Article - Notes on Philippians

INTRODUCTION TO PAUL’S LETTER TO THE PHILIPPIANS

FREE TO BE!

I always do a preliminary sort through my morning mail before my secretary gets to it. I want to pull out any letters that don’t look ‘official’. These hopefully represent pleasure and not more work! I suppose that most of us love receiving personal letters full of news from distant friends; full of shared memories; reminders of joys and sorrows we have perhaps been through together. Paul writes this ‘Epistle of Joy’ from prison in Rome probably near the end of his life around 63AD. He is keeping in touch with his good friends at Philippi, whom he has visited on three occasions.

The first occasion was pretty spectacular. It had started with the vision of the ‘Man from Macedonia’ who urged him to ‘come over and help us’. So he arrived at the port of Philippi (Neapolis) around 52AD on his rather disheartening second missionary journey. Acts 16 will tell you all about the conversion of Lydia and the jailer and his family and the founding of the first European church.

Now as a general rule, Paul wouldn’t accept money from the churches he founded, but Philippi was an exception. He had often received gifts from them over the last ten years, and they had just recently sent him more money with one of the congregation, Epaphroditus. He was also to serve Paul as an assistant. Imagine this poor man’s embarrassment when he became seriously ill with the Roman Fever and was then worried and homesick - no one likes being ill when they are away from home. So Paul decided to send him back to Philippi with a letter of explanation, just in case they thought Epaphroditus had chickened out of staying with a condemned man in big bad Rome. And the letter this man carried back, full of encouragement to stick together and enjoy the freedom that Christ gives us in his service, is the letter we will be opening over the next few days.

CHAINS THAT FREE
DAY 1

Sometimes I think there are two kinds of people: the moaners and the make-the-most-of-its. Are they born that way or is it something that is cultivated over the years? In Britain, grumbling is almost a national pastime, a part of our cultural heritage. So how do we take steps to counter this tendency? As a pastor, I would sometimes give a ‘prescription’ to moaners in my church: “To be taken three times a day after meals - think of 5 things for which you are grateful to God!” Paul was certainly not a moaner. Could you have written such a cheery, encouraging greeting from a first century prison?

Philippians 1:1-11

And not only does Paul pray for his friends ‘with joy’ (4) but he sees his present unpleasant circumstances as an opportunity to preach the Gospel. He was under house arrest in his own private lodgings where he received a constant flow of visitors. But night and day he was chained to a succession of Roman soldiers - his guards. (Acts 28:20) Many of them became Christians and then enjoyed one-to-one discipleship classes on the end of a short chain to the great apostle of Christ.

Philippians 1:12-26

Why not write a letter to some Christian friends this week telling them what you are praying for them (9)? It will help you to focus your prayers rather than just praying ‘God will bless them…’ You might also tell them how you are making the most of the difficult things happening in your life at present.

FREEDOM FROM SELF
DAY 2

I, me, mine, myself… We have become the self-centred generation. Subtly, Socrates' dictum, "Know Yourself" has become "Be Yourself" and even Christians seem bent on pursuing self-fulfilment at any price. "This church doesn't worship the way I want… this fellowship doesn't use my gifts… this house group doesn't meet my needs… I've got this 'thorn in the flesh' and you owe it to me to deal with it NOW, Lord…" Christ warned his disciples that if they tried to save their own lives, they would lose them. (Matt 16:25)

Paul also knew that self-fulfilment, and that Christian robustness of character which is able to stand up to anything, can only be found in Christ and by following Christ’s example.

Philippians 1:27-2:4

United we stand (1:27; 2:2), divided we fall. And we don't 'fall' just as church fellowships through our divisions. Individually our lives are diminished and disintegrate when we live selfishly, looking constantly to our own interests.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that before ever there was a universe, or people, or a Bible, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were in an eternal loving, self-giving relationship with one another.

Fix this thought in your mind over the next few days: "Look not only to your own interests". Tie a knot in your hanky, move a ring to a different finger, write it on a little card - but see how it transforms your attitudes to other people, and so to Christ.

THEOLOGY THAT FREES
DAY 3

"I want to play the piano really well, but I don't want to learn music or practise or be taught by other pianists. I just want to be free to do my own thing on the piano." It's nonsense isn't it? We know from so many areas of life, whether music, or driving, or sports, that the better we have mastered the techniques, the freer we are to express ourselves. Paul was never interested in theology just as an intellectual exercise. He knew that "You are not what you think you are; but what you think - you are!" Do you have trouble living a Christlike life? Then get a better understanding of Christ and all he did in your brain. This is why all of Paul’s letters, full of practical instructions, always start with a great wad of theology!

Philippians 2:5-11

"In many ways this passage is one of the greatest reaches of theological thought in the New Testament, but its aim was to persuade the Philippians to live a life in which disunity, discord and personal ambition had no place."
William Barclay (DSB Philippians p.38)

Read through the passage again asking yourself in what ways Christ humbled himself and gave up his own desires. When you begin to grasp this 'Love so amazing, so divine' displayed in God made Man, your thinking will change, and so your actions will change. You will begin to have the mind of Christ and so live the selfless life of Christ. Stop and pray about things at home or work where you are tempted to try and get your own way, at any price. How do you think Jesus might have handled this situation?

FREE TO BE ME
DAY 4

I’m always telling my students in preaching classes to use more illustrations from everyday life and ordinary Christians. A human story often helps us to work out what it is that God is saying to us. Paul is anxious that his friends in Philippi will be able to work out what their responsibility is at the same time as they realise that it is God at work in them: act as if everything depended on you; pray as if everything depended on God! But he doesn’t just tell them this, he gives them three examples.

Philippians 2:12-30

Timothy is the patron saint of those who are quite content with second place so long as they can serve! We know he was really close to Paul and that the apostle had great hopes for his ministry. But he never pushed himself forward. In fact, quite the opposite: he was always looking to the interests of others - of Paul and of the Philippians and of Christ. (20,21)

Epaphroditus was a brave man, for the Roman authorities could have turned on him as Paul’s accomplice. He had given up his career in Philippi to go and be a dogsbody in Rome and he had almost died in the process. But you can almost see him there, lying on his bed, coming out of the fever saying, “I’m sorry Paul, to cause you all this trouble. And I came here to look after you!”

Paul was facing the death sentence, but not caring about his own life, he wanted to make things easier for Epaphroditus’s return to Philippi. Think of the most selfless person you know. How can you be more like them, and so like Christ? The more you give yourself to others, the more you become more fully ‘you’.

FREE TO BE ANGRY!
DAY 5

What makes you angry? People who squeeze the toothpaste from the wrong end? People who lie to you? Your own failings? I get angry when I’m sitting in badly run committee meetings. Try to remember the last time you were angry. How did you handle it?

James obviously expects us to get angry but hopes we will be ‘slow’ to do so. (James 1:19f). Paul warns us that our anger may turn to sin, so we should deal with it quickly and not brood for days. (Eph 4:26) And Jesus certainly became angry with the Temple tradespeople. (John 2:12-25) A fiery temperament is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s how we handle our anger when it flares up, and what we get angry about which matters.

Paul became angry whenever he found people perverting the Gospel of Christ. Especially when they tried to change its essence from the ‘outrage of grace’ to the ‘burden of works’; from accepting the free gift of God, to trying to impress God with how good they are; from believing that they are saved through Christ to believing that some ritual (like circumcision) can save them.

Philippians 3:1-11

What are some of the things you think you should get angry about - in the church, in your nation, in your own life?

“There is indeed a holy anger without which joy in the Lord is something short of what he intends it to be.”
Alec Motyer (BST Philippians p.154)

FREE STANDING
DAY 6

One of the things I admire in my Christian teachers is their maturity and reliability. Whatever the latest spiritual fad is, they are not knocked off course or shaken in their faith. They don’t go off like sqibs with a new enthusiasm. They have deep roots (Psalm 1) and have been weathered by the storms and trials of life. They can look back on the past, hold firm for the present, and press on to the future. Paul was like this and longed for his friends at Philippi to know this same stability of Christian character.

Philippians 3:12-4:1

“Stand firm!” commands Paul. But how do we do this? So many of us are custard Christians - we are upset over trifles! Or we are blown about by every wind of doctrine (Ephesians 4:14). Or we feel intimidated and insecure when other Christians have ‘spiritual experiences’ that they think we should have. Or we get depressed and down and feel useless and failures as disciples of Christ. One of my friends when things got on top of him used to say to me: “Well, I know where I am going to be a hundred years from now!” Paul’s eyes were fixed on Christ; on his ability to work his purposes out through Paul’s life and coming death; on his power enabling Paul and the Philippians not to follow their natural earthly desires but live as citizens of heaven.

Get a heavenly perspective on your own life. Try writing your own obituary! When you are finally home with Christ, what would you like to be remembered for. When you can regularly see things from the standpoint of eternity, you will be well on the way to standing firm, mature in Christ.

