Priest outlines Church worldview

Rev. John Burkhard, OFM Conv., has a positive postmodernistic worldview when it comes to the Catholic Church.

Recently, he explained what that means when he spoke as part of the annual convocation of St. Bernard's School of Theology and Ministry in Albany.

The lecture was based on his book, "Defining Gospel Life in Postmodern Culture."

Three views

"There have been only three worldviews since ancient times," he told his audience:

* "the Greek, or Homerian worldview, a culture of polytheism that held a highly symbolic vision of societies and how they functioned;

* "the classical or pre-modern worldview that reigned from the time of Christ until the Middle Ages and Martin Luther;

* "the Enlightenment, which ushered in the modern age of scientific reasoning. Most Christians have thought of the world from these last two viewpoints until the mid-20th century."

Postmodern

Father Burkhard explained that postmodernism encompasses the changes that have come since the end of World War II and the discoveries of modern science, such as quantum theory, which virtually rewrote the laws of science.

"Sometime around the 1980s," he said, "we began to notice that what used to be considered truth is now being questioned. Ideals are changing. Society is different. This is postmodernism.

"Catholics have gone through tremendous change in the past 60 years," he continued. "Our parents and grandparents still lived in the vitality of the classical worldview where few questions were asked. Theirs was a highly hierarchical point of view where our leaders presented the truth and that truth was accepted without question.

"The Second Vatican Council [in the 1960s] helped us realize that the Church had to make the risky move from the classical worldview into that of the modern period in order to keep up with the larger communities. Today, we are being asked to make another conversion in our thoughts and expressions of faith, and for most of us it is difficult to accept. This changing worldview is postmodernism."

New view

Father Burkhard said that "modernism taught us to let go of our traditions. Postmodernism is telling us to embrace those traditions once again. We see this through the searching and questioning of our young people.

"It is also telling us something else. Just as we see our young adult Catholics reaching back for tradition and ritual as in the time of our parents and grandparents, we, too, must look back with them.

"In today's Catholic Church, we deal with many issues that are directly affected by postmodernist thought, issues of male and female roles in ministry, and the increased role of laypersons in ministry. Ecumenism can help us reformulate ourselves into postmodernists -- people who believe we are not one exclusive church, but one communion of faithful believers who can find God in our lives, in the world and among us."

(Father Burkhard, an associate professor of Systematic Theology at the Theological Union in Washington, D.C., taught at St.-Anthony-On-Hudson Seminary in Rensselaer from 1971 to 1988, and was academic dean and president there. )

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