Where Now?

Culture wars have set cultural conservatives against cultural liberals, those who support "Judeo-Christian" principles against "secular humanists." However, as these articles have attempted to show, the convulsions are much deeper beneath the crust of politics, morality and entertainment. By ignoring these deeper issues, the tectonic plates beneath our civilization continue to shift while we chase the ambulances and try to rescue victims here and there.

Before proceeding, it is essential that we understand that however valiantly we may be engaged in "culture wars," we are certainly not offering any serious challenge to secularism. If, as we have seen, secularism is really worldliness and that form of worldliness that we call "modernity," then contemporary Christians conservatives’as well as liberals’are almost equally culpable. Contrary to popular sentiments, recent evangelical efforts at combating secularism are not having any long-term success in pulling the culture out of its determined course toward a new dark ages. We may think that our conservative activism is an attack on secularism, but evangelical Christianity is as captivated by modernity as liberal Protestantism. Let me offer some examples.

Relativism and Fragmentation

If modernity is architecturally illustrated by a ten-story granite federal building, a government housing project and tract homes, postmodernism is architecturally symbolized in the average shopping mall. Instead of order, unity and planned conformity, the mall celebrates conflicting styles. One store looks nothing like the one next to it, in contrast to the old malls built in the '60s and '70s, where only the sign distinguished the department stores in a mall. As Peter Fuller put it, "The west front of Wells Cathedral, the Parthenon pediment, the plastic and neon signs of Caesar's palace, Las Vegas, even the hidden intricacies of a Mies van der Rohe curtain wall: all are equally 'interesting.'" (1)

But is this not the approach that many evangelical Christians take to truth as well? What happens, for instance, when questions about worship style are raised? Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" and Kendrick's "Shine, Jesus, Shine!" are both equally "interesting." One may attend a successful Wesleyan, Lutheran, Reformed, Pentecostal, Baptist, Roman Catholic, mainline liberal, conservative evangelical, charismatic or non-charismatic service and find the same sermon and "worship experience." That is not because the Spirit has breathed some new unity into his fragmented body, but is itself a part of the fragmentation of the age. In other words, there are no doctrinal or liturgical distinctives anymore precisely because few of these churches take such things seriously. It is not the unity of the Spirit, but the unity of the marketplace, that has determined the homogeneity of these groups. They are all patterning their preaching, worship and outreach to the consumer trends. When it comes to morality, some of these leaders will happily employ Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, apparently unaware that the author's arguments against the "dumbing down" of the nation in the interest of peace, harmony and "sensitivity" is precisely the same trend one observes in these successful churches today.

Human-Centered Orientation & Belief in Human Nature

Here, Karl Barth's criticisms of Protestant liberalism sound like the criticisms we often make of contemporary evangelicalism. The tendency of the human heart is toward Pelagianism’the ancient heresy of self-salvation. We believe in ourselves and in our potential to "pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps." Eighty-six percent of America's evangelical Protestants believe that in salvation, "God helps those who help themselves," and seventy-seven percent of evangelicals believe that humans are, by nature, basically good. This means that the great majority of evangelical Christians in this country are, in ancient terms, Pelagian, and in modern terms, secular. The irony of the evangelical attack on "secular humanism" was indelibly stamped on my mind when Robert Schuller suggested to me that we work together in confronting a common enemy: secular humanism. This from the man who said that the Reformation erred because it was God-centered rather than human-centered.

From this human-centered orientation, we see the flowering of a human-centered diet in preaching and Christian discourse. For instance, the average Christian bookstore is dominated by books on the horizontal dimension of life: "Christian" tips on self-esteem, recovery, child-rearing, personal fitness, happiness, success and political victory. Replacing theology with ethics and Christ with moralism was once the thing that liberals did best. Even evangelism’the place where one might expect a thoroughly God-centered, Christ-centered message’is often couched in human-centered language: "Here's what God will do for you if you say 'yes.'" I am expecting one day in the not so distant future to hear an evangelist promise, "Try God. And if you're not completely satisfied, simply return the unused portion for a full refund." Everything, from the Law to the Gospel, is "sold" for its usefulness to the "buyer," not because the Law is the expression of God's personal character and the Gospel the expression of his saving intention.

