Veith Jr. / Olasky Postmodern Times

A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture
1. Auflage 1994
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2933-7
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 15, 256 Seiten

Reihe: Turning Point Christian Worldview Series

The modern era is over. Assumptions that shaped twentieth-century thought and culture, the bridges we crossed to this present moment, have blown up. The postmodern age has begun. Just what is postmodernism? The average person would be shocked by its creed: Truth, meaning, and individual identity do not exist. These are social constructs. Human life has no special significance, no more value than animal or plant life. All social relationships, all institutions, all moral values are expressions and masks of the primal will to power. Alarmingly, these ideas have gripped the nation's universities, which turn out today's lawyers, judges, writers, journalists, teachers, and other culture-shapers. Through society's influences, postmodernist ideas have seeped into films, television, art, literature, politics; and, without his knowing it, into the head of the average person on the street. Christ has called us to proclaim the gospel to a culture grappling with postmodernism. We must understand our times. Then, through the power that Christ gives, we can counter the prevailing culture and proclaim His sufficiency to our society's very points of need.

Gene Edward Veith (PhD, University of Kansas) is provost and professor of literature emeritus at Patrick Henry College. He previously worked as the culture editor of World magazine. Veith and his wife, Jackquelyn, have three grown children and seven grandchildren.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Veith Jr., Gene Edward

Olasky, Marvin

Leseproben

O N E

“THERE ARE NO
ABSOLUTES”

Charles Colson tells about having dinner with a media personality and trying to talk with him about Christianity. Colson told him how he had come to Christ. “Obviously Jesus worked for you,” his friend replied, but went on to tell him about someone he knew whose life had been turned around by New Age spirituality. “Crystals, channeling—it worked for her. Just like your Jesus.”

Colson tried to explain the difference, but got nowhere. He raised the issue of death and the afterlife, but his friend did not believe in Heaven or Hell and was not particularly bothered by the prospect of dying.

Colson explained what the Bible said, but his friend did not believe in the Bible or any other spiritual authority.

Finally, Colson mentioned a Woody Allen movie, Crimes and Misdemeanors, about a killer who silences his conscience by concluding that life is nothing more than the survival of the fittest. The friend became thoughtful. Colson followed with examples from Tolstoy and C. S. Lewis on the reality of the moral law. The friend was following him. Then Colson cited the epistle of Romans on human inability to keep the law. His friend then paid close attention to the message of Christ’s atoning work on the cross.

Although the friend did not become a Christian, Colson felt that he finally had broken through at least some of his defenses. The difficulty was in finding a common frame of reference. Because of his friend’s mind-set, the usual evangelistic approaches did not work. “My experience,” says Colson, “is a sobering illustration of how resistant the modern mind has become to the Christian message. And it raises serious questions about the effectiveness of traditional evangelistic methods in our age. For the spirit of the age is changing more quickly than many of us realize.”1

THERE ARE NO ABSOLUTES

It is hard to witness to truth to people who believe that truth is relative (“Jesus works for you; crystals work for her”). It is hard to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to people who believe that, since morality is relative, they have no sins to forgive.

According to a recent poll, 66 percent of Americans believe that “there is no such thing as absolute truth.” Among young adults, the percentage is even higher: 72 percent of those between eighteen and twenty-five do not believe absolutes exist.2

To disbelieve in truth is, of course, self-contradictory. To believe means to think something is true; to say, “It’s true that nothing is true” is intrinsically meaningless nonsense. The very statement—“there is no absolute truth”—is an absolute truth. People have bandied about such concepts for centuries as a sort of philosophical parlor game, but have seldom taken these seriously. Today it is not just some esoteric and eccentric philosophers who hold this deeply problematic view of truth, but the average man on the street. It is not the lunatic fringe rejecting the very concept of truth, but two-thirds of the American people.

Moreover, the poll goes on to show that 53 percent of those who call themselves evangelical Christians believe that there are no absolutes. This means that the majority of those who say that they believe in the authority of the Bible and know Christ as their Savior nevertheless agree that “there is no such thing as absolute truth.” Not Christ? No, although He presumably “works for them.” Not the Bible? Apparently not, although 88 percent of evangelicals believe that “The Bible is the written word of God and is totally accurate in all it teaches.” Bizarrely, 70 percent of all Americans claim to accept this high view of Scripture, which is practically the same number as those who say “there are no absolutes.”3

What is going on here? Perhaps those polled did not understand the question or the implications of what they claimed to believe. Some of the evangelical sceptics in the 53 percent may be solid Christians who were only parroting what they heard on television, oblivious to the theological implications of this pop philosophy. The polls may reflect ignorance or confusion. Even so, it amounts to the same thing. Holding mutually inconsistent ideas is a sure sign of believing that there are no absolute truths.

