Quotes about Modernity

late modernity has tried to squeeze more and more areas of human discourse into the first type of "truth," making a "fact" out of everything and thereby trying to put everything into the kind of box which can be weighed, measured, and verified as if it were an experiment in the hard sciences like chemistry, or even an equation in mathematics. But this attempt has overreached itself, not least in areas like history and sociology.

The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even, heaven help us, biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way into the postmodern world with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom.

Two great critiques of modernity by biblical scholars are Walter Brueggemann's Texts Under Negotiation and Walter Wink's The Bible in Human Transformation.

Our civilization has moved through three world views: from paganism (no pity and no pacifism) to Christianity (pity but not pacifism) to modernity (pity and pacifism). It is now moving to postmodernity, which is a new pacifism, a pacifism without spiritual warfare, a war on the very notion of spiritual warfare, and a war without pity or mercy for its enemy

The rise of modernity corresponded with the decline of an approach that regarded the created order as sacramental in character. The patristic and medieval mind recognized that the heavenly reality of the Word of God constituted an eternal mystery; the observable appearances of creation pointed to and participated in this mystery.

Once modernity abandoned a participatory or sacramental view of reality, the created order became unmoored from its origin in God, and the material cosmos began its precarious drift on the flux of nihilistic waves.

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

to be absolutely modern means: never to question the content of modernity and to serve it as one serves the absolute, that is, without hesitation.

The Bible has been trapped in modernity. Everything has to work perfectly. And if everything doesn't fit in a Lego-oriented functionality, then we don't deal with it as Christians.

Many a modern preacher is far less concerned with preaching Christ and Him crucified than he is with his popularity with his congregation. A want of intellectual backbone makes him straddle the ox of truth and the ass of nonsense. Bending the knee to the mob rather than God would probably make them scruple at ever playing the role of John the Baptist before a modern Herod. The acids of modernity are eating away the fossils of orthodoxy.

The obligation falls upon us to foster in ourselves the sensibilities that modernity has suppressed or even denigrated. ... Without awe, our lives are impoverished, our society decays.

The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us.