FREEDOM FROM FRICTION
DAY 7

Philippians 4:2-9

“You remember George. He was the one who still insisted on coming to church at 11am when we changed the time to 10.30am.” This is the way one of my fellow church members is always remembered. (He is now worshipping God regularly in heaven, but I suspect only at 11am and 6.30pm…) What a pity if you are only remembered for bad things! Two thousand years on, these two women with the unpronounceable names (unkindly etched in my memory as Odious and Touchy) are usually only remembered because they had fallen out with each other over some issue. Although they were good women, who contended at Paul’s side for the cause of the Gospel, they had lost their peace and joy and direction over some petty squabble.

“To dwell above with those we love, oh that will be glory.
But to live below with those we know is quite a different story”

Paul is anxious for the church to be united in its task and united in its witness to the pagan world round about. This was Christ’s test: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35) So Paul is pleading with the Philippians again to get their thinking right so that right actions will follow. It’s not that they all had to agree on every matter. It was being able to disagree in love, rubbing the rough edges off one another like pebbles on a beach. (“Grind us together Lord” as I once heard someone misquote the chorus!) Who has irritated you in your fellowship recently? Don’t let malicious thoughts get the better of you and become a “root of bitterness” destroying your peace with God and with one another. (Heb 12:15)

FREE FROM WANT
DAY 8

“Do you want a beautiful body? Do you want a magnificent car? Do you want your children to be happy, your clothes to be clean, bouncy and fresh smelling. Do you want more money to improve your home and business.” And we all know that the answer has to be “YES!” The advertising industry is carefully geared to increase our ‘wants’. It is much less concerned about needs, and even less worried about our contentment. Paul would have been a hopeless target for the advertising industry!

Philippians 4:10-23

Paul could be excused for being anxious and worried about the future, just as John the Baptist had been while awaiting death in prison. (Matt 11:2-6) But he was amazingly contented and at peace and we can see three things behind this: his friends, his own self-discipline and his Lord.

It wasn’t the money or even the sending of Epaphroditus which was a tonic to Paul. It was knowing that there were people who loved him enough to pray and do something practical. Who can you help to be contented in this way?

Paul stressed that he had ‘learned’ to be content (12f) - it didn’t come naturally. All the ‘changing scenes of life’ had been used by Paul to shape his attitude to that of Christ, with no envy or jealousy of what others had.

But most of all, Paul simply trusted Christ. Come plenty, come need; come death, come life; come what may, Paul knew that the glorious riches of Christ were his forever! Whatever you are facing, always trust in Christ. He is utterly trustworthy.

Article - Postmodernity & Rationality

Postmodernity & Rationality

The Final Credits or just a Commercial Break?[1]
[From Antony Billington, Tony Lane & Max Turner, eds., Mission & Meaning: Essays Presented to Peter Cotterell (Paternoster, 1995)]

Introduction
Postmodernity is a delightfully slippery word; a lexicographer’s nightmare. Rather like the sub-atomic particle dutifully obeying Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, it refuses to be pinned down. The literature is so littered with “probably” that it rivals the lager adverts. As far back as 1987 The Independent was advising hip culture vultures that “This word has no meaning. Use it as often as possible.”[2] Postmodernity is already passé within its own terms, for the concept becomes outmoded as soon as it is articulated. Postmodernity - a word to be preferred to postmodernism[3], which is a self-contradiction, for there are no more “isms” - is a condition[4] and not a philosophy. It is an all-pervasive mood and not a rational structure; a shift in sensibility;[5] a Weltstimmung and not a Weltanschauung. Postmodernity passes the death sentence on the Cartesian project of self-authentication through self-knowledge and it marks the final abandonment of the Enlightenment’s promise of self-determination. It describes a world full of contradictions and fuzziness in whose very paradoxes and pluralities personhood is affirmed.

Protestant Christianity has long been the bastion of Enlightenment rationality and in so doing has always been in danger of dethroning the suprarational God of the Bible. Despite the warnings of the Wisdom literature and some of the hard sayings of Christ, there has always been the irresistible temptation to sytematize and so tame and control the Lion of Judah. In it’s championing of the rational mind mastering God’s rational world[6], it has unwittingly fashioned and honed weapons for its enemies. They have built the secular city and banished an objective and transcendent God to the realm of personal preference and inner reality; the god who is within; the god-whatever-you-conceive-him/her-to-be. Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith group have openly acknowledged this and sought to build a Brave New Christianity on this premise.[7]

But postmodernity sweeps all this away and in this respect, it is the most profoundly Judaeo-Christian epistemology since the Garden, because it implicitly acknowledges that we cannot work anything out for ourselves. It confesses that, if indeed we are limited “to our poor reach of mind” then the fragmentation and meaninglessness portrayed in Ecclesiastes is all we can expect.

Definitions
The first use of the word can be traced back to Frederico de Onis in the 1930s although its contemporary employment dates only from the 1980s.[8] There are different usages at different times over the past forty years in music, architecture, literature, theatre, the sciences… Charles Jencks notes with wry humour the beginning of the postmodern era in architecture at 3.32pm on 15th July 1972 when the Pruett-Igoe housing development in St Louis, the prize construction of high modernism, was blown up on account of its being uninhabitable.[9]

In the 1940s the noted historian Sir Arnold Toynbee undertook a massive overview of the history of civilisation. He used the word in the early 1950s, but in the sense of the decadent, anarchic and irrational. Nonetheless, there are striking similarities with present descriptions of the postmodern condition and it is worth mention. Patricia Waugh summarizes Toynbee’s prophetic characterization of what would follow the post-war decade during which he wrote.

“For Toynbee, the postmodern age would be the fourth and final phase of Western history and one dominated by anxiety, irrationalism and helplessness. In such a world, consciousness is adrift, unable to anchor itself to any universal ground of justice, truth or reason on which the ideals of modernity had been founded in the past. Consciousness itself is thus “decentered”: no longer agent of action in the world, but a function through which impersonal forces pass and intersect. Art becomes not so much an expression of human spirit, but another commodity. Like knowledge, therefore, it can no longer be critical but only functional. Moreover, we are in the postmodern condition and, implicated in a culture where all knowledge is produced through discourse, we can no longer seek transcendence. There is no position outside of culture from which to view culture. There is no Kantian ‘view from nowhere’, no conceptual space not already implicated in that which it seeks to contest. There can only be disruption from within: micropolitics, language games, parodic skirmishes, irony, fragmentation.”[10]

It is dangerous to set up any sort of polarities between modern and postmodern, but so long as it is recognised that the present mood is something of a tension between the two poles; a synthesis, an acknowledgement of one in the light of the other - then the exercise is of some value. Hassan’s schema is one such attempt to voice equivocal dichotomies.[11]

Modernism - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Postmodernism
romanticism/Symbolismc - - - - - - - - - - - paraphysics/Dadaism
form (conjunctive, closed) - - - - - - - - - - - antiform (disjunctive, open)
purpose - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - play
design - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - chance
hierarchy - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -anarchy
mastery/logos - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - exhaustion/silence
art object/finished work - - - - - - - - - - - - process/performance/happening
distance - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -participation
creation/totalization/synthesis - - - - - - - decreation/deconstruction/antithesis
presence - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - absence
centring - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -dispersal
genre/boundary - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - text/intertext
semantics - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -rhetoric
paradigm - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -syntagm
hypotaxis - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -parataxis
metaphor - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -metonymy
selection - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - combination
root/depth - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -rhizome/surface
interpretation/reading against - - - - - - - -interpretation/misreading
signified - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -signifier
lisible (readerly) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -scriptible (writerly)
narrative/grande histoire - - - - - - - - - - - anti-narrative/petite histoire
master code - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - idiolect
symptom - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - desire
type - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -mutant
genital/phallic - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - polymorphous/androgynous
paranoia - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - schizophrenia
origin/cause - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -difference-difference/trace
God the Father - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -The Holy Ghost
metaphysics - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -irony
determinacy - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -indeterminacy
transcendence - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - immanence
cataphatic - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - apophatic
Apollonian - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dionysian
Roman - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Celtic
Martha - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mary

The Postmodern Mood
One of the drawbacks of trying to convey the feel of postmodernity is the limitation of words. So in this next section, in the manner of the ‘stream of consciousness’, beloved of late modernity, I want to try and affront you with The Post. Ideally, you should be listening to floaty, ambient music like The Orb or Enigma, Leftfield or Enya, or the theme music of Twin Peaks. John Tavener would do at a push, or Officium… Alternatively, put the radio and the TV on at the same time.

The degree to which you are disturbed by this section is a measure of how much you have been influenced by postmodern culture. If you find it disorientating and confusing then you are very much a Modern. You probably don’t like those TV programmes where several things are happening at the same time as text is appearing on the screen (like Def II) and you don’t like ‘alternative worship’. (I went to a service where the Latin Tridentine Mass was being said against a heavy House rhythm while slides of icons were displayed on a high nave screen and several abstract videos were running on banks of TV screens.) You have probably never read novels by William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis or Don DeLillo and you have never watched Trainspotting (that’s a film). Most over 50s are firmly entrenched in modernism, and almost all who have grown up in the church of whatever age.

But first some terms which both set the scene and help to create the mood of ‘pessimistic wishful thinking’ or ‘nihilism with a smile’[12]....

