Postsecular Modernity is not Postmodern

“[Modernity’s] implosion occurs when the process of mediation – dialogue, dialectic, and debate – can no longer be held to  operate; when certain incommensurable perspectives become apparent; when the subject increasingly loses the distinctiveness of its position and likewise the object; when the natural is seen as already cultivated; when the private is increasingly subject to social policy and internalizes a public surveillance; when the universal is recognized as representing a certain power/knowledge interest which necessarily marginalizes other interests. And so the hierarchy of values implodes, with no appeal possible to an authority outside the system itself – no principle, no shared ontology, no grounding epistemology, no transcendental mediation. And so we move beyond the death of God which modernity announced, to a final forgetting of the transcendental altogether, to a state of godlessness so profound that nothing can be conceived behind the exchange of signs and the creation of symbolic structures.”

Graham Ward, “Introduction, ‘Where We Stand’,” Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (2005), p. xix

“There’s not even room enough to be anywhere, it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

Bob Dylan, “Not Dark Yet,” Time Out of Mind (1997)

“It may well be that in the end postmodernity will prove to be better characterized in eschatological terms of prefinality.”

Carl F H Henry, “Postmodernism: The New Spectre?” The Challenge of Postmodernism (1995), p. 51

“I have convinced myself, the elite in this world who are well educated and well off, regardless of how many political concessions they may be willing to make, will never step down from lording over the masses.  And the vast majority of people, the masses themselves?  For them there are only two levers:  suffering material want and religious fanaticism.  The political movement that understands how to grab onto these two levers to exploit them will be victorious.  Our time needs iron and bread – and then a cross or something like it.”

Georg Büchner in a letter to Karl Gutzkow (1836)

“To sum it all up, the Gospel writers themselves must be the documents of the linguistic change by the Word.  The four Evangelists in their new way of speaking, would not be the only documents of such a change.  Faithful Christians will continue to be impressed by the change in the nature of man by martyrs and missionaries…. But for the pure mind, for science, for the intellect [neither missionary nor martyr] will ever prove that a change of mind occurred.  The scientific conscience in all of us rebels against such external evidence…. The mind does not and need not ever on such a basis trust in a historical change of man’s nature, because it is not the mind’s business to trust, to believe in external evidence.  But the mind cannot help believing in a change of mind from a change of style.”

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Fruit of Lips or Why Four Gospels (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 1978), p. 19  

The postmodern is not because the modern still is, although now postsecular. Postmodern theologian Graham Ward provides an excellent example of the misnomer, postmodern. Ward uses the metaphor “implosion” to describe what has happened to modernity, explaining this happens “when certain incommensurable perspectives become apparent…so the hierarchy of values implodes, with no appeal possible to an authority outside the system itself – no principle, no shared ontology, no grounding epistemology, no transcendental mediation.” Thus, he concludes, we have reached “a final forgetting of the transcendental altogether, to a state of godlessness so profound that nothing can be conceived behind the exchange of signs and the creation of symbolic structures.” If this description were accurate, then the iron cage spoken of by Max Weber has not had its doors forced open from without to subject its interior to the effects of re-enchantment, but rather, the cage itself has collapsed into the layers of discarded newspapers its inhabitants had been placing over its floor the past couple of centuries for collecting their waste.

It is however hard to find this profound state of godlessness in the real world of ordinary daily life, or in the works circulated by the media industry exploiting the imagination or in the exchanges making up global public discourse. Daily conversations carry all manner of religious infiltrations, innuendoes and outbursts.  Led to medium by their religious muses, makers of movies, literature, art, drama, dance and music produce for us a cacophonic collage of spiritual explorations bursting with the popcalyptic (see http://mfnd.wordpress.com/).    Mythical thought, the structuralist Lèvi-Strauss taught, expresses itself using collected scraps and pieces left over from earlier human endeavors.  Artists today are less interested in this secular recoding of our past.  Even if as only a warm up exercise to stretch the mind they are open again to the spirit that gave the original twist to the first story.    Since decadence has replaced progress, they prefer filling our heads with dystopic visions and religious gestures.  They are more interested in sneaking a peek of Mephistopheles than following Faust to be part of a grand project for improving humanity’s lot (goodbye Sir Thomas More, hello Thomas Pynchon, still comfortably missing).  Nor, at the level of international relations, does there exist any such thing as a religious free zone.   ”Religion may or may not move mountains,” Stephen Prothero hedges, however he quickly adds, “it is one of the prime movers in politics worldwide” (God Is Not One, 2010, pp. 7-8).   For those with eyes to see it is the qualification “one of” that is on the wane, not religion.

