Engaging a Postmodern World

Cardinal Carlo Martini, S.J. has an interesting perspective on "Teaching the Faith in a Postmodern World" in this week's America magazine. He expresses gratitude for this unique historical moment when the church touches nearly every part of the world, is substantially united in faith, and is experiencing its greatest flowering of theology. At the same time, there is evidence of fragmentation. 

We are not all living in the same historical age. Some are still living in the time of the Council of Trent, others of the First Vatican Council. Certain people have digested the Second Vatican Council well or poorly; others are well advanced into the third millenium.

Outside the church, Martini describes the challenge of engaging postmodern culture which he defines in terms of its opposition to classical modes of thought traditionally embraced by the church.

This mindset keeps its distance from a former platonic Christian world, in which there was taken for granted the primacy of truth and values over feelings... In our world there is a spontaneous preference for feeling over the will, for impressions oer intelligence, for an arbitrary logic and the search for pleasure over an ascetic and prohibitive morality... Today the preference is for a knowledge that is more contextual, local, pluralist, adaptable to different circumstances and different times.

Instead of rejecting postmodern challenges, Martini suggests that they are a call to deeper discernment and that this situation creates new opportunities for the Church.

Christianity has an opportunity to show better its character of challenge, of objectivity, of realism, of the exercise of true freedom, of a religion linked to the life of the body and not only of the mind...[T]he mystery of an unavailable and always surprising God acquires greater beauty.

Martini exhorts us not to be surprised by diversity but to take risks, to befriend the poor, and to nourish ourselves with the Gospel.  I am encouraged by his hopeful depiction of our engagement with postmodern thought.