The "Me Generation" is now in power, in Washington, D. C., where rebellion against authority and tradition have now taken on a more respectable aura than the campus revolutions of the '60s. The evangelical activists have emphasized this '60s-rooted rebellion, but what they fail to realize it seems is the fact that the evangelical movement itself is a massive rebellion against authority (creeds, confessions, the institutional church, church discipline, etc.) and tradition (theology, liturgy and classic hymns). While James Dobson might remind us of the disastrous effects of Stanford's radical student cheer, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civilization has got to go," the same tradition of our western religious inheritance in the ancient church and the Reformation is being cheerfully thrown out of the conservative evangelical churches. And why? For the same reason the radicals disdained the rest of western culture: It is old. It is "irrelevant," "impractical," "constraining" and "confining." It does not allow us to "express ourselves" in freedom. The same sentiments that lead liberals to abandon "traditional values" leads conservatives to abandon "traditional worship." Recently I was reading through some church growth literature and under the section on "values," a number of the megachurches stated that, at the top of the list, "We value individualism and personal expression. We don't want to tie people down to doctrines, rituals and rules."

The "therapeutic revolution," as Philip Reiff called it, transformed the mainline churches into Freudian or Jungian citadels, but now evangelicals are pop-psychology's greatest admirers, and this just at the time Newsweek announces the passing of the latest trend in banality in a cover story, "The Cult of Self-Esteem." Liberalism’or, more broadly, secularism’is always carried out with the best of intentions by spiritually-motivated people. In Germany, liberalism was championed by those (mostly pietists) who sought to make Christianity relevant by recasting it in modern terms. It was called "evangelism" and "apologetics," but it was secularism just the same. Modernity's narcissistic self-preoccupation is alive and well in the evangelical community. If the evangelical activists can lament the ascendancy of the "Me Generation" in Washington, surely the rest of us can also lament the ascendancy of the "Me Generation" in the leadership of the evangelical movement.

The Power of Pragmatism

William James, the father of America's unique philosophical contribution, pragmatism, belongs to "modernity," and yet "postmodern" philosophers such as Richard Rorty have revived him for their project. Once again, "postmodern" may simply mean "modernity" at warp speed. Peter Fuller writes, "Postmodernism knows no commitments: it takes up what one of its leading exponents, Charles Jencks, once called a 'situational position,' in which 'no code is inherently better than any other.'" (2) That is why the College de France's report on French education summarized the problem thusly: "We live in the age of feelings. Today there is no more truth or falsehood, no stereotype or innovation, no beauty or ugliness, but only an infinite array of pleasures, all different and all equal." (3) William James himself said that the test of a truth is "its cash-value in experiential terms."

But before we get too high-and-mighty, we must realize that this is the prevailing sentiment in the churches, whether conservative evangelical or liberal Protestant. The charismatic movement is not founded on a revolutionary exegesis of relevant biblical passages; it is simply in step with modernity and postmodern intensification of pragmatic sentimentalism. Even in conservative circles one gets the impression that churches are "all different and all equal." Whether one is a Roman Catholic "evangelical" or a Baptist or Pentecostal "evangelical," all that matters is the feeling, the experience, of being "born again." This is not a new Age of the Spirit; it is the Spirit of the Age.

The church growth movement is impervious to criticism on theological grounds because it justifies everything on the basis of "whatever works." If an evangelist is successful or if a movement (the Vineyard, Promise Keepers, whatever) is "working" and its publicity can reflect that, what more do we need? Modernity has turned us into creatures of the marketplace, where consumer trends dictate our surroundings, and this is as true for the churches these days as it is for shampoo and automobiles.

Progress over Providence

Ziggy Marley, the reggae singer, asks Americans, "Tomorrow people, where is your past? Tomorrow people, how long will you last? A people with no past have no future." Ever since the Enlightenment, the tendency has been to look backward in disgust and forward in anticipation. Do evangelicals reflect this influence of modernity?

