Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

contemporary West look not to the churches, but to all manner of other options to feed
their spiritual hunger.
Postmodern spirituality emerged in the 1960’s, as both a rejection of traditional,
institutional Christianity, and the full-blown pagan renaissance. There is also far less
religio-cultural distance between the postmodern West and much of the rest of the world.
Itioka, writing about mission trends in 1990, said, “What we are seeing is a reversal of
worldviews. While the northern hemisphere is becoming more pagan, the southern
hemisphere is being evangelized” (Itioka, 1990:10).
McCallum believes we “can characterize postmodern spirituality as a flight from the
pursuit of historical and propositional truth to a preoccupation with mystical experience...
To postmodern mystics, reason and evidence are deemed unnecessary, and even viewed
with suspicion” (McCallum, 1996:211). Donald Nugent suggests that the occult revival
that took place during the European Renaissance period, has many commonalities with
the postmodern occult revival today, adding:
there is in both a degree of primitivism and
psychic stavism, with an underlying
substratum of despair. Both are eras where
power is sought by the disenfranchised,
especially women... in the Renaissance one
finds only one warlock for every 10,000
witches -- and both have seen a growth of
sexual license and pornographic literature.
Each has been influenced by a new measure
of contact with Eastern culture, and each has
seen an increase in the use of psychedelic
drugs (Lovelace, in Montgomery, 1976:85).
Proponents of contemporary postmodern religion suggest the reasons for the animistic
resurgence is, “nostalgia for the natural and rural world, feminism, sexual liberation,
dissatisfaction with established religious institutions and social norms, and a desire for
greater individual self-expression and self-fulfilment” (Ankarloo, 1999:viii). All across
the Western cultural landscape are the manifest signs of resurgent animism. ‘Tats,’ or
tattoos are extremely common, as are all manner of body piercings. Toleration,
eclecticism, relativism and pluralism abound in the postmodern spiritual renaissance.
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa