Modernism and Post-Modernism; 1 John
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.
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
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
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.