This is the first in a series in a collaborative reading of Colossians Remixed by Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat. You can read some tweeted thoughts & snapshots here.

Can you remember what the world was like in 2004? The Iraq War as a direct and misguided consequence of 9/11 was in its first year. NATO & the EU expanded, Cyprus remained divided, Athens hosted the Olympics, there were terrorist attacks and a massive tsunami. The Nintendo DS & Facebook were launched. Started! I was still in my 20s (just).

That’s the world Generation X, my generation, was facing and we were confronting our powerlessness (failed efforts to stop the Iraq invasion) but had nothing better to offer than consume stuff. Which we did. That’s the world and the generation that this book is speaking to. So the initial chapter is about trying to make sense of that world and it’s worth reflecting whether, and in what way do their observations still hold? What adjustments should we make as a read, today? As they say, “Reading is always contextual. How one reads, interprets & responds to a text is influenced & formed by the context within which one does the reading”¹.

The authors focus on two big trends, postmodern disquiet and cybernetic global optimism.

Postmodern disquiet

I don’t particularly want to get lost in the weeds of a discussion about postmodernism except to say it definitely defined that period of the early 21st century. Here is a quote from the book that summarizes quite well how they understood and described it.

Postmodernity, then, can be described as a period of cultural disquiet. In the face of the betrayals and failures of past overarching metanarratives, culturewide suspicion and incredulity takes hold. A single story, providing coherence to personal identity, grounding for ethical action and passion for life in history, is displaced by a carnivalesque existence of fragmentation, numbness and boredom. Final decisions based on rational analysis give way to the undecidability of keeping all options open and the spiritual promiscuity of pop religion.

emphasis added²

If that’s the description of that time then I’m not sure we can say we’re living in that time any longer. This time is not numb, but angry. Not bored but furiously engaged. Certainty, if not rationality, has returned with a vengeance. We are less fragmented but more polarized than for a long time. The cold war may be over but new cold cultural wars are forming. The desire for coherence has coalesced around personal identity. Our politics is identity politics before almost anything else. Yet there remains a refusal to let anything else dictate that coherence, we alone can decide and all authority rests with our authentic selves whatever they may be. Yet the carnivalesque existence of fragmentation remains, as perhaps best evidenced by the multiplicity of sexual and gender identities. In 2004 it would have been simply LGB but now it is LGBTQ+ and the + covers as few as 30 and as many as 70 different possibilities.

Cybernetic global optimism

It was 2004 and Facebook had only just been launched so I don’t blame them for using a term that hasn’t aged well. When was the last time you used ‘cybernetic’ in conversation? However, what it describes is very much still with us although it is hitting a rough patch right now.

This is the story of progress, which proclaims with all the certainty of faith that civilization will blossom, peace will reign, and we will enter into an age of prosperity if we allow human reason to freely investigate the world by means of the scientific method and transform that world through technological power. If we do these things, then we will realize our highest aspiration, economic growth. This belief in the ineluctable progress of autonomous humanity is the underlying faith or religion of Western culture.

Emphasis not added.³

This is the world of people like Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling. It is still a powerful force despite the battering that nationalism, pandemics and climate change has visited upon globalization as a good end.

Hand in glove

These two ideas do work well together. A fragmented world that is reduced to the individual framing their own reality, creating their own meaning and determining their own destiny is a dream come true for a consumer society. It simply creates more choices, more possibilities, more products and therefore more profits. That the fragmented self is now highly resistant to perceived control that simply locks in the determination to buy and purchase what authentic self wants and the rest of the world can go skip off.

However, there is perhaps, a sense, as there always has been that the things we want in life are good servants and poor masters. We are chained and locked into a lifestyle that we do not want to break but we see is destroying the world in which we live.

God or idol?

This was the age to which they were writing, and in many ways, still describes our age although one that is more frayed, angry, divided, cautious, cynical and yet more searching than at any time in perhaps a half century. So what place God?

You see, the danger of wanting a god, without being willing to allow this god to speak in a voice that is radically other to our own voice, is that the god we end up with is like any other consumer product we take off the shelf. We would never be accountable before such a god, precisely because we would never allow this god a voice that would actually call us to account. This consumer-friendly god, this god of postmodern construction, this generic off-the-shelf god would be no God at all. Rather, it would be an idol. And before idols like this the empire has nothing to fear, because ultimately such idols – such gods – are in the service of the empire.

((p.34))

That’s a challenge no matter where you stand. In our increasingly polarized days it is harder than ever to hear voices that genuinely challenge our perspectives and hold us to account. We refuse to let anyone else have that authority, we will not submit.

1. p.18 [↩]
2. p.25 [↩]
3. p.30 [↩]