The first in a series of three sermons given by Dr. Ralph Blair at the 2010 Preaching Festival held in Ocean Grove, N.J.
“Ye Olde Postmodernism”
Prefixing “Postmodernism” with the quaintness of “Ye Olde” and its visions of English village shambles and whiffs of ale and Cheshire cheese, isn’t as anachronistic as “Ye Olde’s” pseudo 16th-century affectation, itself. And digging through ancient layers of human history to find traces of today’s pop jargon isn’t as out-of-joint as it may seem.
Way back in the mists of Eden, a pontificating snake strikes the pose of a primeval postmodernist. Not yet cursed to crawling around in the dust, the snake struts its stuff. The snake sneers at what it dogmatically disdains as a dogmatic God. It’s judgmental of what it judges to be a judgmental God. It pretends to push a participatory pluralism but betrays its postured tolerance for a diversity of truths by slithering into its own “grand narrative”: It, alone, is right and God is wrong. It exchanges the truth of God for it’s own lie and labels that, the “truth”. It tries to replace God’s revelation for us with its own revolution against God. Discarding God’s clear meaning, the snake hisses rationalizations that the meaning of any author, including God, is secondary while any recipient’s reading, and especially the snake’s own reading, is primary. This trickster tells the humans: “Words mean what you say they mean. There’s no inherent meaning in words, you idiots.” And with a serpentine “truth” of its own, presented in the guise of a simple question – “Hath God said?” – it proceeds to trap its prey in a wily postmodernist deconstruction of God’s word of love.
The interrogation goes on: “Who in the world does this ‘Creator’ think he is to define creation? Who’s he to set rules of reality? Who elected him? What power ploy’s he up to? What right has he to restrict your freedom with some ridiculous rule that, of all these trees, this one is off-limits? How dare he marginalize you to only all the other trees! Beware! There’s something up his sleeve! It’s your duty to deconstruct what he’s said! Deconstruct everything! [Including the snake’s instruction?] It’s in your interest to question! Question everything! [Including the snake’s directive?] It’s your right to transgress. Transgress everything! [Including the snake’s commandment?]”
And so, the humans drink the deadly snake oil down to the last drop. And, mortally wounded from having failed as snake handlers, they assume they’re qualified to be God-handlers.
That old snake’s thoughts sound familiar, don’t they? And our forebears fell for them as we do. We hear the same thoughts in our culture. They run through our heads and hang out in our hearts. In a fallen world on its own, there’s never anything new under the sun. The more a fallen world makes changes by its own choice, the more a fallen world stays chained by its own choice.
In the 5th-century BC, Protagoras, in his sophistry, extolled that man is the measure of all things and pushed a relativist view of truth.
Around 250 BC, after a long and wearisome search for wisdom, Qoheleth’s penultimate conclusion was one of postmodernist cynicism sans celebration. All he saw in this world was disconcerting ambiguity and absurdity. And, but for his final words – on awe of God and obedience to God while awaiting God’s justice – his dissertation, known to us as Ecclesiastes, would have ended as dismally as it began: All is in vain, all is a “a chasing after the wind”.
But, the Winds of God are chasing after us. They blow where they will. They blast away all flimflam and blow us away in bracing breezes of new life.
When the Winds of God, having taken on flesh and blood in the fullness of time, stood on trial before a Roman governor in outpost Palestine, the proto-postmodernist Pilate averted his eyes from Truth himself and sneered, in the tired query of a know-it-all cynic: “What is truth?!”
Down through the history of Western thought, many have tried to answer questions of truth. In the pre-modern era – up to the late 1700s – questions about truth assumed the existence of the divine, though among the ancient philosophers, the gods were little more than poetry. With the Enlightenment of the late 18th century and continuing into the mid-20th century, the modern era’s faith in reason and science took center stage. It was able to do so on the basis of the ordered laws of creation, first detected through pre-modern perspectives on a biblical Creator of order out of the chaos of nothingness.