Ward as a thoroughly modern theologian struggles to come to terms with an increasingly postsecular social reality. Correctly, I believe, he points out there are incommensurable perspectives, and so yes, the inevitable universal and absolute victory of secular discourse as the voice of modernity has imploded in upon itself. Nonetheless, modernity continues, not as a state of godlessness, but increasingly as religiously influenced, religiously immersed, religiously motivated and religiously possessed. What great irony! Ward’s essay, “Introduction, ‘Where We Stand’,” introduces a theological reference work titled, The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, which refers to a place beyond our reach because we have yet to figure out how to move ourselves over modernity’s borders! Philo and Maimonides have fallen into philosophical silence; they speak without a listening audience. Meanwhile, Moses and Elijah are still talking with Jesus. Our ears burn because we so badly want to listen in.

“For decades now we have lived with the uncertainty of no longer being able to say just what epoch it is in which we find ourselves.  Are we in the postmodern era, the era of second modernity, or, in modernity’s first edition as before?   How could it have come to this dilemma?  What kind of times are these in which we no longer even know what times we live in?”[1]    Each decides.  Be merciful to those you meet, they are all doubly bound.  Religion returns to haunt the modern, and the modern mentality remains trapped in the present.

Little children,

because your sins are forgiven for His name’s sake,

protect the children.

Fathers,

because you know Him who is from the beginning,

give the elders back their Christian heritage.

Young men,

because you have overcome the evil one,

restore the rebels’ sanity.

Trust to the angels doing the work that God has given them.  Do we want to play with puzzles to prove our mettle, or do we want Jesus to make us fishers of men, trusting the angels to come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace?   In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Evangelical academicians promote postmodernity by pronouncing it the central threat of our age.  Their publishers market a dialectic of crisis and panic over postmodernists unleashing the destruction of chaos upon defenseless and ignorant Christians.   But fear not!  The caped and cowled shall save church, Jesus and us from this disunifying undoing of correct reasoning.  Behold the thrust by which St. George slays this unholy behemoth: “This position is logically self-destroying for it affirms as a single absolute truth that there is no single absolute truth” (Cape Town Commitment paper, Lausanne Third Congress, 2010).   This is a tamed tale woven with words spoken from hearts seeking through method to beat back their own doubts and fear.   It reminds me of the teenager learning dance steps by listening to music while checking out his moves looking in a mirror.  What the evangelical academy and media industry call postmodern is nothing more than secular modernity reaching “an awareness of what is missing,” — the reconnecting of faith and reason in a postsecular age (title of a book by Habermas et al., Polity Press, 2010).  Ein Bewuβtsein von dem, was fehlt.  Social reality, God’s medium of providence, imposes upon the secular modernist to impel a sense of that which is missing.  Social reality, that interpretation of the medium of meaning for this moment in history, has been brought forth by the THAT who calls forth in us the awareness of what is missing.

The postsecular turn in modernity — postmodernity so called — is not an epistemological crisis to argue against or refute.  It is a placement, a mandate we are to obey.  God is graciously tapping our strength, His saints whom He calls by name to live in this postsecular modern era.  None of us has been trained well enough to suppress the truth with the holds our parents and teachers tried to show us.  For freedom Christ has set us free, therefore we should live as people who are free, not using our freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as bondservants of God.  In the transcultural moment in which He has placed us, He has awakened in the nations the religious yoke of slavery for doing the work of making history.  Religious idioms and gestures are becoming less and less mere aesthetic adjustments or meager pragmatic moves.  We speak of theology and religion less scientifically and more as a people exercised (or perplexed) by religious passions.   Owing to the seismic shift in religious sentiment that God has unleashed, it is time for us to receive our wages and gather fruit for eternal life.  The risks and false promises intrinsic to the last secular dialectic, imperial politics generating the revisionist vengeance of identity politics, have prepared us for the coming first great event that will shape human memory in a new kind of way.  Welcome to the 21st century.  We have entered the west’s fifth revolution[2], the first global and postsecular modern age.

