faith and Order in a postmodern world: A response

A snapshot of the postmodern situation: I am responding to a paper by a Methodist theologian from Tonga, who now teaches in Aus-tralia, and an American Orthodox theologian teaching at a Catholic University in New York City. I am myself a Lutheran, born, raised, and resident in the South of the United States, but have also lived ten years in France and am of French-Canadian, Irish, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Scotch-Irish, Dutch ancestry. One of my great-grandfathers was the president of the Burman Baptist Seminary, now the Myanmar Institute of Christian Theology, in Insein, Myanmar. One grandfather was the principal of a high school in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. A cousin of one grandmother was a Roman Catholic priest in the diocese of Springfield, Massachusetts. Heterogeneity in a nutshell. II. The Theme Faith and Order in the Post-Modern World. " Every aspect of the phrase gives one pause. First, “Faith and Order. ” The Faith and Order Movement came into existence early in the 20th century to address the differences over faith and order that divide the church. These divisions and the disputes are not new. The problem that sets the Faith and Order agenda predated modernity and will, short of a new outpouring of the Spirit, be around when post-modernity is a footnote in history textbooks. Is a discussion of post-modernity a distraction from the real work of Faith and Order? Second, "the Post-Modern world. " "Postmodern " is a notoriously slippery concept. What makes the postmodern world post-modern? One can focus on simple definitions, such Lyotard's well-known "incredulity toward metanarratives, " but will that do if one is seeking an analysis that will guide fruitful discussion and action? The devil is in the details.1 And is postmodernity actually post-modern? Has it left modernity behind or is it just another moment in the dialectical evolution of modernity? The end of modernity has been declared repeatedly, at least since the Romantics at the beginning of the 19th century. Modernity has buried 1For a survey of the variant meanings of “postmodern ” from a theological perspective, see Pau