Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Crossway
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: Turning Point Christian Worldview Series
- Sprache: Englisch
The modern era is over. Assumptions that shaped twentieth-century thought and culture, the bridges we crossed to this present moment, have blown up. The postmodern age has begun. Just what is postmodernism? The average person would be shocked by its creed: Truth, meaning, and individual identity do not exist. These are social constructs. Human life has no special significance, no more value than animal or plant life. All social relationships, all institutions, all moral values are expressions and masks of the primal will to power. Alarmingly, these ideas have gripped the nation's universities, which turn out today's lawyers, judges, writers, journalists, teachers, and other culture-shapers. Through society's influences, postmodernist ideas have seeped into films, television, art, literature, politics; and, without his knowing it, into the head of the average person on the street. Christ has called us to proclaim the gospel to a culture grappling with postmodernism. We must understand our times. Then, through the power that Christ gives, we can counter the prevailing culture and proclaim His sufficiency to our society's very points of need.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 405
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1994
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
POSTMODERN TIMES
TURNING POINT Christian Worldview Series
Marvin Olasky, General EditorTurning Point: A Christian Worldview Declaration by Herbert Schlossberg and Marvin Olasky
Prodigal Press: The Anti-Christian Bias of the American News Media by Marvin Olasky
Freedom, Justice, and Hope: Toward a Strategy for the Poor and the Oppressed by Marvin Olasky, Herbert Schlossberg, Pierre Berthoud, and Clark H. Pinnock
Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics by Doug Bandow
Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity by E. Calvin Beisner
The Seductive Image: A Christian Critique of the World of Film by K. L. Billingsley
All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture by Kenneth A. Myers
A World Without Tyranny: Christian Faith and International Politics by Dean C. Curry
Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources and the Future by E. Calvin Beisner
More Than Kindness: A Compassionate Approach to Crisis Childbearing by Susan Olasky and Marvin Olasky
ReadingBetween the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature by Gene Edward Veith, Jr.
State of the Arts: From Bezalel to Mapplethorpe by Gene Edward Veith, Jr.
Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively ChristianEducation by Douglas Wilson
A Fragrance of Oppression: The Church and Its Persecutors by Herbert Schlossberg
The Soul of Science: A Christian Map to the Scientific Landscape by Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton
Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Cultureby Gene Edward Veith, Jr.
T A B L E O F
P R E F A C E
What is less clear is whether the change is good or bad. On the one hand, the supreme example of a society built on modernistic materialism, atheism, and social engineering—the U.S.S.R.—has collapsed. Traditional American ideals of free market economics and individual freedom are sweeping the globe. Christianity, which not only survived communism but was a major force in its demise, has a new credibility, as old modernist critiques lose their force and multitudes worldwide discover the Word of God and turn to Christ.
On the other hand, society is segmenting into antagonistic groups. Tribalism, terrorism, and ethnic cleansing are splitting the globe apart. Americans fight “culture wars” over moral issues such as abortion and euthanasia and intellectual issues such as education and cultural diversity. Convulsed over “political correctness,” universities no longer operate under the modernist assumption that one objective, rational truth exists. Even such basic questions as the value of Western civilization are up for grabs: Is the Western heritage one of human achievement and liberty, or is the Western heritage primarily racism, sexism, imperialism, and homophobia?
Diverse “communities”—feminists, gays, African-Americans, neo-conservatives, pro-lifers—now make up the cultural landscape. These different groups seem to have no common frame of reference by which to communicate with each other, much less arrive at a consensus. In the meantime, families fall apart, AIDS kills thousands, and the mass culture puts us all in a TV daze.
So is the postmodern age good or bad from a Christian point of view? Perhaps we will have to say with Dickens, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” He was speaking, in The Tale of Two Cities, of the era of the French Revolution, in many ways the beginning of modernism. But his words seem to apply to every era. Every age has its greatness and its follies, its possibilities and its temptations. But these are always different from age to age. To embrace the opportunities and to avoid the traps, Christians should be in a continual process of “understanding the present time” (Romans 13:11).
The church has always had to confront its culture and to exist in tension with the world. To ignore the culture is to risk irrelevance; to accept the culture uncritically is to risk syncretism and unfaithfulness. Every age has had its eager-to-please liberal theologians who have tried to reinterpret Christianity according to the latest intellectual and cultural fashion. Enlightenment liberals had their rational religion and the higher criticism of the Bible; romantic liberals had their warm feelings; existentialist liberals had their crises of meaning and leaps of faith; there is now a postmodern liberalism (as we shall see). But orthodox Christians have also lived in every age, confessing their faith in Jesus Christ (as we shall see). They were part of their culture (you can recognize the distinct style of seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century Christians, even when they say the same things). Yet they also countered their culture, proclaiming God’s law and gospel to society’s very inadequacies and points of need.
