Proverbs 28:26:
Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool, but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered
"You can change your beliefs so they empower your dreams and desires. Create a strong belief in yourself and what you want." - Marcia Wieder
Either Proverbs is wrong and Marcia is right, or its the other way around, but they cannot both be right. If you are committed to postmodernism, you might consider both of them right, in order to either avoid conflict or further your cause. In either case, it is all boiled down to power struggles. Postmodernism is such a dry term and bantered around like it was a satellite channel or an expensive magazine periodical. In fact, instead of treating it like I did scientific naturalism, I'll just stick with the familiar and see if I can make my point. But we are all taking it in and breathing it out, so my goal is to at least point it out, what it means, and then you can agree or disagree.
Before I do, I have to summarize where we are with modern science. All modern science is guided by Principle of Verification and Falsification. But that has to exclude an enormous portion of life, including both principles, since they fail their own test. It leads to a reductionism that sometimes also leads to dehumanization. When human beings are reduced to animals, minds to brains, etc., the value is drained and a door is opened to alot of very scary stuff. But because the philosophy that underguirds modern science is too restrictive to live out, in addition to being self refuting, hardly any scientifically minded people live it out too consistently, with few exceptional cases like B.F. Skinner, as one example.
Most others turn to postmodernism to escape this reductionism without having to consider Jesus Christ's Gospel. In some cases, Christians turn to postmodernism, as a means to avoid rejection as well as respond against abusive Christians. In fact, because of postmodernisms advent into alot of the church, an entire political reshaping of our country is taking place as I type this. It is basically a return to the democratic party and liberalism but is touted as a change we have never experienced. I am very skeptical, but time will tell.
Postmodernism has actually provided some good things in that it has fought against scientific reductionism and tried to induce a value system of some sort, as a stop gap means of keeping us all civil and happy. Politically, it has tried to keep other people from manipulating and forcing themselves onto others. Literararily, it has tried to encourage and empower people to think and apply rather than to blindly submit without question. Artistically, it has given us some great music, architecture and cinema...alot of which I am a huge junkie. But just because postmodernism has good points, the bad far outweigh the good. Naziism provided a strong education system, employment and national pride, but should anyone conclude it was anything other than a horrific political movement? Of course not! That is, unless you are a consistent moral relativist, in which case, who's to say?
What Does It Mean?
Postmodernism is hard to define because there are so many offshoots, tributaries and different academic disciplines that fall under it. A good way to look at it is this: postmodernism believes:
1) If there is a reality out there, we can't get to it because of our bias.
2) Rationality is simply sentences. Where there is no language, there is no truth.
3) Truth is relative to other truths in your social setting. So long as it coheres to them, it is true.
4) Like modern science, there are no universals, like redness, roundness.
5) If there is a "reality" it is really reduced to a social construct that can be deconstructed.
6) There are no absolute truths, only relative truths, based on social considerations.
7) Scientific naturalism is correct, in that the only actual knowledge is emperical knowledge.
8) By changing language, individuals, groups, societies can be empowered.
I am sure alot of these things have a ring of familiarity or are even things we hold dear. But they are false. Not only that, by holding to them, we throw out the baby with the bathwater and exchange fears of what we want to avoid with greater evils that were unintended. Alot of the 20th century is a historical case in point.
Regarding personal bias and getting to reality: postmodern folks deny that it is possible for a person to make an objective judgement discerning between good and bad information. Every decision is hopelessly clouded by personal bias and restrictions of sense perception that keeps us from ever getting to 'the thing in itself'. Postmodernists get confused between psychological objectivity (being emotionally committed to something) and rational objectivity (being able to objectively discern something). You can be psychologically biased and make an objectively rational decision. It's usually called making a decision even though you may not like it. Once more, psychological objectivity isn't necessarily a good thing either. How good would it be to maintain psychological objectivity for Naziism or cancer? Of course it wouldn't be good at all. Can you make objective decisions without psychological objectivity? You sure can, despite postmodern theory. That means reality is out there and we can know something about it, despite any bias, and the fact that sometimes we do that begrudglingly is a sign that psychological bias isn't too high a wall to scale.