Secular modern “thinkers” obsessed over Being as a generic replacement for the one true God who personally reveals Himself in the Scriptures and fully only in the final revelation of the Son of God who became flesh, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of a virgin and named Jesus of Nazareth, a descendent of David who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, confirmed dead, was buried; and then, descended into hell.

The third day He arose again from the dead,

in accordance with the unbreakable Scriptures;

He ascended into heaven,

and sitteth on the right hand of God

the Father Almighty;

from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

Incompetent genii composed the secular ode to ontology to replace creation’s communion song.  That ode now falls flat.  To a growing many it loses appeal. Ringing hollow in their hearts it satisfies fewer listeners.  The absolute notions of spiritual neutrality and of unaligned objectivity are seen by the growing number of religious men and women to be nothing more than fanciful standings.  These secular constructs of the imagination have been drawn upon the social landscape by a cadre of guardians, a “globalized elite” that make up an “international subculture composed of people with Western-type education,” who make up “the principal ‘carrier’ of progressive, Enlightened beliefs and values.”[3]     Like an April shower washes away hopscotch squares drawn with chalk on a sidewalk for children’s play,  the desecularizing, resurgent religious rains pour down upon the global public square to sweep away the secular rules put in place by our expert keepers.

In these times of the latter rains residents of the postsecular modern world will grind their teeth harder while hearing the gospel.  The pretense of relying solely on reason for freedom and flourishing is giving way to passion’s faith in living idols, lords and gods, goddesses and spirits.  The secular interregnum of which Rosenstock-Huessy spoke is ending (The Christian Future or The Modern Mind Outrun, The Fruit of Lips or Why Four Gospels?).   Nulla misericordia sine miseria.  No longer will we have need of the suffering other to teach us mercy, from now on we will learn on our own how to be merciful.  God has nullified western scholasticism’s privileged tenure.  The time of teocallis has arrived.

We must study Stephen to learn again how to preach in the streets of Jerusalem.  The time when the unclean spirit had gone out of us to pass through waterless places in futility seeking rest is over.  It now has said, “I will return to my house from which I came.”  Look at us.  The secular has made us empty; we are swept and have been put in order — perfectly set for spiritual possession in accordance with the mystery of lawlessness.  Who will be merciful?  Who will preach the gospel in the Areopagus, in public for justice without compromise to those caught up in this coming global moment when the naked public square fills again with religious clamor and the doctrines of demons flood the air?   Here is a scene from the postsecular modern public square[4]:

For these days the one true Triune God has prepared us, so we might speak His words in that crowded public square:  “Whom did you dread and fear, so that you lied, and did not remember me, did not lay it to heart?  Have I not held my peace, even for a long time, and you do not fear me?  I will declare your righteousness and your deeds, but they will not profit you.  When you cry out, let your collection of idols deliver you!  The wind will carry them off, a breath will take them away.  But he who takes refuge in me shall possess the land and shall inherit my holy mountain.”

O my leaders, my teachers, my profit-makers and rakers of light; God gives us this moment not for us to rail against or react against, or try to roll back or seek to control.  This is a moment to which together we should rally as to fields white for harvest, obeying what God demands of us, to lift up our eyes and see!

A destroyed Egyptian Coptic Christian church in Imbaba, Cairo (Photo: EPA)  http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/michaelweiss/100087770/the-muslim-brotherhoods-salafi-pact-puts-egyptian-christians-in-great-danger/.

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[1] Walter Grasskamp, Ist die Moderne eine Epoche? (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2002), p. 42.

