Key Values and Beliefs of Postmodernism - Bibliography

Bibliography


• Hahn, Todd & David Verhaagen. GenXers after God. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998.

• Rainer, Thom S. Bridger Generation, The. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1997.

• Sweet, Leonard. Post-modern Pilgrims. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 2000.

• Veith, Gene Edward. Postmodern Times. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994.

Key Values and Beliefs of Postmodernism - part 5, Church's Response

The Church’s Response

In trying to understand how the church can communicate in a relevant way with postmodern thinkers, Leonard Sweet evaluates the amazing success of the TV show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. “…The success of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is that, unlike other game shows, it has successfully transitioned from rational to experiential, from representative to participatory, from word based to image driven, and from individual to connecting the individual and the communal” (xxi). The church must learn to communicate the truth not just rationally, but experientially. The church must call postmodernists to participate with the truth beyond linguistic understanding into the realm of the imagination. Finally, the church must communicate the truth of the body of Christ, the worship community.


The Rational, Experiential Truth

Christian truth has never been a concept or idea, but a person. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” said Jesus (John 14:6). Postmodernists will never accept the gospel as a conceptual, authoritative truth. Their minds have been enslaved by the thought, by the belief, that there is no such thing. Christians will have as much success along this track as postmoderns would if they were trying to convince us that life on earth originated from space aliens. The concept of space aliens creating life on earth is as contrary to the Christian worldview as the idea of ultimate truth is to the postmoderns. “It is hard to witness to truth to people who believe that truth is relative. It is hard to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to people who believe that, since morality is relative, they have no sins to forgive” (Veith 16).

Yet postmoderns believe wholeheartedly in little, personal truths. In fact, they cannot disbelieve in personal stories of truth without undermining their own belief systems. There is no greater collection of personal encounters with truth than the Bible. It is filled with individuals coming to the realization of truth in their own lives. The woman at the well discovered a man who told her everything she ever did. “Could this be the Christ?” she asked (John 4:29). Thomas bowed before the resurrected Christ and proclaimed, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). Saul bowed on the road to Damascus before the blinding light and asked, “Who are you, Lord?” (Acts 9:5).

As we introduce postmoderns to the historical Jesus, the Jesus of the gospels, Jesus the storyteller, we introduce them to the truth. As we earnestly pray for our postmodern friends, the Holy Spirit of truth will begin moving in and around them. And as they experience the truth for themselves, not only vicariously through the stories of Jesus, but personally through their own lives, they will eventually arrive at the point where their truth encounters with Jesus will far outnumber all of their other “truth encounters” with other beliefs, and they will then be open to the idea of ultimate truth. Todd Hahn and David Verhaagen call this “narrative evangelism” (26)


The Church as a Body

Not only do postmodernists need to encounter the person of Jesus Christ in the scripture, but they also need to encounter him within his body, the church. Perhaps more than any other need in their lives, the gospel can speak to the loneliness and isolation that so may Busters and Bridgers feel. At a time when families and communities and whole societies seem to be falling apart, or worse tearing each other apart, the church, the body of Christ, can model a wholesome, diverse, supportive family. “The Church was a different kind of community, neither unified in an autonomous humanism like the Tower-builders [of Babel] 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, but unified in love for each other and faith in Jesus Christ” (Veith 22).

For many congregations, productive ministry will require many changes. Our churches will have to be more representative of families than organizations. Service, communication, fellowship, meeting needs, giving, all these aspects of corporate life together will have to become more of the norm. We will have to move out of our modernist comfort zones in order to corporately reach postmoderns. The good news is that we need to do this anyway, for our own sakes. We need to more fully be an Acts 2:42-47 church. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”


The Truth as a Worldview

Finally, we need to get the truth of the gospel out into the marketplace where postmoderns can see it. Postmodernists believe what they believe because they saw the problems unsolved by modern solutions. As we have seen, postmodern answers don’t effectively address them either. The gospel, however, does. The answer to poverty is not socialism, but work and generosity. The answer to conflict is not destruction of beliefs, but respectful communication and seeking after the truth. The solution of deteriorating families is not abandonment, but sacrificial servanthood. As we are able to present Biblical ideas and models as solutions to real problems, as we are able to creatively, visually, and imaginatively place God’s plan alongside the failed plans of postmodernism, we will eventually get a hearing, and the Christian metanarrative will be embraced as the truth.

