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!

Comments

[Jason Hesiak]

i would like to hear more...from you, andrew, or (you), carl...about this whole "equating being postmodern iwth being global." i think that's exactly how i think of "being postmodern," but i'm also fairly certain that my thinking on what "being postmodern" is exponentially less informed than Dr. Carl's :) i mean...of all the ways to think of what it is to be postmodern, that one is i think a bit unique. but yet i share it with you, dr. carl :) i always thought that it was my unique way of thinking of it due to my simple-mindedness :), but the fact that i share this with carl might be cause of re-evaluation of...me :)...in a more posotive light :)

ok seriously...if i can think of one prototypical artifact of history that is the kind of thing that lead me to think of "being postmodern" in this way, it is the parthenon and its frieze. its frieze depicts the taming of wild horses to be put to use in agriculture. interestingly it was within a generation and a half of that when alexander went about conquering the whole known world.

another example is that giotto's realism and the quantifications of the clock were pretty close to each other historically as well.

that those two very different examples both serve together to help me with my idea of "equating being postmodern with being global" i think in the past has only helped reinforce my own self-reflexive theory that the reasaon for my particular (i thought unique) theory on what it means to "be postmodern" was my simple-mindedness :)

anyone with any sense would ask: "what do those two examples have to do with each other?" lol...and i would grope for an answer...which is why i'm asking to hear more about why carl thinks of "being postmodern" the way he does :)

[ryan johnson]

yes, globochrist is good...as is the review. here's my vote: everyone would benefit by reading _church planting movements_ by david garrison. much less theoretical, much more "empirical" and practical, this book inspires (like globochrist) but in a notably different way. instead of theorizing about rhizomatic, indigenized, non-western church, garrison's book describes (first-hand) various real-life examples, spanning the globe. in my view, this book takes the cake in terms of a practical, hands-on investigation of all the "rhizomatic" church can be....

[andrew]

Jason, re: being postmodern and what the heck does that have to do with being global . .

for me, it is not a big jump at all. One of the most influential books I read on postmodern theory was "The Condition of Postmodernity" by David Harvey who said, and i quote from memory here, that the postmodern tension is "a differing experience of time and space". you know . . time-compression, shrinking globe, being no(w)here, etc. and 'globalism' brings those tensions together in one word.

[andrew]

hi ryan. david garrison's book is great and i have enjoyed my chats with him.

the group i recommended carl's book to were all pretty much familiar with garrison's book on church planting - as i am - and had no problem with actually putting it into practise. what was a challenge, however, was finding terms and concepts that would help them explain to the folks back home what they were doing and why. Carl's book was an obvious first choice as an interpretive guide to why organic church planting movements are necessary in a postmodern postwestern world.

[Carl]

Thanks so much Andrew. I'm going to put up my own post in the next week or so to "engage" these comments as well as others that are coming forth on the book. I wanted to call your attention to my own version of Andrew appreciation day at the blog rhizone.typepad.com.
Carl

[Carl]

Jason asks what does being postmodern have to do with being global? As a metaphor, it's sort of like the question what does modern art have to do with modern physics? The answer is - nothing directly, everything indirectly. You couldn't have had cubism without the revisioning of space and time in Riemannian geometry, or Einstein's special theory of relativity. They both challenged in different ways the three-dimensional world that most thought was the only way to look at the world, but they were both the effects of the exhaustion of what we might call the Cartesian-Newtonian picture of things (now the "early modern").

We talk a lot in theology about "world views," but we don't really choose world views. They choose us. Most of the famous "postmodern" philosophers redefined what philosophy and theological thinking was in terms of the cognitive and cultural shocks of the 1960s. Philosophy doesn't define worlds, it interprets them, and often through the feedback process changes them.

As I write in my book, Derrida's FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE, written in the early 1990s, is the first postmodern philosopher to see the link between the global and the postmodern, and the whole of GLOBOCHRIST really takes off from there. In American - and somewhat generational - jargon the "postmodern" has become a word for a certain cultural style, which has an American genesis. But that evolution of the cultural style is the result of other, deeper forces - among others, the spread of global communications.

The Great Commission is all about globality. In the age of global communications and electronic networking, it is without question taking a "postmodern turn." But that would really only be possible without globalization. Globalization is not a new intellectual fad, it is the reality of our current age.

[Jason Hesiak]

wow it came from derrida! i seriously had no idea...lol i'm not sure if that makes me feel good or not...now that i think of it...my studio professor did drop a big hint on that, i guess...well, sort of...in the context of the conversation he didn't mention anything about postmodernity...but he did mention sputnik on numerous occasions. i guess it was obviously coming from somewhere.

and now for my next question...well, first let me say, i guess i have to buy FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE...but may i ask...does he mention the god Pan in that work? its interesting to me that it would be in that particular work where derrida would make the link between the postmodern and the global. i think originally there probably had to be a certain thinking driven or guided by a kind of faith in order to even eventually arrive at anything "global"? but then besides the question of faith and the globe, i think of the relation between Pan, the Devil and Jesus. Pan in Gk. means "all"...depictions of the Devil traditionally borrowed heavily from depictions of Pan..."Satan is the Prince of This World"...but Jesus is the "firstborn, the head."

BUT then at the same time the rise of a culture of "the global" necessitates...as you seem to indicate, Carl...a lowering...a humbling...a relationality which you are describing as "rhizmonic", i think (or some other word that is similar, related, but different, which i have forgotten). "if you want to kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel."

:)