In biblical religion, God is guiding history to its appointed end, but the danger is to confuse divine providence with human progress. The many advances of modernity, technological, scientific and economic, have given the mistaken impression that we are advanced beyond our ancestors in wisdom and truth. But the existence of microwaves does not guarantee that the people operating them are not adolescents in the realm of true wisdom and knowledge. We are barraged with information, and this gives us the illusion that we are better-informed, but even as technology gives us this ability we are losing our intellectual, moral and spiritual ability to distinguish worthless information from genuine knowledge.

Gnosis over Scripture

In our last issue of Modern Reformation, we focused on Gnosticism and its revival in this postmodern era. In its denial of place, tradition, authority, time and history, modernity has predisposed us sociologically for this heresy. At the same time as it was reacting against the sterile intellectualism of the Enlightenment, nineteenth century Romanticism was the precursor to postmodernism. As Roger Lundin observes, "Long before Wordsworth, Blake, or Emerson began to tout the virtues of imaginative inwardness, Protestant radicals had eagerly championed the Christ who dwells exclusively in the human heart." (4) But now it is the evangelicals, not the Protestant liberals, who make this their cardinal doctrine. Schleiermacher, the father of modern liberalism, urged people to "turn from everything usually reckoned religion [i.e., doctrine, liturgy, Word and sacraments], and fix your regard on the inward emotions and dispositions, as all utterances and acts of inspired men direct." (5) But now this sentiment would characterize the average evangelical sermon, praise song or conversation.

What surprise, then, it would be to most evangelical brothers and sisters to learn that this "super-spirituality" is actually an effect of "modernity" and the secularization of the church! Religion in this age is something that is concerned with what happens within, not with what happened outside of our hearts, in real history. Nor is an external Word superior to the inner light, the direct experience, the personal relationship with God.

In short, if evangelicals are going to really challenge secularism, they are going to have to repent of their own accommodations to modernity in the form of the church growth movement, the recovery movement, and the movement mentality in general. Christ founded a church, not a movement, and the very idea of "movement" has its origin in modernity. Having said this, what are we to do after we have recognized our worldliness? In the remainder of this article I want to suggest some positive ways forward.

A New Openness to the Supernatural

The eclectic smorgasbord of spirituality and superstition that the Apostle Paul saw in Athens is very much part and parcel of our postmodern condition. Nevertheless, at least people’including academics’are now actually showing some interest in religious explanations that were once regarded as inadmissible in the court of human inquiry.

"Blind watch-maker" deism may work when the universe is viewed as a machine which, once built and started, runs under its own power. But that worldview has passed. Scientists now see the cosmos as always changing, constantly in flux, and that dynamic character appears chaotic. Instead of being like a machine, it is like a modern symphony, where at certain points the orchestra seems to be out of control. But in reality each musician is closely following the notes printed on the page, composed by one artist and directed by another. In other words, science is demonstrating every day the impossibility of the odds that such observable "randomness" and "chaos" could actually be unchecked without the slightest accident destroying us all in a variety of ways. That is why Einstein said, "I do not believe that God plays dice with the universe." If there is a God, he is directly involved in every detail of our existence: That is the great news that science offers to believers in this present day. Deism is simply not an option, at least in theory, and that is very good news.

Common Sense Realism

The only philosophical school during the Enlightenment that opposed "foundationalism" (the belief in one universal basis for truth, whether rationalism or empiricism) was Thomas Reid's Scottish Common Sense philosophy. We do not need absolute philosophical certainty, Reid said, in order to come to reasonable conclusions. Although we all operate with certain presuppositions about the way things are, experience teaches us that we are constantly reassessing those assumptions in the light of reality. There is a real world independent of the mind, Reid insisted, and it exists whether we understand it or not. Thus, he retained objectivity while allowing for the subjective aspects in arriving at knowledge that experience requires and postmodernism now holds so dear.