Francis Schaeffer named this process “worldview criticism.” He seeks to look within worldviews, both Christian and non-Christian, to look at the underlying assumptions about truth, and then to examine how these underlying assumptions will play out in everyday life. Invariably the contradictions inherent within postmodernism (or any other non-Christian worldview) will surface. This requires Christians, however, to have enough faith to leave their propositionally defined worldviews, step into a non-Christian worldview (for a season), and come to understand it well enough to speak form within it. In the same way that Christ had to leave Heaven and submit himself to the limits of manhood, we must be willing to step out of our understandings of truth and submit ourselves to the limits of postmodern ideas. Then postmodernists will be able to know us, understand us, believe us, and respond to the Truth that lives within us.

Key Values and Beliefs of Postmodernism - part 4, Results

The Results of Postmodernism

As the members of the Buster and Bridger generations viewed the modern period, they saw that communications and globalism and capitalism and democracy and the United Nations, all of these modern structures had been unable to bring about peace between peoples and nations. None had been able bring about the unity of truth and worldview that each claimed to have. Postmodernists adopted a new strategy for peace and understanding, relative existentialism, pluralism, and multiculturalism. The results have not been the ones that postmodernists desired.


Fragmentation of Families

As we noted above, the nuclear family has undergone stresses and fractures that it has never seen before. Postmodernism has aggravated the problem even more. All societal values toward marriage are being attacked. Cohabitation, children born to unmarried mothers, the rise of the gay marriage movement, and divorce all contribute to an appalling lack of commitment to or in marriage relationships, and an alarming number of children growing up in constantly changing homes with constantly changing or even missing parental role models. When children and parents are living together under one roof, the relativistic existentialism of postmodernism fractures the moral fabric of the family and brings the culture war into the living room. Parents can’t legitimately “force their beliefs” on their children, who rebel and embrace all kinds of deviant behavior like alcohol, drugs, premarital sex, pornography, bi- and homosexuality, Satanism, and all the subsequent consequences like teenage pregnancy, truancy, criminality, violence, and addiction, just to name a few.

Leonard Sweet addresses one example of the battle for the family. “One of the most frightening statistics for the future is the decline of touching in family settings. In USAmerica, parents touch their kids only about two times per hour on average. In France, parents touch their kids six times per hour” (14). He notes that “The old adage, ‘Seeing is believing,’ actually began as an endorsement of touch as a carrier of truth: ‘Seeing is believing, but feeling’s the truth’” (15). He goes on to say that “…the more touch-starved the culture, the more touch crimes we can expect. The statistics are bearing this out. In the words of one abused German patient, ‘The absence of loving touch and the abundance of sadistic touch has badly wounded me. Man does not live by breath alone’” (15).


Fragmentation of Society

This breakdown of values extends far beyond the family out into society. Sexual mores, questions of the value of life, social norms on drugs and tobacco, even questions on environmental stewardship rocket through our societal conversations, polarizing all kinds of special interest groups and population segments. “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” (Veith 21). We find the tolerance that postmodernists hoped to create degenerating into isolation of one group from another. With no motivation to or even legitimizing of seeking the truth, each segment of society has settled into its own truth, and when conflict over finite resources with another segment arises, we all want the other group to defer to our virtual reality. Consequently, “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…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 frames of reference by which to communicate…” (Veith xi). All these differing values produce this huge, paradoxical schism in our culture. For example, Rainer notes that “The bridgers of the 21st century may very well be the generation of paradox in racial issues. Among the 72,000,000 persons in this generation, we will likely find the greatest level of racial tolerance our nation has ever known and the most intense bigotry a generation has produced in a century” (11).