And although reason and science made significant contributions to human welfare and they continue to do so, the strictly rational and the scientific method had obvious limitations. So, in the mid-18th-century, philosopher and historian David Hume conceded: “Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental questions”. Still, the optimistic expectations for rationalism and science persisted into the mid-20th century.
In the church, the modern era’s absolute rationalism produced both a new-fangled fundamentalism of liberalist Christianity and its rebuttal, an “old fashioned” fundamentalism of traditionalist Christianity. And atheism, the fundamentalism of the unbeliever, was also a product of this same modern mentality.
Nonetheless, a loss of faith in rationalism and science became more and more apparent as the 20th century wore on. What Protestant “progressive” of 1900 dubbed in ill-founded hope, “The Christian Century”, unfolded in two bloody World Wars and other even longer wars, both hot and cold, and unspeakable atrocities that wiped out millions upon millions of innocent civilians. It was all made so much more possible by the horrible perversions of reason and science.
A British psychiatrist and social critic comments: “The two greatest moral catastrophes of the twentieth century, wrought by Lenin and Hitler, were perverse effects of the Enlightenment. Lenin and Hitler were creatures of the Enlightenment not in the sense that they were enlightened, of course, but in the sense that they believed they had the right and the duty to act in accordance with their own unaided deductions from their own first principles. Everything else they regarded as sentimentality. Lenin preached no mercy to the non-proletarian, Hitler, none to the Jew. The truth of their theories, supposedly rational and indubitable, was more evident to them, more real in their minds, than the millions killed as a consequence of those theories. If a syllogism ended in a command to commit unspeakable evil, you did not doubt the premises or the argument but obeyed the command.” (Theodore Dalrymple)
So, as the later 20th century wore on, enchantment with the Enlightenment began to flicker and darken into disillusionment with Western rationalism. Many began looking Eastward. But problems would not be solved in that direction.
Ravi Zacharias – having grown up in India, with a detour into atheism and educated in the West – is familiar with the disillusionment of both East and West. He’s written a new book, From Oprah to Chopra, in which he discusses what he calls “the spiritual hungers and fulfillments supposedly offered by a westernized Eastern mysticism – a hodgepodge of psychology, belief, and language in order to tailor-make your faith.”
Such picking-and-choosing to suit oneself is, of course, universal and ages old. It’s found among the casual spiritually-self-centered and cool navel-gazers contemplating their “inner child” while choosing to be otherwise “childfree”, as well as among the desperate ritually-self-righteous, whether nit-picking scribes and Pharisees, sodomy-obsessed legalists of the Religious Right or Islamists bent on decapitating homosexuals, Christians and Jews. It’s found, as well, among the self-styled “progressives” of the Religious Left, so very eager to accommodate the shibboleths of aggressive secularism lest they be dismissed as entirely irrelevant rather than merely marginalized.
Against modernism’s proudly positing absolute truth, postmodernists proudly promise to posit no absolute truth. But postmodernist dogma – that there’s absolutely no absolute truth – is postmodernism’s own absolute truth sans any acknowledged Ground of Being save self. So, postmodernism’s rejection of modernism’s “grand narrative” in favor of a variety of allegedly equal or legitimate “narratives”, presumes to posit its “grand narrative”.
Postmodernists sneer at what they declare to be offensive pre-modern and modern proselytizing of a “grand narrative”. And they’re especially incensed when the proselytized “grand narrative” is Christ. But they seem to sense nothing offensive in their own self-contradicting dictate to Christians that Christians should not dictate to others: Thou shalt not evangelize!
Pop culture uncritically buys into clichés of postmodernist “truth” on truth. The irony of the term, “postmodernist ‘truth’”, notwithstanding, here it is: So-called truth is merely a social construction. It can be “true for you” but “not true for me” and certainly cannot be true for all people for all time. Now, this is not merely descriptive, i.e., that people do see things from their own perspectives and have their own versions of what’s what. It claims that there is no real truth that renders anyone’s own version invalid for him or her.