Because of its non-foundationalism (i.e., it does not require absolute certainty and makes room for presuppositions, which are re-evaluated in the light of experience), I am convinced that this is the epistemological way out. Postmodernism, for all of its diversity, is united in its repudiation of "foundations" and "certainty." But that does not necessarily lead to relativism. Even Reid acknowledged that we must settle for more modest successes. One of the most influential philosophers of our time, Willard V. O. Quine, compares knowledge to a spider's web. "A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions re-adjustments in the interior of the field." (6) Similarly, Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, itself responsible for a revolution of sorts in the academic community, argues that science advances not simply by accumulating facts, but by constructing paradigms’that is, "big picture" ways of viewing the whole collection of puzzle-pieces. Is this not pure relativism? Not necessarily, since one piece that does not fit can cause us to radically alter our paradigm or "big picture." This is all that Christians need in order to make their case. One historical fact’the Resurrection of Christ’upsets the entire worldview of modern and postmodern men and women. As long as one event, one piece of information of enormous magnitude can be always allowed to overthrow a reigning worldview, Christianity has enough epistemological room in which to make its case.

As Nancey Murray McClendon puts it, "The criterion of truth is coherence." (7) Does it hold together? Although we might prefer a correspondence theory of truth to a coherence theory of truth, postmodern epistemology does leave the crack in the door open far enough for us to demonstrate that non-Christian ways of thinking do not hold together; they do not conform to the coherence theory of truth, but are internally contradictory. Having accomplished this, however, what are we to put in its place? Presuppositional apologetics (Gordon Clark and especially Cornelius Van Til and his successors) is at its best in exposing the incoherence of non-Christian thought. However, we need something sturdier to put in its place than, "Now that you know that you are operating with circular reason, why not accept our circle instead of yours?" After all, to the question, "How do I know that the Bible is the Word of God?" the presuppositionalist answers, "Because it says that it is the Word of God."

A recovery of Common Sense Realism, which once reigned in American Reformed and Presbyterian circles, would allow us to meet the challenges of postmodernism while at the same time resisting the naive pure "foundationalism" that has no credibility in any reputable faculty.

A New Openness to Tradition

Postmodernism also respects the idea of tradition that modernity has been consistently assailing. To be sure, we obtain knowledge from tracking satellites and testing experiments in a lab, but we operate every day with assumptions about the way everything fits together. Everyone has a working hypothesis, a worldview, that is more or less thought-through. Unlike extreme empiricists, we must acknowledge that there is no such thing as a theory-independent "fact," but unlike the rationalists, we should realize that the facts we observe are not merely inventions of the mind, but are somehow descriptive of the way things really are out there. As long as we acknowledge our presuppositions and test them by common sense rules of analysis, we do not have to become relativists. As philosopher of science Michael Polanyi described his purpose, "[It] is to achieve a frame of mind in which I may hold firmly to what I believe to be true, even though I know that it might conceivably be false." (8) Colin Gunton even compares this favorably to Calvin's notion of "certainty." (9) If Christianity can be demonstrated to be true, it must be at least conceivably possible for it to be false. One is not a fool to embrace the Resurrection without knowing all the facts, but is certainly foolish to embrace it in clear opposition to facts.

The truth-claims of Christianity are historical rather than scientific, and this means that the way one tests the Resurrection claim, for instance, is not with a microscope and repeatable experiments, but the same way a historian or lawyer would investigate the claims of any past event. Nevertheless, there are some parallels that may help us think through our witness in this age. John Polkinghorne, a leading Cambridge physicist who has written a good deal on the relation of science and Christianity, writes, "Science has not been immune from the acid attack of the hermeneutics of suspicion, so characteristic of the thought of the last hundred years. Yet it is from the sidelines that these skeptical voices are raised. Very few of those actually engaged in scientific work doubt that they are learning about the actual pattern and process of the physical world." (10) What is called for, says Polkinghorne, is the realization that both science and religion require the existence of facts and the interpretation of those facts:

Because we can only approach reality from some initial point of view, experience and interpretation are inevitably intertwined. We cannot escape from the hermeneutical circle. In Paul Ricoeur's words: 'We must understand in order to believe but we must believe in order to understand.' The scientist commits himself to belief in the rationality of the world in order to discover what form that rationality takes….The possibility of error is a necessary element of any belief bearing on reality…To withhold belief on the grounds of such a hazard is to break off all contact with reality. (11)