Political Fragmentation

With all of this societal conflict, public decision-making under postmodernism begins to fragment as well. The competing of all the special interest groups spills over into an increasingly polarized electorate. The Presidential election of 2000 is a classic example, resulting in the biggest Constitutional crisis the United States have faced since the question of slavery and the Civil War. The electoral margin hinged on only a few thousand votes in nearly 10 states, and less than 1,000 in the political battleground of Florida. The now famous red and blue map, a county by county breakdown of the entire country, graphically illustrates the polarization of the electorate, with urban, densely populated areas of the Northeast and Pacific Coast voting overwhelmingly for Al Gore, and the rural, Western, Midwest, Southern regions voting overwhelmingly for George Bush.

Not only do issues divide the population segments of postmodern America, but methodology also. “Truth is not the issue. The issue is power. The new models ‘empower’ groups formerly excluded. Scholarly debate proceeds not so much by rational argument or the amassing of objective evidence, but by rhetoric (which scheme advances the most progressive ideals?) and by the assertion of power (which scheme advances my particular interest group, or more to the point, which is more likely to win me a research grant, career advancement and tenure?)” (Veith 57).

Recently Sean Hannity, a nationally recognized journalist, had on his radio talk show two lesbian guests discussing censorship regarding the removal of Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s television show from the air. At one point the discussion between the two guests deteriorated into a talk-a-thon, with each one attempting to talk over the other for at least 30 seconds, neither willing to listen or allow the other to speak. Certainly “Truth is not the issue. The issue is power.”

Similarly, Michael Medved, on his nationally syndicated radio talk show, hosted the national coordinator for a group called A.N.S.W.E.R., Americans uNited to Stop War and End Racism. When addressed by the host and callers on various issues, the guest chose to ignore direct questions and simply talk continuously on whatever topic she chose. Meaningful dialogue over real issues simply could not take place. “Truth is not the issue. The issue is power.”

Key Values and Beliefs of Postmodernism - part 3, Beliefs and Values

Beliefs and Values of Postmodernism

In this environment the worldview of postmodernism has taken shape. Existentialism is its philosophy. Multiculturalism and pluralism are its societal values. An individualistic spirituality is its legitimization. Societal fragmentation is its result.


Existentialism

Existentialism as a philosophy has been around for several hundred years, but has taken on a new gravity and popularity since the 1960’s. “Today existentialism is no longer merely the province of avant garde novelists or French intellectuals in cafes. Existentialism has entered the popular culture. It has become the philosophy of soap operas and television talk shows. Its tenets shape political discourse and are transforming the legal system. Existentialism is the philosophical basis for postmodernism” (Veith 38). So what are the tenets of existentialism? It can be summed up in the famous quote, “I think, therefore I am.” Existentialism simplified says that because I exist, and because I view reality within my own brain, I can create my own reality, my own existence. “According to existentialism, there is no inherent meaning or purpose in life. The blind automatic order of nature and the logical conclusions of rationalism may be orderly, but they are inhuman…meaning is a purely human phenomenon. While there is no ready-made meaning in life, individuals can create meaning for themselves. By their own free choices…human beings can create their own order…” (Veith 37).


We Must Make Our Own Meaning

Postmoderns would not reject the idea of truth, but only the idea of absolute truth. They believe that a person can experience truth, but under their existentialist parameters he can only experience it if he creates it for himself. And just because a person has created truth doesn’t mean the next person will create the same kind of truth; he may create a completely different kind of truth. Hence the Christian can find perfect fulfillment in Jesus Christ the Son of God, and the atheist can find perfect fulfillment in his humanistic morality, and both be right…for themselves. They both have found truth; they have just found different truths…within themselves. “According to the post modernist, all reality is virtual reality. We are all wearing helmets that project our own
separate little worlds. We can experience these worlds and lose ourselves in them, but they are not real, nor is one person’s world exactly the same as someone else’s” (Veith 61).