Postmodernists also are big into language....so much that truth is really language...sentences, actually. They believe that truth is comprised of sentences that obey arbitrary cultural linguistic rules. What that means is that unless someone speaks it, writes it or reads it, there is no such thing as truth. What's wrong with this? Can you hold to a truth or fact in your mind without associating language with it? Sure you can. I could give several examples. First of all, when you show an apple to a baby, then point to a picture of an apple in a book, that baby associates the thing with the picture, absent language. It isn't an apple because the baby said it was....the baby can't speak any language yet, but she can know what an apple is. Truth is not bound by language.
They also believe that if you want to talk about truth, the only way you can, in meaningful terms, is in the context of how well one belief or proposition coheres with all other beliefs or propositions in your social context. For example, if you are a Buddhist and believe that there is no soul, that would cohere to other Buddhist believes about suffering, self discipline as defined by the Eight Fold Path, etc. It would cohere and since it coheres, it would be true....for you. However, it would not cohere for a Christian since Christians beliefs would not cohere to a 'no soul' theory and so it wouldn't be true for them. But there is a problem with coherence theory for truth...if all truth is defined by how well it coheres with my other beliefs, how can one know if the coherence theory of truth is true? Especially, how can it be true if it doesn't cohere to my other core beliefs and does it end up trying to be a transcendent, absolute truth above all other belief systems, against basic postmodern principles? You see how faulty coherence as a primary truth test becomes? You can believe something false and it will cohere with other beliefs. For example, say John believes he is a Ninja Turtle and that he further believes that everyone who says he is not is conspiring against him. John would have consistent beliefs that were false. Coherence just doesn't work as a truth test.
They also reject universals. They hold to what is known as nominalism or extreme nominalism. All that means is that they believe there is really no such thing as redness, for example. They believe that what we call 'redness' is having something appear to us a certain way we describe with a word 'red' and nothing more. They also reject essentialism. Essentialism means that something is essentially what it is, regardless of how many changes it goes through. Francis Magnolia Nowlin was the same person in 1918 as she was in 1996 as my grandmother, even though she aged, her hair color changed, all her cells had been replaced many times over, etc. Postmodernists would reject essentialism and say that my idea of Francis Magnolia Nowlin was defined in my mind and that as she changed, there was no surviving 'essence' of that woman. It is basic and self evident that substances, like self and other people, endure through change. It makes no sense and goes against basic understanding to reject essentialism. But this is a postmodern commitment.
They believe that reality is reduced to a social construction. Your reality as an American Democrat is different from the reality from a Sudanese farmer. It's true that these two examples have vastly different cultures, experiences and backgrounds. However, the 24 hour day, changing weather, birth, death, aspirations, etc., are common and transcend all local experiences, cultures and backgrounds. There is an over-arching reality that contains us all and it is also self evident, contrary to the belief of social construction of reality. There are absolute truths, despite postmodern relativism, because simply asserting there are no absolute truths is itself an absolute, universal truth. I can't really see why I need to address that much further because it is so self evident. If someone ever tells you there is no absolute truth, ask them if they are absolutely sure. But make sure you buy their lunch for them, because they may get agitated. Sometimes truth hurts.
They side with scientific naturalism in that the only possible experts out there are those that deal with emperical knowledge. You can have experts on the topic of physics, biology or chemistry. But there can be no experts on God, theology, morality, politics, etc. That's because all those things are not based on emperical knowledge. That is why Oprah can be just as much of an expert on Jesus' teachings as Louis Berkoff. Peter Jennings can provide just as much of a detailed trace of the historical Jesus as the Apostle John. It's also why political programs are like a food fight. It's not a matter of facts and knowledge, but opinion and perception of things that cannot be emperically verified or falsified.
The last item is something I will deal with in the next section, because all these philosophical ideas and beliefs the postmodernist accepts and proposes is, to a great measure, to obtain to the last item, self empowerment and/or the goal to keep other dominant individuals or groups from manipulating or dominating non-dominant groups. There is an ethic to it, but without a proper grounding in truth and knowledge, it will end up in chaos. With the empowerment movement in this country, it can already be seen.
What it looks like in your life...