Conclusion

The postmodern person is a disenchanted modernist. He or she is convinced that human reason and cleverness cannot achieve universal happiness and is cynical toward political or ideological grandstanding. There is no hope in utopian movements, either liberal or conservative; communitarian or democratic. Fragmentation is prized over a rational, ordered worldview. And yet, we must ask these people whether they have merely exchanged their own "universal foundations" (like fragmentation) for the older ones (rational order). They know what's wrong with modern ideas, but they have few of their own except by negation. Far from a coherent worldview, postmodernism has been described by Tyron Inbody as "intellectual Velcro dragged across culture." "In its extreme form," Inbody writes, "it has been described as a 'supercalifragilisticexpialodoxic' totalizing negation of modernism, breathlessly presented as a rejection of everything from Plato onward." For postmodernism, "knowledge is inherently local, provisional, and confessional…These two ways of doing theology, modern and postmodern, distinguish between concern for rationality and concern for transformation…Reality is interpretation 'all the way down.'" (12)

They are against universal systems, utopian progress, and absolutes, but they do not quite know yet what to substitute. There are myriads of proposals, but no single direction’perhaps that is required in a system that glorifies fragmentation and contradiction. And yet, as Inbody noted, there is a new openness to an emphasis on confessional, communal interpretations of reality (and, thus, of Scripture) that avoid the modern arrogance of individual theologians and philosophers reinventing theology from scratch.

We must, it seems to me, do two things in this moment: (1) As Marx said every intellectual had to pass through the "fiery brook" of Feuerbach's dialectical materialism, today every intellectual must take seriously the challenges to modern ways of thinking and reassess our presentation and defense of Christianity in the light of those challenges; (2) Without "jumping on the bandwagon" of academic fads, we must exploit the new opportunities afforded by the collapse of the materialistic and rationalistic worldview. Since the Enlightenment was itself a decisive attack on Christian orthodoxy, we should not defend modernity against postmodernism simply because the former is familiar and comfortable. Hyper-rationalism is no kinder to faith than hyper-irrationalism, and both offer their own distinct challenges and opportunities. We do not have to take sides in order to exploit opportunities.

Our confessional Christianity allows us, in a certain sense, to remain somewhat aloof and judge both philosophies from a transcendent perspective. Our own classical doctrines give us a fresh opportunity to explore their relevance in a new intellectual environment. And for all of the "huppla" over "the sacred," meaning everything from telepathy to Mormonism, the collapse of materialism has opened up fresh possibilities for discussions about God and the supernatural. The anti-supernatural worldview that has dominated western culture has now given way to an almost irrational and superstitious outlook, but this can be exploited. As Princeton's Diogenes Allen remarked,

The philosophical and scientific bases for excluding the possibility of God have collapsed…Hume's and Kant's quite sophisticated objections have been found to fail…The conviction that we live in a self-contained universe can no longer be supported by a philosophic consensus. In a postmodern world Christianity is intellectually relevant. (13)

Each period of church history calls for different theological approaches. The early church expanded not by sophisticated academic systems, but by evangelism and by the church simply being the church. Nevertheless, it ended up creating a massive intellectual tradition. Its successive battles with heresy created a reservoir of wisdom from which to draw, since, at the end of the day, "there is nothing new under the sun." Contemporary innovations are usually revivals of ancient heresies. Similarly, the Reformation was not a period of calm, sophisticated academic reflection, but of revolutionary proclamation. Like the early church period, the Reformation was subversive’not in the sense of overthrowing kingdoms’but in the sense of undermining unbelief and bringing spiritual crisis as the Word brought God and man into confrontation. But like the middle ages following the early church, the post-Reformation period of Protestant orthodoxy was a period of systematization. The theology of the Reformers and their descendants did not differ, but the method was different because the moment called for a "paradigm shift" rather than the systematic restructuring of the new paradigm.