This book is a guide to the contemporary landscape—its dominant ideas, its art forms, its social configurations, and its spiritual assumptions. It describes various trends and comments on them from a Christian point of view.
Some Christians think that with the end of modernism, the postmodern era can mean a rebirth of classical Christianity. They speak of the postmodern age in glowing terms. While I agree with this perspective, I also see a new secular ideology replacing the modernistic worldview. Like modernism, this postmodernism is hostile to Christianity, but for different reasons. In this book I am critical of what I call “postmodernism,” although I see promise in being “postmodern.”
Since I write here for the church as a whole, and not for academic specialists, I leave out the more technical aspects of postmodernist thought. The specific contributions of major figures of postmodern thought such as Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and others, I am skipping. Nor am I plunging into the technical details of critical theory, hermeneutics, or other highly specialized kinds of discourse postmodernists generally use to thrash out their ideas. Other Christian scholars, particularly Roger Lundin and Clarence Walhout, have provided thoughtful and sophisticated treatment of such scholarship from a Christian point of view.
The origins of this book go back to a lecture I was asked to give, “Deconstructing Deconstruction,” sponsored by Probe Ministries at the University of Texas. I owe a great deal to my colleague Dr. David Krenz (who should have written this book) for helping me to understand what the postmodern is all about. Nancy Pearcey, through our work with Charles Colson’s “Breakpoint” radio program, has helped me, seventeenth-century scholar as I am, to keep a focus on contemporary issues.
I also appreciate the contributions of two fellow writers with whom I get together to drink coffee, read manuscripts, and talk. Rev. Harold Senkbeil has helped me understand the theological problems facing contemporary Christianity and the possibilities of developing a confessional alternative grounded in Reformation spirituality. Rev. Richard Eyer, a hospital chaplain, has opened my eyes to medical ethics and to the ways that Christianity is engaged in (literally) a life-and-death struggle with the new worldviews.
Thanks too to Marvin Olasky for commissioning this final contribution to the Turning Point Series, to the Fieldstead Institute for its support of this series, and to all of its other authors who have helped me in countless ways to see our times in light of the Word of God. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to my wife Jackquelyn and to Paul, Joanna, and Mary.
O N E
Colson tried to explain the difference, but got nowhere. He raised the issue of death and the afterlife, but his friend did not believe in Heaven or Hell and was not particularly bothered by the prospect of dying.
Colson explained what the Bible said, but his friend did not believe in the Bible or any other spiritual authority.
Finally, Colson mentioned a Woody Allen movie, Crimes and Misdemeanors, about a killer who silences his conscience by concluding that life is nothing more than the survival of the fittest. The friend became thoughtful. Colson followed with examples from Tolstoy and C. S. Lewis on the reality of the moral law. The friend was following him. Then Colson cited the epistle of Romans on human inability to keep the law. His friend then paid close attention to the message of Christ’s atoning work on the cross.
Although the friend did not become a Christian, Colson felt that he finally had broken through at least some of his defenses. The difficulty was in finding a common frame of reference. Because of his friend’s mind-set, the usual evangelistic approaches did not work. “My experience,” says Colson, “is a sobering illustration of how resistant the modern mind has become to the Christian message. And it raises serious questions about the effectiveness of traditional evangelistic methods in our age. For the spirit of the age is changing more quickly than many of us realize.”1
THERE ARE NO ABSOLUTES
It is hard to witness to truth to people who believe that truth is relative (“Jesus works for you; crystals work for her”). It is hard to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to people who believe that, since morality is relative, they have no sins to forgive.
According to a recent poll, 66 percent of Americans believe that “there is no such thing as absolute truth.” Among young adults, the percentage is even higher: 72 percent of those between eighteen and twenty-five do not believe absolutes exist.2
To disbelieve in truth is, of course, self-contradictory. To believe means to think something is true; to say, “It’s true that nothing is true” is intrinsically meaningless nonsense. The very statement—“there is no absolute truth”—is an absolute truth. People have bandied about such concepts for centuries as a sort of philosophical parlor game, but have seldom taken these seriously. Today it is not just some esoteric and eccentric philosophers who hold this deeply problematic view of truth, but the average man on the street. It is not the lunatic fringe rejecting the very concept of truth, but two-thirds of the American people.