If you try to consistently live as if objective truth about reality was unattainable, then what is left is raw power. Power in politics, power in vocation, power in...everything. It is winner take all. However, the postmodern goal is to make sure people don't use language and societal constructs to run over anybody and that through changing language and subsequently our thinking, we can empower the weak and protect them from the strong. But that hasn't happened. It has turned all of life into the Orange Bowl. You end up with billions of vested interests competing in the market place of ideas, each one vying to overturn the prevailing view. You have postmodern thinkers who deny dichotomous thinking (right/wrong, good/bad, protagonist/antagonist) living out dichotomous strategies of claiming power and control. You have Republicans dodging truth to place themselves in a better light. You have Democrats dodging the truth and placing Republicans in the worst possible light. In the end, what matters is who wins. Whoever wins is right and whoever loses is wrong.
The idea of protecting those who can't protect themselves, without realizing who is doing the protecting, turns into granular bedlem and as the pressure of the contest and the pressure of reality begins to tighten, the gloves come off and pretty soon, more damage is caused than what was originally the concern. That's because Jesus was absolutely correct about the human heart:
"But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person." Matthew 15:18-20
What naturally comes out of the human heart? Place human beings under extreme pressure and you can easily tell our nature. It isn't to protect the weak, extole the good and empower the exploited. It's to protect our own butts and how hard and nasty we protect ourselves depends on the pressure placed on us. All the while, we try to do it as if we were innocent and well-meaning people, which means we're habitual liars as well. We recognize what is right and good and even pretend to desire it for others as well as ourselves. However, once the warp and woof of reality set in, we fall off the wagon and begin to excuse ourselves. Postmodernism begins by breaking all its own rules and making sweeping generalizations about human nature....that end up clashing with the evidence.
So, you try to empower the weak to offset the exploiter, and all the sudden, it is you who are the exploiter. You want to end abusive manipulation of the system, by abusively manipulating it yourself. You want to end the reign of tyrants by becoming the worst of their kind. You wish to rescue the company, nation or community from what is considered abusive neglect only to install an abusive neglect of your own and anyone who gets in the way will be demonized. The intentions may have been initially noble ones. But it just never turns out that way, because human nature is not conducive to achiveing those goals, without each individual having a radical change in within their hearts. Only God can do that. No social construct, deconstructed narrative or politically correct legislation can make a dent.
In short, postmodernism seems to have figured out the problem of scientific naturalism, but is far from being a sufficient answer to the problem scientific naturalism brings about (dispassionate reductionism). In fact, it ends up exascurbating it, rather than resolving it. Recognizing what ought to be and our inability to naturally achieve it should cause us a problem...a rather big problem. Only biblical Christianity can provide sufficient answers to the problems postmodernism unwittingly brings about. It provides an answer up against the self-refuting and restrictiveness of scientific naturalism. It also provides condemnation for the original abuses within historical Christendom that were condemned by both scientific naturalists and postmodernists. It is simply left untried because it requires relinquishing autonomy, and we would rather face hell than give that up.
Postmodernism and Emergent/Emerging Church
Because of the recent popularity and political impact, I want to say something about postmodernism within the church. Since 2000, the emergent/emerging church has risen to great success within evangelical Christendom. It's unofficial titular head, Brian McLaren has taken the lead in writing his trilogy prodding a deconstruction and reconstruction of biblical Christianity. Brian McLaren is no philosopher, but has a precommitment to postmodern thought. In his books, McLaren asks Christians to abandon dichotomous thinking, even to the point of no longer distinguishing between absolute truth and relativism, which is impossible to do even if it is easy to write. Needless to say, his ideas are not that great. But there is something in McLaren's work that seems to 'emerge' that is relavent to the emergent/emerging church in general...its precommitment to politics and power as its essential message, with reconstructed biblical Christianity as an aid to that political idealogy.