The Post - Postmodernity, Pomo, or high modernism, or late modernism or Pre-postmodernism, or post-Fordism, or Late Capitalism, or Modernism-Not. The present intellectual and artistic climate in Britain, arguably, as discussed above. It is the quasi-philosophical and cultural accompaniment to the New Age, experienced in one way or another by most who live in the silicon cities of the West and the US. It is only discussed by intellectuals dispossessed[13] of a role in the ‘new’ techno-rational society: “the implosion of intellectual vision” as Bauman puts it.

Cyberpunk- a genre of science fiction (SF) which became self-conscious during the 80s, first characterized as Radical Hard SF or Neuromantics[14] or the Mirrorshades group.[15] At its best, it describes with all the linguistic style of the modern novel, a hi-tech future which is sometimes a drug-induced nightmare, sometimes a surrealistic New Age, always beyond the cutting-edge of physics and metaphysics. The Frank Herbert Dune series (also a film) is a very accessible way into the mind-set. The discourse of cyberculture is certainly impacting our academic institutions as well as street life.[16]

Cyberspace - the ‘place’ where we can live in virtual reality. “There is no ‘there’ there.” I was ‘sitting’ in a cyberspace restaurant (actually I was sitting at my computer console) talking with an academic from the West Coast of the US who was bored at 3am their time and decided to look around one of the cyber-cities you can visit by way of internet[17]. One of our other lecturers ended up doing some bereavement counselling with someone he met in cyberspace from - who knows where they are from. In virtual reality anyone is from anywhere…

Generation X - post-boomers, twenty somethings, baby busters, the 38 million Americans born between 1963 and 1977 made famous by Douglas Coupland’s book[18].

MTV - A Music Television Channel (also on VH1), which shows contemporary music videos 24 hours a day worldwide. There are some regional variations, but in general, this is the lifeblood of youth culture around the world.

Zine - a magazine or fanzine. Glossy and expensive like Mondo, Wired, or cheap FAXed and Xeroxed. The guys in my house produce Heartbreak Hotel every term. Look along the magazine racks in the ‘pop’ or ‘techno’ or ‘culture’ section of Tower Records, or a big HMV or Our Price. In the right shops there are zines to cater for every taste, whether Knitting Patterns, Latex Sex, Black Poetry or Chicken World.

Metanarrative - Some overall story or set of ideas which binds all cultural activities together in a project or system which proposes to make sense. Christianity is such a metanarrative - postmodernity denies the possibility of such Grand Narratives, or Macronarratives.

Structuralism focuses our attention on the text itself, and the understanding of a text in its cotext and context.

Deconstructionism is the daughter of Structuralism and concentrates on the reader-response to a text. All ‘meaning’ or authorial intention breaks down.[19]

So drift through this…
See Appendix 1

Some Aspects of the Postmodern Condition
Lists always get too close to ‘defining’, and we have seen that there can be none of that in the pursuit of postmodernity. Sampson put it well concerning his own essay:

“The classification which follows is… open to the objection that it snatches at a shadow, but it does have the virtue of mapping the ground on which the shadow lies.”[20]

Frederic Jameson paints a Small Picture:

“If the great negative emotions of the modernist moment were anxiety, terror, the being-unto-death, and Kurtz’s “horror”, what characterizes the newer “intensities” of the postmodern, which have also been characterized in terms of the “bad trip” and of schizophrenic submersion, can just as well be formulated in terms of the messiness of a dispersed existence, existential messiness, the perpetual temporal distraction of post-sixties life. Larger virtual nightmare, the sixties gone toxic, a whole historical and countercultural “bad trip” in which psychic fragmentation is raised to a qualitatively new power, the structural distraction of the decentred subject now promoted to the very motor and existential logic of late capitalism itself.”[21]

1. Non-rationality
It is not that postmodernity denies rationality, for to do so would be the death of discussion. Rather it holds loose to connected rational systems, to Grand Narratives, to any notion of the Big Picture. “Reason is displaced by reasons, each within its own discourse and for its own public. None is privileged.”[22] It is in this sense post-structuralist and post-deconstructionist.[23] This is an area where Christians need to do some more hard thinking. We rightly want to defend rationality and the power of verbal communication, and yet we sometimes seem to be saying that the cosmos is rationally coherent. And, as we experience it, it is not.

2. Blank Irony
The use of humour in general and irony in particular has been a feature of Modernity for most of this century[24]. But blank irony[25] is irony without arrogance. It is irony without self-importance. Moderns are still contemptuous enough to use irony as a tool for mocking that which they have ‘ridden above’. The ironist assumes privileged access to an objective point of view. He lives in the Big Picture. But the blank ironist has no such luxury. She lives in an incoherent and pluralist world. You can see this in films like Blazing Saddles or Airplane, in series like Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Red Dwarf, or more recently, Wayne’s World or Beavis and Butthead. “So let me get this straight. Young people go into stores, and buy heavy metal videos, and take them home and play them. And then they kill their friends… So what’s the problem?”[26] This is part of postmodernity’s discomfort with any representation that appears to be ‘saying’ anything or taking a moral stance. So there is in art and literature (and the adverts) constant self-mockery: what various writers have called playfulness, pastiche, jokeyness, stylistic promiscuity, eclecticism, self-parody.

3. Consumerism
Why do we need 83 different breakfast serials to choose from? Why must I be wearing this season’s fashions? Why do so many millions in the West worship in the mirrored Temples of Shopping Malls every Saturday and Sunday? Because it is in choosing and in buying that I find identity and acceptance. “Goods are valued for what they mean as much as for their use, and people find meaning in the very act of consumption. Advertising and product image become goods consumed for their own sake, rather than as representative of real products.”[27] This is the illusion of freedom which late capitalism offers us. It builds on the premise that “the love of money” is the only dynamism by which the world economy can function. So if I cannot choose and buy, because I am ‘under-privileged’ then I must look for identity and acceptance elsewhere, or else despair. The ‘elsewhere’ can be religion, or drugs, sex and rock‘n roll, or violence, or any mixture of these.

4. The Return of the Repressed[28]
Violence has itself become an exploratory tool of postmodernity and an icon of the modern film. Tarrantino’s films: Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and Pulp Fiction all exemplify a society fascinated by the fragility and ultimate worthlessness of life, while outraged at the institutionalised violence and brutality demonstrated by regimes throughout the world. Other examples of this can be seen in Francis Ford Coppola’s earlier Vietnam film Apocalypse Now and in Oliver Stone’s more recent Natural Born Killers. This is an artistic preoccupation with blood, the boundaries of sanity, and the limits of law, which offers an opportunity for voyeurism to a society that has carefully sanitized itself of death, insanity and criminality: these have been institutionalised so that most citizens need rarely, if ever, brush with them. Each year I ask students (of average age 29) how many of them have seen or touched a dead body. Apart from the medics, the affirmative answer represents only about 2%.

Violence is sometimes seen as a way to liberate the oppressed and empower the marginalised in postmodern constructed morals. (I.e. morals constructed by society for some reason or another.) Veith explains “power reductionism”, a sort of postmodern reworking of a discredited[29] Freud, in these terms: “All institutions, all human relationships, all moral values, and all human creations - from works of art to religious ideologies - are all expressions and masks of the primal will to power.”[30] The rage of the oppressed and the assertion of being through power seems to give special euphoria to some (especially within academia) postmoderns. This is of particular relevance to postmodern politics, but there is no time to develop this here.[31]

5. Plurality of Beliefs
Postmodernity has seen the commodification of belief structures. I buy into a belief and use it to feel good. If it doesn’t make me feel good, then why bother to buy into it? Because of the death of the Macronarrative, I can permute some acceptable combination of Micronarratives which give me a gentle euphoria. No matter that there is a rational conflict between any of these Micronarratives. Non-rationality takes care of that. In this way people build up sets of ‘free-standing’ self-referential beliefs. Cotterell has often pointed out the illogicality of trying to say that, for instance, Islam and Christianity are both ‘true’. “If we take this issue more generally, when Christianity claims that Jesus died on the Cross, and Islam… insists that Jesus was not crucified… must we make a choice between the alternatives?”[32] For postmoderns, the answer would be “no!” Within the self-referential system of Islam, you can believe what you choose. Within the self-referential system of Christianity, you can believe what you choose. And you can swap minute by minute between the two (or more) without worrying your head about the clash of logical truth claims. It is only transcendent truths which would bring conflict. But as there is no Objective Other, no transcendence, then everything is possible.

6. The Media
This is the central nervous system of the postmodern body. It communicates culture. The inescapable air waves shape our thinking from cradle to grave. “Media is man-made weather,” says one of the characters in Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers. And there is always weather. Satellite TV has arguably been a major factor in the crumbling of communist superstates and the fascist dictatorships. The capitalism portrayed in the glossy adverts, in Dallas, Dynasty and Bay Watch, in MTV and the Hollywood Blockbusters, doesn’t look nearly as bad as the totalitarian regimes paint it. There is of course a close connection between advertising and the media, which is financed in most parts of the world by advertising - and no doubt soon will be in Britain. This leads to the conclusion that Capitalism is the engine of culture. It is pure profit that drives the cultural machine. This has led Camille Paglia to comment that “Capitalism is the mysticism and glamour of things which take on a personality of their own… the West objectifies persons and personalises objects.”[33] Postmodernity is also therefore, the death of High Art and the death of the Dignity of Life. It is only those who have an Other World objectivity, a worldview based on transcendence, who can exercise high art within their own sphere of expression.

