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

  Ways of seeing 
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I have appreciated the conversation on this series thus far.  Please continue to share your thoughts, push back on something or share what you like or add some thoughts of your own.  If you get the chance, read back through some of the comments they are rich.  Now on with Part V.

How Postmodernity Affects the Congregations I Serve
The difficulty that this poses in the lives of people in the congregations that I serve is that some people hesitate to fully trust and live in the story of God for fear that if they do, they will end up like the arrogant bigots who tend to beat people over their heads with their Bibles.  They would rather slit their wrists than to become “one of them.”

Yet the problem is that some people unwittingly start to hold onto to a form of what Hauerwas calls “vulgar relativism.”  This is "the view that combines a relativistic account of ethical terms with a non-relativistic principle of toleration, fails to deal with real confrontation, since it assumes the impossibility of pointlessness of choosing between options that do not matter to anyone.  The problem with vulgar relativism is it treats all moral convictions as if they were only notional commitments." (Hauerwas 1981:104)

So when one narrative considers human trafficking to be profitable and another story considers it to be diabolical, the vulgar relativist is hung out to dry. Hauerwas concedes to holding to a kind of relativism and does not consider it the task of the church to “deny the reality of the multiplicity of stories in the world or to force the many stories into an artificial harmony” (Hauerwas 1981:91).  Yet he does not hold to a “vulgar relativism” that would make him incapable of making judgments or unwilling to seek to change someone else’s mind or tradition. (Hauerwas 1981:101).

So, on the one hand, postmodernity has exposed the myth of objectivity.  But on the other hand, those under the influence of postmodernity sometimes fall sway to a relativism that disenables them to take a stand against real evil.  Where are we to go from here?  Well, Smith notes that scriptures “give us good reason to reject the very notion of objectivity, while at the same time affirming the reality of truth and knowledge” (Smith 2006:43n). And while you are thinking about all of that, in my last two parts to this series, which will probably come next week, I have some advice for those who consider conversion a four-letter word, be it because of modernity or postmodernity's influence.