Chapter 7: Walking to Emmaus in a Postmodern World
We finally get to the application phase of the book. In order for the application to be meaningful, it must be meaningful in the historical and social context of the people who are to apply it (that is, meaningful to us).
In the context of this book, that means a discussion of postmodernism. This book was published in 1999, which is 12 years ago. I feel that Christians have been chattering about postmodernism forever. Blue Like Jazz came out in 2003 and is, to my knowledge, one of the first Christian books that was well-written to engage the postmodern audience. Wright had brought up these points 4 years ahead of that, and we’re now another 8 years past it. So it feels a little old to read about postmodernism, but I respect that this was the context in which the book was written.
Wright uses Psalms 42 and 43 to construct a narrative to understand the mindset of the post-Easter disciples. The psalmist begins in a state of depression, longing for God and not finding him. He then reflects on what it was like when he was in God’s presence, which makes him even more desperate for his return from exile. Psalm 42 ends with an instruction to himself to put his hope in God. Wright frames it with a sense of futility, saying that “telling yourself to hope is not the same things as hoping; but if it’s all you can do, it is better than nothing” (156). In Psalm 43, the sadness continues, but only for a few more verses. In verse 3, the psalmist calls out in prayer for God’s light to be led back home again.
With this narrative in mind, Wright looks at the road to Emmaus. The two disciples had put their hope in Jesus to bring about redemption (v. 21), but they were sad because it didn’t happen. They were looking for an end to the story (end of exile), but didn’t get it. The story in their minds is simply, “What went wrong?” They understood the signs and teachings and everything seemed right, yet it wasn’t what they expected.
The incognito Jesus then gives them a different storyline. It’s important to realize that Jesus would not have proof-texted his way through the scripture when he began with Moses and the prophets and explained things to the men. He was giving them a new narrative to understand what happened.
The story was never about Israel conquering her enemies, as they had hoped to see by the defeat of the Roman Empire. Rather, the story is simply about God acting on behalf of his chosen people, to do the things they (and the world) could not do for themselves. And now, that story was complete. The prayer in the Psalm had been answered, and they returned to the others to share the joy of God leading them back to the holy mountain.
So what happens now? Wright posits that it’s time to take a look at our Christian narrative within our context. The formerly current narrative spoke to a modern world, but is found to be wanting when spoken to the postmodern world. It’s not as if the story is “wrong” (just as the disciples weren’t “wrong” in their understanding of the signs and teachings), but there is a need to go back through the story and pick up the correct narrative to tell to others and to have God’s light lead them back home again.
To do this, the symbols of the narrative need to be re-examined, and the method of communication needs to be set straight. Modernity was trapped in its sense of having everything figured out. We had the four spiritual laws (which the internet says dates back to 1952) and those simply told us exactly how everything is and what we need to do. It also told us exactly how to evangelize and how people should come to know Christ. But this approach is not going to work in the postmodern world, where black-and-white orthodoxy does not carries the meaning of “strict dogmatism.” Wright uses an interesting story to make his point.
“I am reminded, too, of the power of symbolic praxis to go beyond words when I think of one of the greatest ballerinas of all time. After one of her great performances somebody had the temerity to ask her what the dance meant. Her reply was simple and speaks volumes to us as we consider mission in the postmodern world. ‘If I could have said it,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t have needed to dance it’” (168).
With this, Wright pushes a turn towards a Christian existence of being the expression of God’s love being poured out in us and through us, instead of a system of dogmatic statements (not to say that this rejects the existence of dogma -- where would Christianity be without some set of core beliefs about the nature of God, Jesus, humans, and the universe?). We can’t just tell people about what Jesus did, we must show them what Jesus did. I’ll quote another short section:
“I believe we have this as our vocation: to tell the story, to live by the symbols, to act out the praxis and to answer the questions in such a way as to become in ourselves and our mission in God’s world the answer to the prayer that rises inarticulately, now, not just from one puzzled psalmist but from the whole human race and indeed the whole of God’s creation” (171).
What does this mean in practice? What is the narrative that needs to be rewritten and which symbols need to be communicated in a different way within academia? I can think of a few things, but none of them I wish to spend time expounding upon.
1) The monetization of the college degree: Why go to college? Because you can earn more money. The symbol of a college degree represents money, not an education.
2) The entitlement of good grades: I show up to class and try hard, how come I’m not getting an A? The symbol of grades represents effort, not the actual quality of the work. (I actually got this more as a TA at UCSD than I have as a professor at NSC. People feel less entitled to a degree when not everyone around them has one.)
3) The numbers-driven mentality: Especially in my area, there’s a lot of political pressure to produce better results, where better results simply means that certain numbers go up. It’s true that there is value to using these numbers as a gauge and challenge for improvement, but it’s also possible to create better numbers without actually increasing the quality of the education that students receive. Legislators tend not to understand this. The symbol of success has become good statistics, not well-educated students.
