Postmodernism and Christianity

In an essay in Being Reconciled , Milbank describes postmodernity as “dissolving of fixed limits” in several respects: “(1) the blurring of the nature/culture divide; (2) the merging of public and private; (3) the mode of the information economy; and (4) economic and political globalization.” He argues that “postmodernity, like modernity, [is] a kind of distorted outcome of energies first unleashed by the Church itself.” Postmodernism in particular as the “obliteration of boundaries” is a distortion of the initial energies of Christianity, which is “the religion of the obliteration of boundaries.”

Christianity went out to “explode all limits: between nations, between races, between the sexes, between the household and the city, between ritual purity and impurity, between work and leisure, between days of the week, between sign and reality (in the Sacraments), between the end of time and living in time, and even between culture and nature, since Jesus advised us to follow the mute example of the lilies of the field. Indeed the category ‘creature’ enfolds and transcends both the natural and culture; culture for the gospels . . . is only a higher and more intense ‘life’; while, inversely, all of nature is the divine artifact. But above all, wiht the doctrine of the Incarnation, Christianity violates the boundary between created and creator, immanence and transcendence, humanity and God. In this way, the arch taboo grounding all the others is broken.”

This genealogy of postmodernism suggests that the church’s response cannot be “outright refusal, nor outright acceptance,” but “more like an attempt at radical redirection of what we find.” Neither a “reiteration of Christian orthodoxy in identically repeated handed-down formulas” nor “a liberal adaptation to postmodern assumptions” will do. The latter is betrayal, but the former is also a subtle betrayal since it allos “the illusion of a continuation of the faith in merely formal, empty terms, which discovered no real habitation for faith in our times, either with or against them.” He urges that engagement with postmodernity should “force us to re-express our faith in a radically strange way, which will carry with it a sense of real new discovery of the gospel and the legacy of Christian orthodoxy.”