Three baseball umpires go out to eat at a New York City restaurant after a baseball game. In conversation, one says, "There's balls and there's strikes and I call 'em the way they are." Another responds, "There's balls and there's strikes and I call 'em the way I see 'em." To which the third says, "There's balls and there's strikes, and they ain't nothin' until I call 'em."
The first umpire above represents objective realism. In other words, there are non-negotiable things such as balls and strikes, good and bad, right and wrong. Their reality do not depend upon the observer, the environment, social conditions, cultural norms, political agendas, or anything else. They are what they are.
The second umpire is certainly more subjective in his outlook. It all depends on how the observer sees the world around him. Each person can use his own reasoning ability to come to different conclusions, but still there are such things as balls and strikes, but it just differs from person to person. We might call this position subjective realism, or modernism.
The third umpire takes the subjective angle to the extreme. How do we know anything at all? Is there anything we point to that is "real" beyond our judgments? There are no absolutes in life, just contrasting perspectives where we should bend over backwards to extend tolerance of all views of life. Nothing is anything until I say they are, and what I say may be different than what you say, and that's cool. This is postmodernism, the prevalent philosophical approach to life today, that can be witnessed in everything, from entertainment to politics to business to religion to architecture to literature to art, you name it. Postmodernism leaves no stone unturned.
Postmodernism is a new name, but it is as old as the last verse in the book of Judges: "every man did what was right in his own eyes." Man is the captain of his own ship, the maker of his own ship, the course for his own ship, the rules for his own ship. "There's balls and there's strikes, and they ain't nothin' until I call them." Man creates his own reality, he lives by his own definitions, and nobody can say that he is wrong, because there is no absolute wrong.
How well do we recall a former President's line, "It all depends on what the definition of 'is' is." Many of us shook our heads in disbelief, as we tried to figure out what he was saying. For those who are like umpire number one, that line made no sense. But for those who are like the third umpire, it resonated with them like nothing else in contemporary life at the time. Postmodernism had found its way in the office of the Presidency (along with many other things).
Right after the President's comments, reporters were sent out onto the streets with the question of the century. This part may have been forgotten by most of us, but the question was, "Do words have a fixed meaning (umpire number one), or may we give them any meaning we choose (the position of the third umpire)?" Of course, how could that question have any definite meaning if words have different meanings to people? The postmodern dog is chasing his postmodern tail.
With that aside, though, to the surprise of the surveyors, most people seemed to agree that words can sometimes mean different things to different people. That prompted a second question by the reporters: "Is morality an absolute or a private matter?" The overwhelming response came back that morality is a private matter.
These two questions became the lead-in on a CNN news report. First, words only have personal meaning. Second, that morality is a private matter. Ironically, the third item on the news that day was that the United States had just issued a stern warning to Saddam Hussein that if he did not stop playing word games with the nuclear inspection teams we would start bombing Iraq.
All of sudden, words did matter. Instantly, we did not want someone else to live by his own ethic or his own rules, and we did not want him to write his own dictionary. At the same time, we were going to make sure that our citizens could write their own dictionary, and live by their own ethics, and write their own rules. Perhaps the next most famous line of that day should have been, "It all depends on what the definition of "hypocrisy" is."
Before we look more closely at the differences between modernism and postmodernism, it may be a good thing for Christians, churches and church leaders to take a long, hard look at themselves. These articles are not just a critique or analysis of the way things are out there. Frances Schaeffer once said, "Find out what the world is doing today, and that will be what the church will be doing seven years from now." He may have been off five or six years, but the point is well made.
Many Christians who are appalled at the direction our culture is going seem to be content in the direction their own particular church is going, and they both may be heading down the same road of postmodernism. In Bible study groups or Sunday School classes, is the overarching concern and goal of teaching is "What does the text say, and what does it mean?", or is it, "What does this say or mean to you?" Does personal interpretation always seem to take center stage regardless what the text says, or is it of much more importance that the teacher brings out the true meaning of the text through disciplined study, and then only from that is there any genuine application made? Will umpire number one or umpire number three feel right at home in your Bible study class?
Is there a healthy emphasis at one's church with verse-by-verse (expository) preaching and doctrine, or is it a never-ending stream of topical sermon series with catchy titles over felt needs that people have and where doctrine is not that high on the list because it is too messy, too controversial and too confrontational? How many megachurches or megachurch wannabes have been built by men with strong entrepreneurial skills and weak exegetical skills?
