Sorry that I’ve not posted for a while – thanks to those of you who have pestered me about my blog! Things are rather busy, with approaching deadlines and exams and stuff. Updates might be infrequent in the meantime. Also, I accidentally saved this as a draft rather than publishing it, even though I wrote it a week ago – whoops!
A post by John Ferrer on his blog IntelligentFaith discusses Postmodernism and the Entertainment Death of Man, and I’d like to discuss some of the ideas there, many of which are very good and intelligent observations. This is also tied in with my thoughts following discussions at Word Alive with some people about the challenges of being a Christian in academia and at university, though I’ll return to that in a later post (hopefully).
The question I’d like to pose, though is this: Is the best Christian response to postmodernism, basically, a return to modernism?
It seems to me that there is some grain of truth, and some measure of error, in both. Modernism very generally and broadly emphasises the divine side of humanity, those elements of human nature that derive from our being made in the image of God, such as our ability to discern truth. But it takes it too far in not taking account of our fallenness, and denying a God above us – it goes from recognising those things that are marks of our being image-bearers of God to making man into his own God. The mistake of modernism is to believe that man by himself can provide a unified answer and philosophy to life, can perfect himself, can decide morality and so on, all without God.
Postmodernism rightly criticises modern man’s pretentions to God. It recognises human fallibility and fallenness – but to the extreme. Not only are we unable to know truth completely objectively, we are completely unable to know truth objectively, for example. Postmodernism takes us away from one wrong extreme – man as God – to another wrong extreme – man as not even bearing the image of God. Postmodern theorists and philosophers don’t quite put it in these terms, of course, though their language can often be surprisingly theological.
A Christian philosophy will therefore agree with modernism on some points (e.g. objective truth exists), postmodernism on other points (e.g. we perceive through the filters of our culture, assumptions, language and so on), and will disagree with both on other points (e.g. both reject God).
Our response should not be to seek to turn the clock back to an earlier flawed human philosophy, nor to accomodate Christianity to the current intellectual fads, but seek to move forward striving for an ever more Biblically based worldview. Rather than simply seek to “defend Christianity from the challenge of postmodernism”, as one book put it, let’s seek to “face postmodernism with the challenge of Christianity”.
I think this can be best achieved by a Biblically-based, academically rigourous Christian post-relativism. It’s a challenge, but one I want to work on and encourage other Christians in. Weneed to gain a vision of each area and profession as a mission field. Yes, we desperately need to take the Gospel to far-off places, but the ungodly lands of Westminster and academia are also in as much need of the Gospel.
What’s more, as Christians we need to be working out the lordship of Christ in every area of life. Our mission is not just to speak the Gospel, but to live it, to embody Christ to the world around us. That means working out what it means to be a Christian academic or a Christian politician or a Christian windowcleaner or engineer or whatever. That’s not an easy thing, and it requires us as Christians to serve God rigourously with our minds, applying a Christian worldview to whatever we are doing so that we are serving Christ and demonstrating his love, power and holiness before a watching world.
If I can find an angle on the subject acceptable to my tutors, I hope to write my dissertation on Christianity and literary theory next academic year. I wrote my Critical Theory essay on Roland Barthes’ influential essay The Death of the Author and I think Christianity makes sense of so many of the puzzles raised by literary theory and postmodernism and so on, as I hope to uncover over the coming months. Even today at Mack, Dave Williamson’s sermon on Ecclesiastes 1 was opening up new possibilities in my mind for the exploration of the interchange between Christian truth and literary theory. So stay tuned!