7. Technology
I was ‘ink monitor’ at my primary school, mixing up the ink from the blue powder and topping up the ink-wells on each child’s desk. The ‘nibs’ we stuck on to our wooden ‘pens’ cost one old penny each. Now, 35 years on, I am sitting in a MacDonald’s (again!) in Washington DC, with my lap-top on the table, having just checked the correspondence which I downloaded from Postmodern Christian, an internet subscriber group which I accessed via the phone line in my friend’s house last night. Our capitalism/media driven culture is only possible because of technology. The printing press was one revolution, the cheap microchip has been another. And machines humble us, because they never make mistakes and they remember everything. Indeed, in the world of artificial intelligence, the capacity for error is now a measure of humanity. It is observable generally that, the more there is for humans to remember, the less they remember. I used to learn telephone numbers. Now all my phones ‘know’ the numbers of my friends. The ironically named “virtual reality” is becoming more convincingly real by the day and cheap technology is opening many new doors into cyberspace.

8. The Significance of Insignificance
The Enlightenment Project and history as the history of success has failed. The history of failure is what matters. Humanity has dethroned itself from the high ground of cosmic significance. Museums are often reluctant now to set out their displays as the history of ‘progress’ for that suggests success and ‘right direction’. It implies an objective viewpoint. Rather the past is observed as a non-judgmental collage of what was.[34] From a Christian perspective, this ‘history of failure’ is a profoundly Biblical view of the world and of Heilsgeschichte - God’s saving acts in the light of humanity’s constant failure.

9. Different Relationship to Space and Time
The Copernican Revolution marked the opening up of Space and Time to the mind-boggling proportions that post-Einstein cosmology has now given us.[35] Postmodernity has recognised the fact that for most people the idea of “150 years ago” and the idea of “15 thousand million years ago” are equally impossible to grasp; Saturn, a few million miles away, might just as well be at the edge of Hubble’s known universe a trillion, trillion, trillion… miles away. Then there is also a paradox that the faster things happen, the longer waiting takes. When it took a week to go from London to New York, an hour’s delay in departure hardly mattered. Now an extra hour in the departure lounge warrants a letter to the airline. This is the apparent compression of space and time. There is now a lack of any chronological perspective as we have moved from the diachronic to the synchronic. So postmodernity espouses a new consciousness of time and space, a new way of relating to how things were and of the spaces in which we live and interact. Everything is in effect viewed through the timeless ‘here and now’. There is no history and no future. This is not the existentialist ’now’ of self-authentication through decision. This is an acknowledgement that all history is a history of the present.[36] Nostalgia can be another good trip. You can see this experimenting with time in the work of writers like Martin Amis, Vonnegut or Foucault, and in films like Sally Potter’s Orlando or in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series.

10. The Waning of Affect
The ability to feel deep emotion is spasmodic and brief. This is partly due to information overload and partly due to the fragmentation of consciousness. We have to cope with so many emotions in so short a space of time each day. The TV culture and sound-bite sensations have coarsened the human spirit. There has been a loss of depth and more than that, in postmodernity there is a denial of depth. Jameson describes the loss of an ‘inner self’ that is able to feel, claiming that postmoderns’ “feelings (Lyotard “intensities”) are now free-floating and impersonal and dominated by euphoria.”[37] Edward Munch’s famous painting The Scream is a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation.[38] In postmodernity there can be no cathartic, wordless scream. There is only humour and another day.

11. Image as Identity
In the loss of any objective ‘other’ and of any sense of progress, there is a fragmenting of the personality; a controlled schizophrenia in which “the unity of the “I” is more like the unity of a story than the unity of a thing.”[39] This is a persistent theme through all postmodern theatre, literature and film. Madonna is the iconographic example of this in contemporary culture. She is all surfaces and image; performances and pastiche; sexual machine, controlling superfemme, vulnerable Monroe, exploitative capitalist. There is no identity ‘behind’ the image. She is the sum of them and the collective consciousness of all her roles.

12. Cultural Cohorts
We used to talk of the generation gap (young and old ), and then of generation gaps (from 14 upwards at roughly 7 year intervals). But a more accurate picture of our presently fragmenting society recognises cultural tribalism or postmodernisms. “Society is splintering into hundreds of sub-cultures and designer cults, each with its own language, code and life style.”[40] Many people participate in various microcults each week: the cult of the work place, the modern management cult, the Club cult, the pub cult… Some of these commonly overlap, for instance the work cult and the pub cult. Others rarely do. So there are few from the world of banking amongst the neo-punks - although there are some - I have met them! Advertising recognises the need to aim for target audiences. Satellite TV and the Fanzine scene has made this task easier. But for the church at worship and play, this presents a considerable problem. When I am asked to speak at a ‘Youth Service’, I wonder “which youth?” For there is a host of subcultures in the 15 to 25 age group.

Postevangelicalism for Postmodernity?
As I have already hinted, I think that the postmodern world can be a very fertile soil for the Gospel if the church will but grasp the opportunities and venture through the open doors. We should not mourn the loss of arrogant modernism. But what will come in its place? As Toynbee recognised, the symptoms are those of decline and fall. Although the threat of nuclear apocalypse has receded with the unexpected thaw in the Cold War, computer technology has made the threat of economic collapse in the West an ever present danger. Will there be a resurgence of the Right and fascism, of the Left and ideological authoritarianism, of militant religious fundamentalism, or of servant Christianity? If we are in what Northrop Frye describes as a low mimetic period of history, then there can follow (says Frye) either chaos or a return to high myth. Although it is much more, Christianity is certainly high myth, and the stage could be set for a new revival. Evangelicalism in its present dying form will be unable to play a dominant role on its own. Postevangelicalism[41] which will be able to integrate more readily with broader traditions of historic Christianity, could play a major role in shaping the world which will emerge, God willing, from postmodernity.

These are early days yet, but perhaps we can see some characteristics of postevangelicalism emerging which will help us with the Dominical Gospel mandate.

1. Making Sense of Things
Postmodernity is a way of coping with life. It does not make sense of it. There is none. Christianity is a way of coping and making sense of life. Not complete sense, for now we see through a glass darkly. It is a metanarrative, but it is not exhaustive and Christians should beware of claiming too much. “Part of the responsibility for the modern fragmentation of culture, and especially for its loss of a coherent sense of meaning and truth, is to be laid at the door of Christian theology’s traditional tendency to a monolithic conception of God and of truth.”[42] Biblical faith forces humility and a degree of agnosticism on us, lest we presume again to eat of the tree of knowledge. Traditional, rational apologetics was fine for modernism, although even then it tended to share modernism’s arrogance, but it will become increasingly irrelevant to western postmodernity. We need to let God grasp people’s hearts and imaginations before we can restore their minds.

2. Story & Hope[43]
Postmodernity sees that personal identity, in as much as there is any, is experienced in the story of life, unfolding moment by moment, crossing the lives of others, with shifting images and shifting beliefs. (Short Cuts is a good cinematic example of this). The people of God have glorious beliefs and a magnificent story to tell. But we must learn how to relate to those round about us at the level of our common humanity, and not, at first, at the level of schematized dogma. Douglas Coupland concludes his latest book, Life After God, with these poignant words of challenge:

“My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.”[44]

So why, like many of my friends and family, is he not looking to the church to find God? Largely because we have become implausible and such an introverted sub-culture that we cannot communicate with our contemporaries. We must learn to give a reason for the hope within us in a way our friends (if we have any unchurched friends) can understand.

3. Community
God, the Holy Trinity, is community, and in that community of love we find our identity in the postmodern sea of shifting images and personal fragmentation. Jesus’ command has never been more relevant: “Love one another as I have loved you… by this everyone will know that you are my disciples.” If we cannot demonstrably love one another, then we might as well pack up. Colin Gunton and others are right in stressing the importance of Trinity as foundational to our faith, practice and mission.[45]

4. Transcendence
Many postmoderns, like Coupland, realise the need “To break the holds of power and institute research into a new collective subjectivity and a revolutionary healing of mankind. For we are sick, so sick of ourselves.”[46] But where can they look but to themselves if there is no “Other”? We must present clearly the intimations of transcendence which God has planted throughout his universe. Beauty and love, order and satisfaction, suffering and meaninglessness - all point to an Utterly Other, to a gently compelling mysterium tremendum et fascinans. (Otto) Theologically, Gunton has argued for ‘open transcendentals’ and ‘trinitarian transcendentals’ which maintain the dynamism in our God-given faith and guard us from another round of reformation-stultification.[47] But once a postmodern has encountered Christ and believed the incarnation, she can never be ‘properly’ postmodern again. For if we are not alone, then there is a fulcrum for meaning, rationality, progress and morality.

