Modernism and Post-Modernism; 1 John 2:15

1 John 2:15-17 NASB “Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away, and {also} its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever.”

 

The cosmic system has to do with thinking, not action. Too often, especially in older and legalistic elements of Christianity, worldliness is expressed in terms of hair or cosmetics or dress or certain life-styles, and that may or may not have something to do with worldliness. Worldliness in Scripture has to do with thought forms and to thinking like Satan thinks. Cosmic thinking is antithetical to what the Bible teaches. Divine viewpoint is based on absolute truth revealed in Scripture.

 

Every generation, every era, every culture has different manifestations of the cosmic system. Life is looked at through a different set of glasses, a different lens, and everything is interpreted within that. But what characterises our age more than anything else is the concept of postmodernism. September 11 and the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre woke everybody up to the real presence of evil in the world. The one exception, one writer observed, is the universities, the realm of so-called scholarly intellectuals. He said “this is the one exception where prominent voices blame America first and demand sympathy for the other (whatever the “other” is), the supposed victim of rapacious rationalism and imperialism (notice how he links the philosophical way of thinking, rationalism, with action—imperialism).  The loathing of intellectuals for the West itself is one concept of our age.” The ideas of these people and the books that they write are influencing the intellectuals in a country and the students in a country. The universities and the colleges crank out these business people, the politicians, the lawyers, the educators, the historians of our era. They are trained by the intellectuals at these universities to think a certain way, and as it filters its way down from the intellectuals to their students to the people who go out into the real world, then these ideas begin to affect everybody around them. That is how it seeps out into society and before you know it we are all thinking this way. The average person in America is neither an existentialist nor a postmodernist, they have never heard of either one of them, but just because they don’t know the technical terminology doesn’t mean they aren’t influenced by this.   

 

Another example of postmodernism and what we think of as Christians from a German philosopher who lived at the early part of the 20th century. He was a defender of Nazi tyranny. He saw in National Socialism an inner truth and greatness that could free the western world from its enslavement to rationalism. It is an attack on reason, a reaction to the rationalism and empiricism of the Enlightenment.

 

Another leader in postmodern thought also had a problem with legitimate authority and tyrannical abuse of power. He looked at prisons, jails and asylums as symbols of the illegitimate use of power as a result of western rationalism. So anything western is considered evil. That really is a subtle attack on Christianity because what made western history western history and western civilisation western civilisation was not the barbarians of Germany, the Slavs and the Huns that came out of the steppes of Russia, the mystical Celts and their Druid worship; it was the Christians who came along and transformed European history. So all of this is simply an assault on absolute truth, on objective truth, and on the structures of authority that God has established. At the same time this man admires the regimes of Mao Zedong in China and the Ayatollah  Khomeini. Those are his heroes. So in this whole thing power becomes a major theme in understanding postmodernists, power for people who have been previously marginalised. There are two good watchwords that come out of postmodern thinking: empowerment and issue. The word “issue” is a morally neutral word; “problem” isn’t. Problem implies that there is an absolute, that there is a wrong, that there is right and there is wrong; but issue has the idea that you are just going to resolve something without having to deal with something right or wrong. These kinds of terminology reflect a shift in the way people think in our culture. They no longer think in terms of absolutes, they think completely in terms of relatives.

 

Postmodernism

1.          Sixty-six per cent of Americans believe that no such thing as absolute truth exists. (That is an internally illogical statement: if no absolute exists, is that an absolute? Postmodernism hoists on its own petard). Seventy-two per cent of those between the ages of 18 and 25 do not believe there is any such thing as absolute truth. Fifty-three per cent of evangelicals believe there are no absolutes. That is cosmic thinking, worldliness in the church; they are thinking like the world. This kind of thinking seeps in everywhere and affects every single one of us in extremely subtle ways.

2.          Modernism came along in the 1600s and dominated western culture up until the early 20th century. It started with Descarte who developed rationalism, and that was combined with the empirical thinking of John Locke and others. Those two system come together to basically emphasise that man can find truth on his own. That period was known as the Enlightenment. They now believed in the ability of man and so were “enlightened.” The Enlightenment came to a crashing halt with the thinking of Immanuel Kant which brought in subjectivism. With Kant there is no longer belief that you can learn that you can learn anything about the absolute. It changes; intellectually you can’t get there anymore. The result is scepticism and philosophical existentialism. You can’t know truth anymore. Scepticism always produces mysticism in the flow of history. Scepticism dominated the 19th and 20th centuries. Postmodernism really finds its beginnings in 1900, the beginning of the 20th century. It doesn’t become popularised until the 1960s.