Perhaps a person has not seen it in this light before, but postmodernism may have found a welcomed home at the neighborhood church. Truth has given way to the golden calf of "relevance." To be hip is more a factor than to be holy, and to speak tolerance is more a driving force than to speak truth. Anything that is new and flashy is to idolized at the expense of the ancient and true. Jesus' half-brother wrote that we should contend for THE faith, but has that been rewritten in postmodern jargon to mean that we should be comfortable with whatever faith each one of us perceives it to be?
(Come to think of it, after looking over again the above three paragraphs, maybe the church has been ahead of the postmodern curve for a very long time now.)
If one has heard of the Emergent Church Movement with such spokesmen as Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo and Doug Pagitt (and one has to wonder at Rick Warren and Bill Hybels), then one has already been acquainted with the this movement's marriage to postmodern philosophy. (I would strongly encourage all concerned Christians to find out where their church and church leaders stand in regards to the tenets of this movement. If a church is following this new wave of doing church, then my advice is to get out while the getting out is good.)
Listen to Doug Pagitt, pastor of Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis, as he spoke to a gathering of 1100 Emergent Church leaders (this is no fringe movement!) in 2004, "Preaching is broken. Why do I get to speak for 30 minutes and you don't?" (That is to say that each one of us are equally-qualified umpires.) He continued, "A sermon is a violent act. It's a violence toward the will of the people who have to sit there and take it." (Why should I call balls and strikes? All joking aside, maybe it is The Ten Suggestions and not the Ten Commandments. Maybe it is "this is what God recommends for your consideration.")
Brian McLaren has called for a five-year moratorium on making any pronouncements about whether homosexuality is a sin or not. "In five years, if we have clarity, we'll speak. If not, we'll set another five years for ongoing reflection." In his book A New Kind of Christian, Mr. McLaren writes, "I drive my car and listen to the Christian radio station, something my wife always tells me I should stop doing ("because it only gets you upset.") There I hear preacher after preacher be so absolutely sure of his bombproof answers and his foolproof biblical interpretations. . .And the more sure he seems, the less I find myself wanting to be a Christian, because on this side of the microphone, antennas, and speaker, life isn't that simple, answers aren't that clear, and nothing is that sure."
Brian McLaren would add, "I don't believe making disciples must equal making adherents to the Christian religion. It may be advisable in many circumstances to help people become followers of Jesus and remain within their Buddhist, Hindu, or Jewish contexts."
Many emergent-sytle congregations have done away with pastors altogether and have replaced them with "narrators." The sermon dinosaur is extinct in those places; a free-ranging dialogue where no one takes a leading role may be the norm. Authoritative pronouncements from Scripture have been swept aside, and in their place have been inserted non-threatening platitudes that could have easily come from Rev. Oprah.
Hopefully and prayerfully, the great majority of "conservative evangelical" churches have not ventured this far into the Emergent Church fold. Something tells me, though, that the numbers are more than we care to think, and there are much more churches flirting with this movement, even if they have not yet formally tied the knot. Departure from sound doctrine is hardly ever a wholesale abandonment over night; rather, it is a methodically slow, insidious, subtle baby step after baby step walk in the wrong direction.
We need to stop the baby steps before they become giant leaps. That postmodern plank needs to be taken out of the church's eye. The "tea parties" nationwide have rallied American citizens to say a common refrain, "We want our country back. We want our Constitution back." Maybe now is the time for peaceful church tea parties. "We want our Bible back. Away with all this postmodern craze and foolishness. Just give us the Word. Tell us, leaders, what we need to know from the holy Scriptures, and then tell us what we need to do based upon what the we know to be true."
Recently my wife alerted me to two different forms of communication that asserted we need to pray for Muslims around the world to come to know Christ. I'm all for that! In both forms of communication, though, it was stated that since Muslims pay special homage to visions and dreams, we need to pray that Jesus will reveal Himself to the Muslims in dreams and visions. My heart was broken, because maybe these people do not realize that what they are doing is undermining the objective reality of God's Word and playing right into the hands of postmodern subjectivism with things such as dreams and visions. The "Jesus" who reveals himself to one Muslim in a dream may be different than the "Jesus" who reveals himself to another Muslim in a dream, so who is to determine which "Jesus" is right? Or maybe each "Jesus" is right; we are right smack in the company of the third umpire again.
Will the shock and outrage by us over a former President's deconstruction of language carry over to the shock and outrage we should feel over the deconstruction of the sacred text that is done "in God's name" Sunday after Sunday, from Bible study group to Bible study group, from bestselling book to bestselling book, from church program to church program, from pulpit to pulpit?
Yours for the sake of truth,
Chris
