (as I said earlier, I probably am one) but wanted to ask more about the distancing of the areas Raschke sets to one side as ‘leftist politics.’ Is there no sense that redressing of issues of justice and poverty is vitally important in the light of globalisation and postmodernity? I agree that the ‘something/ one’ that distinguishes us, that calls us to be the church must be more than ‘a Western countercultural guise’ - I agree too that the global body of Christ, incarnationally knowing no cultural boundaries, is vital – but I am left wondering just what that means for people inhabiting the Western world of the ‘posts’? What does it mean to ‘be Christs to one another’ in a meaningful and authentic way?

The apparently romanticised view of the southern shifting of Global Christianity (166-167) and the statement that this is ‘the real postmodern moment...the global postmodern moment’ demands some scrutiny. Ironically, the global face of Christianity as it is developing seems often fundamentalist and non-rhizomic, and some of the hopes of relationality, or incarnational Christianity are still being worked out. Perhaps this is where the need to engage one another, and learn of each other would be fruitful for the hope of GloboChrist to be most fully realised.

Certainly I heartily agree with Raschke’s statement that the moment the church is focus group based, or ‘demographic constituency developed’ (168) it loses something that is essential to the GloboChrist we claim to follow – and I was positive that there was/is a tacit understanding of the inherent messiness of communities that seek to be inclusive.

For me, the book was challenging, interesting, and compelling. Like the other reviewers I will read it again (and again) to try to grapple further with some of the nuances of the arguments. I’ve already given it to colleagues and friends so that we can chew over it together. I wish that the new material introduced in this last chapter had been given an airing earlier, and that the ‘unacademic postscript’ had been, well, more unacademic. It was all well and good to take on McLaren, the emergents, the fundies/modern evangelicals, and remind us of weak Christianity, church-in-bed-with-consumption, globalisation and postmodernity, I was thankful for it all, but I confess, I also wanted to be given more of a sense of the ‘what then now... for relational and rhizomic Christianity’.

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SEPTEMBER 08, 2008


GloboChrist: Chapters 1 and 2

It is really a thrill for me to start off this series for The Church and Postmodern Culture blog by writing some thoughts on the first two chapters of Carl Raschke’s new book called Globochrist: The Great Commission Take a Postmodern Turn.

I was with Carl a few months ago in Amsterdam and we chatted about some of the themes of the book, in particular the idea of the rhizome as a metaphor for the internet - something both Carl and I have been using for some time to suggest a better way forward for church planting movements and understanding the impact on new churches from the organizational structures of the internet. Or perhaps the other way around, assuming we are also creating the internet structures based on how we think. Chicken or egg??

Even more to the point, I have recently returned from a missions conference for Baptist missionaries in Western Europe. All of them Americans. GloboChrist was the one book I recommended to buy and read. Those who have read the book will quickly see why I thought it so relevant but I only have time for a short post on two chapters so let me do that now without further ado.

Chapter One. "Globopomo: The Planetary Postmodern Moment"

Carl’s contribution here is to equate being postmodern with being global. Whatever postmodernism was, or however it has been received, over the last few decades, it is about “globalization” in this 21st century in which we live and more and have our being and, unlike a mere philosophical theory, we cannot avoid it. This fact brings postmodernism back into play for those of us that thought we could move on.

I have said before that Americans have a habit of coming late to dinner and then leaving before dessert. This certainly happened in the American church world that equated postmodernism with a 60’s style philosophical relativism and saw it prematurely ejected (yes, i said EJECTED) from church vocabulary. But now, Carl, having served up a fascinating menu of postmodern food for thought over the last twenty years, tops it off by bringing out the mousse (I almost said ‘Mauss’, the French ethnologist) and once again proves that the postmodern conversation did not go the way of disco but in fact is alive and well and in fact overshadows our lives.

Carl's second contribution, as I see it, is to bring Gilles Deleuze on stage early in the play rather than Derrida. Now I am not a philosopher but these things DO interest me and from my perspective, I see at least three distinct structural threads going back to Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 20th Century, and that is not counting Lacan.

One is the post-modern literary thread, the usual suspect, that starts with Saussure’s structuralism (or from what he was incoherently hinting at) and winds its way through Russian formalism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism of course, and it is here that a somewhat clichéd Derrida appears to tie the threads together and into the world in which he lived.

Another less travelled road is the cultural thread that starts with Sausurre’s “signifier and signified” and runs through the mythology of Barthes, the cultural anthroplogy of Claude Levi-Strauss, to find its voice in current missiology and cultural wars of the emerging/inherited church.

A related thread is the semiotic, starting with Saussure’s ideas of syntagm and paradigm, morphing into binary logic, Barthes and Baudrillard, media theory (McLuhan) and more recently, new media theory (Manovich) It is this semiotic string that Raschke plucks and we hear the note of Gilles Deleuze sound strong. I raise my glass at this because, as I said, I have been pointing to Deleuze for some time, having once given a lecture on being an entrepreneur in web based mission movements entitled “Like a Rhizome Cowboy”. What I was hinting at 5 years ago, Carl deals with far more thoroughly and proves that my early hunch was correct. And to be fair to Dr. Raschke, I was just scratching the surface of something that he went far deeper into than I ever did. And to be fair to Derrida, he is also a player in this thread as well.