We are, I believe, on the verge of another paradigm shift in theology, a period similar to that of the early church and the Reformation. Leaving the evangelicals to one side for a moment, let us consider our own Reformed and Lutheran defenders of orthodoxy. Most orthodox Protestants’I mean the ones who still believe in the creeds and confessions’seem oblivious to the fact that we have gone through the Enlightenment and now are encountering a massive rejection of the Enlightenment. We cannot simply be "premodern," as if nothing has happened in intellectual history for the last three centuries.

Our best orthodox theologians grappled with their own time and place, but we largely do not. We are acting as if the Enlightenment won and the best that we can do is gather together our eight orthodox folks and hope for better days. The systematic theologies that came out of the post-Reformation period all the way down to the Muellers, Hodges and Berkhofs, is our greatest wealth of theological reflection and should become more, not less, important in seminaries. B. B. Warfield and his Old Princeton cohorts went into the jaws of death (liberal German universities) in order to understand modernity with a view to confronting it with the Christian truth claims. Nevertheless, something more is needed. If we are in one of those periods of "paradigm shifts," then our age parallels the Reformation period itself, not the period of systematization that followed it. It is not merely a period of building and buttressing the edifice of orthodoxy, but of fresh proclamation. Like the old European cathedrals lying in rubble after World War II, "Christendom" is over.

Perhaps God is calling us, therefore, to do exactly what the apostles and church fathers, together with Martin Luther and John Calvin did in their respective ages: Not simply to get the facts straight and defend the particulars of a system (as important as that is), but to bring God and this age into a critical confrontation that will have massive paradigmatic effects. In other words, we need to "think big," and view the world as our audience, instead of "thinking small," with the orthodox as our audience.

Men and women who find theology boring may find it so because they are encountering it as an objective study rather than as a living encounter. Sadly, both liberals and fundamentalists have made theology boring. "Theology," writes Duke professor Stanley Hauwerwas, "is a ghetto activity as insulated and uninteresting as the Saturday religion pages of the local paper. God knows, it is hard to make God boring, but American Christians, aided and abetted by theologians, have accomplished that feat. Accordingly, theology is seldom read by Christians and non-Christians alike because it is so damned dull." (14)

Perhaps our appropriate rejection of Barth's view of Scripture, election and universal salvation has barred us from appreciating his emphasis on "encounter." Here the existentialists remind us of one of Scripture's own central themes. The Bible is not simply a textbook of propositions (although it is that); it is also a record of God's saving encounter with his people. I say it is a record of God's saving encounter with his people and not the other way around, because Scripture is divine revelation and not merely human reflections on God and religious experience. Theology is not really at odds with a "living encounter," but in the minds of most the antithesis between the two is one of the greatest obstacles to gaining interest in theology. Think of Luther's famous remark that a theologian must be someone who has experienced damnation. In other words, God's Word speaks to us in our situation, in our despair and guilt and unrighteousness. It addresses us in a particular context. Similarly, Calvin criticized Cardinal Sadoleto (and implicitly the Roman curia) for having a "lazy theology" because the Cardinal had never experienced the depth of his own depravity and guilt. There should be greater attention to the relationship between theology and experience, with the orthodox taking the latter more seriously and the rest immersing themselves in serious theological classics.

We should engage in theological reflection as an objective study and we need more, not less, of that. But we who affirm that premise also need a recovery of the existential aspect. Liberation theologians, including its European inventors (viz., Moltmann, Metz), sought to recover the situational and existential importance of the Christian faith for the everyday lives of suffering people. But, in the tradition of Hegel, their "salvation" was entirely earth-bound and secular. It was a political, economic, and social liberation, and sin was understood primarily if not exclusively in institutional terms. What liberation theology sought, however, is on the mark: a connection of Scripture with the real world and while they were making that connection, orthodox theologians were often simply engaged in damage control and defensive measures. It is partly for this reason that a new generation of evangelical theologians has become enamored with non-evangelical theologies.