The rejection of absolutes is not just a fine point in philosophy. Many of those polled no doubt took the question as referring not so much to epistemology as to morality. Relative values accompany the relativism of truth.

Up until now, societies have always regulated sexuality by strict moral guidelines. This has been the case in all ages, for all religions, and for all cultures. Suddenly, sex outside of marriage has become routinely accepted. In 1969, well into the “sexual revolution,” 68 percent of Americans believed that sexual relations before marriage are wrong. In 1987, a supposedly conservative era already frightened by AIDS, only 46 percent—less than half—believed that premarital sex is wrong.4 In 1992 only 33 percent reject premarital sex.5

In issue after issue, people are casually dismissing timehonored moral absolutes. The killing of a child in the womb used to be considered a horrible, almost unspeakable evil. Today abortion is not just legal. It has been transformed into something good, a constitutional right. People once considered killing the handicapped, the sick, and the aged an unthinkable atrocity. Today they see euthanasia as an act of compassion.

These moral inversions are taking place not only in the secular world, but within what passes as Christendom. A recent study claimed that 56 percent of single “fundamentalists” engage in sex outside of marriage. This is about the same as the rate for “liberals” (57 percent). (Ironically, the church with the strictest teachings about sexual morality and the greatest emphasis on the role of good works in salvation may have the most permissive members. According to this study, 66 percent of single Roman Catholics are sexually active. American Catholics may be even more permissive than secular Americans. The study claims that while 67 percent of Americans accept premarital sex, 83 percent of Catholics do, in complete opposition to the teaching of their church.)6 Along the same lines, 49 percent of Protestants and 47 percent of Catholics consider themselves “pro-choice” when it comes to abortion.7 Some 49 percent of evangelicals and a startling 71 percent of Catholics say they believe in euthanasia,8 apparently assuming that “Thou shalt not kill” is not an absolute.

Certainly, opinion polls can be slippery, misleading, and subject to various interpretations. Other polls show that people have strong moral positions on other issues. As I will show, over-reliance on opinion polls is one of the signs of a particular kind of contemporary confusion.

And even if the polls are correct, they only confirm what the Bible says about sin. No one with a Biblical view of sin should be surprised to see that immorality is rampant throughout society and in churches and that Christians too fall prey to moral failure and hypocrisy.

Churches have always been packed with sinners, as is fitting (who else is there?). Christians admit their inability to keep God’s Law, and so they depend solely for their salvation on the forgiveness won by Jesus Christ. Theologians have always recognized that church members, no less than the unchurched, need to be evangelized and discipled.

And yet the polls suggest something new. While people have always committed sins, they at least acknowledged these were sins. A century ago a person may have committed adultery flagrantly and in defiance of God and man, but he would have admitted that what he was doing was a sin. What we have today is not only immoral behavior, but a loss of moral criteria. This is true even in the church. We face not only a moral collapse but a collapse of meaning. “There are no absolutes.”

THE SHIFT IN WORLDVIEW

What has happened? Once most people accepted basic Christian concepts. Now only a minority do. This moral and religious shift is not the only change we face. “We are experiencing enormous structural change in our country and in our world,” says the Christian futurist Leith Anderson, “change that promises to be greater than the invention of the printing press, greater than the Industrial Revolution.”9 Christians dare not be blind to change of this magnitude.

As Francis Schaeffer and other scholars have shown, Western culture has gone through many phases. One worldview follows another. In the eighteenth century the Enlightenment challenged the Biblical synthesis that had dominated Western culture. With the nineteenth century came both romanticism and scientific materialism. The twentieth century has given us Marxism and fascism, positivism and existentialism.

Today as we enter the twenty-first century, a new worldview is emerging. The “modern,” strange as it is to say, has become oldfashioned. The twentieth century, for all of its achievements and catastrophes, is passing into history. The “modern ideas” that characterized the twentieth century no longer seem relevant. We are entering the “postmodern” age.

The term “postmodern” primarily refers to time rather than to a distinct ideology. If the “modern” age is really over, Christians have every reason to be glad. Ever since the battles between “modernists” and “fundamentalists”(and before), Biblical Christianity has been bludgeoned by the forces of modernism, with its scientific rationalism, humanism, and bias against the past....