[2]  The revolutionary impulse agitating global humanity originated in the volatile mix of western cultures shaped by Roman Christendom.  The papal revolution of the eleventh century triggered the permutation.  The second revolution was the German civil revolution we call the Protestant Reformation.  The Puritan revolution culminated in American Independence.  The French revolution reached historical completion with Communist victory in China in 1948.  The fifth revolution is marked by the American route to modernity, which preserved Christian faith as a formidable cultural power.  This fifth revolution, postsecular modernity, may well result in an Islamist international order.   For those interested in trekking this thin-aired way of reading history begin with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, Autobiography of Western Man (1969).   Next, follow Harold J. Berman through his two volumes, Law and Revolution, The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (1983) and The Impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Western Legal Tradition (2004).  I confess the historiographical innovation of proposing postsecular modernity as the heretical fifth revolution in Rosenstock-Huessy’s original paradigm.  But I sensed a hint of it in Jean-François Revel’s Without Marx or Jesus, trans by J. F. Bernard (1971, orig., 1970).  Revel wrote more than forty years ago that the religious element of the American revolutionary movement or counter-cultural movement of the sixties was undeniable, with the “need for sacredness…being satisfied by the application of a traditional principle that has always been successful in America: the best religions are those that you find for yourself” (his emphasis, p. 190).   Revel describes the American revolution of the sixties as being “less a political phenomenon at the highest levels of power than a series of transformations spontaneously occurring within society at a deep level.”  His argument he said was “that a revolution in this sense is a phenomenon that had hitherto never taken place, an event that would develop along lines other than the known historical ones and that could not be thought about — or even perceived — in terms of the old categories” (Jean-François Revel, Anti-Americanism, trans. by Diarmid Cammel, Encounter Books, 2000, pp. 10, 11) .  This is what I call the fifth revolution.  As such the American model of religious modernity offers Muslims an appealing approach as they seek their own path in integrating religious identity with political power in the present postsecular age of modernity.  President Obama may be the bridge builder to this possible future.  See Francis J. Mootz III, “Faith and Politics in the Post-Secular Age: The Promise of President Obama” Scholarly Works, 60 (2009) http://scholars.law.univ.edu/facpub/60, where Mootz states, “My thesis is that President Obama might embody a means for faith and politics to co-exist in the post-secular age.”  I would recommend studying two of the President’s speeches as crucial for better understanding what role he can possibly play in the present global postsecular world.  The first is his campaign speech he delivered March 18, 2008, in Philadelphia at the Constitution Center.  The transcript is available here:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId+88478467.  The second of his speeches deserving study is his remarks to the Muslim world, delivered on June 4, 2009 in Cairo, Egypt.  This important speech can be read here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html.  This is not an Obama phenomenon, nor is the American model of religious modernity adaptable only for Muslims.  God is Back, the world is getting religion, and it is the American model of religious modernity that is delivering it.  From their secular perch editor in chief of The Economist, John Micklethwait, and that news magazine’s Washington D.C. bureau chief, Adrian Wooldridge, see the globalized world’s foreseeable fashion as going religiously modern in American style:  ”It now seems that it is the American model that is spreading around the world:  religion and modernity are going hand in hand, not just in China but throughout much of Asia, Africa, Arabia and Latin America.  It is not just that religion is thriving in many modernizing countries; it is also that religion is succeeding in harnessing the tools of modernity to propagate its message.  The very things that are supposed to destroy religion – democracy and markets, technology and reason – are combining to make it stronger (God is Back, How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World, The Penguin Press, 2009, p.12).”   Undoubtedly, American secularists have a hard time seeing this never mind accepting it.  Puff and pop news magazine Newsweek carried in Arabic on its March 9, 2009 cover the statement, “Radical Islam Is A Fact Of Life.  How To Live With It” according to the English translation provided in lower letters within parenthesis.  In the cover story commentator and political analyst Fareed Zakaria decrees that all Islamists are helpless in the face of modernity.  He writes, “The truth is that all Islamists, violent or not, lack answers to the problems of the modern world.  They do not have a world view that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women.  We do.  That’s the most powerful weapon of all” (“Learning to Live with Radical Islam,” p. 28).   This statement not only insults Islamists, but as Zakaria means it, it is doubly wrong.  First, there are multiple forms of successful modern Islamist thinking, one need only read Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Tariq Ramadan to realize that.   Secondly, Zakaria fails to realize that America’s model of religious modernity is a global cultural virus whose growth is exploding.  Like the evangelical globalists who drafted the 2010 Cape Town Commitment paper for the Third Congress of the Lausanne movement, he has yet to look to the future to see what is happening today or even bother to see today for catching a glimpse of the future.  I can understand Zakaria, for him any religious participation in the public square is anathema.  But why the evangelical inability to see what God is doing through them?  Therein remains mystery yet to be celebrated as confession.

[3]  Peter L. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World, Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. by Peter L. Berger (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Ethics and Public Policy Center and Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), p. 10.

