The Current Cultural Climate and Authority – A Postmodern View

The seeds of the aforementioned Enlightment period eventually gave birth to philosophies that questioned among other things the right of any one individual or nation to define such notions as truth and morality.  Some recent philosophical systems aggressively attack the notion of authority.  Postmodernists for instance teach that objective standards, morals, and truth cannot exist beyond cultures since they are culturally derived, and are doubtful that they can exist beyond any individually held truth.

Deridda, Sartre, Camus, and others have led a legion of followers into this existential darkness of nihilism.  By supposing that all information conveyed as truth claims are attempts to maintain the status quo by those in power, modern man has been programmed to view all truth claims as needing reinterpreted or in the language of the times, deconstructed.  What this means is that modern man views Christianity not through the lens of historical, grammatical, and linguistic interpretations of what the authors had to say but through the subjective, personal lens of what the modern reader wants to believe was said based on how the individual feels about or thinks about Christianity.  Obviously this presents many problems for speaking about the authority of God to modern man.

There are several “veins” of postmodernist deconstructive thought that impact Christian theism.  They are: 1) deconstructive postmodernism which denies objective truth and foundationalism along with internal consistency and coherence; 2) liberationist postmodernism focuses on social and political structures seeking to transform cultures by destroying the status quo.  Within this strand are the singularly focused feminist, black, and gay liberation theologies; 3) constructive postmodernism that attempts to revise or reconstruct the modern worldview while simultaneously denying the metaphysical; and, 4) conservative or restorationist postmodernism that rejects most of modernism but not all of that system.[1]

The initial casualty of the postmodern attack is the belief in the perspicuity of Scripture.  Postmodernism represents a “vociferous antagonism toward biblical authority.”[2]  Callahan explains what is meant and what is at stake:

Scripture can be and is read with profit, with appreciation and with transformative results. It is open and transparent to earnest readers; it is intelligible and comprehensible to attentive readers. Scripture itself is coherent and obvious. It is direct and unambiguous as written; what is written is sufficient. Scripture’s concern or focal point is readily presented as the redemptive story of God. It displays a progressively more specific identification of that story, culminating in the gospel of Jesus Christ. All this is to say: Scripture is clear about what it is about.[3]

While most Americans would not define themselves as postmodern, they are in fact subscribers to this philosophic belief system through their practice of relativism.  James Patterson and Peter Kim revealed some very startling facts about America in the 21^st century when they reported recently that only 13% of survey respondents believed in the validity of all Ten Commandments; 93% stated that they determined right and wrong for themselves; and 81% believed it was morally permissible to violate known laws if they believed those laws were wrong.[4]  These statistics are important to the current discussion because this data suggests the concept of authority in America has become almost entirely subjective in nature.  This is the niche that postmodernism has carved out for itself in modern American culture.

One of the foundational principles of postmodernist thinking is there are no objective reference points from which man can begin a defense of transcendent truth.  Thus modern man is afloat in a sea of competing and conflicting values where the best that can be hoped for is that everyone will adopt a live and let live attitude.  This renders Americans unable to articulate what they believe because they’ve never thought through their belief system in any detail.  That exercise is not necessary because people do not see any need to defend their beliefs since individual belief systems don’t require justification.  Critics of the American public education system have decried the “dumbing-down” of students for decades.  Unfortunately the same critical analysis has not been extended to the philosophical belief systems gaining ubiquitous influence.  Surely the same dumbing-down of the American intelligence is omnipresent.

This begs the questions of whether or not Americas are truly relativists because they believe that relativism and the broader philosophical system of postmodernism is tenable or do they verbally subscribe to postmodern relativism for some other reason?  Convincing arguments can be made that Americans who assert a morally relativistic life view do so because they wish to justify their moral behavior in the face of judgment, criticism, and perhaps more important for our discussion, conscience.

Weaver for instance suggests that modern Americans are moral idiots because they are eager to adopt any belief system that will assuage their conscience.[5]  The unbridled rush to embrace a “rugged individualism” has led to an unraveling of perceptions and actions necessary to maintaining civic responsibility and cultural morality.  This in turn leads to increasing moral and cultural chaos and the fulfillment of what many Christian theists point to as an illustration of “every man doing what is right in their own eyes.”  Indeed when authority is overthrown in any context the rebels establish their own rules.

Political response to this development is predictable – a deliberate maneuvering toward a decrease in civil rights while insisting upon the necessity of the new paradigm as important to maintain public safety, peace, and freedom.  For a political state to survive, which is the supreme motivation of those steering the ship, there must be in the least a minimum consensus of values.  This is achieved by deliberate political action.  Those groups deemed to be extreme on the “values scale” are purposely marginalized and disenfranchised through repeated and arbitrary legislative and judicial activism.  The goal of this behavior is to provide a clear path for an enlightened and progressive belief system to ascend to a position of social acceptability and thus become the voice of social conscience.  What this amounts to in our present context is the construction and management of a set of replacement values for Christian theism that are the political equivalent of police crowd control techniques.  They are rooted in humanistic concepts and values at odds with Christianity.  The so-called culture wars that America is in the throes of currently are nothing more than a conflict between Christian theism based on the authority of God’s Word and government mandated morals based on humanistic concepts.

Christian theists see in this continued interference by government in the shaping of values an action equivalent to cultural suicide.  When the high moral standards that Christianity inculcates are dismissed the vacuum will be filled by lesser standards of behavior.  Turning away from the highest good to the least common behavioral denominator does not condition responsibility in citizens.  It has the opposite consequentially negative effect.  Americans are being led into more debased lifestyles and looking for sanction for such from any source available.  The government of the United States instead of providing for an environment where Christian theism can flourish and inform appears to be working directly against such a condition.

This constant secular drum beat of postmodern thinking is having an impact on more than just secular culture.  An unfortunate but clearly observable consequence of postmodernism is that the same secular attitudes of individualism and anti-traditionalism prevalent in the culture are now being carried into the church by unsuspecting believers.  Wade points out that “modernistic individualism (has) take(n) root in our psyches to the extent that we believe we are individually the final arbiters of truth.”[6]  The authority of God and His Word is increasingly viewed as an individual matter.  This provides for a “cherry-picking” approach to authority where believers act as consumers, deciding what to purchase and utilize for the moment.  Thus Christian theists are now facing the formidable foe of postmodernism on two fronts – in secular culture and in the church.

     [1]David S. Dockery, ed., The Challenge of Postmodernism: An Evangelical Engagement (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1997), 16-17.

     [2]Larry Dean Pettegrew, “The perspicuity of Scripture,” Master’s Seminary Journal 15 no 2 (Fall

2004): 209-225.

     [3]James Patrick Callahan, “Claritas Scripturae: The Role of Perspicuity in Protestant Hermeneutics,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (39/3 (September 1996): 362.

     [4]James Patterson and Peter Kim, The Day America Told the Truth: What People Believe About Everything That Really Matters (New York, NY: Plume, 1991).  Cited in William D. Watkins, The New Absolutes (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1996), 28-29.

     [5]Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 1.

     [6]Rick Wade, “Scripture and Tradition in the early Church,” Available from Probe Ministries at http://www.probe.org/site/c.fdKEIMNsEoG/b.4226045/k.32E/Scripture_and_Tradition_in_the_Early_Church.htm  Accessed February 18, 2009.

Next post – Part 4 – Christian Theism and the Authority of God in the 21^st Century – A Response