Deconstructing Language

In the realm of spiritual things existentialism might strike us as patently false, but when applied to earthly things it takes on a rather bizarre quality. Since absolute truth doesn’t exist, language cannot really communicate it. And if language cannot communicate things that are absolutely true, than it cannot communicate any really hard, objective facts. Language, then, becomes a series of symbols that carry meaning, but meaning that is always susceptible to an individual’s own interpretation. What I understand someone else to mean in my own view of reality is never completely what they meant in theirs. “Postmodernist theories begin with the assumption that language cannot render truths about the world in an objective way” (Veith 51).

This approach to language is called “deconstructionism” because it attempts to “deconstruct” the meaning of a “text” into the components of original meaning in the mind of the message’s sender. “Deconstructionists cultivate what they call ‘subversive reading.’ Language does not reveal meaning; rather, language constructs meaning…they (the language constructs) are actually a cover for the power relationships that constitute the culture” (Veith 54). A deconstructionist might look at the opening line of the Declaration of Independence like this. Instead of understanding, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights…” he might understand, “We hold our own preferences to be unquestioned, that all men (not women) are created equal (though some are obviously more equal than others), and that they are guaranteed by our own creating of this statement to have certain unalienable (that is, as long as we can stay in power) rights…” Deconstructionists try to read between the lines of language to discover what the speaker “really meant,” or more accurately, what the reader thought the speaker really meant…for his is really the true reality…for him.” (I told you this sounded bizarre!)


Deconstructing History

When applied to history, deconstructionism gets really scary. Since reality is always subjective, always interpreted from each individuals own “virtual reality,” and since language cannot communicate any truth apart from this subjective reality, history ceases to be an objective record of verifiable facts and events and becomes instead a biased, personal interpretation of what we want to believe about objective events, the truth about which is no longer (or really never was) able to be known. “Postmodernists also seek to dissolve history. They no longer see it as a record of objective facts, but as a ‘series of metaphors which cannot be detached from the institutionally produced languages which we bring to bear upon it.’ As a result, Patricia Waugh says, we can make no distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction.’ ‘History is a network of agonistic
language games where the criterion for success is performance, not truth’” (Veith 50). In other words, the “truest” history is not the most accurate one, but the most persuasive one.


Utilitarianism

If all reality is virtual reality, if language can’t communicate any kind of truth or fact, and if history is a huge collection of personal understandings, how does one navigate his own day-to-day life? Postmoderns are very much left on their own concerning the evaluation of decisions and actions, and must try to act according to the values that exist in their own virtual reality. Utilitarianism is the name given to this idea, that different actions can be evaluated as to the amount of happiness or benefit they would give both to oneself and to others. Then the course of action that gives the most benefit can be pursued. Many would call this “situational ethics.” In any given situation, objective ideas of right or wrong are not consulted, as they are not really objective, nor right, nor wrong. Rather, different courses of action are considered, and the one that seems to accomplish the most desirable result is followed.

Absolute values, such as the right to life, telling the truth, and sexual purity are considered not as absolutes, but as one factor among many others, such as quality of life, economic hardship, psychological impact, and personal freedom. The result is obvious. “The devaluation of life is complete for the bridger generation. On both ends of the spectrum of life, the taking of life is decided by a subjective ‘quality of life’ argument, based on the whims and prejudices of a person or persons who become judge, executioner, and god. The bridger generation has largely responded to abortion, infanticide, and assisted suicide with indifference. They are numb to the taking of lives” (Rainer 48). “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” (Veith 34).