Moreover, the poll goes on to show that 53 percent of those who call themselves evangelical Christians believe that there are no absolutes. This means that the majority of those who say that they believe in the authority of the Bible and know Christ as their Savior nevertheless agree that “there is no such thing as absolute truth.” Not Christ? No, although He presumably “works for them.” Not the Bible? Apparently not, although 88 percent of evangelicals believe that “The Bible is the written word of God and is totally accurate in all it teaches.” Bizarrely, 70 percent of all Americans claim to accept this high view of Scripture, which is practically the same number as those who say “there are no absolutes.”3
What is going on here? Perhaps those polled did not understand the question or the implications of what they claimed to believe. Some of the evangelical sceptics in the 53 percent may be solid Christians who were only parroting what they heard on television, oblivious to the theological implications of this pop philosophy. The polls may reflect ignorance or confusion. Even so, it amounts to the same thing. Holding mutually inconsistent ideas is a sure sign of believing that there are no absolute truths.
The rejection of absolutes is not just a fine point in philosophy. Many of those polled no doubt took the question as referring not so much to epistemology as to morality. Relative values accompany the relativism of truth.
Up until now, societies have always regulated sexuality by strict moral guidelines. This has been the case in all ages, for all religions, and for all cultures. Suddenly, sex outside of marriage has become routinely accepted. In 1969, well into the “sexual revolution,” 68 percent of Americans believed that sexual relations before marriage are wrong. In 1987, a supposedly conservative era already frightened by AIDS, only 46 percent—less than half—believed that premarital sex is wrong.4 In 1992 only 33 percent reject premarital sex.5
In issue after issue, people are casually dismissing timehonored moral absolutes. The killing of a child in the womb used to be considered a horrible, almost unspeakable evil. Today abortion is not just legal. It has been transformed into something good, a constitutional right. People once considered killing the handicapped, the sick, and the aged an unthinkable atrocity. Today they see euthanasia as an act of compassion.
These moral inversions are taking place not only in the secular world, but within what passes as Christendom. A recent study claimed that 56 percent of single “fundamentalists” engage in sex outside of marriage. This is about the same as the rate for “liberals” (57 percent). (Ironically, the church with the strictest teachings about sexual morality and the greatest emphasis on the role of good works in salvation may have the most permissive members. According to this study, 66 percent of single Roman Catholics are sexually active. American Catholics may be even more permissive than secular Americans. The study claims that while 67 percent of Americans accept premarital sex, 83 percent of Catholics do, in complete opposition to the teaching of their church.)6 Along the same lines, 49 percent of Protestants and 47 percent of Catholics consider themselves “pro-choice” when it comes to abortion.7 Some 49 percent of evangelicals and a startling 71 percent of Catholics say they believe in euthanasia,8 apparently assuming that “Thou shalt not kill” is not an absolute.
Certainly, opinion polls can be slippery, misleading, and subject to various interpretations. Other polls show that people have strong moral positions on other issues. As I will show, over-reliance on opinion polls is one of the signs of a particular kind of contemporary confusion.
And even if the polls are correct, they only confirm what the Bible says about sin. No one with a Biblical view of sin should be surprised to see that immorality is rampant throughout society and in churches and that Christians too fall prey to moral failure and hypocrisy.
Churches have always been packed with sinners, as is fitting (who else is there?). Christians admit their inability to keep God’s Law, and so they depend solely for their salvation on the forgiveness won by Jesus Christ. Theologians have always recognized that church members, no less than the unchurched, need to be evangelized and discipled.
And yet the polls suggest something new. While people have always committed sins, they at least acknowledged these were sins. A century ago a person may have committed adultery flagrantly and in defiance of God and man, but he would have admitted that what he was doing was a sin. What we have today is not only immoral behavior, but a loss of moral criteria. This is true even in the church. We face not only a moral collapse but a collapse of meaning. “There are no absolutes.”
THE SHIFT IN WORLDVIEW
What has happened? Once most people accepted basic Christian concepts. Now only a minority do. This moral and religious shift is not the only change we face. “We are experiencing enormous structural change in our country and in our world,” says the Christian futurist Leith Anderson, “change that promises to be greater than the invention of the printing press, greater than the Industrial Revolution.”9 Christians dare not be blind to change of this magnitude.
As Francis Schaeffer and other scholars have shown, Western culture has gone through many phases. One worldview follows another. In the eighteenth century the Enlightenment challenged the Biblical synthesis that had dominated Western culture. With the nineteenth century came both romanticism and scientific materialism. The twentieth century has given us Marxism and fascism, positivism and existentialism.