We must sail between the Scylla and Charybdis of conservative paranoia and modernist fashion. In our day, a fresh proclamation of the biblical truths of Creation, Divine Sovereignty and Transcendence, Providence, Incarnation, Redemption, Justification, the work of the Holy Spirit, the Second Coming of Christ and the Consummation will take on new significance, providing a mine from which to draw for a culture looking for transcendent answers. In Christianity, God reveals his name, his identity, and his redemptive plan through the Living and Written Word. On this score, the insights of Yale theologian George Lindbeck, a leading postliberal theologian, are relevant. He urges us to recover our familiarity with Scripture and its language:

Pietists were wary of any use except that of legitimating and evoking a particular kind of religious experience; legalists and social activists looked only for directives for personal or collective behavior…The leaders of the Enlightenment…were not believers, but they were biblically literate and biblically cultured. Conversely, Bible-believing fundamentalists sometimes know remarkably little of the content of scripture…When I first arrived at Yale, even those who came from nonreligious backgrounds knew the Bible better than most of those now who come from churchgoing families…Playing fast and loose with the Bible needed a liberal audience in the days of Norman Vincent Peale, but now, as the case of Robert Schuller indicates, professed conservatives eat it up…Now we are in a postmodern age. Authors steeped in the Bible are diminishing in number, and one cannot help but wonder about the future of the western literary tradition…With the loss of the knowledge of the Bible, public discourse is impoverished. (15)

While liberals and conservatives chase after modern fads, think of the amazing power Christian orthodoxy might have in the postmodern context: At a time when high culture has lost its faith in humanity, the Gospel question makes a difference. In some circles of evangelical theology, it is just now time to get in step with modernity, with its passion for finding the common threat in all religions, its human-centered focus, its emphasis on experience over doctrine, and its theological relativism. Representing this flank, Clark Pinnock cheers, "We are finally making peace with the culture of modernity." (16) Once again, evangelicals who want to be "relevant" simply end up showing up late to these things, just as "the culture of modernity" is collapsing and being subject to sustained attacks. Well has Peter Berger complained, "The theological novelties that have dominated the Protestant scene in the last two decades all seem basically to take up where the older liberalism left off." (17) Intellectuals are wondering where evil comes from and how to understand it, with secular psychologists asking, "Whatever became of sin?" and national secular periodicals running cover stories on the subject of sin and grace. Ironically, those who will be most relevant in this age will most likely be those who have something to say about these classic questions that were the heart of the Reformation debate.

No religious expression will be given the time of day right now unless it connects with the real world and makes a difference in people's lives. Therefore, it is not only the explanation of the doctrine of justification, for instance, but its proclamation in the pulpit and its application to such areas as Christian liberty and one's vocation in the world, the problem of evil and suffering, and the fear of death, will be just as necessary. After every doctrinal presentation, we must ask ourselves the question every postmodern hearer is thinking: "So what? What difference does it make?" That is why the Heidelberg Catechism, after each series of questions on a particular doctrine, asks, "How does this comfort you?" And this is actually a biblical approach, where the indicative is never separated from the imperative, the theological from the practical, the propositional from the situational, as it has been in modern theology and thought in general. Orthodox ministers must overcome their justified fear of "application-oriented" sermons and begin to apply saving truth to life here and now, just as pietistic evangelicals need to rediscover the theology and the text of Scripture, so they will have something to apply. This is no time for caving in to the Tower of Babel just as it is crumbling, but a time to recover "the faith once and for all delivered to the saints." God grant us his Spirit to meet the challenges and opportunities before us.

For Further Reading:

If one had to choose four books from the evangelical perspective, explaining the particulars of postmodernism, I would highly recommend the following: Roger Lundin's The Culture of Interpretation (Eerdmans), Gene Veith's Postmodern Times (Crossway), Thomas Oden's After Modernity…What? (Zondervan), and David Wells' God In The Wasteland (Eerdmans). Beyond these titles, the following books might also be of help:

Aladair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (South Bend: University of Notre Dame, 1988).

Leslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (London: SPCK, 1991).

Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985).

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death (New York: Penguin, 1987); Technopoly (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993).

Diogenes Allen, Christian Belief in a Postmodern World (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1989).

Timothy R. Phillips, ed., Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World (Downers Grove: IVP, 1995).

Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992).

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920's (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).