In biblical Christianity we believe that mankind was created in the image of God, that man is both immaterial and material. The modernist believes that humans are simply material machines and that there is no immaterial soul. So if we go to a secular psychologist who is not a Christian he is going to look at why you do what you do totally in mechanistic terms, it is just genetic, biochemical. So he is just going to treat the problems with some drug because it is not a result of something deeper or more profound such as sin. The universe is therefore purely physical, it runs on itself and nothing exists beyond our own senses—no God, no angels, etc. The postmodernist has no real opinion of human nature, but he is suspicious of any dogmatic assertion. Why? Ultimately in postmodernism there is no absolute truth. So anybody who comes along with any sort of absolute, any dogmatic assertion, is immediately suspect. Therefore man is anything you want him to be. He can be one thing today, something else tomorrow, or he can be both of those contradictory concepts as long as he is happy.

Free will. Man’s volition, responsibility, often is tied together with his free will. In biblical Christianity the will of man is diminished, his ability to love freely is diminished by sin. We are born enslaved to the sin nature. We don’t have free will in the sense that Adam had freedom, but we are still morally responsible, we are not fatalistically determined. But in modernism man is completely independent and self-governing. He can do anything he wants to because he is not a sinner, he is just a creature. There is no such thing as sin and good because those are moral categories you can’t know about. Moral categories don’t apply to machines; machines just do what they are designed to do. So men are autonomous and self-governing and they choose their own direction.

In postmodernism people are the products of their culture, everything is more group oriented, and they only imagine they are self-governing. The fact that you think that you make decisions is just a deception. You really don’t, all your actions are just determined by your group. The emphasis is on group-think, you figure out what group you are in and then you are immediately plugged into that group and that is going to determine how you are going to act and how you are going to think.

The view of reason. In biblical Christianity we recognise that the use of reason and logic are necessary and legitimate, but they are not the ultimate basis for understanding reality; that comes from revelation. Revelation comes from a God who is rational, a God who creates language. Reason, though and language are eternal for the Christian and what we have on earth as image bearers in simply a finite reflection of what God is. In modernism, rationalism and empiricism are independent and the only basis for discovering truth. God does not speak; He is blocked out by that brick. In postmodernism there is no objective reason at all, rationalism is a myth. See, if everything is determined by the group we are in then there is no real thought. What is there? There is just reaction and that which is automatically produced by the group. So rationalism, reason, logic is just a myth. Logic is all determined by your group, it is inherent within language, and that language reflects your culture, everything is predetermined so there is no absolute.

The view of progress. In Christianity we don’t see man as progressing toward anything, i.e. in pre-Millennial dispensationalism. Advances are positive. We have new advances in technology, treatments for diseases, all of which are positive, but there is no utopia that can be brought in by man. It is not going to get better and better. In modernism mankind is progressing because the ultimate hope is man. That is the highest there is; there is no God. Man is the apex of the chain of being so man on the basis of his wonderful reason and knowledge are going to bring in a utopian society. After WW II that really took an hit and is one reason postmodernism rejects modernism.        

3.          There are three factors, then, in postmodernism: a) the collapse of the importance of religious belief. In a pre-modernistic society religious belief was foundational to everything. (It still is, they just don’t      know it) There is no universal consensus of what is true anymore; b) Globalism. After WW II we had expanded communication, expanded travel, all worldviews in the world became familiar with the other worldviews. Everybody claimed to know truth and in the cacophony of truth claims people say, well nobody can know truth so I’m just going to do whatever I think is right, whatever makes me feel good, whatever makes my life work; c) as truth breaks down there is fragmentation and polarisation in society. Everything starts fragmenting and falling apart and going in different directions because everybody is opposed to everybody else, and that is what has generated the culture wars—wars over morality, ethics, what is taught in schools, textbook content, movies, etc.

4.          Christianity teaches that truth is objective and can be known. Postmodernism teaches that human beings make up their own reality—whatever is real for you. There is no real anymore, so whatever you think; multiple realities are equally true.

