Veith Jr. Post-Christian

A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4335-6581-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Undaunted Hope in a Post-Christian World We live in a post-Christian world. Contemporary thought-claiming to be 'progressive' and 'liberating'-attempts to place human beings in God's role as creator, lawgiver, and savior. But these post-Christian ways of thinking and living are running into dead ends and fatal contradictions. This timely book demonstrates how the Christian worldview stands firm in a world dedicated to constructing its own knowledge, morality, and truth. Gene Edward Veith Jr. points out the problems with how today's culture views humanity, God, and even reality itself. He offers hope-filled, practical ways believers can live out their faith in a secularist society as a way to recover reality, rebuild culture, and revive faith.

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

Leseproben

Introduction

After Postmodernism

On September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center in New York City collapsed, I thought that postmodernism was over. I was wrong.

I had written a book entitled Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture, which came out in 1994.1 I had drawn on Thomas Oden’s milestones for the phases of Western thinking. The premodern era, he said, the age in which both classicism and Christianity were dominant, came to an end on July 14, 1789, with the fall of the Bastille: the French Revolution enthroned the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral, ushering in the Age of Modernism, with its trust in science, progress, and social engineering. That era, in turn, came to an end two hundred years later, on November 9, 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Communism was the ultimate expression of modernist ideology, but it led not to liberation and the elimination of all our problems, as promised, but to tyranny, economic collapse, and mass murder. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire, according to Oden, marked the beginning of the postmodern era.2

Oden saw postmodernism in a different light than I did. He saw it as a reversion to the sensibility of the premodern times, marking the end of theological liberalism and making possible a return to Christian orthodoxy. Oden wrote from the perspective of a mainline theologian, and, indeed, the collapse of modernistic, rationalistic liberal theology has been one of the great contributions of postmodern thought, though other kinds of liberal theology would rise up in its place. I, however, wrote from the perspective of an academic in the humanities, in which postmodernism had to do with moral, cultural, and intellectual relativism. This worldview, which Oden called “hypermodernism,” was manifesting itself not just in the academic world but in popular culture, the arts, literature, politics, and religion.

But immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I thought I was witnessing another of Oden’s milestones, a building’s demolition that marked the end of an era and the beginning of something new. Postmodernists believe that reality is a construction—of the mind, the will, the culture—rather than an objective truth. But those planes flying into those skyscrapers, taking everyone by surprise, were no mental constructions. Nor were the deaths of nearly three thousand victims. Nor was the heroism of the firefighters, police, medics, and ordinary people caught up in the horrors of that day. This was all objectively real.

And as the dust was still settling, I was hearing on television, reading in the press, and listening to conversations that were distinctly non-postmodern. In considering the terrorists, their background, and their ideology, no one sounded like a relativist. What the terrorists did was evil, people were saying, and what the first responders did who ran into the buildings as they were collapsing to rescue people was good. It sounded as if not all cultures are equally valid after all. Maybe not all religions are equally beneficent. Meanwhile, the notoriously jaded and cynical New York arts scene was proclaiming “the end of irony”—that signature quality of postmodern expressions—and promising works of sincerity and human values.

Above all, in the aftermath of 9/11, there was a palpable sense of transcendence. The tribalism encouraged by postmodernism gave way to a deep experience of national unity. And even notable secularist journalists were saying to the families of victims, “God bless you,” and “You are in our prayers.”

But after the shock faded, so did the moral clarity. Moral, cultural, intellectual, and religious relativism surged back. But there was a difference.

Before, all religions, in elite opinion, were considered to be equally good. Afterward, all religions were considered to be equally bad. Terrorism began to be defined not as a moral transgression but as what you get when a group of people believe that “they have the only truth” and that “theirs is the only valid religion.” The terrorists were Islamic “fundamentalists,” so not Islam but fundamentalism was to blame, with Christian “fundamentalists” being considered, in many circles, as no better. Religious pluralism used to mean that different beliefs and traditions were allowed to exist side by side. But with the interfaith services that became ubiquitous after 9/11 and the reaction against every kind of fundamentalism, pluralism became something more like polytheism. You must accept all of these deities and religious traditions, but you are not allowed to believe in one of them only. Alternatively, you could reject all of those organized religions. Modernist atheists argued that God does not exist because anything supernatural has no place in their scientific, materialist worldview. Postmodernist atheists argued that God is simply a cultural construction. But the New Atheists launched moral criticisms of God, arguing that religion—particularly the Christian religion—is to blame for the world’s problems. Many more Americans held on, in the postmodernist way, to their own private, interior, personal religions, constructing their own theologies and claiming to be “spiritual, but not religious.”

The brief, shining moment of national unity was also shattered. Thirsting for retaliation, America went to war, only to find that the American ideals of democracy, liberty, and human rights might not be so universal after all, at least in societies that lack our classical and Christian infrastructure. The political divisions that go back to the Vietnam War reasserted themselves. So did the moral equivalence that is a corollary of relativism: Is our attacking the Taliban any different from Al Qaeda attacking us?

Postmodernism did not end with the fall of the World Trade Center. Rather, it hardened, becoming more political and less playful, more dogmatic and less tolerant. As we have moved deeper into the twenty-first century and new issues and new developments have come to the fore, postmodernism has mutated, taking on new forms and adapting to new conditions.

After Postmodernism, What?

In 1994, when Postmodern Times was published, the technological medium I discussed was television. I said some things about computers and how they could be interconnected to form a kind of “cyberspace.”3 The Internet was just starting to get off the ground when I was writing my book, but it was nothing like the all-pervasive information universe that it has become, with its social media and fake news. I knew something big was coming, referring to the “as yet unimagined electronic technology” on the horizon.4 I did imagine the advent of virtual reality technology. I said, “The much-heralded union of computers, television, and video games will enable us to put on a helmet that will create the illusion that we are in the middle of a computer-generated world.”5 I then turned this, as yet unrealized, technology into a metaphor for the postmodernist worldview:

According to the postmodernists, all reality is virtual reality. We are all wearing helmets that project our own separate little worlds. We can experience these worlds and lose ourselves in them, but they are not real, nor is one person’s world exactly the same as someone else’s. We are not creating our own reality, however. Rather, we accept a reality made by someone else. Just as the corporations that manufacture the virtual reality technology program the fantasy, the so-called objective world that we experience is actually programmed by large, impersonal social institutions. Despite our heroics in fantasy land, zapping space aliens and freeing the holographic princess, we are only playing a game. We are actually passive and at the mercy of our programmers.6

Contemporary culture has changed from what it was in 1994, with new issues to consider and new ways of thinking to understand. But many of these changes are developments from earlier trends and consequences of what came before.

Postmodern Times discussed the sexual revolution in terms of extramarital sex; now the issues are homosexuality, pornography, and sex robots. In the 1990s we were deconstructing literature; in the twenty-first century we are deconstructing marriage. In the 1990s we were constructing ideas; in the twenty-first century we are constructing the human body. In the 1990s we had feminism; in the twenty-first century we have transgenderism. In the 1990s we were urged to embrace multiculturalism; in the twenty-first century we are warned about committing cultural appropriation. Pluralism has given way to identity politics. Relativism has given way to speech codes. Humanism has given way to transhumanism, the union of human beings and machines.

Not all of the new movements and developments are exaggerations of postmodernism, though many of them are. Hardcore postmodernists had denied the existence of the self, insisting that our experience of individual consciousness is itself a cultural construction. But today the self is back in vogue, along with its related values of...