Because the religious right has been associated with the Republican Party, the emergent/emerging church has taken great effort to disassociate the church with the party. I am actually glad to see that. But what concerns me is the commitment to postmodern ideas, which is manifest in the emergent/emerging church's bottom line, which is political power. Power, because of an abandonment of objective truth, is McLaren's gospel, which is no gospel at all. He defines Jesus as a political liberator, which he certainly was not...He was much more...making politics in general a side bar to what His real purpose is. But this is nothing new. It is the picture painted of Jesus by Liberation Theology, which has Marxist roots. Liberation Theology is interested, primarily, with political empowerment of minorities and exploited peoples, and using Jesus, rather incidentally, as the vehicle of choice to help obtain that political power. Truth, particularly the truth of the Gospel, is not even incidental, but an arbitrary vehicle.
I hope the reader can understand where I am going with this. When it comes to style of worship or the casual encouragement of many of these churches, I am in full favor. I am actually a proponent of localized worship styles, individuality in preaching and to be as comfortable in church as possible. The idea of starched shirts and hard pews is sort of sadistic to me. I also like the disdain of marrying politics to Jesus. Politics are the matters of men and pass away through time. Jesus' Kingdom reigns forever. Rather, my problem is the content of the message and the philosophical foundations that underguird it. Jesus is a person and His Gospel is a personal relationship with that person, living in His Kingdom now, through accepting His finished work on the cross, done on behalf of those who accept that work and Him personally. Politics is incidental to that, not the foundation and goal behind it. When you get that backwards, you are no longer a follower of Christ but a follower of man. And we can see history littered with those results.
Because of their recent power, I attribute the outcome of the election to their work. They will be the reason the religious right has lost alot of steam. Maybe that is a good thing. The religious right tended to worship conservative politics over Jesus, just as the emergent/emerging church has worshiped liberal politics over Jesus. They have taken all the worst aspects of conservative Christianity, adopted it for themselves, to fight conservative Christianity and have exchanged the frying pan for fire. There has never been a political season more charged with contentless language. Nothing is defined and presentation is all that matters. We will see if reseating liberal politics in power is really a change that is unfamiliar to the people of the United States, rather than just another stab at power lost in 1980. Time will tell. But because of the postmodern state of mind, we can see power as the remaining factor when the baby and the bathwater are thrown out.
In Part 4, I will conclude with this series by presenting the Biblical foundation as not the best alternative to scientific naturalism and postmodernism, but the only alternative that exists.
Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool, but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered
"You can change your beliefs so they empower your dreams and desires. Create a strong belief in yourself and what you want." - Marcia Wieder
Either Proverbs is wrong and Marcia is right, or its the other way around, but they cannot both be right. If you are committed to postmodernism, you might consider both of them right, in order to either avoid conflict or further your cause. In either case, it is all boiled down to power struggles. Postmodernism is such a dry term and bantered around like it was a satellite channel or an expensive magazine periodical. In fact, instead of treating it like I did scientific naturalism, I'll just stick with the familiar and see if I can make my point. But we are all taking it in and breathing it out, so my goal is to at least point it out, what it means, and then you can agree or disagree.
Before I do, I have to summarize where we are with modern science. All modern science is guided by Principle of Verification and Falsification. But that has to exclude an enormous portion of life, including both principles, since they fail their own test. It leads to a reductionism that sometimes also leads to dehumanization. When human beings are reduced to animals, minds to brains, etc., the value is drained and a door is opened to alot of very scary stuff. But because the philosophy that underguirds modern science is too restrictive to live out, in addition to being self refuting, hardly any scientifically minded people live it out too consistently, with few exceptional cases like B.F. Skinner, as one example.
Most others turn to postmodernism to escape this reductionism without having to consider Jesus Christ's Gospel. In some cases, Christians turn to postmodernism, as a means to avoid rejection as well as respond against abusive Christians. In fact, because of postmodernisms advent into alot of the church, an entire political reshaping of our country is taking place as I type this. It is basically a return to the democratic party and liberalism but is touted as a change we have never experienced. I am very skeptical, but time will tell.
Postmodernism has actually provided some good things in that it has fought against scientific reductionism and tried to induce a value system of some sort, as a stop gap means of keeping us all civil and happy. Politically, it has tried to keep other people from manipulating and forcing themselves onto others. Literararily, it has tried to encourage and empower people to think and apply rather than to blindly submit without question. Artistically, it has given us some great music, architecture and cinema...alot of which I am a huge junkie. But just because postmodernism has good points, the bad far outweigh the good. Naziism provided a strong education system, employment and national pride, but should anyone conclude it was anything other than a horrific political movement? Of course not! That is, unless you are a consistent moral relativist, in which case, who's to say?
What Does It Mean?
Postmodernism is hard to define because there are so many offshoots, tributaries and different academic disciplines that fall under it. A good way to look at it is this: postmodernism believes:
1) If there is a reality out there, we can't get to it because of our bias.
2) Rationality is simply sentences. Where there is no language, there is no truth.
3) Truth is relative to other truths in your social setting. So long as it coheres to them, it is true.
4) Like modern science, there are no universals, like redness, roundness.
5) If there is a "reality" it is really reduced to a social construct that can be deconstructed.
6) There are no absolute truths, only relative truths, based on social considerations.
7) Scientific naturalism is correct, in that the only actual knowledge is emperical knowledge.
8) By changing language, individuals, groups, societies can be empowered.
I am sure alot of these things have a ring of familiarity or are even things we hold dear. But they are false. Not only that, by holding to them, we throw out the baby with the bathwater and exchange fears of what we want to avoid with greater evils that were unintended. Alot of the 20th century is a historical case in point.
Regarding personal bias and getting to reality: postmodern folks deny that it is possible for a person to make an objective judgement discerning between good and bad information. Every decision is hopelessly clouded by personal bias and restrictions of sense perception that keeps us from ever getting to 'the thing in itself'. Postmodernists get confused between psychological objectivity (being emotionally committed to something) and rational objectivity (being able to objectively discern something). You can be psychologically biased and make an objectively rational decision. It's usually called making a decision even though you may not like it. Once more, psychological objectivity isn't necessarily a good thing either. How good would it be to maintain psychological objectivity for Naziism or cancer? Of course it wouldn't be good at all. Can you make objective decisions without psychological objectivity? You sure can, despite postmodern theory. That means reality is out there and we can know something about it, despite any bias, and the fact that sometimes we do that begrudglingly is a sign that psychological bias isn't too high a wall to scale.
Postmodernists also are big into language....so much that truth is really language...sentences, actually. They believe that truth is comprised of sentences that obey arbitrary cultural linguistic rules. What that means is that unless someone speaks it, writes it or reads it, there is no such thing as truth. What's wrong with this? Can you hold to a truth or fact in your mind without associating language with it? Sure you can. I could give several examples. First of all, when you show an apple to a baby, then point to a picture of an apple in a book, that baby associates the thing with the picture, absent language. It isn't an apple because the baby said it was....the baby can't speak any language yet, but she can know what an apple is. Truth is not bound by language.
They also believe that if you want to talk about truth, the only way you can, in meaningful terms, is in the context of how well one belief or proposition coheres with all other beliefs or propositions in your social context. For example, if you are a Buddhist and believe that there is no soul, that would cohere to other Buddhist believes about suffering, self discipline as defined by the Eight Fold Path, etc. It would cohere and since it coheres, it would be true....for you. However, it would not cohere for a Christian since Christians beliefs would not cohere to a 'no soul' theory and so it wouldn't be true for them. But there is a problem with coherence theory for truth...if all truth is defined by how well it coheres with my other beliefs, how can one know if the coherence theory of truth is true? Especially, how can it be true if it doesn't cohere to my other core beliefs and does it end up trying to be a transcendent, absolute truth above all other belief systems, against basic postmodern principles? You see how faulty coherence as a primary truth test becomes? You can believe something false and it will cohere with other beliefs. For example, say John believes he is a Ninja Turtle and that he further believes that everyone who says he is not is conspiring against him. John would have consistent beliefs that were false. Coherence just doesn't work as a truth test.
They also reject universals. They hold to what is known as nominalism or extreme nominalism. All that means is that they believe there is really no such thing as redness, for example. They believe that what we call 'redness' is having something appear to us a certain way we describe with a word 'red' and nothing more. They also reject essentialism. Essentialism means that something is essentially what it is, regardless of how many changes it goes through. Francis Magnolia Nowlin was the same person in 1918 as she was in 1996 as my grandmother, even though she aged, her hair color changed, all her cells had been replaced many times over, etc. Postmodernists would reject essentialism and say that my idea of Francis Magnolia Nowlin was defined in my mind and that as she changed, there was no surviving 'essence' of that woman. It is basic and self evident that substances, like self and other people, endure through change. It makes no sense and goes against basic understanding to reject essentialism. But this is a postmodern commitment.
