The Challenge

"I suggest, in fact, that if postmodernism functions as the death of modernist culture, many of us will find ourselves like the disciples on the road to Emmaus. We as Western Christians mostly bought a bit too heavily into modernism, and we are shocked to discover that it has been dying for a while and is now more or less completely dead. We need to learn how to listen for the hidden stranger on the road who will explain to us how it was that these things had to happen, and how there is a whole new world out there waiting to be born, for which we are called to be midwives. The answer to the challenge of postmodernism is not to run back tearfully into the arms of modernism. It is to hear in postmodernity God's judgement on the follies and failings, the sheer selfish arrogance, of modernity and to look and pray and work for the resurrection into God's new world out beyond. We live at a great cultural turning point; Christian mission in the postmodern world must be the means of the church grasping the initiative and enabling our world to turn the corner in the right direction.

"We must therefore get used to t a mission that includes living the true Christian praxis. Christian praxis consists in the love of God in Christ being poured out in us and through us. If this is truly happening, it is not damaged by the postmodern critique, the hermeneutic of suspicion. We must get used to telling the story of God, Israel, Jesus and the world as the true metanarrative, the story of healing and self-giving love. We must get used to living  as those who have truly died and risen with Christ so that our self, having been thoroughly deconstructed, can be put back together, not by the agendas that the world presses upon us but by God's Spirit."

(N.T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus, pgs 168, 169)

Tom has been getting a lot of flak lately, "Did Wright get it wrong?" and such by critics, scholars and the average blogging Joe about his latest book. This quote from his 1999 book should prove a good starting point for discussion, even if no one has read his new book, Justification. Perhaps I venture too far in saying that Justification is Tom's direct application of this post-postmodern Christian praxis. 

Thoughts?