The Postmodern Embrace 1
A subject very near and dear to my heart here is the idea of the philosophical framework a person uses to build their worldview. The most common framework for the past generation or so (although over 100 years old in academia) is the one called “postmodernism.” It is something the Christian subculture has been fretting about since at least the nineties, when Josh McDowell published his book, “Right from Wrong.”
Two ironies have emerged in the years since that book was published.
The first, right from the beginning, was the way that Christians freaked out over the way that postmodernism critiqued ideas that were dear to modernism. Modernism is the previous framework that reigned in Western Culture since the Enlightenment. It is also something that Christianity fought against in many ways. Modernism claimed that everything in the universe is something humanity can understand, classify, and overcome with pure reason. It is the worldview that gave rise to macroevolution, just to name one example where Christianity and modernism clashed. So why would Christians complain that modernism was being rejected? Both modernism and postmodernism are simply mankind’s attempts to explain reality, neither are perfect, and neither are completely threatening to faith. But Christians were really bothered about aspects of Postmodernism. For example, it went so far as to claim that there is no objective truth.
The second irony one sees particularly in Western Evangelical Christianity today is that a large number of them have accepted and embraced that last tenant of postmodernism. More than almost any other demographic, Evangelicals are apt to deny objective reality, science, education, and they are the most likely group to buy into conspiracy theories. They no longer ask, “what is real?” as they now embrace the claim that no one can know what is real. Instead, they ask, “what best fits my agenda or goals?” How did we get to this point? There are many too many factors and events in the past twenty years to list exhaustively, but I think that there are three key shifts worth highlighting, which I will do in future posts…
For now, it suffices to say, we need to recover the kind of faith that does not deny reality. When we can’t explain things, it does not mean that either our faith is wrong or that the facts are lies, it simply means that we don’t understand yet how facts line up with what we believe. We may never understand everything, and that is ok. That is why we have faith and not mere knowledge. But what we don’t need to “defend” our faith by denying reality.
Two ironies have emerged in the years since that book was published.
The first, right from the beginning, was the way that Christians freaked out over the way that postmodernism critiqued ideas that were dear to modernism. Modernism is the previous framework that reigned in Western Culture since the Enlightenment. It is also something that Christianity fought against in many ways. Modernism claimed that everything in the universe is something humanity can understand, classify, and overcome with pure reason. It is the worldview that gave rise to macroevolution, just to name one example where Christianity and modernism clashed. So why would Christians complain that modernism was being rejected? Both modernism and postmodernism are simply mankind’s attempts to explain reality, neither are perfect, and neither are completely threatening to faith. But Christians were really bothered about aspects of Postmodernism. For example, it went so far as to claim that there is no objective truth.
The second irony one sees particularly in Western Evangelical Christianity today is that a large number of them have accepted and embraced that last tenant of postmodernism. More than almost any other demographic, Evangelicals are apt to deny objective reality, science, education, and they are the most likely group to buy into conspiracy theories. They no longer ask, “what is real?” as they now embrace the claim that no one can know what is real. Instead, they ask, “what best fits my agenda or goals?” How did we get to this point? There are many too many factors and events in the past twenty years to list exhaustively, but I think that there are three key shifts worth highlighting, which I will do in future posts…
For now, it suffices to say, we need to recover the kind of faith that does not deny reality. When we can’t explain things, it does not mean that either our faith is wrong or that the facts are lies, it simply means that we don’t understand yet how facts line up with what we believe. We may never understand everything, and that is ok. That is why we have faith and not mere knowledge. But what we don’t need to “defend” our faith by denying reality.
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