[4]  “Muslims Attack Christians in Egypt, 12 Killed, 232 Wounded, Assyrian International News Agency (5/8/11), http://www.aina.org/news/20110508144114.htm.   It now appears only available at “Egypt: Muslim Rampage against Christians Continues, now 12 dead, 232 wounded,” (5/8/2011), http://www.jihadwatch.org/.

An Exercise explaining the above as an addition at the end to remind us we have to do everything all over again:

Thesis.  history of mentalities (like everything else minds conditioned by the academy produce) is an academic confession of the effects of a style of Christian faith lived in the west when the west was either not known or looked down upon as a weak place (the medieval mind was a creative mind of translation and universal law and not of withdrawal, a truth Nietzsche never dared face).

First, a tutorial rebuke from an unbeliever:

For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst.  Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love.  This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation.  Up to this very day there is no alternative to it.  And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance.  Everything else is idle postmodern talk.(i)

What collective mental experiences possess us?  To what rhythms of reflection do we sway?  What feelings lift us, sift us, weigh down upon us, immerse us in the stream of meaning that moves us on its way?  From whence the sentences we hear as commands, which we seize for our poetry and pronounce as our law?  What is it that is fully with us but to which we are neither fully present nor fully aware?  These deep things we pretend are subjects of our studies when we examine mentalities of religious sensibilities or mentalities of death.  Durkheim willfully pronounced the existence of a collective consciousness.  We confess this is but another way of speaking about our seeking after God, giving voice to our wanting and feeling for a way toward Him, for trying to find Him providing us with good things and pondering us without His wrath falling upon us.   We choose to scientifically approach God presupposing that as we do so we do not become futile in our thinking, or suffer our foolish hearts having been darkened.

O Christians, “Take away the stone.”  Feel the earthquake.  An angel of the Lord has descended from heaven and has come and rolled back the stone and sat on it.  “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?”  Look up!  The stone has been rolled back although it was very large.  Find the stone rolled away from the tomb. See the stone has been taken away from the tomb.  For the first time (and no one knows for how long) we may examine all things with the assurance of Christian faith coupled with the benefits of secular modern freedom.  Walk accordingly throughout all the various disciplines of knowledge the university subsidizes.  Reread everything, re-walk the paths laid down by those before us to change everything back from whence they came without the abuses that had been carried forward with their creation.  Do not be afraid of the Middle Ages, rather, live there again as postsecular modern men and women.  Strengthen the things that remain.  Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.  Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  Reveal all things without seeking to rule over anything.  Dare annouce the word of God.  For the Lord God does nothing without revealing His secret to His servants the prophets.  The lion has roared; who will not fear?  The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?  Turn the secular infected scholars over to their own sytle of discourse, it is dying.  Be kind to all, be able to teach, be patient when wronged, while enduring evil be willing to correct opponents with gentleness.  Yield ground to the will of God.  Who knows,  He may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth that they may escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.  Let your faith be the passion of light and kenosis.  See all things to make the good confession to all:  “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.”  Speak accordingly, and be merciful.   The one who says anything apart from Christ does not know what he or she is saying.

Example.  Random selection from among many lodged in my memory:

“If examined empirically from a bird’s eye view…the history of mentalities examines as its subject matter the coming of the modern, post-Christian world from out of the Christian cosmos of the Middle Ages.  Historians of mentalities do not research the gradual detaching of Christendom from the ancient world and its ultimate triumph, but rather begin with the height of its development and trace its demise, particularly the transformations in the modern world, in modern knowledge and in modern politics that are no longer religiously bound together.  The question, what compensational means of binding these things together intervenes when the religious production of common sense fails, probably still remains too ‘close’ to us and thus falls outside the circle of questions historians of mentalities ask.  This is the case because this question would itself be part of the problem that it prepares to solve.  The question indeed arose in reaction to the thinning of cultural ether, of Christian filling of all human procedures — spiritual and material — that moved through all expressions of life.  Again, history of mentalities developed as a way to study the intellectual [mental, spiritual] changes and changes in meaning that came about by the Christian cosmos of the Middle Ages having transformed into the modern world, which means, of faith having been replaced through (scientific) knowledge.  Factually however, this transformation had created a multitude of new connections of thinking, feeling and behavior in the place of the old ‘faith’.  It is necessary to consider this exiting/ending situation before history of mentalities may be carried over to cultural areas and epochs beyond the Christian.  This is so because to a great extent history of mentalities developed as a historical phenomenology of the forms of faith in Christian Europe.  Perhaps mentale is itself merely a modern metaphor for that primary standing in the world, which in the Christian vocabulary is called ‘faith’.(ii)”