Today as we enter the twenty-first century, a new worldview is emerging. The “modern,” strange as it is to say, has become oldfashioned. The twentieth century, for all of its achievements and catastrophes, is passing into history. The “modern ideas” that characterized the twentieth century no longer seem relevant. We are entering the “postmodern” age.
The term “postmodern” primarily refers to time rather than to a distinct ideology. If the “modern” age is really over, Christians have every reason to be glad. Ever since the battles between “modernists” and “fundamentalists”(and before), Biblical Christianity has been bludgeoned by the forces of modernism, with its scientific rationalism, humanism, and bias against the past. Today the assumptions of modernism, including those that have bedeviled the church in this century, are being abandoned. Christians can rejoice at the dawn of a postmodern age.
Modernism, however, is being replaced by the new secular ideology of postmodernism. This new set of assumptions about reality—which goes far beyond mere relativism—is gaining dominance throughout the culture. The average person who believes that there are no absolutes may never have heard of the academic exercise of “deconstruction.” The intellectual establishment may disdain the electronic world of television. Contemporary politicians may be unaware of avant garde art. Nevertheless, these are all interconnected and comprise a distinctly postmodernist worldview.
While modernist attacks on Christianity are losing their force, postmodernists are attacking Christianity on different grounds. For example, modernists would argue in various ways that Christianity is not true. One hardly hears this objection any more. Today the most common critique is that “Christians think they have the only truth.” The claims of Christianity are not denied; they are rejected because they purport to be true. Those who believe “there are no absolutes” will dismiss those who reject relativism as “intolerant,” as trying to force their beliefs on other people. Postmodernists reject Christianity on the same grounds that they reject modernism, with its scientific rationalism. Both Christians and modernists believe in truth. Postmodernists do not. Whether modernism or postmodernism will prove the more hospitable to Christianity remains to be seen.
Scripture tells us of the importance of “understanding the present time” (Romans 13:11). “Most Christians,” observes George Barna, “do not perceive the Church to be in the midst of the most severe struggle it has faced in centuries.”10 Many Christians, including theologians, are still battling modernism, unaware that the issues have changed. If Christians are to minister effectively in the postmodern world and avoid its temptations, they must understand the spirit of the age.
THE CURSE OF BABEL
Despite the endless claims of novelty, Christians know “there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago” (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10). Unbelief and sin have always been with us. The ancient pagans too were relativistic, in a way, and God’s people have always been tempted to compromise their faith by selling out to the dominant culture. The Bible thus addresses the issues of the postmodern age with startling clarity.
The shift from modernism to postmodernism seems in fact a version of an ancient failure and an ancient curse. At one time, “the whole world had one language and a common speech” (Genesis 11:1). Exhilarated with their unity, their common understanding, and their technological ability, people said, “‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves’” (11:4).
The culture that built the Tower of Babel parallels the modern age. Confident in their human abilities, their reason and scientific knowledge, the modernists had no need for God. To make a name for themselves, they not only built cities, they engineered new social and economic orders, such as socialism. Their technology, more advanced than the Babelites’, enabled them to build not just a tower to reach the heavens, but spaceships to reach the moon.
God judged the pretensions of Babel. Noting their genuine accomplishments and the vast potential of human achievement, the Lord saw that a united, technologically sophisticated human race would be nearly unlimited in their capacity for evil. “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them” (11:6). God mercifully thwarted this primitive but dangerous beginning (what “they have begun to do”). He shattered their self-deification and brought their famous tower to ruin.
In our own time, it has become clear that reason, science, and technology have not solved all of our problems. Poverty, crime, and despair defy our attempts at social engineering. The most thoroughgoing attempt to restructure society according to a rationalistic, materialist theory—communism—fell to pieces. Technology continues to progress at breakneck speed, but, far from reaching the heavens, it sometimes diminishes our lives.
God punished Babel by undermining the faculty that made possible their success—their language. The human race splintered into mutually inaccessible groups.
“Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth. (Genesis 11:7-9)
This is exactly what has happened with the fall of modernism. The monolithic sensibility of modernism, which seemed to have an unlimited potential, has fragmented into diverse and competing communities. People can no longer understand each other. There are no common reference points, no common language. Totalitarian unity has given way to chaotic diversity. Scattered in small groups of like-minded people, those who speak the same language, human beings today are confused.
God’s people can only agree with the judgment on the Tower and the curse of Babel. They will likewise agree that modernism is idolatrous and will rejoice in its fall. The curse of Babel, while appropriate, was a punishment for sin. When Christ atoned for the sins of the world, the curse for sin was removed. When the Holy Spirit was poured out upon the church, the curse of Babel was undone.
