Postmodernism – what is it?
One of the greatest challenges to Christianity in the UK today is what is called ‘postmodernism’. Don’t worry about that word. What it stands for is one amongst many of the enemies of the Christian faith. The beast that comes out of the sea in the book of Revelation has seven heads, but one of the most powerful foes the gospel is encountering today is this spirit of our age - postmodernism. Yet we have to remember that it is just one of the heads of the beast. What is it? How would we characterise the spirit of our age? In five ways:
1 Ignorance of Christian truth
Our age has hardly any idea of what Christianity teaches except that it is moralism, that Christianity says, ‘Don’t!’ So it is profoundly cool towards the professing church; it is abysmally ignorant about Jesus Christ and the story of the Old Testament. I believe that there is nothing more important for any reader who might have been unconsciously influenced by this spirit than to seek to understand the narrative of the first three chapters of the Bible. It is unique, and it all flows from these words - the most profound statement that has ever been made - ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ The risen Lord Jesus himself talking to two men on the road to Emmaus got them out of their despair by explaining to them the words of Moses in the Bible, and the living Christ is still doing that today.
2 Openness to everybody’s story
Our age says, ‘Everything is relative; there are no absolute standards. Everybody should be able to have his or her own story and should have the right to tell it.’ The buzz word of this spirit is the ‘narrative’. ‘We are not following some external Book that has been written down but we are true to our own narrative.’ That is the approach of politicians in the western world today. Why do they live in a culture of lies? Because they are being faithful to their own narrative, and it is a fiction. We are saying that Genesis chapters one, two and three are God’s story of how the world came about, who man is and what has gone wrong with mankind. This inspired narrative is told in a timeless, truthful, warm and personal way. There is no better place to begin explaining the mess that people are in than by reading and thinking about these chapters.
3 An insistence that the thing has to work
Today’s spirit is pragmatic. The first question it asks is not, ‘Is it true?’ No, it asks first of all, ‘Does it work?’ It says to us dismissively, ‘You can elaborate your stories about human and cosmic origins and write them out in a book; they may be very pretty and striking, but do they have any relevance to us today? Does it work?’ Our insistence is that these chapters of Genesis overflow with relevance, because God didn’t finish what he had to say by describing the making of the world. God gave people a cultural mandate and the institution of the family. God opened up the theme of what men and women were to do with their lives in the creation he had made. Doesn’t everyone agree that knowing this is very important? What is the good life? How should we live? Has God told us? Genesis brings us the truth very practically, not in some ethereal, mystical or philosophical way, but in terms of the benefits that come to people when they believe and obey the truth.
4 Human relationships are all important
Matthew Arnold composed a celebrated poem called ‘Dover Beach’ about what he thought was the inevitable decline of Christianity. ‘The sea of faith . . . [is] retreating’, he wrote. So what does Matthew Arnold put in its place? He says, ‘Let us be true to one another.’ There is no personal God who is a Father to his people. He doesn’t exist, and so all we have is one another. ‘Community’ - that’s another buzz word - community is the answer to the vacuum left by the absence of God. ‘Belonging is all important; acceptance is what I crave’, says the postmodernist. There was a popular American television series called ‘Cheers’ based on the activities of a group of men and women who spent hours in a bar in Boston. The show’s theme song spoke of a place ‘where everybody knows your name’. How wonderful to belong to a place where they all know you! A theme of Genesis is God giving names to what he makes, and Adam giving names to the animals, and then when the woman is brought to him he names her Eve and knows her as his wife. There is nothing between them; they are naked but they are unashamed. In Eden human relationships were most important. Whereas postmodernistic beliefs have left the family splintered and shattered the Bible brings together what sin has rent asunder.
5 Personal experience is supreme
‘Follow your heart . . . go with the flow.’ Those are the cries of the spirit of our age. Man must never grieve his precious experiences by mortifying them. He is told, ‘Give in to your longings and hunches even if it means heartbreak for others. They will learn from them. Man’s chief end is to please himself.’ How wretched it is; a man in power will seduce his own secretary or even his wife’s sisters in total disregard for the feelings of others. In my youth you would call such a person a cad or a ‘wrong’un’. These chapters in Genesis teach a great lesson, that the fulness of life is experienced when you know God personally. This is eternal life to know God and do his will. There is the possibility of being in a covenant relationship with the living God and knowing his life in you empowering and enabling. He makes himself known to us and justifies us freely by his grace, and then we may spend our happy days serving him.
That is the background of life today which is having such a miserable influence on the people all around us, and on ourselves too, alas. We live between two worlds. Those verses of Genesis one, two and three describe one world; Eden, the world of God, and the world of man are in harmony. The postmodernist world is not so; it is Paradise Lost; man seeking to cope without God and failing to do so.
Our response as Christians is to be living a credibly godly life; be ready to give a reason for your hope to anyone who inquires, seek to be increasingly filled with the Spirit, use every means to encourage the word of God to be at home in your heart with all wisdom, be utterly involved in your church, and make your family a blessed and welcoming oasis to all the casualties of postmodernism.