Are you postmodern, or do you have postmodern qualities? That may be one of the first questions you ask yourself when reading "Faith Step by Step, Finding God and Yourself," a new book by Adventist church leader Reinder Bruinsma about the "postmodern ques
Are you postmodern, or do you have postmodern qualities? That may be one of the first questions you ask yourself when reading “Faith Step by Step, Finding God and Yourself,” a new book by Adventist church leader Reinder Bruinsma about the “postmodern quest for meaning and significance in what appears to be a meaningless universe.”
Bruinsma, author of numerous books and president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Netherlands, teaches a class at Newbold College, one he said sparked an idea. The class “deals with the way in which people today think. So I read quite a bit on postmodernism and everything else that entails. And so that kind of got me thinking, can I do something more with what I have been reading and thinking?
“Also, at the same time ... our church has very little in terms of materials for the particular target group that I tried to reach in this book—people who are at the margin of the church, people who are maybe even in the church but have serious questions, or people who are further away from the church.”
Many of these individuals, he says, are somewhere along the continuum from modern to postmodern. “I hope that somehow I can deal with some of the questions they have and be of some help to them.”
But what exactly is postmodernism? In his book, Bruinsma explains several key areas that describe a postmodern person. “Basically what the main philosophers of postmodernism say are that the great stories of the past no longer satisfy. And really there is no great story. It’s your own personal story. Everything is broken down into smaller fragments. Everything is relative. There is no one truth. There is no one kind of behaving. But you have your truth, I have mine, and let’s be happy about that. That is in a nutshell part of the postmodern mindset that you see more and more also in the church.”
This way of thinking is affecting the Adventist church, not only in secular Europe, Bruinsma says, but in many parts of the world. People are asking more of the basic questions of faith, he explains. “And they’re definitely less interested in doctrinal fine print. They’re more interested in what it does for you—the experience. It also has a lot to do with the attitude toward the institution of the church. Postmodern people are very suspicious of anything that reeks of church organization, leadership, and so on. And so you find all these things also to a greater or lesser extent in the church.”
Part of the postmodern way of thinking is that “whatever you are, that’s acceptable,” he says. “If you say you’re a Seventh-day Adventist, they will say ‘oh, well that’s interesting.’ But of course they don’t want you to start arguing that your faith is the only faith that’s worthwhile.”
After a period where it wasn’t favorable to talk about religion, Bruinsma explains, “You can actually talk about religion again. ... I think that we must convince the people that having faith is normal.”
He says the culture in his own country wasn’t the only influence for his book. “I also saw it more and more in my own children. ...I began to see that they are in fact representatives of this particular mindset, and I hadn’t seen that before. So it made me want to do something to talk to them, to talk to the children of some of my friends. ... many of them are somewhere on the verge of the church. They’re not disinterested in religion but somehow what the church offers them doesn’t seem to satisfy them.”
He includes a warning in the introduction to the book: “For many readers this is probably not going to be a comfortable book. Some people in my own church may feel uneasy with some of the language I use. They may miss some familiar themes, and may wonder why I seem to take some considerable detours when things appear to be so straightforward (to them). Well, this book is not written for them.”
Another point he makes in the introduction of the book: “Even though I still believe in most of the things I believed in some 25 years ago, I have changed significantly in the way in which I believe.”
In an interview with ANN, Bruinsma commented: “I’m probably also myself less interested in doctrinal fine print. I’m also more interested now in what faith actually does for me. If I believe something, how does that make me a better person? How does that help me to relate better to God, to relate better to other people? And I think that is significant ... almost a paradigm shift in my own life. That is something I hope will happen to others as well.”
Bruinsma hopes that what people will take from this book is a realization that religion and faith in God “is a good option. ...It’s worthwhile to actually go for it and to come to some kind of commitment.”
Stanborough Press Ltd. in Grantham, England, published the book.