Rethinking Robert Webber - Part 1

I started down a path a few years ago, based in Tom Oden's urging to follow Vincent of Lerins' dictum, "always, everywhere and by all". It seemed to me a path that would mitigate some of the fragmentation that exists in Protestantism. A healthy respect for the past, for the consensus of what Christians have believed in every culture and century might help us overcome our blind spots and pet divisive doctrines.

About the same time, I discovered the late Robert Webber. His seminal book, The Younger Evangelicals highlighted, I believed, some of what Oden was saying. We live in a post-modern culture. Webber, I believed, was not one to embrace postmodernism uncritically, but was able to acknowledge its influence. He seemed to suggest many things that would help evangelicals navigate the postmodern era without buying its assumptions lock, stock and barrel.

I also read his Worship Old and New which I really thought would be helpful to evangelicals and would narrow some of the unnecessary gaps between free church evangelicals and traditional Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans and Anglicans. He defined and explained worship based on Vincent's dictum - always, everywhere and by all.

So I was a fan of Robert Webber. He passed away not long ago and I still want to respect and honor his gentle, irenic and useful work. I believe he was a genuine, orthodox and brilliant guy. But as I read more of his writings, I have to pause and step back.



Though Webber did not embrace postmodernism wholesale, in reading his Ancient Future Faith more carefully, I sense a bit more capitulation than I feel comfortable with.

To be clear, Webber was critical of some aspects of the Postmodern:

“It would be a mistake for us to think that the new philosophical thought arises out of a vacuum. It does not. If anything, the philosophy of postmodernism is a response to the scientific revolution. This shift from a mechanistic worldview to an open and dynamic worldview raises many new questions. However, we need to be aware that the intent of most postmodern philosophy is to dismantle not only modernity, but Christianity as well” p. 22

Weber was an efficient writer and summarized well some tenets of the postmodern experiment:

1. He saw it as a shift away from subject-object distinction (from individualism to community)
2. He recognized that absolutes had been abandoned
3. He understood PoMo posited no single unifying factor to the universe
4. He recognized that in PoMo land, language has no authority  (P. 23)

He was not a relativist, and critiqued that aspect of the postmodern philosophy.

“…the metanarrative of a particular community only speaks for that community and has no universal truth value” p 23

Yet Webber was looking for a way to negotiate a shifting paradigm and seemed to be looking for assistance from different quarters saying: “…evangelicals have a friend in the thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer.” P23

What Webber seems to like about Gadamer was the idea that in his thought there was a way to bridge the divide between differing paradigms, between radically different cultures and world views. Obviously that has implications for a lasting orthodoxy. Gadamer, Webber says, suggests a notion called the “…fusion of horizons…”, in which there is a “possibility of communication from one paradigm of history to another through a fusion of horizons…to re-present an original presentation in a different paradigm in such a way that the re-presented content remains faithful to the spirit of the original…” p28

So Webber valued "remaining faithful". He wanted to change ways of communicating to be effective in a postmodern context without necessarily altering the core content. To the extent that Webber wanted to make lasting truths relevant in a new cultural context, I was happy to follow along. Unfortunately, Webber seems to have undermined himself in his own writings. Which will be the topic of part 2.