Pluralism & Multiculturalism

With all of these different, even conflicting belief systems and truths and realities floating around out there, how do postmodernists expect people to live together in civilized society? Two key values, key social structures are pluralism and multiculturalism. When different belief systems come into contact, one of two things must happen. Either people will adopt the one most effective at handling the reality of the world around us, or people will agree to live together with differing belief systems. Since postmoderns expressly reject the idea that one belief system can ultimately be better or truer or more real than another, they must agree to live together peacefully. This is pluralism, the idea that people of differing but equally valid belief systems can live together agreeably. Multiculturalism is very similar, being the idea that different but equally real or valuable cultures and ethnicities should live together without trying to change or “convert” one another.

Walter Truett Anderson has noted that postmodernists “…say that we do not have a ‘God’s eye’ view of non human reality, never had, never will have. They say we live in a symbolic world, a social reality that many people construct together and yet experience as the objective ‘real world.’ And they also tell us the earth is not a single symbolic world, but rather a vast universe of ‘multiple realities,’ because different groups of people construct different stories, and because different languages embody different ways of experiencing life” (Veith 47). With no objective standard, no God from whom they can see a “God’s eye view,” they have no moral or ethical basis for judging which of the symbolic worlds might be truer or better or more real, so postmodernists must accept them all.

Or must they accept them all? The problem arises when postmoderns encounter adherents to any of the modern belief systems who claim to know ultimate truth or reality. To accept their symbolic world into their postmodern one is to allow a system that doesn’t accept theirs, and ultimately to invite conflict instead of eliminating it. To overcome this obstacle, postmodernism has embraced (probably unconsciously) three large processes (Veith 47). First postmodernists mush break down the belief in universals. They must convince true believers that “no universal consensus about what is true” exists. They seek to do this by trying to create the global cultures of pluralism and multiculturalism. They try to expose all belief systems to all other belief systems in an effort to convince all that there are no absolutes. My friend in college was doing this when he tried to convince me that my faith was more a function of where I was born than of any sense of truth. The result is a polarization within each faith system between the “intolerant fanatics” and the intelligent, wise moderates, which ultimately results in a world wide proliferation of “culture wars,” or conflicts over the nature of a society’s definition of truth. We see such wars in our country between the “religious right” and the liberals. The muslim world is in tremendous conflict between the “Islamic fundamentalists” and a more secular Islam. Hinduism in India has taken on a more militant stance than it has perhaps ever had in the face of “de-Hinduizing” influences. Buddhist nationalism in Bali, Thailand and Myanmar has reacted to western secularizing ideas as well.

Key Values and Beliefs of Postmodernism - part 2, General Distinctives

If postmodernists reject the “truths” discovered during the modern era, what do they believe? Let’s look at some of the key generational distinctives of the first postmodern generations and see not only what they believe, but why they believe it.


Technology

The massive technological advance of the twentieth century has forever changed our world and deeply impacted the way people live. Beginning with the generation known as the Busters, those born from 1964 to 1980, and continuing with the generation labeled by Thom Rainer as the Bridgers, born from 1980 to the present, technology has drastically changed the methods of communication, recreation, education, and work into a lifestyle that has never been seen before. As a Buster, I remember computers being integrated into the school curriculum for the first time ever when I was in high school. As I sit, I am writing this paper for credit in a class that is being taken almost completely over the internet. We are almost done with our Christmas shopping for the year, all of our presents so far were bought over the internet. One of our neighbors “telecommutes” to work with his firm in San Francisco, 250 miles away. E-mail, cellular phones and text messages have become a commonplace way of communicating. Cable and satellite receivers and the internet have made news viewing a 24 hour a day possibility. College students no longer gather in a room to play the board game Risk until 3:00 in the morning, but network together from their own computers in their own houses over the internet to play Age of Empires instead.

“For most of the bridgers, the world of high technology will be the world they knew. Computers will be as common as televisions early in the 21st century” (Rainer.  The Bridger Generation, 46).