Well, of course, there are huge problems here. And the problems are more than merely the self-contradictory rationalization of postmodernism itself. If no one can say what’s true, if truth is only a matter of what “is true for me” in my world, in my culture, era, etc., or “true for you” in yours, how do we proceed with, say, open-heart surgery, a murder trial, the writing and reading of a love letter, the writing and reading of a will, an employment contract, an insurance policy or a flight schedule-board at the airport? In a world without truth, is all there is, only a matter of opinion? Really? Truly?
A world without truth is a flat-earth for them and a sphere for us, 6,000 years old for them and 4.5-billion years old for us. Q: “Who’s to privilege our truth over theirs?” A: “Whoever’s in charge! Q: “But, is that true?” A: “Don’t ask such stupid questions!” Q: “Why not, if I’m asking from my truth? And on what basis do you call my truth, ‘stupid’? Can we converse at all?”
Reparative therapy is the truth for “ex-gays”. Who are we to say our truth trumps theirs? Eli Wiesel has his truth on the Holocaust and that Iranian “truther”, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has his. Whose “truth” is really true? Don’t ask?
If you get cancer, how do you know whether to make an appointment with an oncologist, a witch doctor or Benny Hinn? And whomever you schedule to see, how can you count on his keeping the appointment if you go by your truth about time and he goes by his?
Here’s a true story. A self-styled “progressive” publication has just recently fired a writer who wasn’t postmodern enough. But, evidently, neither is the editor who fired him. Listen carefully: The editor says he objected to this guy’s “notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy.” “Despite the fact”? Wasn’t the guy’s commitment to fact the reason you fired him? And, didn’t you fire him on the basis of the apparently assumed objective reality of your editorial policy?
Well, postmodernists do try to handle problems that they, themselves, have brought down upon themselves. For instance, in saying that truth is relative – that truth seems to be conveniently exempted. However, their “solutions” are but flip little word games, backtrackings into half-baked modernism or a revival of an old radio show I remember from my childhood. It was called “Let’s Pretend”.
Postmodernist guru Jacques Derrida plays around with absurdity, amusing himself with nonsense, and finishes his act with a nihilist, “Who cares!”
Others do a half-hearted admission that, well, alright, okay, maybe there are, yes, um, some very restricted contexts in which we might call something more or less “true”. Maybe we can have more confidence in oncologists than in Benny Hinn – especially if Benny brings up Jesus. Is Mozart more truly musical than a kid banging his fists on piano keys while his proudly postmodernist parents-in-earplugs call it a concerto? But, if so, we must ask the irate postmodernist in the next-door apartment: On what basis did you call 311 to complain of a cacophony? Ma’am, you’re backsliding into modernism!
A “Let’s Pretend” solution is claimed to be simply utilitarian. If you’re anxious and want a spiritual sense of something “out there”, it really doesn’t matter if it’s “out there”. Just pretend it’s out there and maybe that’ll help. But hold on, even the placebo effect depends on one’s thinking she’s taken real medicine. And how do you assess whether a “let’s pretend spirit” has helped her? If she’s showing more symptoms of anxiety than before, how can we believe her when she claims she’s less anxious? Are we supposed to take her increased cringing in the corner as our truth but not hers?
And would our reservations about the “ex-gay” claims be “true” only for us but not for the “ex-gays” who claim to be “healed” ? What’s to be said of their still viewing gay porno sites on the web? Whose “truth” on this is true? Is their “healing” true for them?
Now, not all of the critical reaction against modernism is to be discarded. Modernism did go too far, becoming self-centered and lop-sided. But so does postmodernism, though it’s helped to call attention to the neglected subjective and affective to counter the merely objective and cognitive.
