Apology against the Postmodern 

In 1925, who would have thought a revolution was being unleashed by a 24-year-old high school biology teacher at Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tennessee? Yet, this obscure classroom teacher, in an equally obscure town, would define the next 100-years of American history. What became known as the Scopes Trial, would be chiseled into the collective consciousness of an entire nation.

Those, who read the major newspapers that fateful July in ‘25, observed the skewed portrayal of William Jennings Bryan and his Christian followers as downright fools. On the other hand, Clarence Darrow and his secularists were lauded as consummate intellectuals. H. L. Mencken, in dispatches to the New York Times and Baltimore Sun, called the Tennessee residents “yokels,” “morons,” and “hillbillies.”

The coup de grace occurred when Bryan died in his sleep the Sunday after the trial closed. Mencken paraded the profligacy of many, by smugly saying, “We killed the son‑of‑a‑bitch” (PBS, 2021).

How reminiscent of the orgy of wickedness, frolicking around the carcass of Aslan, in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Bryan’s epithet, pontificated by Mencken, should be engraved on the shield of every Christian warrior. Oh, how the devil has such pure, insatiable, and utter contempt for the people of God! Oh, how the lost world loves its own! Oh, how it vilifies the virtuous, mocks the moral, and derides the decent!

More startling than this pivotal point of history, though, is that another cursed philosophy is bubbling out of the Snow Witch’s cauldron. For this barbaric brew, known as postmodernism, promises to surpass all the sinister secularism yet confronted by the church in this decade. Of this revolution, Dennis MacCallum (1996) rightly asserts, “… [Postmodernism] will likely dwarf Darwinism in its impact on every aspect of thought and culture… Popularized forms of postmodern thinking are diffusing into mainstream culture with a speed never imagined in Darwin’s day. If we don’t energetically grapple with postmodernism and learn to communicate in its terms, we can never hope to push back the ideological tide.” (The Death of Truth, pp. 12-13)

Having returned to college to earn a degree in history, I was inundated with postmodernism in the form of multiculturalism. More recently, I sat through a graduate class in educational philosophy, where I was systematically subjected to buckets of postmodern dogma. Talking recently to a local Christian School principal, she confessed to being incessantly bombarded with postmodern orthodoxy, as she attended another graduate class.

These are not merely colorless, shapeless backdrops to be attributed to irrelevance when observing the social mosaic. Neither are they isolated instances of “corn pone” professors with megalomaniac visions of grandeur. This is the latest trend in the philosophy of the damned. It is touted from Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, Stanford, as well as a consensus of other elite schools. Like sheep, other average state universities have already followed their lead, and are systematically redefining their respective disciplines to keep up with the avante garde.

If history is an indicator, postmodernism will rapidly assimilate into Christian colleges and public high schools. Then progressivist theologians will try to contour new theologies to fit the new cultural paradigms. Some will hold to their outdated modernistic theologies (e.g. crises theology, process theology). Other theologians will react to these theological abuses, and once again stick their theological heads in the sand by adopting a language of escapist isolationism. Precious few theologians will diligently defend the historic Christian faith, once for all delivered to the saints.

Unfortunately, many churches will adopt revised language and concepts in order to minister to the felt-needs of the congregation. This will accomplish little more than accommodating postmodern presuppositions. Those who do this will experience surges of church growth. However, rather than seeing this as a natural outgrowth of America’s gutter culture which flocks to any place for a good ear massage, they will see this as God’s blessing.

As a result, many others will parrot the perceived success of their peers and try to find their own language and paradigms that will accommodate the new mindset Some will even go so far as to construct a linguistic synthesis between the contemporary culture and evangelicalism, thus baptizing postmodern presuppositions into the evangelical faith. Once again, the historic Christian faith will be submerged under an obfuscating sea of worldly philosophy.

Dr. Francis Schaeffer did the church a great service by disclosing the monolithic philosophy of secular humanism in the early seventies. Up to that time, the church was flailing at seemingly isolated theological and social hot spots. They could not see the connection between eastern mysticism, atheism, radical socialism, feminism, the generation gap, the Nation of Islam movement, the Peace Movement, and pantheistic ecology.

The church was already reeling from its losses to materialistic evolution and abandonment by the political establishment who banned prayer in public schools. For the average Christian, it appeared the world had gone mad. There were thousands of differing battles needing to be waged.

Previously, the church and the Establishment had been unified. A Judeo-Christian ethos emanated from the White House to the Court House. Science and politics had affirmed Christian presuppositions for many generations.

During the sixties, the Establishment abandoned the Christian faith and adopted a posture of neutrality. Suddenly, the baby boomers were rebelling against the vacuous morality of Americanism. In this fragile, volatile environment, Schaeffer began to show the church the big picture. These were not isolated, independent movements. These were natural extensions of a specific philosophy that had become acculturated in society through the education system. Suddenly, Christian activism and apologetics began to focus its arsenal on the REAL enemy of civilization, secular humanism.

Unfortunately, Schaeffer died years ago. However, the social phenomena and the churches’ reaction to it are frighteningly similar. If he were here, he would acknowledge that it must be understood, that there is a single thread which ties together the various movements of political correctness, multiculturalism, alternative medicine, egalitarianism, pluralism, victimization, and a host of other beliefs. These are mere branches of the dominant philosophy of postmodernism.

To combat postmodernism, one must become aware of the underlying presuppositions by which it operates. At its most rudimentary, postmodernism contends that human beings are cogs in a social machine. The concept of the individual is a contrived category. It does not actually exist. It is a myth, derived from a particular culture. The postmodernist psychologist, George Herbert Mead (2018), once wrote, “Individual consciousness emerges from social interaction: Far from being a precondition of the social act, the social act is the precondition of it (On Social Psychology, pp. 132).” In other words, all individual knowledge is of necessity a social by-product.