The key question is whether this technological world will have a positive or negative impact. “…The media impact will be strong and pervasive in this huge generation (the Bridgers)…[but] most of the evidence today indicates that the negative influences will far outweigh the positive” (Rainer 42). There will be positives; “…young Americans take in information visually as never before, and they are adept at visual interrelationships of objects and images…Conversely, they are less-developed verbally and interpersonally. They drink in visual information quickly, and have a far quicker boredom trigger” (Rainer 40). They tend to think through issues less deeply and without an overall framework of how different issues fit together. In a discussion I had with a high school student during the Presidential campaign of 2000, she said that she supported increased governmental services, but not higher taxes, completely unaware of the connection between the two. They also tend to form fewer, and more superficial, relationships.


Crime

Perhaps the greatest negative impact, however, will concern the effect of violent television shows on children’s behavior. “…Accumulating evidence indicates a clear link between the amount of television watched and increased behavior problems” (Rainer 42). “Never in America’s history has such a high proportion of one generation (Bridgers) been touched by criminal activity… ‘The most vexing problem is the small minority of  teens who kill or maim with little moral compunction…Police officers are encountering more “kids with no hope, no fear, no rules, and no life expectancy,” says John Firman of the International Association of Chiefs of Police’” (Rainer 44-45).


Relativistic Worldview

Undoubtedly one of the reasons for this high incidence of crime among postmodern generations is the change to a relativistic worldview. In the modern era, the world shrunk in size considerably. People developed a keen awareness of other peoples, cultures, values, religious systems, in general other belief systems. Global communications became an every-day commodity. Faced with these different belief systems, moderns strove to discover which one was valid. Postmoderns, however, have rejected the notion of any kind of absolute truth, and have embraced all belief systems as equally valid. I still remember a classmate in college asking me to agree with the proposition that, if I had been born and raised in India, I would have believed in Hinduism just as strongly as I, being born and raised in the United States, believed in Christianity. He failed to recognize that he and I were both born in the US, yet we had much different convictions about the truth of Christianity and Hinduism. It was not our “common cultural belief” that determined our personal belief. It was not the strength of my conviction, nor the strength of his hypothetical Hindu’s conviction that caused him to question ultimate truth; it was the weakness of his own conviction in either.

In light of postmodernists’ lack of conviction, their pervasive thinking seems to be that “a billion Chinese couldn’t be wrong,” therefore their beliefs must be true…at least to them. If this is true for the Chinese, it must be true for Indians, Tibetans, Arabians, and all other groups. Speaking of the Bridger generation, Rainer says that they “…believe in almost any expression of a higher being or higher power. And they resist any claim that one faith system is superior or exclusive” (13).

If this relativistic worldview is true of religion, why shouldn’t it be true of knowledge in general? The postmodernist says, “It should!” Veith notes that postmoderns believe that “Knowledge is no longer seen as absolute truth; rather, knowledge is seen in terms of rearranging information into new paradigms. Human beings construct models to account for their experiences. These models – whether worldviews or scientific theories – are ‘texts,’ constantly being revised. These paradigms are useful fictions, a matter of ‘telling stories.’ But the stories are now indistinguishable from what was once assumed to be knowledge: scientific ‘truth,’ ethics, law, history” (57).

In a recent survey quoted by Thom Rainer, 91% of respondents agreed that what is right for 1 person may not be for another person in a similar situation. 80% agreed that no one can be absolutely positive that they know the truth. And 57% said that lying is sometimes necessary (43). In other research quoted by Gene Veith, 66% of Americans believed that “there is no such thing as absolute truth. Among young adults, the percentage is even higher: 72% of those between 18 and 25 do not believe absolutes exist” (16). Even within the church, 53% of those who call themselves “evangelical Christians” believe that there are no absolutes (Veith 16).