Worship is an important part of this witness to the transcendent God. A vibrant corporate spiritual life, whether charismatic, Toronto-blessed, Anglo-catholic or Alternative worship, points to human creatureliness and the otherness of God which postmodernity denies but which our image-of-Godness yearns after. “You have set eternity in their hearts…” says Koheleth[48]. Furthermore, liturgy and the liturgical year, tradition and sacramental re-enactments, all help us to regain our place in space and time. This has always been a function of cultic worship.[49]

5. Radical Holiness
The evidence of God in our own lives is one of the clearest signposts to transcendence. It is not by setting up a dull and irrelevant Christian counter-culture, but by affronting society with ‘godly’ living, that we challenge people to consider the immanence of the transcendent Christ. ‘Holiness’ must not be confused with ‘niceness’. To counter postmodernity’s anti-hero we need Christian heroes: men and women who will be Rough Knights for the High King.

6. A Theology of Pleasure and Desire
The Old Testament perhaps extols pleasure more than the New, but the New does not deny it in giving it a firmer basis in joy. We should receive with thanksgiving all the exciting things and experiences that postmodernity brings to many of us, while demonstrating that we are citizens of heaven with a greater hope. Postevangelical Christianity must be more life affirming than denying. Although with CS Lewis we should remember that “All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status, always reminds, beckons, awakens desires. Our best havings are wantings.”[50] Our desire for God, the giver of all good things, can never be satisfied this side of death. It is the Love of perpetual longing. Mark Seem is indulging in wishful thinking when he suggests that desire alone in some way can replace the transcendent.

“A politics of desire would see loneliness and depression as the first things to go… the anti-oedipal strategy: if man is connected to the machines of the universe, if he is “anchored”, he ceases to worry about the fitness of things, about the behaviour of his fellow-men, about right or wrong and justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit … The life that’s in him will manifest itself in growth, and growth is an endless, eternal process. The process is everything.”[51]

7. A Transformed Western Church
We have tried all manner of techniques and reforms in the church in the past fifty years and seen a steady decline in the West. Perhaps the new thing that God is forcing upon us through postmodernity will better equip us to work with Christ in discipling a generation who are ‘open’ but do not know where to turn.

“Generation X has come into young adult maturity in a cultural and moral ‘whirlwind of barbarism’… We believe that the characteristics for which generation X has received such bad press are the very qualities that will render them most effective as pioneers of a revitalised Christian faith. Their pragmatism and skepticism, their sharp-eyed assessments of life and above all, their search for community and personal relationships are exactly what the emerging era requires.”[52]

If postmodernity is just a commercial break then we should work and pray for a Kingdom programme to follow… until the Final Credits.

(Origin, 6/94 Last Revisions, 3/07)

Endnotes

[1] This article by Nick Mercer (without the bibliography and slightly modified), is published in Antony Billington, Tony Lane & Max Turner, eds., Mission & Meaning: Essays Presented to Peter Cotterell (Paternoster, 1995), chapter 18. The title is from an idea by my research assistant Mark Carter.
[2] The Independent, 24th December 1987 quoted in Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (Sage Publications, 1991), p.1.
[3] Philip Sampson offers a slightly different explanation for preferring ‘postmodernity’ in ‘The Rise of Postmodernity’, Philip Sampson, Vinay Samuel & Chris Sugden eds., Faith & Modernity (Oxford: Regnum Lynx Books, 1994), n.1,p.50.
[4] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) and Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984).
[5] A Huyssen, After the Great Divide: modernism, mass culture, postmodernism (Indiana University Press, 1986) p.181.
[6] From another point of view, a belief in a rational God who created a rational universe has underpinned much of the post-reformation expansion in scientific knowledge. See R Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972).
[7] E.g. David A Hart, Faith in Doubt: non-realism and christian belief (London: Mowbray, 1993).
[8] See Featherstone op.cit. p.7ff and Antoine Compagnon , The 5 Paradoxes of Modernity (New York: Columbia University,1994), p.114ff. Although I noted Virginia Woolf in 1928 in Orlando (Penguin, p.19) compairing the black and whitness of the Elizabethan age to our age: “The withered intricacies and ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age were unknown to them.”
[9] Harvey op.cit. p.39.
[10] Patricia Waugh, Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), p.5 quoted in Gene Edward Veith, Guide to Contemporary Culture (Leicester: Crossway Books, 1994) p.45. I suspect that Waugh brings some of her own postmodern mind-set and language to this summary which tends to postmodernise Toynbee.
[11] I Hassan, ‘The culture of postmodernism’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.2(3)(1985),123f. Some of the terms in this chart will be unfamiliar to some readers. A helpful, fun, but well informed and illustrated commentary on all these terms can be found in Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt, Postmodernism for Beginners (Cambridge: Icon, 1995).
[12] Gardner and Rietkerk quoted in Sampson op.cit. p.30.
[13] This is part of Zygmunt Bauman’s argument in Intimations of Postmodernity (London:Routledge, 1992).
[14] After William Gibson’s classic Neuromancer, (London: Harper Collins, 1984, 1993).
[15] Bruce Sterling edited a cyberpunk anthology, Mirrorshades (London: Ace Books, 1986, 1988), which contains a good editorial Preface outlining the history of cyberpunk.
[16] See the illustrated Mark Dery, ed., Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994)
[17] There are always articles and TV programmes about the global information superhighways, ‘surfing the net’ and so on. E.g. Timothy C Morgan, ‘Cyber Shock: Can the church keep pace with the new information culture?’ Christianity Today Vol.39,No.4(3 April 1995),pp.78-86 and Peter Farrington, ‘Inklings of God on the Internet’ Alpha (May 1995),pp.38-40.
[18] Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture (London: Abacus, 1992). And see William Mahedy & Janet Bernardi A Generation Alone: Xers Making a Place in the World (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 1994).
[19] That great ironist Lewis Carroll illustrated the point well:“When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty scornfully, “it means what I want it to mean, neither more nor less.”
“My dear old thing,” said the March Hare, “there’s no more to it than that. When you say or write something, you’ve got to reckon that you can’t keep tabs on it. Other people might take what you say quite differently from how you meant it. It’s like setting a bird free. Once it’s gone , it flies where it wants.”
See Michael Ovey, ‘Deconstruction: Gagging the Speaking God?’ Cambridge Papers 2/4(1993) and for a fuller discussion and bibliography on structuralism and deconstructionism see Veith op.cit. ch.3.
[20] Sampson, op.cit. p.36.
[21] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p.117.
[22] Sampson op.cit. p.40.
[23] Partly, this is what Valentine Cunningham discusses in In the Reading Gaol (OUP, 1994).
[24] See Karl-Josef Kuschel Laughter: A Theological Reflection (London: SCM, 1994).
[25] A term that Frederic Jameson uses in op.cit..
[26] A line from a Denis Leary comedy routine. Woody Allen is also full of blank irony.
[27] Sampson, op.cit. p.31.
[28] A phrase used by Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity (London: Polity, 1991).
[29] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, (London: Athlone, 1984). This is an extremely dense book, but perhaps marks the way ahead for postmodern philosophy?
[30] Veith op.cit. p.158.
[31] But see Veith op.cit. ch.9.
[32] Peter Cotterell, Mission and Meaninglessness (London: SPCK, 1990), p.33.
[33] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (London: Penguin, 1991 ), p.37.
[34] See Sampson op.cit. p.51,n.18.
[35] Stephen Toulmin & June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (London: Pelican, 1967) and The Architecture of Matter (London: Pelican, 1965) are still very readable accounts of this.
[36] See Harvey op.cit. Part III.
[37]Jameson op.cit. p.15.
[38] Ibid. p.11.
[39] Harre quoted in Sampson op.cit. p.45.
[40] Philip Elmer-Dewitt, ‘Cyberpunk!’ Time (8 Feb 1993),p.62.
[41] There will be a spate of books on this subject in the coming few years, of which Dave Tomlinson’s, The Post-Evangelical (Triangle, 1995) is one of the first. Jim Packer’s exhortations to “co-belligerence” in North America and the widespread move in British evangelicalism towards a radical self-appraisal of essentials is already paving the way.
[42] Colin Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many (CUP, 1993), p.129.
[43] See also Andrew Walker, Telling the Story (SPCK, 1996)
[44] Douglas Coupland, Life After God (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p.359.
[45] Gunton op.cit.
[46] Mark Seem in the introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, op.cit., p.xxi.
[47] Gunton op.cit. ch.5.
[48] Eccles.3.11.
[49] See for example Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959).
[50] WH Lewis, Letters of CS Lewis (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966), p.289. Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths dated 5/11/59.
[51] Mark Seem in the introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, op.cit., p.xxiii.
[52] William Mahedy & Janet Bernardi, A Generation Alone: Xers Making a Place in the World (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 1994)

Select Bibliography

* Represents a good starting place • Worth serious study

Ronald J Allen et al, Theology for Preaching: Authority, Truth and the Knowledge of God in a Postmodern Ethos (Abingdon, 1997).
* Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt, Postmodernism for Beginners (Cambridge: Icon, 1995). An amusing, secular, well-illustrated diversion.
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
• Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992). A definitive and very much respected sociological study.
Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Deceiving The Twentieth Century’ The New Statesman (1 Apr 1994),p.24.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
Tom Beaudoin, Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1998). A fascinating analysis of spirituality and church.
Antony Billington, Tony Lane & Max Turner, eds., Mission & Meaning: Essays Presented to Peter Cotterell (Paternoster, 1995).
Harry Blamires, The Post-Christian Mind (London: SPCK, 2001).
John Bowker, Is God a Virus? (London: SPCK, 1995).
Andrew Boyd, Life’s Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for the Post-Hip (Penguin, 1999). Lots of repeatable one liners!
• Antoine Compagnon, The 5 Paradoxes of Modernity (NY: Columbia, 1994). An elegant argument describing the fragmentations of postmodernity as consequences of paradoxes in modernity. It concentrates mainly on visual art and architecture.
Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture (Oxford:Blackwell 1992).
Robert Cook, ‘Postmodernism, Pluralism and John Hick’ Themelios Vol.19,No .1,(Oct 1993).
* Douglas Coupland, Generation X: tales for an accelerated culture (London: Abacus, 1992). This novel will give you the flavour of postmodern life.
Douglas Coupland, Life After God (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994). And his more recent novels.
Valentine Cunningham, In the Reading Gaol (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
Mark Dery ed., Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994).

* Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Penguin, 1984). DeLillo is increasingly recognised as the best analyst in fiction of contemporary culture.

Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Penguin, 1992).
Terry Docherty, Postmodernism: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1993).
David S Dockery, The Challenge of Postmodernism: An Evangelical Engagement (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1995).
Terry Eagleton The Idea of Culture (Blackwell, 2000).
Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1992).
Mike Featherstone ed., Theory, Culture and Society Vol.5,Nos.2-3(June 1989).
Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992).
William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Harper Collins, 1984).
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
Stanley Grenz, Primer on Postmodernism (Eerdmans, 2000)
Colin Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many (CUP, 1993).
Jürgen Habermas ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’ in New German Critique No.22(1981).
*• David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). A thorough analysis.
Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light (London: Routledge Comedia, 1988).
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992)
J Ingleby, ‘Postmodernism: A Laid-Back Pluralism’ Third Way 15/4(1992),p.25.
• Frederic Jameson, Postmodernity: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). Definitive book for postmodern literary theory from a neo-Marxist perspective. Quite difficult. First chapter is the important one. Deeply right at times although, overall, deeply wrong.
* Alan Jamieson, A Churchless Faith (London: SPCK, 2002). A revealing qualitative piece of research on why people leave church.
Paul Lakeland, Postmodernity: Christian Identity in a Fragmented Age (Fortress, 1997).
Scott Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1990).
David Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland (Polity Press, 2000). Heavyweight and sociologically chewy with some nice bits about Christianity's role as a cultural resource.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984).
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth 1993).
William Mahedy & Janet Bernardi, A Generation Alone: Xers Making a Place in the World (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 1994).
* J Richard Middleton & Brian J Walsh, truth is stranger than it used to be (London: SPCK, 1995).
Leslie Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society (London: SPCK, 1989).
Christopher Noah, World Postmodern Fiction (London: Longmann, 1993).
* Kevin O’Donnell, Postmodernism (Oxford, Lion, 2003)
Michael Ovey, ‘Deconstruction: Gagging the Speaking God?’ Cambridge Papers 2/4(1993).
Gérard Raulet, ‘From Modernity as One-Way Street to Postmodernity as Dead End’ New German Critique No.33(Fall 1984).
J Reader, ‘Theology, Culture and Postmodernity: Response to Graham, Walter & Newbigin’ Modern Churchman 34/5 (1993),p.58.
Mike Riddell, Mark Pierson, Kathy Kirkpatrick, The Prodigal Project (London: SPCK, 2000). This has an intereactive CD-ROM, and explores new patterns of church.
* Philip Sampson, Vinay Samuel & Chris Sugden eds., Faith & Modernity (Oxford: Regnum Lynx Books, 1994). A good collection of essays coming out of a Lausanne Committee of World Evangelization conference held in Uppsala, Sweden in 1993. Sampson’s essay is very helpful.
Philip Sampson, ‘Why Stick to the Script?’, Third Way 19/4(May, 1996), p.21
B Smart, Modern Conditions Postmodern Controversies (London: Routledge, 1992).
• George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber, 1989). A profound and ultimately theological overview of Western cultural history putting this century in context.
Dave Tomlinson, The Post-Evangelical (Triangle, 1995).
Kevin Vanhoozer, The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (CUP, 2003)
Gene Edward Veith, Guide to Contemporary Culture (Leicester: Crossway Books, 1994). This is an excellent Christian analysis from someone who knows the literature well.
Andrew Walker, Telling The Story (SPCK, 1996).
* Pete Ward, Liquid Church (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2002). A very provocative book about changing patterns of church.
Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh, T& T Clark, 2000).
World Evangelisation Vol.18,No.65, (December 1993).
Transformation Vol.10.No.4, (October/December 1993).
The Way Vol.36.No.3, (July 1996).
* Third Way Vol 19.No.3, (April 1996).
Magazines: Mondo, Wired, Viz & other fanzines.
Films: American Beauty; Blazing Saddles; The Player; Barton Fink; Short Cuts; Reservoir Dogs; Jacob’s Ladder; Something Wild; Mad Max; The Matrix; Orlando; Twelve Monkeys; Trainspotting. Most recent films directed by David Lynch, Peter Greenaway or Robert Altman
See also on a TV near you: MTV, The Simpsons, Friends, Sex in the City, Family Guy, Malcolm in the Middle, Little Britain, Ugly Betty

Appendix 1

Stream & Databites

I have been to MacDonalds in Berlin, London, NY, SFO, Manila, Hong Kong, Paris, Stockholm, Worthing, Johannesburg, Athens, Madrid, Brugge, Toronto… They are PSZs (Personal Security Zones - Toffler) in our turbulent Global Village. There was a time when churches were PSZs. Now they are menacingly unpredictable, even in the Home Counties.

I am a compulsive consumer - you are a consumer - of this lecture - of worship services and articles and sermons and Goods.

Productivity has collapsed into the black hole of consumption.
Tesco, ergo sum - I shop, therefore I am.

I am a compulsive producer. We are trapped in the cash-nexus and bind of consumerism: every time you spend money, you’re propping up systems you loathe; the structural sin that so tightly binds.

I am a target market. Somebody wants to sell me something, somebody who knows my needs, desires and anxieties, and will use this knowledge as a crow bar to alter my behaviour and therefore open my wallet… or am I paranoid?… or cynical… or grateful?

Of all the ‘somethings’ I am supposed to buy, I am to keep buying more of them. So they are obsolete or out of fashion almost as soon as I buy them.

The Global Village - Universal Culture. Driftwood shanty towns, with TVs and satellite dishes. Two billion people can view Baywatch.

The Post is cultural white noise - makes no sense, but it is on TV.

Democracy increasingly makes false promises.
Politicians are more concerned with image than integrity.
So the media, the Image Makers, control the political machine, while claiming they are serving the democratic process.

You must be bored again.

The Post is a Soup of floating cultural fragments - Scientific Revolution 17th Century… Enlightenment 18th Century… Romanticism 19th Century… Modernism 20th Century… Postmodernism 21st Century… Relativity (Einstein) Uncertainty (Heisenberg) Incompleteness (Gödel) Chaos (Mandelbrot). And a backcloth of General Synod reports.

“Fake it ‘till you make it.” We all have to look the part, to consume our images.

Stop Waiting for Godot.

Images are the most ephemeral of commodities, shifting fashions keep us purchasing in an accelerated culture.

Shopping Malls are the temples of creativity and diversity. Tescos that look like churches with clocks on Towers and soaring columns pointing to the Great Retailer in the Sky.
They give meaning. But no comfort.

“People bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night knowing there is something they have forgotten to do.” Don DeLillo.

Integrate globally. Disintegrate locally.

The Space/Time compression of the last 20 years. Breakfast in London; lunch in New York. (Luggage in Munich.)

Take irony for granted.

Practise one-liners.

This week 70s funk, next retro-punk. And we eat in shiny new 1940s restaurants decorated with expensive memorabilia we threw away in the 1950s.

Premature Nostalgia - do you remember the 90s?

Fragmentation and surfaces, shifting personal identities - these are the essence. Relationships - not depth or permanence - unless you want them…

Participate without belonging

Clubbing, Techno, Garage - Coke, “E” - Drugs are simply states of mind - Coenaesthesis (Emotional Anaesthesia). Altered States of Consciousness. It’s the only way To Be. Or Not To Be. Good Choruses will do the trick. Or a soothing Mass. Or laughing in the Spirit or being Torontoed. Or anything that can unbind our future-shocked and stressed emotions.

“When there is enough out-of-placeness in the world, then nothing is out of place.” Don DeLillo.

Vote anyway.

Virtual Reality merges with reality. “The world looks suspiciously like a 20-channel satellite TV with a madman holding the remote control; before you have time to make sense of the story, the screen beams other images, to be replaced with yet other images, before you begin to know what they are images of; and all comes from nowhere and melts into nowhere again.” Zygmunt Bauman

Control the remote.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” WB Yeats

Humour is serious. Irony rules - Humour is the White Man’s burden.