Furthermore, not only do postmodernists claim that belief in the individual is academically misguided, but they also blatantly affirm that it is dangerous. John Gill, a postmodernist author, contends that, “in this day of the shrinking world, … individualism is a luxury as practically dangerous as it is theoretically erroneous (Toward a Philosophy of Education, pp. 118).” The political ramifications of this notion in a free republic are bone chilling.

According to postmodernists, we are social beings. All our knowledge comes by way of a “social construct.” As Gill articulates, “The final justification of human knowledge lies not in objectivity, as with critical philosophy, nor in subjectivity, as with existentialism, but in our common and shared activity as knowing agents… it is important to keep in mind that the search for and legitimization of knowledge takes place within a social context, or community (TPE, pp. 56,74).” I am a Christian, according to them, because I was predisposed to believe that way by virtue of my social upbringing.

This is the driving force behind multiculturalism (also called “diversity”). There is no culture that is more righteous or virtuous than any other one. All cultures are equal. As such, they should all be equally represented.

To ensure this, national education institutions are promoting funding tied to the requirement that state schoolteachers take workshops reinforcing what is called, “diversity training” and “culture sensitivity.”

This is not the same as the Christian concept of justice toward all cultures. The Christian belief is based upon the stark realization that all cultures have sinned, and that Christ is the propitiation for all. It is this basis by which we can judge all cultures, even our own. There are cultures that are more right than others, those which conform themselves most to God’s standards. There are inferior cultures, those cultures which engage in more rebellion against His holy commandments.

Postmodernists contend that “progress” is a code-word used by modernists to justify the domination by European culture of other cultures. To be Eurocentric is a postmodernist’s sin. This has been a major catalyst for the historical revisionism becoming so widespread in this country. Great energy is expended by postmodern historians to lay the blame of all social evils at the door of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, males.

 For postmodernism, there is no objective, universal truths which transcend culture. All knowledge is culturally derived. As Gill (1993) contends, “While there may be no set, universally agreed upon answers to many of the questions under consideration, especially in philosophy and religion, each person may indeed should, work toward some tentative conclusion of his or her own (TPE, pp. 76).”

These are unashamedly relativists. They do not care that it creates a necessary tautology (i.e. If all things are relative, then the statement all things are relative is in fact relative). The reason for this is that the law of contradiction is itself a byproduct of a social construct. There is no such thing as objective rationality (that is, reason unaffected by bias). It is a socially constructed myth. So, a can be non-a at the same time and in the same sense.

It is this point that is the most sinister part of postmodernism. It is the first philosophy in Western civilization which claims to throw out the law of contradiction as a test for truth claims. Even Hegel and Kierkegaard did not do this. However, a point of weakness in their philosophy is that they irresistibly use reason to “prove” their case. But, they use it only when it is convenient to try to establish authority for their argument.

Finally, for the postmodernist, thoughts are imprisoned in language. As the famous postmodernist linguist, Michael Polyani, was famous for saying, “We know more than we can say” (Gill, 1993). All languages are mere symbols of what exists and is necessarily inadequate to communicate truth. The Eskimo language has dozens of words to describe snow, most other cultures only have one. For them, language is a prison house.

Imagine trying to explain the color, “blue” to a person blind from birth. They could not go outside their language in either thought or experience. They would have to create words to go outside of their experience. They are imprisoned by their language.

Jacques Derrida, often credited as the Father of Postmodernism, taught that the key to understanding any text was in its “deconstruction.” In other words, since the author had his own biases and agenda for writing his work, it is the readers responsibility to discover what those biases are and read it accordingly. For example, the Constitution was written by white Anglo-Saxon slave holders, so the true message of the framers was to construct a government whereby they might be able to maintain control of the wealth and power of the new nation.

This has huge ramifications for both politics and theology. For if language is a prison house, then those who received revelation from God and wrote the Bible, were incapable of clearly understanding the realities of which God’s word spoke, and they necessarily mixed their own personal biases and social constructs in with the pure word of God. We must then “deconstruct” the Bible to understand what it means.

What should be our response to the postmodernist?

First, we must discover and understand their presuppositions. The key notions of bias, social construct, deconstructionism, multiculturalism, and the like, must be clearly understood for what they are. They are branches of the philosophy of postmodernism.

Next, we must clarify those presuppositions in the minds of our hearers. If all cultures are equal, then they must not criticize Hitler for the holocaust. They must not condemn the practice of the clitorectomy (female circumcision) of teenage girls by African tribes. They must neither condemn the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, nor the white slave trade in Islamabad. For, all cultures are equal, and there is no truth that transcends it.

Having exposed the emotive attachment to their presuppositions (because beginning with logic will not work), we carefully move our hearers to the point of tension. If all knowledge is socially derived, then the knowledge that all knowledge is socially derived, is in fact, socially derived. Consequently, it carries no more moral sway than any other philosophy.

Finally, we supply the Christian alternative when we see a new receptiveness forming. We pray for a response, and trust that the God of all mercy will grant them saving faith.

 

Sources:

 

Gill, J. H. (1993). Learning to learn: Toward a philosophy of education. Humanities Press International.

MacCallum, D. (1996). The death of truth: Responding to multiculturalism, the rejection to reason and the new postmodern diversity. Baker Publishing.

Mead, G. H. (2018). On social psychology. University of Chicago Press.

Public Broadcasting System (PBS). (2021). Monkey Trial. American Experience. https://www.shoppbs.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/monkeytrial/peopleevents/p_mencken.htm