When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?” (Acts 2:1-12)
What it means, among other things, is that the gospel is for the whole human race in all of its diversity, that through the Word preached by the apostles the Holy Spirit communicates faith to people of every language and culture. Far from being some unintelligible utterance, the tongues of Pentecost were uniquely intelligible—to everyone, no matter what their native language. The restoration of language was a sign of the Kingdom of God.
On Pentecost the Holy Spirit began gathering the Church from all nations (Acts 2:41). This Church was a different kind of community, neither unified in an autonomous humanism like the Tower-builders and the modernists, nor fractured into alien groups like the Babelites and the postmodernists. Rather, the Church is a balance of both unity and diversity, a single Body consisting of organs as different from each other as a foot and an eye (1 Corinthians 12), but unified in love for each other and faith in Jesus Christ.
Because of this larger perspective, God’s people will see the futility of both the building of the Tower and the cacophony of voices that followed its abandonment. They will likewise recognize the limitations of both the modernists and the postmodernists. Once again, the issues will be sin, idolatry, and language.
OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK
This book is a walking tour of contemporary thought and culture. As such, it will range far and wide, examining academic philosophy and popular TV shows, art and politics, social changes and the new religions. Its purpose is to describe trends that Christians need to be aware of, commenting on them from the perspective of Biblical Christianity.
The first section on postmodern thought describes the new paradigms that characterize contemporary thinking, from the deconstructionism and post-Marxism of the universities to the relativism of popular culture. The section surveys the history of modernism and postmodernism, describes their consequences, and suggests a Christian response.
The next section explores the arts, in which the inner dynamics and implications of postmodernism are expressed most clearly. From the popular art forms of film and television to the experiments in art and literature of the avant garde, the new aesthetic testifies to the loss of both absolutes and humanness. On the other hand, some postmodern art, architecture, and literature, in their reaction against the modern, offer a model for how the traditions of the past can be brought back into the contemporary world.
The third section examines postmodern society, showing how our society is splintering into various factions, with the culture fragmenting into subcultures based on race, ethnicity, and sexuality. The chapter on politics shows how postmodernism reduces all social relationships to questions of power, threatening freedom and democracy. The fall of communism, however, suggests that democracy, a free economy, and Biblical absolutes may provide the basis for an alternative postmodern social order.
Although the entire book amounts to a theological commentary on contemporary culture, the final section concentrates explicitly on religion. It shows how the postmodernist worldview manifests itself not only in New Age religions, but tragically even within the evangelical church. The section closes by showing that to be truly relevant to the postmodern age, the church need not succumb to the spirit of the age; rather, the postmodern church has only to recover and apply its spiritual heritage.
This book is critical of postmodernism, but remains open to the postmodern. It is as if there were two contrary postmodern positions, each vying for dominance. Is the true herald of the postmodern age the counterculture movement of the 1960s or the fall of the Berlin Wall? Who best represents contemporary America, Madonna or Ronald Reagan? Is Christianity declining as Americans descend into relativism and neo-paganism, or is it triumphing, emerging from Communist persecution and catching fire across the globe? The postmodern consciousness seems to make possible either a new radicalism or a new conservatism. Which version will prevail in the next millennium remains unclear.
This book may help Christians tip the balance. Certainly, the turmoil of the present time is characteristic of a transition from one epoch to the next. Whether Christianity will once again exert its influence on the culture, or whether Christianity will become further marginalized in the twenty-first century, Christians must pay close attention to the signs of the times.
In doing so, they will see that Biblical faith has survived every assault, even persecution, and has proven relevant to every age despite attempts to silence or to change its message. Conversely, each humanly devised worldview has proven inadequate and has been replaced by yet another set of assumptions. As modernism gives way to postmodernism, and as the twentieth century gives way to the twenty-first century (if Christ delays His coming), Christians will discover even more reasons to hold fast to the Word of God.
P A R T O N E
T W O
A Amassive intellectual revolution is taking place,” says Princeton theologian Diogenes Allen, “that is perhaps as great as that which marked off the modern world from the Middle Ages.”1 Signs of this revolution appear everywhere—on university campuses and on television screens, in the thought-forms of computer networks and in the lifestyles of average Americans. As the twentieth century draws to a close, there is a sense that a particular way of thinking is disappearing and that we are on the verge of something new.
Christian scholar Thomas Oden was one of the first to chronicle these changes. He maintains that the modern age lasted exactly 200 years—from the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.2 The French Revolution exemplifies the triumph of the Enlightenment. With the destruction of the Bastille, the prison in which the monarchy jailed its political prisoners, the premodern world with its feudal loyalties and spiritual hierarchies was guillotined. The revolutionaries exalted the Rights of Man. They dismissed Christianity as a relic of the past. During the course of the revolution, they installed the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral. In the modern period, human reason would take the place of God, solving all human problems and remaking society along the lines of scientific, rational truth.