Gotta love this book!

Thirdly, Raschke highlights the new wave of Islamism that is sweeping the USA and Europe. This is something that we have to get our head around and not many people have tackled it. Really! Nuff said.

Having defined the challenges of our new post-modern post-western world, we are challenged to recognize Raschke’s three essential characteristics of global postmodern Christianity:
decentralization, de-institutionalism, and indigenization.

That last one ties us in to the cultural and semiotic ideas of Deleuze and again the idea of the rhizome which, although has many underground roots, remains a single organism that seeks to give itself away. Which of course is very different from the tree metaphor that spurns off independent trees and reinforces our theologies of separatism and denominationalism. Hmmmm. Me talking here, not Carl.

Chapter Two: "De-Signs of the Time”

Having dealt in a recent book with our need to find roots in the historical Protestant Reformation before launching out too far in this New Reformation, Raschke now brings a challenge for the church to engage the current culture, to “contextualize” itself inside this new world, to become “missional”. This is the heart of the second chapter of GloboChrist.

Raschke calls for an incarnational Christianity that “translates” who God is into a new culture. Quoting from Andrew Walls is very appropriate here but the thought going through my head is that “translating” may not be enough. Rather, if the internet and the dynamics of new media are influencing the culture and minds of a new generation, then an appropriate “transcoding” (Lev Manovich) into native new media forms might be the step beyond a mere translating of old forms into a new world when we should be going native and creating new forms online and offline, forms that “recapitulate” and not just “represent” (Douglas Rushkof). Just a thought. Must talk to Carl next time we meet.

But I am nitpicking here. Its a fabulous chapter which drops us back into the world of semiotics and the importance of reading the signs of the times or ‘de-signs’ if you like. This is another reason why I recommended this book for the missionaries who are tasked with the challenge of reading the culture in which they have been sent. Following Christ’s example, we “dwell” or “tabernacle” with others “in their unique situation, their perceptual habits, just as God was in Christ, and dwells and continues to dwell and will always dwell with us as Emmanuel, God with us.”

I have to mention, before finishing off this long post, [apologies] that in his book, Carl Raschke is at best critical and at worst, SNARKY towards the “emerging church” which he sees as a bunch of bo-bo psuedo-intellectuals who are parochial, Eurocentric and not radical enough. He claims the movement is too similar to American and European culture and has ignored the poor, downtrodden and lost.

Although I do not disagree with his response to what he has seen, and have seen for myself some examples of what he writes about, I think the movement is much bigger than he has seen and the term “emerging church” is losing its usefulness. It is probably time to leave the term behind. The word “missional”, although also suffering at the hands of the misinformed, gets a better deal in GloboChrist and it may be that word that brings us all together. However, his critique of the emerging church is welcomed, as is his positive references of Hirsch and Frost on the subject of being incarnational in our ministry.

Shoot! What a fantastic book. I am still shaking my head how an intellectual from USA can write a book that is so pertinently relevant to missionaries working in Europe. But he did, dammitt, and I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever for recommending it.

I should get royalties!

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AUGUST 28, 2008

GloboChrist: Introduction

[Previously I had mentioned that posting would begin Monday of this week, but we need to push back the schedule by just one week.]

This coming Monday marks the first engagement of Carl Raschke's new book entitled GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn. Andrew Jones will be posting an engagement with chapters 1 and 2 called "Globopomo: The Planetery Postmodern Movement" and "De-Signs of the Time," respectively.

In the meantime I wanted to post a very brief introduction to the series of engagements. In Raschke's introduction (which can be read in its entirety on the Baker Academic website here), he states that the new post-Cold War setting has inspired those like Francis Fukuyama (i.e. the "end of history" thesis following Hegel and Kojève) and Thomas Friedman (see: The World is Flat) to proclaim that finally, the "rest of the world" will now be able to have its Englightment, and with it, its own Romantic forms of self-expression. Coupled with this, Raschke follows Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis but modifies this slightly that what we are really experiencing is a "clash of revelations" (p. 17). That is, the rest of the world, which is very religious, seems to be clashing with the West insofar as the West is predominantly a secular culture. Enter postmodernism which simultaneously "signals the arrival of a post-Western era" (p. 18). It is not so much that the West is fading--as it is very much left its mark around the entire world--but that, "Just as the eclipse of ancient Rome was followed by the rise of a new Roman civilization that was predominantly Germanic but subsequently came to be called European, so the decline of the West will likely lead to a new world that remains Western in character, though no longer in name" (ibid). Moving beyond the "personal relationship with Christ" of much of evangelical parlance, Raschke instead focuses on the "power of relationship, or the power of establishing, sustaining, and purposefully pursuing relationships His is a power in this sense, not just an impersonal force. The GloboChrist is a theological term we have coined to show how this power is manifesting itself amid the growing anxieties over what is happening under the impact of the force we call globalization and the politcal, cultural, and religious upheavels that arise in its wake" (p. 19).

If you haven't already been reading the book, please read along with us and read along with us in the forthcoming posts beginning Monday to see how Andrew Jones, Amos Yong, Jamie Gates, and Deirdre Brower-Latz engage with and interact with Raschke's newest offering.

"The postmodern moment is far more momentous than the cultural spleen and political partisanship that has defined much of Western discourse for nearly half a century" (p. 20).

read it all