If you can’t say something serious while laughing at yourself, then you cannot be serious.
The Failure of the Enlightenment Project. Cogito ergo sum, cogito.
The Enlightenment Project was to illumine everything.
It has turned everything into the material and realised that nothing is knowable.
Come in Humanism, your time is up.

“This statement is unprovable” Kurt Gödel

The Xerox Revolution - The Zine Scene - proliferation of small circulation/highly specific publications.

Death of the Importance of the Individual - Ochlocracy - Crowd Rule.
The crowd wear Levis and are thin and are for abortion and against the government.

It’s hard to belong to anything now, unless it’s against something.

The Breakdown of Cultural Coherence - social fragmentation and lack of metanarrative.

Be profoundly superficial.

The church is the plausibility structure of faith.

God is Community.

Everything you know is wrong.

“It’s like this dad. You can either have a house or have a life. I’m having a life.”

Why have the stress and responsibility of a proper job?
I’d rather have time and a McJob.

Deconstructionism is logical positivism ad absurdum.

The good thing about The Post is it takes apart ideologies - communism and churchianity. The bad thing is The Post denies transcendence…

“In the twilight of the gods, men came forth like giants.
In the twilight of the men, all the gods came back again.
But is it dawn or dusk, or just a smoggy day?” Rob Draper

Belief in history is a step of faith, which having taken it, proves reasonable.
Belief in rationality is a step of faith, which having taken it, proves rational.
Faith is risk.
The Holy Spirit is the witness to transcendence and the inspirer of risk.

“When there is the ‘death of God’ in a culture, it becomes increasingly hollowed out, ‘weightless’” Nietzsche.

Truth is relative. That may be true for you, but it is not for me.

Jesus is either mad, bad or who he said he was - so what?

“At least five times the faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. In each of the five cases it was the dog that died.” GK Chesterton

Databites

Dip into Nihilism
Manoeuvre between Pastiche & Mishmash
In panicked Defence of the Sacred - Embrace Fundamentalism
Need What Didn’t Exist
Pretend to be Real
Implicate Yourself in Every Interpretation
Write More about Less
Worship in a Building that Quotes Other Buildings
Take Irony for Granted
Participate without Belonging
Practise One-Liners
Purchase Genuine Imitations
Have Beliefs but don’t Believe
Be as Different from the Joneses as you can Afford to be
Debt-Finance Immediate Gratification
Give me ambiguity… or give me something else…
Cats know how we feel. They don’t give a damn, but they know.
Postmodernity is nascent, or infantile, or convalescent modernism. (Baudrillard)
Lottery - a tax on people who are poor at mathematics
The modern Western culture in which most people over 45 in the UK grew up saw everything as decided by reason
All change is perceived as loss
The future isn’t what it used to be
No persecutor or foe in two thousand years has wreaked such havoc on the church as has modernity
All generalisations are false
Ontology has collapsed into epistemology
Dead at 30; buried at 70 (Bart Simpson)
The media is modern society’s central nervous system
My karma just ran over my dogma
Postmodernists generally regard reason’s ability to organise and systematise as coercive and repressive
The answer to everything is a sort of blurry thing
For most evangelicals God was functionally irrelevant
Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy
Capitalism, the state and the knowledge industry have deeply affected the way the church in the west has expressed the Gospel
If you don’t watch the violence, how will you get desensitized?
We have tried to use the forces of modernization to serve us, but unwittingly we ourselves have been shaped by them
Veni, vidi, velcro. I came, I saw, I stuck around
The Post is the death of the individual and the birth of neo-tribalism
Postmodernity makes evangelism easier yet makes discipleship harder
Postmoderns are rightly suspicious of postmodernity
Ozmosis: the inability of one’s job to live up to one’s self-image
Time is an illusion. Lunch-time doubly so
Look closer see less
The Post is the awareness of how much faith you need to believe that anything is real
We are born naked, wet and hungry. Things go downhill from there
Postmodernity is nothing to be proud of. It is a cultural virus, like AIDS. You catch it by watching TV.
A bird in the hand is safer than one in an aircraft engine
Data in, rules out. The future is looking increasingly fuzzy
Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot
A bishop never more resembles Jesus Christ than when his mouth is closed
(St Ignatius of Antioch, AD 37-107)
Things and meanings have imploded. All boundaries and distinctions have become blurred
A curved line is the loveliest distance between two points
(Mae West)
You are unique, just like everyone else
Very funny Scotty, now beam down my clothes
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana
Things go right gradually; they go wrong all at once
Jesus! Protect me from your followers
The ultimate factor in the church’s engagement with postmodernity is the church’s engagement with God
Modernity’s replacement of ‘top down’ God-centred living with ‘bottom up’ human-centred living
Dogs come when called; cats take a message and get back to you later
Christianity survived for many people by retreating to the inward
How much uncertainty can a person take?
The Post hurts

Article - Singleness

Changing Patterns in Society - Singleness

There are more single adults in Western society and in the church than ever before. In England and Wales, out of 40 million people old enough to be married, 17 million are single - that’s over 40%. (HMSO Statistics, 1990.)

Yet the church’s constant emphasis is so much on family and marriage, that it is in danger of marginalising this growing section of society. (I used to introduce myself as a “childless, single-parent family”, just to get in on the act…)

So why are there so many more single adults? George Bernard Shaw’s dictum, “it is a woman’s business to get married as soon as possible, and a man’s to keep unmarried as long as he can ” is no longer true. The age of marrying is going up for both women and men and fewer adults now get married, some choosing to cohabit. (Government figures for 1987 showed 1.8 million cohabiting adults.) There are a number of other contributory trends: sadly, more and more marriages are ending in divorce or separation, and fewer divorcees are remarrying. And then there is the growing number of lone parents: a few from choice, most by necessity, but totalling 17% of all families, which is the highest proportion anywhere in the world. Better health care means that widows and widowers are living longer. The homosexual community is possibly growing, although reliable statistics are hard to come by.

But there are some deeper, albeit more disputable, issues. Selfishness and affluence often go hand in hand. So a number of singles simply enjoy the ability to live on their own, in comfort and totally egocentrically. If the basic selfishness is not addressed, then the chances are that any marriage will end in disaster - and often they know that.

Within most Baptist churches, singles are a significant group. The Evangelical Alliance survey in 1992 found that about 35% of adults in churches were single; only a little less than the national figure for the whole population. Despite popular myths, the proportions of single women and single men under 30 in church are about the same. However, in Baptist churches, the imbalance of single women to single men over the age of 45 is very pronounced at 70:30.
‘Singles-blindness’ is a feature of much church life, because, although such a large group, it is often ‘hidden’, representing as it does, such a diversity within the church community: young and old, unmarried, divorced, widowed… It is a helpful and often revealing exercise to work out the percentage of single adults in your congregation.

Biblical Reflection
God created male and female in his image, to live together, for it was not good for either of them to be alone. Yet when God became human, he chose an unmarried woman to be his mother, and then chose a life of celibacy till his death. And this illustrates the ambiguity with which the Bible treats singleness; and indeed the ambiguity with which the historic churches have viewed the subject: single priests, monks and nuns, exhorting and protecting family values.

The Genesis story makes it clear that the complementary union of male and female is at the heart of the fight against loneliness and isolation. Paul points to the mystical paradigm in the sexual union, representing Christ and his Bride, the Church. In fact, both Old and New Testaments are full of sexual imagery, illustrating the closeness of God to his people, or the idolatry of ‘playing the harlot’ with foreign gods. Humans are made in the image of God, and our sexuality perhaps reflects the eternal intimacy within the Godhead. This is why our sexuality and spirituality are so closely connected. Consider this definition: “longing for intimacy, to know and be known, desiring to comprehend the other and be totally comprehended by them; to love and be loved, to be fully at one with, absorbed by and absorbing the loved one.” This could be a partial definition of human sexual union, or Christian spirituality.

So if sexual union appears to be an integral part of our human image-of-God-ness, why does Paul extol singleness as the ‘better way’, and why was the only totally fulfilled human unmarried?

Part of the answer lies in Genesis 3, where the Fall clearly disrupts the male/female relationship as well as the Humanity/God relationship. It is at this time also that there is a distortion in one of God’s greatest gifts, human sexuality. Marriage can never be the same again, and arguably, neither is it to be the sole solution for loneliness. There is an ‘aloneness’ which drives a person to God, and which even marriage cannot alleviate. And there is a closeness to God through the Second Adam, which Adam and Eve never knew. (“For a member of the Body of Christ, marriage is no longer a necessity or duty, for man is no longer alone as Adam was; he is the friend of Christ, he lives in the communion of saints, and he is indwelt by the Holy Spirit. ” Max Thurian)

In I Corinthians 7, Paul speaks of singleness, either for a period, or for life, as a desirable (i) gift for the individual (v.7). It is no use the person saying they do not have ‘the gift’. For as long as they are single, then they have the gift and have to make the most of it. Of course, they can work hard at trying to exchange the gift for that of marriage if they so choose - this may mean changing church, or at least making sure they are in places where they are likely to meet suitable spouses.