The trust in human reason and the rejection of the supernatural took many forms, but nowhere did the modernistic impulse reach further or more ambitiously than in the invention of the Marxist state. Marxism, beginning with the assumption of “dialectical materialism,” sought to find material, economic causes for all human problems. Marx reduced the human condition to issues of class struggle and economic exploitation. In doing so, he worked out a quasi-scientific alternative that would supposedly bring on an earthly paradise. Under communism there would be no private property. There would be no more exploitation. Under socialism individuals would find meaning by losing themselves in a larger group. The economy and all phases of society would be planned for the good of the whole.
Soviet leaders put these seemingly “enlightened” ideals into practice with the Russian Revolution. But instead of bringing a worker’s paradise as the theory promised, oppression and brutality resulted, on a scale unparalleled in human history. Amazingly, the monolith of Soviet communism, though armed with secret police and nuclear weapons, crumbled when its people uncovered its lies and demanded freedom.
Christians could have predicted what would happen when human beings claim ultimate authority for themselves. The doctrine of original sin means that human beings left to themselves may profess noble-sounding ideals, but in fact they will commit horrific evil. The French Revolution offers an example, as the lofty rhetoric of the Rights of Man ushered in the guillotine and the Reign of Terror.
Now the assumptions of modernism have fallen apart, from Moscow to San Francisco. The Enlightenment is discredited. Reason is dethroned, even on university campuses. The Industrial Revolution is giving way to the Information Age. Society, technology, values, and basic categories of thought are shifting. A new way of looking at the world is emerging.
Thomas Oden contends that this postmodern era is an opportunity for orthodox, classical Christianity to make a come-back.3 The failure of modernism means that the old secular critiques of supernatural Christianity have lost their force. Conservative Christianity has a new credibility in the postmodern world.
He is right. Postmodern Christians can proclaim the gospel to their culture with a new force and urgency. Nevertheless, the secular establishment is setting up some postmodern alternatives of its own. These views respond to the failure of the Enlightenment by jettisoning truth altogether. The intellect is replaced by the will. Reason is replaced by emotion. Morality is replaced by relativism. Reality itself becomes a social construct. This emerging worldview challenges Christianity in different ways from the old modernism. Postmodern Christians will have to confront the views of postmodern non-Christians.
BEFORE THE MODERN
To understand the modern and the postmodern, we must first understand the premodern. To put it simply, in the premodern phase of Western civilization people believed in the supernatural. Individuals and the culture as a whole believed in God (or gods). Life in this world owed its existence and meaning to a spiritual realm beyond the senses.
This is the definition assumed by modernist theologians who are used to saying that since, of course, “modern man” can no longer believe in miracles, the supernatural events described in the New Testament must be reinterpreted for the “modern age.” Since many in the twentieth century do in fact believe in the supernatural, it is clear that by the term “modern” they do not refer to chronol ogy but to a state of mind. They accuse conservative Christians of holding premodern ideas due to ignorance, lack of education, and intellectual naivete. As one scholar puts it, evangelicals simply “have not heard the news of modernity.”4 This “news,” this gospel of modernity, has such authority that other kinds of news, such as the gospel of Jesus Christ, are not even considered.
The premodern, however, deserves to be taken seriously. This phase of Western culture was not characterized by a single monolithic worldview. Rather, this complex, dynamic, and tension-filled era included mythological paganism and classical rationalism, as well as Biblical revelation.
The ancient Greeks themselves struggled with the conflict between their pagan religion, which grew out of the animistic nature religions of primitive cultures, and the rational philosophy of intellectual giants such as Plato and Aristotle. Socrates was forced to drink the hemlock because of his “atheism”—he rejected the mythological worldview, arguing that the stories of the socalled gods were nothing more than projections of human vices. There must be only one supreme God, he reasoned, the source of all truth, beauty, and goodness. Plato, the disciple of Socrates, went on to develop classical idealism, the view that the particulars of this world owe their form to transcendent ideals in the mind of God.
