Are You Emergent? Part 2 and Chronological Snobbery

To continue the thought of the previous entry, I think it is also the optimism the Emergent group has for the present "postmodern" age that is concerning. Their optimism does not seem that dissimilar from the optimism of those believers in modernism. Were not many Enlightenment philosophers very self-conscious about their ushering in a new and glorious age (this is not meant to be only a rhetorical question)? I guess the difference lies in the moderns seeing their period as a time to free themselves from Church authority while the Emergent crowd sees these "postmodern" times as friendly toward a pre-modern Christianity (which I am sure has a view to one facet of the truth) that could help reinstitute Church authority. Nevertheless, I think it is the self-reflective language that is bothersome. It smacks more of activist language and the language of "movements." Becoming aware of yourself doing something (sleeping, etc.), makes it very difficult to do that thing. Isn't such self-awareness a result of Enlightenment thinking--as C.S. Lewis calls it in a quotation below, a kind of "backwash"... Descartes's "I think, therefore I am"?

I found the following quotes relevant to what the Emergent church is attempting to accomplish. C.S. Lewis, who is known for his quotation re: "chronological snobbery" (see below), also has these things to say about the adhering to the outlook of one's time. In his “Transmission of Christianity” essay Lewis says, "The sources of unbelief among young people today do not lie in those young people. The outlook they have—until they are taught better—is a backwash from an earlier period. It is nothing intrinsic to themselves that holds them back from the Faith." In other words, it's not something inherent in younger people that prevents them from believing; it's the residue left over from previous ages--in our case, modernism. The assumptions of modernism still play a subtle role in the "zeitgeist" of our time--no matter how much we claim we live in a new epoch. I was able to find this quote at the C.S. Lewis Foundation website where there is a good article by Art Lindsley (I don't know who he is) that discusses Lewis's idea of snobbery of the chronological kind. In the following quotation Lewis speaks of his idea of chronological snobbery in relation to his conversion to Christianity:

"In the first place he (Owen Barfield) made short work of what I have called my 'chronological snobbery,' the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also 'a period,' and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them" (italics mine). This age will pass away (just like the last one) and, though it may be unfashionable to put it this way, God's Church--which is the pillar and the support of the truth (I Tim. 3.15) (and not the philosophies of postmodernism)--will still be around.