It is important to understand that postmodernists do not seek to change the basis, or foundations, or truth; they seek to completely eliminate all truth, all foundationalism. Speaking of the stories, or narratives, weaved together to form worldviews, or metanarratives, Patricia Waugh, a leading postmodern spokeswoman, said, “…in the past (in Romantic thought, for example), the critique of reason was accompanied by an alternative foundationalism (of the Imagination). Postmodernism tends to claim an abandonment of all metanarratives which could legitimate foundations for truth. And more than this, it claims that we neither need them, nor are they any longer desirable” (Veith 49).


Fragmentation of People and Relationships

The huge amounts of information given to postmoderns through the depersonalizing media of technology have contributed to their relativistic worldview. If nothing is ultimately right or wrong, one’s own selfish appetites are left to drive our behavior, resulting in a much higher incidence of crime. In a society like this, it would be a miracle if some kind of fragmentation didn’t occur. “Postmodernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is” (Veith 73).

This fragmentation begins in the deepest parts of an individual’s own self-image. “…Just as the postmodern critique of reason goes on to undermine all claims to absolute truth, including those of Biblical doctrine, postmodern anti-humanism goes on to diminish human beings, attacking personality and the very concept of the individual” (Veith 71). A young female punk-rocker said, “I belong to the Blank Generation. I have no beliefs, I belong to no community, tradition, or anything like that. I’m lost in this vast, vast world. I belong nowhere. I have absolutely no identity” (Veith 72). Yet action must be motivated by something, so postmoderns rely on their own personal desires and drives for direction in their day to day life. A study quoted in Rainer found that 64% of people surveyed said that the main purpose of life is personal enjoyment and fulfillment (43).

With such rampant selfishness as the main motivation of action, it’s easy to see how the fragmentation within people expands to the fragmentation among them. Relationships within marriages, families, workplaces, and neighborhoods are all affected.

Veith notes that in this relativistic environment, “Abstract ideas are not the only casualty. When the objective realm is swallowed up by subjectivity, moral principles evaporate. Other people – even spouses and children – are valued only for what they can contribute to my pleasure” (58). The result is a horrendous divorce rate, an increasing culture of fatherlessness (with 27% of children growing up in one-parent homes {Rainer 11}), alarming amounts of vocational and geographical change, and neighbors who don’t know, and consequently don’t support or protect, their neighbors. In short, one is left with a nation of individuals, each pursuing their own self-interest over and above the interests of others.

Key Values and Beliefs of Postmodernism - part 1, What Is It?

What Is Postmodernism?

Throughout history great events and ideas have ushered in great changes in the way people live and think. The invasion of the Barbarians brought an end to the Roman dominance of Europe, ushering in the “Dark Ages.” The resurgence of classical Greek and Roman learning in the 1500s brought about a change in history commonly labeled the Renaissance. The rapid advance of technology and the industrial revolution brought about what we refer to today as the modern era.

Each of these eras has certain distinctives by which it is defined and delineated from other eras. In the Middle Ages, feudalism was the main form of government, during the Renaissance, nation states came about, and in the modern era democracy swept across the world. In the Middle Ages, Catholicism was the main religion of Europe. Accompanying the Renaissance, though, was the Protestant Reformation, in which great portions of Europe changed their religious belief system. In the modern era, many rejected a traditional belief in God and adopted the “faith” of secular humanism.

Many believe that we, living in the new 21st century, are seeing the birth of a new historical era, one with its own distinctives in government, religion, and economic systems. I wish to explore the new worldview which many believe will dominate the thinking and ideas of this new “postmodern” era, the implications it may have on the lives of those living under it, and the appropriate responses we as the church of Jesus Christ need to make to it in order to declare the timeless gospel of Christ to the many who still desperately need its freeing power.



Reaction to modernism.

Much of postmodernism must be understood as a reaction to modernism, which began approximately with the Renaissance in the 1500’s. In the 1500’s the Scientific Revolution transformed the way western men looked at the universe around them. Led by men such as Galileo, William Harvey, Copernicus and Isaac Newton, this movement established the scientific method as the method by which absolute scientific laws about our universe could be discovered and reaffirmed. It ushered in a period of exploding understanding about every aspect of the world in which we live, including our own bodies, diseases, plants and animals, minerals, planets and stars.