Being original and critical are overrated.  Reread everything through the reading of the Scriptures.  Make honey leaving to others the spoiling of wine.  Take up the art of complaint before God in place of criticizing others.  Ask questions.  Lord grant us to commit to one another we will ask each day one question to which we do not know the answer.  Grant that we bequeath what we’ve left unanswered to the next generation.  Grant that we ask another questions to learn what only another can know.  For example, when someone uses the term, “modern,” ask for clarification:  “Do you mean Christian, secular or postsecular?”  The academy is ripe for harvest.  Evangelize, educate and edify accordingly.  Maintain solidarity with sinners while exercising loyalty to your Lord:  Speak “to increase the intensity of adherence to values held in common by the audience and the speaker.”  Speak to make “appeal to common values, undisputed though not formulated, made by one who is qualified to do so, with the consequent strengthening of adherence to those values with a view to possible later action.”  Remember, “Recourse to argumentation assumes the establishment of a community of minds, which while it lasts, excludes the use of violence.”(iii)   Be thankful for the desire to be godly that has seized us.   Pray for one another, our days of persecution are approaching

Remember, in the eyes of this world we are to be most pitied.  To outsiders we are  lost souls in search of a lost cause.   In your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy.  To best be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you reflect upon God’s first question recorded in the Scriptures.  Aim to be well oriented:

“We have had the scholastic mind in the Church.  And we have had the academic mind in the professions of the nations.  Now the Great Society appeals to you and me to find forms for a third, unheard of, mentality.  The Great Society which shall contain all the nations will receive no mental uplift by the threat of war.  She cannot stay alive if the spirits of various times, inside of her, are not pitted against each other in all their energy.  Lest we cease to compromise all our conflicts dispiritedly, we will have to go on destroying each other physically.  A moral equivalent of war will not suffice.  It may have to be a mental equivalent of war as well…. Instead of cramming all the facts that contradict the main theory in footnotes and appendices, such a mind would put the great question of the irresistable next conflict frankly in the center of the page.”(iv)

Trust in the Spirit for your speed.  Outrun modern sinners — whether secular or postsecular — to greet them at the empty tomb.  Tell them the story they deserve to hear, tell them their story, tell them the story of Jesus, who is the Lord of life and of history, the Head of the church and King of the Jews.  Do not presuppose to know how to speak the Gospel in public without compromise or even to be able to identify or locate the public.  Let your hunger for truth and integrity lead you, trusting every word that comes from the mouth of God will feed you.  Remember, “Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us.  By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.”  Stay alert, remember who you are and pray!  Fight the good fight, finish the race, and keep the faith.   Smile, be blessed and speak the Biblical dialectic of…  “Nevertheless!”

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(i)  Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality:  Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, ed. by Eduardo Mendieta (MIT Press, 2002), p. 149.

(ii) Ulrich Raulff, Mentalitäten-Geschichte, Zur historischen Rekonstrucktion geistiger Prozesse (Berlin:  Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1987), p. 14.  Translating the title takes us another round.  What set of footnotes next, {a, b, c} and hope for no more than twenty-six?  What processes do we approach for purposes of their historical reconstruction?  What subject is more than full, designating grammatically that the reader is dealing with more than one?   Are we dealing with that which has to do with what is understandable, that which is intellectual or mental?  Or are we dealing with that which is not physical but spiritual?  What distinguishes them?  How are they related historically or functionally?  How did they come to cohere as signs of difference with stable meanings?  In what ways was this a religious process?  What role did the gospel and church play in announcing God’s grace, bestowing blessing and warding off demons?  Beyond all these questions He waits and watches, this One with whom unless through faith in Jesus Christ we cannot be at peace.

(iii)   Chaïm Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969, orig. in French, 1958), pp. 52, 53, 55.

(iv)  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, or The Modern Mind Outrun (New York, N.Y.: Harper Torchbook, 1966, orig. 1946), p. 234.

mcduffee translations of Büchner, Grasskamp and Raulff.

Read from Fruit of His Lips @ https://mcduffee.wordpress.com/