Still, it took orthodox Christian philosophers such as Herman Dooyweerd and Cornelius Van Til to better critique theoretical thought by noting that pre-theoretical and pre-scientific presuppositions as well as a basic heart commitment underlay all reasoning and that, thus, there are no brut facts, only interpreted facts.
We should realize that there’s a close relationship between objective and subjective, the cognitive and the affective. Feeling follows from thinking. If I think I’m in danger, I’ll feel fear. And my fear disappears if and when I think I’m not in danger – whether or not I’m really in danger. But both modernism and postmodernism slight the relationship between these poles while making much too much of either one pole or the other.
The modern and the postmodern, both, have made contributions to society since humans, although fallen, are still image-bearers of God. Thus, we have had and can still have an ability to find aspects of the good, the true and the beautiful even while operating under a diversity of shortsightedness and sin.
Still, worldviews tend toward reductionism, rendering a relative aspect of reality into an absolute, an idol. They don’t deal with the fact that, “There is no truth in itself”. (Dooyeweerd) Truths that we may be gifted to discover in God’s world are but hints of truth, they’re derivative of Truth Himself – the Personal Ground of all truth, all being.
When Moses asked God, “What is your name?”, God said His Name is Yahweh. In Hebrew, that Name means, “I AM”. The Name means God’s ever-present, ever-living, ever-utter “Self-existence”. He is. He, Himself, is Life. He, Himself, is Light. And He, Himself, is Truth. His creatures don’t construct Him. They don’t get to define Him. He says who He is – He alone can say who He is and who He will be.
Without I AM, there would be nothing – no-thing – no space-time, no light, no laws of nature, no living creatures.
We are not “self-made” – whether we go back to a single sex act, genetics, the care and prayer of our parents or to influences of relatives, friends, schools, churches, neighborhoods, our worlds of work, etc., or we go all the way back to the Big Bang and to stardust of billions of years ago. We’re all cherished creations of I AM.
Pre-modern, modern and postmodern worldviews are demonstrably bound up by their pre-theoretical and pre-scientific presuppositions. These viewing points cannot ultimately be assessed from a perspective beyond the simply humanly objective or the simply humanly subjective. Unaided humans have no “God’s eye view” of the whole and cannot get beneath their own limiting starting points.
Moreover, to be made aware of anything even approaching a sense of ultimate cohesion, the fullest context – Truth Himself – we must escape the hard fact that we’re bound to finally fail because we’re bound by our distorted and distorting core commitment to self-centeredness instead of to Him who is, Himself, the One True Self at the center of all Wisdom, all Life, all Truth, all Love – and the Creator of this whole “just right” universe which we’re gifted to inhabit.
We, on our own, see something that can be seen from within a part of God’s creation and we, on our own, see nothing from outside God’s creation. And, we, on our own, see what we see through sight that’s dimmed by self-centeredness. It’s only by the Creator’s gifts of revelation in creation, in the written Word, in the Word made flesh and blood in Jesus the Christ, and through God’s enlightening Spirit, that the true Truth is ever received by us to any degree whatsoever.
Even redeemed in Christ, we see but “through a glass darkly”, as Paul put it. More than we know, we’re stuck within our divisively distracting systems of theology, our competing canons within the canon, our innocent and willful ignorance of alternative readings of scripture, our unawareness of many things and our idiosyncratic experience, personalities, prejudice, political agendas, etc.
A candid example of some of this was given by C. S. Lewis who, in 1952, observed: “I believe that, in the present divided state of Christendom, those who are at the heart of each division are all closer to one another than those who are at the fringes.” Combatants may be more committed to combat than to what they claim to defend or oppose.
Some years ago, F. F. Bruce commended a former Ph.D. student of his for a book of sound evangelical scholarship on the critical text of Matthew: “It is particularly heartening that such a thorough study of the Gospel should be undertaken by an evangelical. Conservative scholars have often shown unnecessary timidity in the face of redaction criticism. … It is indeed an epoch-making book in the evangelical study of the New Testament.”