In the 1600’s the Protestant Reformation transformed the way much of Europe viewed not only God, but also man in his relationship to God. No longer did men have to go through a priest to be reconciled to God, but each individual could seek God for himself. The emphasis upon faith, personal prayer, study of the Scripture, and personal accountability to a personal God changed the way men viewed themselves. No longer did they see themselves as servants to the church, but now as co-heirs with Christ of the Kingdom of God. Each individual, as a child of God, had dignity and value in himself because of the dignity and value God placed upon him.

In the 1700’s, beginning with American independence, the Democratic Revolution began to radically reorder the foundations upon which governments rested. No longer did Kings receive their legitimacy from the divine right of succession, but from the consent of the governed. The people of nations began to petition kings for more voice in the decisions of government, and in several cases the people overthrew their rulers to establish republican forms of democracy. The result is that modern era governments have been dominated by democratic principles.

In the 1800’s, all of these changes, the application of newly discovered scientific laws, the value placed upon the individual person as a creation of God, and the freedoms afforded these individuals by democratic governmental policies, launched the Industrial Revolution. The replacement of craftsmen by machines, principles of mass production, accumulation of capital and its investment, the creation of a labor force through the urbanization of huge chunks of the population, all combined to move the center of production from the rural farm to the urban factory, fundamentally changing the way people worked and the way societies produced goods.

These four huge revolutions combined to produce the 1900’s, the twentieth century, the consummate period of modernity, the 100 years from 1900 to 2000, in which more change occurred in the world than had occurred, many would argue, in the whole history of the world up to that time. In 1900, man could not fly; by 2000 men were routinely flying into space. In 1900, coal and wood were the two main sources of fuel; by 2000 nuclear energy powered not only many of our homes and factories, but also our ships and submarines. In 1900, antibiotics had not yet been discovered; by 2000, polio, tuberculosis, dysentery, malaria and many other diseases had either been eliminated or controlled. In the twentieth century the television and the computer were invented. In 2000, democracy was the most common form of national government, Christianity is the largest worldwide religion, and capitalism the most widespread economic system. Gene Edward Veith, in his book Postmodern Times, summarily describes the modern age. “Generally perceived as positivistic, technocentric, and rationalistic, universal modernism has been identified with the belief in linear progress, absolute truths, the rational planning of ideal social orders, and the standardization of knowledge and production” (42).

As communications, transportation, governmental systems, scientific knowledge and other aspects of the modern era have brought about a standardization, a uniformity, an order to the world, the worldview of postmodernism has arisen as a reaction. Postmodernists have seen the unity and standardization of many aspects of life in the modern world, and have not found the answers to the meaning of life. Scientific truth has not solved the problem of immortality. Economic prosperity has not solved the problem of poverty. Democracy has not resulted in righteousness and justice. Communication and transportation have not bridged the isolation of people from other people. Postmodernists, then, reject the “truths” of the modern era, embracing a random view of the universe in which truth is relative, order is oppressive, chaos is freedom, and reality is personally determined. “Indeterminacy, anarchy, mutants, absence, surface, antiform…” are some of the values of postmodernists identified by Veith (44).

“Faced with the inherent meaninglessness of life,” continues Veith, “modernists impose an order upon it, which they then treat as being objective and universally binding. Postmodernists, on the other hand, live with and affirm the chaos, considering any order to be only provisional and varying from person to person” (42). “Modernists believe in determinacy; postmodernists believe in indeterminacy. Whereas modernism emphasizes purpose and design, postmodernism emphasizes play and chance. Modernism establishes hierarchy; postmodernism cultivates anarchy. Modernism values the type; postmodernism values the mutant. Modernism seeks the logos, the underlying meaning of the universe expressed in language; postmodernism embraces silence, rejecting both meaning and the Word” (Veith 43).