ave you noticed that many specialists are so inward-looking that they attach undue importance to their field? I studied church growth for a couple years, reading several dozen books on the topic. I found that most of these authors were continually quoting each other and assuming that everyone else was also reading these books.

People who write books against the occult primarily read books about or against the occult, so they tend to exaggerate its influence. They scare one another.

People who write books about the dangers of rock music tend to get their examples and "facts" from one another's books or from tabloid newspapers, so they've developed a frequently recycled body of misinformation.

Christians who read books about the end-times and the secret rapture tend to see every sneeze or hiccup coming from Israel as a fulfillment of prophecy. Those who read spiritual warfare novels imagine angels and demons and clashing swords all around them.

Those who research the New Age find it much more pervasive than it really is. The New Age is passé, for the most part. The crystals and auras that seemed so dangerous a few years ago were merely a fad.

Some Adventists imagine that the Vatican is watching our every move and scheming to put an end to us. Actually, most people haven't even heard of Adventists.

Scholars who write about postmodernism primarily read books about postmodernism, I suspect. They've convinced themselves that we've entered the postmodern age. I'm not sure they're right.

No doubt you've heard of postmodernism. When I studied it a couple decades ago in graduate school, it was an umbrella term for a number of literary theories replacing modernism, a literary fashion that developed in the early twentieth century.

For several years now postmodernism has been a buzzword among theologians, and hundreds of articles and books have been written about it. They quote the same postmodern philosophers and literary critics I read in college, but I've been puzzling over why theologians are so excited about the overthrow of a literary theory.

I recently read a book by Brian D. McLaren that has made it all clear.* It seems theologians don't see postmodernism as a replacement of modernism, but as the "modern world" that followed the "medieval world" about 1500.

Are a handful of literary theories replacing 500 years of renaissance and reformation? Is the modern world dead and buried? The rumors of its passing are greatly exaggerated.

McLaren identifies the following as characteristics of the modern world: it was the age of conquest and control, machinery, analysis, secular science, objectivity, criticism, the "modern nation-state and organization," individualism, "Protestantism and institutional religion," and consumerism.

"In the postmodern world," one of his characters says, "we become postconquest, postmechanistic, postanalytical, postsecular, postobjective, postcritical, postorganizational, postindividualistic, post-Protestant, and postconsumerist" (pp. 16-19).

Is that the brave new world we are entering? Only in our dreams (well, some people's dreams). We're still using machines, analyzing, criticizing, organizing, and consuming.

So what's going on? I think we are finally recognizing that our modern but centuries-old assumptions about life and God color how we see everything. We've stepped back far enough to focus clearly on the "modern age" way of seeing and living.

That's not the same as a new paradigm or model. So-called postmodernism is not really a paradigm shift, but a growing alertness and sense of irony. We are noticing weaknesses in the system, flaws in the way we've been doing things.

The new paradigm has not yet emerged, but we now see the need to adjust our worldview. We're off balance. This is a good time for God to break through to us.

There is an alternative paradigm to both the modern world and postmodernism. It's the way of love, of self-sacrifice, of self-surrender, of compassion, of service, of community, of true worship. It's the paradigm Jesus died to give us.

*Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001). I'm quibbling over one chapter here; the rest of the book is excellent.

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Ed Christian teaches English and biblical literature at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. His latest book, Joyful Noise: A Sensible Look at Christian Music, is available from the Review and Herald Publishing Association. E-mail: christia@kutztown.edu.