But right-wingers who didn’t see or couldn’t afford to see what Bruce did, drove this man to resign from the Evangelical Theological Society. And, the liberal fraternities are no fairer. Daniel Wallace, a biblical text scholar and professor of New Testament at Dallas Seminary, speaks of the “darker underbelly” of bias against evangelical scholars in the Society of Biblical Literature, controlled by the “left-wing fundamentalists” as he calls them. He notes that, “The prejudice runs deep – almost as deep as the ignorance.”
Folks so easily fail to see that there can be room for more takes than their own. Bruce observes, for example, that, “the teaching of Jesus was much more diversified than any particular selection of his sayings would indicate.” Bruce points out that, in the story of the Magi, for instance: “God speaks to some pagan astrologers by means of natural revelation through the language that they would understand.” And Christians in the Reformed tradition have come to realize that we must guard against the shortsightedness of time and place. They’ve come up with the motto: Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda, the “church reformed and always reforming”. Unlike the impatient kids in the back seat, still at least asking whether we’re “there yet” while they know better, we’re all spoiled brats insisting we’ve already arrived by settling for self-centered arrogance.
The biblically backed insight of our partial sight, our partiality if you will, has been brought back into focus, as we’ve said, by a helpful strain of postmodern perspective (though postmodernists themselves so often proceed without it). We must be humble before God and keep it in mind that none of us has anything like the full view. So, understandings to which we arrive are relative, subject to revision with more research and reconsideration in the “yet more light” of revelation. Even after that, there’s “yet more light” to be had when, at last, we come to the Light at the end of the tunnel of this life and are led into the Land where God’s Son, our Savior and Lord, is the only Light.
In the meantime, we’re subject to the inevitable effects of the investigative process itself, our self-limiting systems of thought, our self-imposing prejudices, our insensitivities and continuing ignorance. We still ask irrelevant questions. We still make wrong deductions. We still fall for passing fads. We still don’t see what we don’t see. We’re still insensitive to our insensitivities.
Writing to Timothy, Paul speaks in detail of the Lord Jesus Christ and of “God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal.” This is bold declaration of what’s true about God. But then Paul immediately adds this caveat: God “lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.” (I Timothy 6:15f)
Well, is there or is there not, an escape from the problems of a worldview of prescribed or proscribed absolutism? Is there or is there not, an escape from the problems of a worldview of prescribed or proscribed relativism? Thank God, there’s escape enough. The escape from absolutism is the revelation of God. The escape from relativism is the revelation of God.
And the essence of the revelation of the all-powerful, all wise and all-loving God is His Good News to us. By definition, we cannot come up with revelation on our own. Revelation must be given and received. Thank God, revelation has been given. Pray God, revelation is and will be received.
The revelation is the Good News that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting our sins against us. (II Corinthians 5:19) Humans have never come up with anything like this news. Throughout the entire history of world religions – and with but one exception found in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament – the common denominator of religion’s quest has been the effort to put the gods in our debt. This history is but the formally religious expression of the human effort to be in charge – in charge of the gods, in charge of our everyday world, in charge of other people, in charge of other peoples and in charge of all else we tell ourselves we must control.
It’s only in God’s revelation through God’s action of mercy in the history of his chosen people, Israel, and in God’s action of mercy in God’s Son, Christ Jesus, that we have Good News without our having to contrive it or earn it. God is the Author and Accomplisher of this Good News. God took the initiative. He created us in the first place. He redeems us and recreates us in his Son. He’s already undone the damage we’ve done to ourselves and he’s undone the grief we’ve done to his heart. God forgives us into turning around to him in repentance. And he’s recreating the entire cosmos, too, turning it all around into Christ’s eternal reign of love. He’s doing it for us, in and through Christ and to God’s eternal glory.
So, in response, let’s take God gifts seriously. Let’s respond to God gifts thankfully. And, by God’s grace, let’s live these gifts to God’s eternal glory!