Scotch College

'Right for them'?

I was stopped in my tracks last year (not that I was walking anywhere at the time) by the suggestion that people of another religion were best left to their own beliefs. Surely it was 'right for them'?

The suggestion shouldn't really have surprised me. After all, since the early-mid 1970's so we're told, we've been living in 'the post modern age'.

'Imitation of Shadow' Godwin Bradbeer 1994 - Mortal trash is immortal diamond.

It's hard to get a handle on post-modernism so I asked Bruce Brown (Head of Year 10). He described it to me over lunch yesterday as 'an umbrella'. He pointed out that beneath it 'we find feminism, (don't get me wrong here), consumerism, discrediting of institutions, diminution of humankind (just another animal species), information excels experience, absence of history, credulity (all values are equal, choose the ones you like), tolerance without truth, language without meaning'. Where did all this come from?

In 1961 at Oxford University in a lecture entitled 'The Place of Dogma in Scientific Research', Thomas Kuhn anticipated postmodernism. Deep in the heart of western society there was revolt against the compelling 'objectivity-of-science'. Kuhn, who died last year, presented an idea whose time had come. His approach took off and was applied to other disciplines.

Francis Fukuyama, building a social critique after the collapse of Communism in Europe in 1990 wrote, 'The End of History and the Last Man' (London, Penguin, 1992). According to Keith Sewell, Fukuyama's book 'heralds the global triumph of liberal democracy and the market economy.

This is the end of the story, the closest we can expect to get to heaven. In the words of an Australian beer commercial 'It doesn't get any better than this.' (See Sewell's paper 'The Eclipse of History and the Crisis in the Humanities' Feb. 1995, The Research Press, PO Box 133, Parkville 3052)

'The actual past, it is now argued, is simply not amenable to narrative representation, because it was a vast mass of complexity', says Sewell, himself a historian. Historical narrative is not only not neutral, it is a fabrication. The defined standpoint of the narrator, Catholic, Liberal, Marxist or whatever, is now irrelevant. The (his)story is a post-event creation. This is why, according to Sewell, the study of History is at such a low ebb. History is a thing of the past! In an educational system driven by economic rationalism it struggles for curriculum viability on the grounds of whatever 'skills' and 'competencies' it offers, rather than any inherent value attributable to knowledge of the past.

So, the argument goes, any re-telling of the past is simply one story among others. Validity may be granted to opposing points of view irrespective of their historical basis, with little regard for the personal and social outcomes. This is especially the case where religious story, 'metahistory', is concerned. All this marginalises Christianity, in which texts, history, institutions and personal experience and 'truth' are significant. To commend the way of Jesus is simply irrelevant to the postmodernist mind.

A student who called to see me recently began by saying 'Do you want the good news?' I did, and was pleased to be told the reason he was feeling so excited. That's all. Good news is for sharing.

As a Christian minister; my working life is dedicated to the proposition that when Jesus said 'Follow me' (Mark 1:17), he didn't only mean the Galilean fishermen, he meant everybody. I believe the evangelists, who told his story, and wrote the Gospels, rightly caught his meaning.

John says 'these (things) are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.' (John 20:31).

Christians may at times be insensitive to personal and cultural norms but what they should be about is sharing good news. Gerard Manley Hopkins put it this way (and you should read it out loud because...well we can't go into that right now):

Across my foundering deck shone
a beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade
and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world's
wildfire leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he
was what I am and
this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch
matchwood immortal diamond
Is immortal diamond.

Once, I subscribed to 'Propaganda', the astonishingly candid name of the U2 Fan Club magazine. In fact I appreciated the openness, the honesty. There is so much propaganda that is unlabelled, unidentified and hard to understand. I think that is where the real danger lies.

Rev Graham Bradbeer