As Platonists explored the ideals and the universals of the mind, Aristotle turned his attention to the external world. He too rejected the mythological, reasoning that all causes must trace back to a First Cause, which itself is uncaused. This First Cause can only be a transcendent God, of whom there can be only one. Aristotle went on to investigate the tangible world, classifying plants and animals, and unveiling the purposes of physical objects and natural organisms. In his inquiries into human life, Aristotle affirmed the existence of objective values. Aristotle’s analytical method—with his distinction between means and ends, his relation of form to purpose, and his discovery of absolute principles that underlie every sphere of life—pushed human reason to dizzying heights.5
The ancient Greeks began with a mythological paganism, but by the sheer power of intellect forged a different way of looking at their world. Certainly Greek society with its uneasy mixture of pagan mythology and classical rationalism was no utopia. Morally decadent, this society institutionalized infanticide, slavery, war, oppression, prostitution, and homosexuality.
But when Paul and the other apostles made their missionary journeys, the Greek world was ready for the gospel. Already those nourished by Greek culture had an inkling of the immortality of the soul, the reality of a spiritual realm, and the existence of only one transcendent God. Paul discovered in Athens an altar “to an unknown God.” The Greeks had come to realize that there is a God, but they did not know Him. Their reason, highly developed as it was, had to give way to revelation. “Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23).
When the Greeks converted to Christianity, they were introduced to the Bible. The Hebrew Scriptures gave them new ways of thinking about God and the creation, human beings and moral truth. The new religion squarely opposed infanticide, abortion,6 and homosexual vice. (Liberals who think the New Testament condemnations of homosexuality, for example, were only an expression of the culture of the day are precisely wrong. Greek culture not only tolerated but encouraged homosexuality.7 Greek military minds reasoned that soldiers tied together by homosexual relationships would fight harder to defend their lovers. Even Plato believed that women were inferior, and therefore, the highest love would be expressed between men. New Testament sexual morality was countercultural, as it must be today.)
Christianity both challenged and fulfilled the worldview of the Greeks. The Biblical and the classical worldviews did not always fit together, but they were not completely and in every detail opposed to each other. They agreed that there was a transcendent reality beyond this world, to which this world owed its meaning. They agreed that the physical world was orderly and to some extent knowable; they agreed on the objectivity of truth and on intellectual absolutes. The Greek perspective tended to rely too much on human reason and to downplay human sinfulness. Nevertheless, Augustine found that he could draw on Plato to help formulate his rigorously Christian theology. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas attempted to synthesize the Bible with Aristotle.
For over a thousand years, Western civilization was dominated by an uneasy mingling of worldviews—the Biblical revelation, classical rationalism, and even the remnants of native pagan mythologies. Often Biblical truth was compromised by human reason and pagan superstitions. Other times the Christian worldview emerged clearly and with authority.
During the Middle Ages (A.D. 1000-1500), Christian piety, classical rationalism, and the folk-paganism of European culture achieved something of a synthesis. Although medieval civilization was impressive in its own terms, scholastic theology subordinated the Bible to Aristotelian logic and human institutions, sacrificing the purity of the Biblical revelation. Medieval popular culture further obscured the gospel message, often keeping much of the old paganism under a veneer of Christianity, retaining the old gods but renaming them after Christian saints.
In the 1500s and the 1600s, Western civilization returned to its roots. The Renaissance challenged the somewhat muddled medieval synthesis, as the West returned to both of its sources. Renaissance humanism rediscovered and reasserted the Greeks; the Reformation rediscovered and reasserted the Bible. Both classicism and Biblicism came back to life in a purified form.
Myth, classicism, and Christianity—these three different worldviews, in different configurations, defined the Western world for centuries. Not everyone was a Christian in the premodern world. Biblical Christianity was always in tension with its culture. Mythology and humanistic rationalism continually tempted the church.
Christianity should not be identified exclusively with premodern civilization, anymore than it should be identified with any other humanly devised institution. Still, after a while Christian assumptions—often shared by classical rationalism and even paganism—acquired a special authority. Most people assumed that God is real and must be taken into account. Good is in conflict with evil. Human beings are sinful, yet they are valuable and the objects of God’s salvation. Nature is God’s creation, but there is a reality beyond nature—the realm of the spirit, the source of all values and the true destiny of human beings. Neither humanity nor society nor nature is autonomous. All are utterly dependent on the sovereignty of God.
Then came the modern age. Human beings, sinful as we are, have always desired autonomy, to be free from all restrictions, to focus on this world instead of some world to come. The turning away from Biblical supernaturalism is sometimes traced to Renaissance humanism, with its antecedents in medieval scholastic theology and Greek classical rationalism. If so, such views have always been a temptation for the West. But however humanistic they may have been, medieval and Renaissance thinkers could not deny the ultimate reality of God.