5.          Postmodernism is more than relativism. In postmodernism meaning is created by the social group and its language. For example, previously in existentialism the emphasis was on the individual—he is alone, he is a non-conformist, he finds meaning through the exercise of his own will. Postmodernism goes beyond simple relativism, it emphasises the fact that meaning or absolutes are created by the social group, whatever that it. There is an emphasis on social identity group-think and everybody has to follow the same fashion trend. In postmodernism what happens is that liberation, true freedom comes from rejecting traditional power structures. Really what they are doing is just putting another power structure in place but they now want to empower whoever they view has been marginalised. Postmodernism is opposed and antagonistic to any kind of objective thinking. They call these objective systems stories or narratives, and those stories are different from culture group to culture group and they control how you think. So you are not free, your thinking is controlled by these cultural narratives, therefore truth is just a fiction, and so every narrative group has its own fictions. Truth, therefore, is just a “construction” (a key word) of language. Therefore to get past anything you have to deconstruct the language. That is why one of the key words is deconstruction. After you read Plato you have to deconstruct it; or the Bible, you have to deconstruct it because it was written by people whose language was shaped by their culture. As soon as you start saying that then everything becomes fluid and you can make it mean whatever you want to because it is basically an attack on truth claims. Postmodernism rejects all truth claims and all narratives as illegitimate and unnecessary. Frameworks are bad, systems are bad, and so we would say this is an inherent attack on doctrine, on systematic theology, and in thinking itself.

6.          For a postmodernist it is impossible to know God, history or reason. History is no longer the objective recording of events that took place. History is now something that is malleable, i.e. everyone has a different view of history, it just depends on what your view is, and we are just going to shape it and shift it to make it whatever agenda we have. Reason is hopeless, it doesn’t go anywhere, and who knows whether or not God exists.

7.          It is impossible for the postmodernist to communicate truth because language shapes what you think and language is just a cultural creation. For the postmodernist language can only communicate perception, and those perceptions are the perceptions of that culture or that group and not absolutes. Therefore meaning and language is just a cultural creation. So meaning just becomes totally fluid now. This leads to the eighth point.

8.          Since there are no absolutes behind language then each person becomes trapped and imprisoned by his own language, culture or group. He can’t know what is outside the language because he is trapped by this language, culture or group. So if you are in a male-dominated Euro-centric background then you are in prison—if you are not male, white, of European background—ands seek to marginalise those who don’t fit the main group. Example: If you were to talk about man then you are automatically excluding woman. Therefore whenever you use the word “woman” the first thing you ought to realise is that you have been excluded by men. Therefore the very term “woman” talks about the fact that women have been abused and the use of the term indicates that they have been marginalised and they need to be returned to a position of power.

9.          Results: a) Moral principles that anchor decisions, that give us a foundation for handling chaos, crisis; moral principles that give us a frame of reference or absolutes for facing any kind of adversity evaporate. Now there is no basis for any kind of stability in terms of crisis; b) People become valued only for what they can contribute to me, to my happiness; not because you are valuable, because of who and what you are created in the image and likeness of God. Now people are valued only for what they can contribute to me; c) Personal pleasure now becomes the ultimate criterion. E.g. if you’re not happy in a job or in marriage, get out. If you are making happiness your criterion then happiness is nothing more than self-absorption and the fact that you are fulfilling your self-absorbed desires. Happiness isn’t the ultimate goal in life; it is the by-product of living your life to the glory of God where you are advancing to spiritual maturity. If you are not doing that you will never be happy; d) In the judicial system where judges use creative rationalism in order to overturn centuries of case law in order to create new laws to fit their own social agenda; e) We see it with journalists who have no concept of absolute truth (not true of all journalists). They write biased news reports which promote their own agenda because whatever happened has no absolute reality; f) It can be seen in he educational system since they have no objective truth to communicate, they just focus on the process and on experiences, not on knowledge.

10.    All knowledge and language depend on the validity of logic. The problem is that they attack language as being able to communicate meaning, but they attack language with language so how can they mean what they think they mean? How do they know they are not just bound by their own social construct? Let’s deconstruct the deconstruction! It is an irrational position but once you reject rationality then irrationality is no longer a problem.

11.    When the rational is replaced aesthetic then we believe what we like; we believe whatever appeals to us, it just becomes a matter of personal taste and personal pleasure. According to this belief is just based on what appeals to you and what is personally pleasurable. That means that belief is a deeply personal preference. So whenever you critique that belief you are critiquing the person. It is taken as a personal insult and challenged.

12.    We live in a society that goes into information overload but they never derive any universal principles from that information. We just get bombarded with facts, facts, this, that and the other thing, and nobody ever draws any universal principles from all that information.

13.    It provides a rationalisation for the sin nature. 

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