Another huge area is the way we look at people who are different than us. For 500 years the world has been getting smaller, but now we are in a place where the world gets ever smaller, ever faster because the whole world becomes linked through the internet and television, radio and airplanes. That changes the way we think about people from other cultures. It is not so easy to create caricatures of them, it is not so easy to see them as bad and us as good. So it changes the way that we think about other religions, as well it creates new challenges for us in the whole area of pluralism.
In the modern world we believed that we could have certainty. We could have certainty as individuals and we could have certainty through our own rational processes. We really believe in certainty. Probably most of your readers would agree with that statement: certainty is possible for human beings. Although we might agree that there are some gray areas around the edges, there's this core of real absolute certainty that we believe.
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If we went before 1500 in the medieval period, people wouldn't have believed that they could have that kind of certainty. They would have understood that much of what they know is based on what their authorities have told them, so they had faith in their authority figures over them. Whatever they would call certainty was really based on faith. In the ancient world, people were aware that there was so much that they didn't know; they lived with a sense of swimming in mystery. But in the modern world we believe that mystery is going to be removed through rational processes, analysis, science. In the scientific world we have made a lot of progress in that.
In the theological world we applied the same rationalistic process to the Bible and felt that we were getting the whole thing systematized and figured out. Our preaching and our knowing have been about certainty. It has been about principles, it has been about abstract concepts and propositions. That has really worked. People loved to come to church for the last fifty years of high modernity where they could take notes and add to their knowledge base.
Yet as we move into a postmodern world, we re-enter a world of mystery and we re-enter a world where people are skeptical of those over-blown claims to certainty. So there is a radical rethinking of epistemology. Now there are some extremes of this in some of the postmodern philosophers, where you get the feeling that they are saying you don't know anything and can't know anything. The irony is that they are writing books about this, which makes you think they are trying to convince people of something that they would to some degree know. They are certain that they can't be certain about anything!
I think that this has a huge impact for us as Christians. I think in the long run it is a huge gain for us as Christians because the whole world becomes a little more honest that we all live by faith. I talk about this more in my second book, Finding Faith, that we all live by faith. I think it is going to be hard for a lot of us as preachers because we have postured ourselves in a modern posture, as the experts who dispense certainty and knowledge, rather than a more ancient view of the spiritual leader as people who guide others into mystery. Very different.