In time, however, thinkers began to see Christian supernaturalism as old-fashioned. Human achievements in science and technology seemed to open up a new age of progress, rendering the wisdom of past ages obsolete. The modern world, properly speaking, began in the 1700s with the Enlightenment.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The emerging sciences had their origins in the Biblical view that nature is the good and orderly work of a personal Creator and in the classical view that absolute rational laws govern nature. In the 1700s the progress of science accelerated so rapidly that it seemed as if science could explain everything. Some saw no limits to the power of human reason operating upon the data of the senses.
This age of reason, scientific discovery, and human autonomy is termed the Enlightenment. Its thinkers embraced classicism with its order and rationality (although their version of classicism neglected the supernaturalism of Plato and Aristotle). However, they lumped Christianity together with paganism as outdated superstitions. Reason alone, so they thought, may now replace the reliance on the supernatural born out of the ignorance of “unenlightened” times.
This does not mean that Enlightenment thinkers entirely rejected religion. Rather, they sought to devise a rational religion, a faith that did not depend upon revelation. The result was Deism. According to the Deists, the orderliness of nature does, in fact, prove the existence of a deity, a rational mind that created the universe. This God is, however, no longer involved in the creation. He constructed nature in all of its intricacy and then left it to run like a vast machine. Miracles, revelation, and supernatural doctrines such as the incarnation and redemption are excluded on principle. According to this religion, human beings, armed with reason, are basically on their own.
The Enlightenment rejected Christianity but did affirm the existence of God, at least at first. There is, however, no real need of a God who is not involved in His creation. Eventually, the deity withered away. Enlightenment rationalism saw the whole universe as a closed natural system of cause and effect. Every phenomenon must be understood in terms of a cause from within the system.
Enlightenment thinkers at first related moral absolutes to their deity, going so far as to affirm the existence of an afterlife which rewarded good and punished evil. (In doing so, they rejected salvation by grace and instituted a new legalistic works-righteousness.) But soon people began to answer ethical questions in terms of the closed system, and a new approach to moral issues—utilitarianism—emerged. Utilitarians decided moral issues, not by appealing to transcendent absolutes, but by studying the effect of an action upon the system. Stealing is wrong, not because the Ten Commandments say so, but because stealing interferes with the economic functioning of society. Something is good if it makes the system run more smoothly. Something is evil if it interferes with the cogs of the vast machine. Practicality becomes the sole moral criterion. If it works, it must be good.
Utilitarianism is the view that justified slavery, exploitive child labor, and the starvation of the poor, all in the name of economic efficiency. Today this Enlightenment ethic is the view that favors abortion because it reduces the welfare rolls and sanctions euthanasia because it reduces hospital bills. Utilitarianism is a way of facing moral issues without God.
As Enlightenment science continued to gather momentum into the nineteenth century, the final tie to God dissolved. The Deists taught that while God is not, strictly speaking, necessary to everyday life, He was necessary to get everything started. Charles Darwin, however, argued that God was not even necessary to explain the creation. In describing “the origin of species” in terms of the closed natural system of cause and effect, Darwin removed the need for any kind of creator. Nature became completely selfcontained. Science could now explain everything.
Eventually, thinkers discarded even Enlightenment classicism. The rationalism that had its roots in Plato and Aristotle assumed universal absolutes and nonmaterial truths. In the nineteenth century, however, the empirical supplanted the rational. According to nineteenth-century materialism, only what we can observe is real. The physical universe, as apprehended by our senses and as studied by the scientific method, is the only reality.
The philosophers known as the Logical Positivists went so far as to say that any statement that could not be verified empirically (such as theological, metaphysical, aesthetic, and moral statements) are meaningless. You cannot show me “God” or “justice”; therefore, they do not exist. Abstract philosophy is nothing more than a game of language. (It did not seem to matter to the Logical Positivists that their own criterion of meaning is also nonempirical and thus by their own standards must be meaningless.)
The heritage of the Enlightenment blossomed in diverse ways. Methodologies designed to dissect natural objects began to be applied to human beings. The “social sciences” were invented. Sociology purported to explain human institutions; psychology sought to explain the inner life of human beings, all in terms of a closed natural system accessible by empirical scientific methods.
Societies and economies were re-thought and re-engineered. The American Constitution and free enterprise economics, like the natural sciences, had their origin in a Biblical worldview, though they dovetailed with Enlightenment theories. The social theories that excluded God went much further. Under the assumption that all problems could be solved by human planning, various schemes of socialism succeeded the noble ideals and brutal practices of the French Revolution. The most thoroughgoing attempt to remake society and human beings according to a rationalistic theory came through the imposition of Marx’s dialectical materialism on a vast percentage of the world’s population. Marxism eradicated private property, sought to liquidate religion, suppressed native cultures, and tried to abolish individualism in favor of a vast collective community.
