JR Woodward :: Blog :: Is Conversion a Four-Letter Word? Part II

  Ways of seeing 
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If you haven't read the introduction, check it out before reading the following. As I move along in this series, feel free to share your thoughts, questions, critiques or encouragement.

PART II - How Modernity and Postmodernity Affect People's View of Conversion

Ivan Illich was once asked what is the most revolutionary way to change a society.  Is it violent revolution or is it gradual reform?  He gave a careful answer.  Neither.  If you want to change society, then you must tell an alternative story, he concluded.  (Frost and Hirsch 2003:33)

How Modernity Affects People's View of Conversion
So how does modernity affect people’s view of conversion?   As Toulmin shares in Cosmopolis, there were four distinct significant shifts in the 17th Century, that, when taken collectively, exceeded what any one of them would have produced themselves to help shape modernity’s story. These four changes of mind were from oral to written, local to general, particular to universal, and timely to timeless. (Toulmin 1990:34) 

Thus the idea of timeless, universal truth was in the making.  And when the scientific method was made central and autonomous reason supreme, the idea of “objective” universal truth was born.  Now those who are steeped in modernity’s story make the case that “one can only be said to know ‘truly’ if one knows ‘objectively’” (Smith 2006:43).  But, when Christians adopt this view and engage in evangelism to convert others, they tend to come across as bad car salesmen.  They assume they have objective truth, (not open to interpretation) and everyone else has subjective truth.  As a result they emphasize evidential apologetics and try to argue people into the faith.  More than that, as Smith says, “To assert that our interpretation is not an interpretation but objectively true often translates into the worst kinds of imperial and colonial agendas, even within a pluralistic culture” (Smith 2006:51).

For Christians who have bought into modernity, the gospel becomes something to argue about instead of something to be entered into, embodied, and lived out.  And as Fitch said, “When knowledge is viewed as universal fact it must be proved, but when knowledge is viewed as story, it is proclaimed”  (Fitch 2008: Lecture paraphrasing Smith).  This focus on reasoning has also contributed to the idea that conversion is just a matter of mental assent of certain doctrines, which has often resulted in people “believing” the right things without experiencing life change.

Modernity’s focus on autonomous reason and empirical evidence – that which can be measured and quantified – has resulted “in an unhealthy split between the public and the private realm, between facts and values, between science and religion”  (Brownson in Hunsberger 1996:229).  So Christians influenced by modernity’s story consider the good news to be private and not public.  As Newbigin states,

The idea that the gospel is addressed only to the individual and that it s only indirectly addressed to societies, nations, and cultures is simply an illusion of our individualistic post-Enlightenment Western culture.  Very plainly, when we turn to the Old Testament, we find no such separation of the individual from the society which nurtures and forms him and of which he is a part. (Newbigin 1989:199)

A faith that only addresses the forgiveness of sins through the death of Christ on the cross, without addressing systemic injustice, is an inadequate gospel that is often viewed as quite shallow and self-serving to those outside of the faith.