Paul also sees single people as a (ii) gift for the Church (vv.17, 28-33). Down through the centuries, the church has benefited enormously from men and women who have had the freedom and lack of ties to serve God in special and sometimes courageous ways. And until recently, single Christians were regarded by the Church as special blessings from God. Only over the last century or so has the Protestant Church begun to pity and ostracize them. If 35% of your church is single, what proportion of the leadership is single?

Then Paul also hints at the idea that single people can be a (iii) gift for the Lord (v.35), displaying “undivided devotion". This may have reflected Paul’s own experience, and certainly there is plenty of evidence in the writings of single men and women down through church history who have had a ’special’ closeness to Christ. (Francis of Assisi, Lady Julian of Norwich, Abbess Hildegarde, David Brainerd…)

Christ also extols singleness in a short but revolutionary (for the Jews) little addendum to a pathetic remark by the disciples after his teaching on divorce. (Matt 19.1-12) His three categories of ‘eunuchs’ may represent:
(i) those physically or psychologically unable to consummate marriage - there are many with ‘wounds’ from the past or a sexual orientation that makes them choose not to marry;
(ii) victims of circumstance - divorce, the death of a spouse, obligation to care for parents or family, or just being in a place where there are no suitable partners;
(iii) those who choose, for a period, or for life, not to marry - or remarry.

Issues for Christians
There is no doubt that for many single people their biggest problem is the rest of the church. Most churches just don’t take single adults seriously. They are a negative by-product of failure to find a partner, failure to hold on to a partner and make a marriage work, or failure to die at the same time as their partner. The well-meaning comments at weddings, “your turn next!", the concerned conversations, “and she’s such a nice girl…”, the assumption that if you are a leader you are married, and the obvious confusion when they discover you are not, “Oh, I’m sorry… ” These can all contribute to a sense of failure and of exclusion. It is the steady dripping of a tap that exacerbates the feeling of isolation and unfulfilled longing which is both the privilege and pain of the single life. (Marriage has its own privileges and pains.)

Even preachers sometimes illustrate their sermons as if the entire world is married and has children. And then suddenly remembering the singles they throw in a “some of you will find out about that soon enough… ” (There is a common assumption that those who have never been married ‘can’t understand’, which presumably means that Jesus is not able to sympathize with married people.)

As in so many other areas, there is also a gender bias here against women. The word ‘bachelor’ has overtones of freedom and choice; ‘spinster’ smacks of hair in a bun and sensible shoes. Men are allowed to keep their options open into their mid thirties, although beyond that, they must be immature and there must also be some suspicion about their sexual orientation. Women, however, are pitiable from the late twenties onwards. Their biological clock is ticking away, and although men in their fifties may marry a younger woman and have a family, the reverse is rarely witnessed or possible. (Medical ‘advances’ are rapidly changing that situation with 62 year old mothers…)

Until quite recently in the protestant tradition, celibacy was encouraged as a real option, either for the early years, or for life. This was the apostle Paul’s attitude. But very rarely nowadays is celibacy regarded as a way of serving the Lord wholeheartedly. Rather it is regarded as an odd quirk, tolerated more in older people (who are ‘past it’) than in younger people, and of course, in female missionaries. I am generally worried by people who say, “I don’t want to be married. I’m perfectly happy being single. ” But I am encouraged when I meet those who explain, “Yes. I would like to be married. But I have chosen to be single for the present. ” We should encourage people to explore celibacy as a calling from God. They don’t necessarily have to take any ‘vows’, but they can know the liberty of being free from the continual search for a partner.

Listen to John Stott: “When I was in my twenties and early thirties, I was fully expecting to marry, but when the moment of decision came I lacked assurance that this was God’s will, and so drew back. I began to ask myself at that time whether God was calling me to be single. I have never had a revelation from God. I have never taken vows of celibacy. It’s been the force of circumstances.” (In an interview for the Christian Bookseller.)

Although sex is not usually the biggest problem for single people, the pressures in our society to be sexually active produce a real tension in this area. (Arguably, this is no greater than the sexual tensions experienced by many married people. In my pastoral work I often find that single people have a better understanding of their sexuality - and other people’s - than marrieds.) This pressure is not dealt with by a denial of our sexual drive, but rather by a channelling of some of the sexual energy. “The essence of chastity is not the suppression of lust but the total orientation of one’s life toward a goal. ” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer) Orgasm can be ignored or coped with through masturbation, but the longing for intimacy has to be addressed by community and friendship.

So Jesus had his wider circle of friends: women, men, families. Then there were his daily companions: the twelve disciples. But he had his three best friends: Peter, James and John; and of them, John was his intimate ‘beloved’ friend. Sadly, few churches would tolerate such favouritism either amongst married or unmarried leaders. (And the disciples found it pretty hard to stomach!) But if Jesus, God incarnate, needed such companionship and physical touch, then it must be recognised that for singles to survive, there need to be degrees of physical and mental intimacy with others. (Hug someone who is widowed this Sunday!) The degrees of intimacy will vary with personality, culture, age and many other factors. But for singles to feel that their ‘singleness’ is accepted, and that they truly belong, the noble gift of intimate friendship must be revived, which will make some feel a little uncomfortable. But then David & Jonathan or Jesus & John have always made a few feel uncomfortable. There is little teaching in many of our church on ‘soul friends’, companionship, the dangers of emotional dependency, and so on.

Jesus took children in his arms, and it is still children who will often provide, without the self-conscious embarrassment experienced by most British adults, the affection and acceptance which the single person needs. To hold a baby in your arms and give it it’s ‘bottle’, can be a deeply affirming experience for a single.

Salt and Light
So how can the church release the potential of single people and help them, with all God’s people, to become mature in Christ? And how can the church be a community which reaches out to help the 40% of our population who are single?

Extended families are a great gift, although they sometimes stretch the boundaries of our selfless love and tolerance. Simply to be ‘included in’ on family life, at weekends and at Christmas, on shopping trips or helping with children’s birthday parties, on holidays or painting the kitchen (yours or theirs!); all these are ways of reinforcing among the unmarried, widows and widowers, sole parents, their sense of belonging. It must not become abuse or exploitation. Many marrieds wrongly assume that single people have all the time in the world for running everything in the church, as well as baby-sitting. Extended families must operate out of genuine friendship, mutuality, help and support, not out of pity. Worse still, some married couples almost flaunt the success of their relationship before singles: “The assertion made by a happy marriage often alienates, and often is at least half consciously intended to alienate, the excluded spectator. ” (Iris Murdoch) Conversely, what a sense of belonging I had when my first ‘extended family’ gave me a key to their door!

But single people are sometimes their own worst enemies. They too must shoulder some of the blame for isolation. For they must guard against a self-centredness which wants the benefits of extended family with none of the down side - children and chores must be part of the self-giving which integrates us into society. And there is nothing worse than the single who simply wants an audience to listen attentively to their tale of woe and bitter recriminations against the lot that life has landed them.

And then there are those who cut off their nose to spite their face! They won’t ring anyone, write or visit, and interpret lack of contact by their friends as a sign of lack of love and concern. Sometimes it is indeed thoughtlessness on their friends’ part, but more often it is the busyness of normal family life. Single people must pursue friendships in a way that marrieds often need not. Then again, what a sense of belonging I experience when someone from a busy family rings me ‘just to see that I’m OK’.

Lone parents have particular needs of acceptance and space. To be free from the constant demands of their children occasionally is a great boon. And their children may lack a father or mother role model. Secure couples, especially older ones whose children may have flown the nest, may consider sharing their house with such lone parents. Some churches have enabled two or more lone parents to buy or rent property together so that parenting and household work can be shared. A creche or child-minding service can be of enormous service to those within and outside of the immediate church community.

Sometimes there is a place for arranging for widows and widowers to meet, specifically to talk about bereavement and adjusting to single life again. Many ‘put on a brave face’ while inside they are hurting and longing to talk about the pain of separation, and the aloneness they feel so acutely. It doesn’t go away after a year or so when the rest of the fellowship have got used to the new lone partner. This is another opportunity to reach out into the needy unchurched community. Sometimes social services will put a church in touch with those not coping with bereavement

There are many simple ways of helping. I am always grateful for those who invite me to share their Sunday lunch, or to have supper with them on a lonely Sunday night. (I am not too well-pleased if I find they have also invited, without telling me, someone whom they think would make a perfect partner for me… Matchmaking has its place, but it must be done discreetly, and never forced.) And I will offer to come round and cook a meal for the family sometimes, or invite them out to a restaurant if I can afford it, or turn up with a takeaway, or just take the kids to MacDonalds…

In sum, both marrieds and singles must work hard at accepting one another, giving a sense of belonging, fostering security and trusting love. Marrieds should let single people enjoy their singleness, and help save them from any encroaching bitterness. Don’t patronise or pity, but receive from them and offer to them, remembering that you started out ‘single’ and that you may well end this life ‘single’. And singles must make the most of the particular freedoms and opportunities which God has given them - for as long as they last.