They believe that reality is reduced to a social construction. Your reality as an American Democrat is different from the reality from a Sudanese farmer. It's true that these two examples have vastly different cultures, experiences and backgrounds. However, the 24 hour day, changing weather, birth, death, aspirations, etc., are common and transcend all local experiences, cultures and backgrounds. There is an over-arching reality that contains us all and it is also self evident, contrary to the belief of social construction of reality. There are absolute truths, despite postmodern relativism, because simply asserting there are no absolute truths is itself an absolute, universal truth. I can't really see why I need to address that much further because it is so self evident. If someone ever tells you there is no absolute truth, ask them if they are absolutely sure. But make sure you buy their lunch for them, because they may get agitated. Sometimes truth hurts.
They side with scientific naturalism in that the only possible experts out there are those that deal with emperical knowledge. You can have experts on the topic of physics, biology or chemistry. But there can be no experts on God, theology, morality, politics, etc. That's because all those things are not based on emperical knowledge. That is why Oprah can be just as much of an expert on Jesus' teachings as Louis Berkoff. Peter Jennings can provide just as much of a detailed trace of the historical Jesus as the Apostle John. It's also why political programs are like a food fight. It's not a matter of facts and knowledge, but opinion and perception of things that cannot be emperically verified or falsified.
The last item is something I will deal with in the next section, because all these philosophical ideas and beliefs the postmodernist accepts and proposes is, to a great measure, to obtain to the last item, self empowerment and/or the goal to keep other dominant individuals or groups from manipulating or dominating non-dominant groups. There is an ethic to it, but without a proper grounding in truth and knowledge, it will end up in chaos. With the empowerment movement in this country, it can already be seen.
What it looks like in your life...
If you try to consistently live as if objective truth about reality was unattainable, then what is left is raw power. Power in politics, power in vocation, power in...everything. It is winner take all. However, the postmodern goal is to make sure people don't use language and societal constructs to run over anybody and that through changing language and subsequently our thinking, we can empower the weak and protect them from the strong. But that hasn't happened. It has turned all of life into the Orange Bowl. You end up with billions of vested interests competing in the market place of ideas, each one vying to overturn the prevailing view. You have postmodern thinkers who deny dichotomous thinking (right/wrong, good/bad, protagonist/antagonist) living out dichotomous strategies of claiming power and control. You have Republicans dodging truth to place themselves in a better light. You have Democrats dodging the truth and placing Republicans in the worst possible light. In the end, what matters is who wins. Whoever wins is right and whoever loses is wrong.
The idea of protecting those who can't protect themselves, without realizing who is doing the protecting, turns into granular bedlem and as the pressure of the contest and the pressure of reality begins to tighten, the gloves come off and pretty soon, more damage is caused than what was originally the concern. That's because Jesus was absolutely correct about the human heart:
"But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person." Matthew 15:18-20
What naturally comes out of the human heart? Place human beings under extreme pressure and you can easily tell our nature. It isn't to protect the weak, extole the good and empower the exploited. It's to protect our own butts and how hard and nasty we protect ourselves depends on the pressure placed on us. All the while, we try to do it as if we were innocent and well-meaning people, which means we're habitual liars as well. We recognize what is right and good and even pretend to desire it for others as well as ourselves. However, once the warp and woof of reality set in, we fall off the wagon and begin to excuse ourselves. Postmodernism begins by breaking all its own rules and making sweeping generalizations about human nature....that end up clashing with the evidence.
So, you try to empower the weak to offset the exploiter, and all the sudden, it is you who are the exploiter. You want to end abusive manipulation of the system, by abusively manipulating it yourself. You want to end the reign of tyrants by becoming the worst of their kind. You wish to rescue the company, nation or community from what is considered abusive neglect only to install an abusive neglect of your own and anyone who gets in the way will be demonized. The intentions may have been initially noble ones. But it just never turns out that way, because human nature is not conducive to achiveing those goals, without each individual having a radical change in within their hearts. Only God can do that. No social construct, deconstructed narrative or politically correct legislation can make a dent.
In short, postmodernism seems to have figured out the problem of scientific naturalism, but is far from being a sufficient answer to the problem scientific naturalism brings about (dispassionate reductionism). In fact, it ends up exascurbating it, rather than resolving it. Recognizing what ought to be and our inability to naturally achieve it should cause us a problem...a rather big problem. Only biblical Christianity can provide sufficient answers to the problems postmodernism unwittingly brings about. It provides an answer up against the self-refuting and restrictiveness of scientific naturalism. It also provides condemnation for the original abuses within historical Christendom that were condemned by both scientific naturalists and postmodernists. It is simply left untried because it requires relinquishing autonomy, and we would rather face hell than give that up.
Postmodernism and Emergent/Emerging Church
Because of the recent popularity and political impact, I want to say something about postmodernism within the church. Since 2000, the emergent/emerging church has risen to great success within evangelical Christendom. It's unofficial titular head, Brian McLaren has taken the lead in writing his trilogy prodding a deconstruction and reconstruction of biblical Christianity. Brian McLaren is no philosopher, but has a precommitment to postmodern thought. In his books, McLaren asks Christians to abandon dichotomous thinking, even to the point of no longer distinguishing between absolute truth and relativism, which is impossible to do even if it is easy to write. Needless to say, his ideas are not that great. But there is something in McLaren's work that seems to 'emerge' that is relavent to the emergent/emerging church in general...its precommitment to politics and power as its essential message, with reconstructed biblical Christianity as an aid to that political idealogy.
Because the religious right has been associated with the Republican Party, the emergent/emerging church has taken great effort to disassociate the church with the party. I am actually glad to see that. But what concerns me is the commitment to postmodern ideas, which is manifest in the emergent/emerging church's bottom line, which is political power. Power, because of an abandonment of objective truth, is McLaren's gospel, which is no gospel at all. He defines Jesus as a political liberator, which he certainly was not...He was much more...making politics in general a side bar to what His real purpose is. But this is nothing new. It is the picture painted of Jesus by Liberation Theology, which has Marxist roots. Liberation Theology is interested, primarily, with political empowerment of minorities and exploited peoples, and using Jesus, rather incidentally, as the vehicle of choice to help obtain that political power. Truth, particularly the truth of the Gospel, is not even incidental, but an arbitrary vehicle.
I hope the reader can understand where I am going with this. When it comes to style of worship or the casual encouragement of many of these churches, I am in full favor. I am actually a proponent of localized worship styles, individuality in preaching and to be as comfortable in church as possible. The idea of starched shirts and hard pews is sort of sadistic to me. I also like the disdain of marrying politics to Jesus. Politics are the matters of men and pass away through time. Jesus' Kingdom reigns forever. Rather, my problem is the content of the message and the philosophical foundations that underguird it. Jesus is a person and His Gospel is a personal relationship with that person, living in His Kingdom now, through accepting His finished work on the cross, done on behalf of those who accept that work and Him personally. Politics is incidental to that, not the foundation and goal behind it. When you get that backwards, you are no longer a follower of Christ but a follower of man. And we can see history littered with those results.
Because of their recent power, I attribute the outcome of the election to their work. They will be the reason the religious right has lost alot of steam. Maybe that is a good thing. The religious right tended to worship conservative politics over Jesus, just as the emergent/emerging church has worshiped liberal politics over Jesus. They have taken all the worst aspects of conservative Christianity, adopted it for themselves, to fight conservative Christianity and have exchanged the frying pan for fire. There has never been a political season more charged with contentless language. Nothing is defined and presentation is all that matters. We will see if reseating liberal politics in power is really a change that is unfamiliar to the people of the United States, rather than just another stab at power lost in 1980. Time will tell. But because of the postmodern state of mind, we can see power as the remaining factor when the baby and the bathwater are thrown out.
In Part 4, I will conclude with this series by presenting the Biblical foundation as not the best alternative to scientific naturalism and postmodernism, but the only alternative that exists.
