"In the past, the difficulty in accepting Christianity was its second point, salvation. Everyone in pre-modern societies knew sin was real, but many doubted salvation. Today it is the exact opposite: everybody is saved, but there is no sin to be saved from. Thus what originally came into the world as 'good news' strikes the modern mind as bad news, as guilt-ridden, moralistic and 'judgmental.' For the modern mind is no longer 'convinced of sin, of righteousness and of judgment' (John 16:8). Yet the bad news is the only part of Christianity that is empirically verifiable, just by reading the newspapers." -- Peter Kreeft
Before there was anything that was modern or postmodern, there was the whole world that had one language and a common speech. United by their technological ability and their cultural atheistic aspirations, they decided to build a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that they could make a name for themselves. Confident of their human abilities, these engineering marvels embarked on building a society where Reason reigned supreme. The Lord would have none of it.
A united, highly sophisticated human race would be unlimited in its capacity for evil. The Lord shattered their plans and brought their famous tower to ruin. It is apparent that reason, science and technology today have not solved all of our problems. Those in our day who lived in the ivory palaces of modernism saw their restructured society come tumbling down, just like those in Genesis 11. A materialistic, rationalistic, anti-God experimentation has ended in ruin.
In judgment upon the first attempt at modernism, God said, "Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were unified in disuniting a people by undermining the faculty that made possible their temporary success--their language. "So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel--because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth."
The human race became a disjointed, fragmented, scattered group of babbling fools, with no common reference point and no common language. Totalitarian unity had given way to chaotic diversity. Postmodernism was God's curse upon modernism. That was then, and that is how it is now. The curse of Babel is still with us today. We are living on the ruins of a fallen modernism, only to be overtaken by the confused, babbling nonsense associated with no common moral compass.
God the Father sent God the Son and God the Holy Spirit to undo Babel's affliction of misery upon the human race. First, God the Son atoned for man's open defiance of God's authority. Human autonomy was dealt a death blow on the cross. Our individual modernism that runs through every human heart was slain, and each one of God's merciful recipient of His work of propitiation knows the joy of being freed from the enslavement of Self.
On the day of Pentecost, next God the Father sent God the Holy Spirit through the gracious gift of intelligible utterances to reverse what Babel did. People groups from every language and culture were now joined together in all its diversity because of the work of the one Savior of the world. The gathering of the Church from all nations was underway.
The make up of this different kind of community called the Church is in stark contrast both to the unified autonomous humanism seen in the modernist Tower builders and to the alien, fractured groups like the postmodern Babelites. Modernity assumes that unity is accomplished only through forced uniformity; postmodernism celebrates diversity at the expense of any absolute authority. Only the Church of the redeemed through Christ can obtain true unity while retaining the rich diversity of various cultures.
A person with a biblical worldview and a modernist each say there is a body of truth that can be known, but they come to different conclusions as to what that truth is and how to arrive at it. A postmodernist says, "Why should I believe in anything at all?" Deity, Darwin or Despair. The Christian gets his source of Truth from Deity; the modernist marches to the beat of the Darwinian drummer; the postmodernist has thrown up his arms in desperation and despair, because the only thing that can be known for certain is that there is no certain truth that can be known. This is the challenge of us Christians today as we witness in this cultural environment of hopelessness and meaninglessness.
Christian scholar Thomas Oden maintains that the "modern age" lasted exactly 200 years--from the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For historical novel purposes alone, Charles Dickens did us a great favor in writing A Tale of Two Cities, which chronicles the eye-opening bloodthirsty anarchy of a godless French Revolution. Even Thomas Jefferson was epileptic in praise over the Revolution in France at first, because he thought that the French Revolution was a mirror image of the American Revolution. As time went along, it became obvious to all that the French Revolution was a totally different creature than the American Revolution, in that the latter was framed upon a biblical understanding of man and society, and the former exalted the rights of man to the dismissal of Christianity.
During the course of the French Revolution, the Goddess of Reason was installed in the Notre Dame Cathedral. In the modern period, human reason would take the place of God, solving all human problems and remaking society along the lines of scientific, rational truth. What once was considered the Queen of the Sciences, Theology had been stripped of its glory, tossed outside the imperial residence of man's enlightened mind, and left abandoned to die in the back alleys of time. The Age of Enlightenment had arrived.
Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century did more than anybody else to divorce knowledge from revelation. He laid the foundations upon which many after him would build. Descartes sought to establish certainty by doubting everything that could be doubted (and that includes God) in order to reconstruct knowledge on unquestionable foundations. Basic certainty in the modern enlightened era is no longer centered on God and His revelation, but on man. Both modern man and postmodern man prescribe to the idea that whatever exists out there can be discovered apart from any divine authority. Human beings are a law unto themselves.
In our universities, for example, human reason was treated as the final arbiter of what was true. The modern mind discounted the idea of the supernatural and looked for scientific and rationalistic explanations for everything. There are absolute and universal truths to be known that apply to everyone, but scientific methodologies became the chief means by which modern people sought to gain that knowledge.
The new "savior" for the modern era was Charles Darwin, and the new "bible" was his The Origin of Species. From this seminal work spawned a string of humanistic ideas and worldviews, from Freudian psychology to Marxism to socialism to fascism to "pro-choice advocacy" to sexual liberation to theological liberalism. A new world could be created by man in his march toward the truth discovered by Reason.
Modernity offered so much, but delivered so little. The twentieth century was a never ending story of modernism's failures. World wars, social unrest, mass genocide, escalating worldwide poverty, a long ideological cold war, and other human atrocities and injustices all added up to a dismal record of performance by the modernists and their utopian pipe dreams. The symbolic death of the modern era was marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the more imposing monuments to modern ideology. The demolition of that wall and all that it represented signaled the death of a worldview that had enthroned Man and Reason.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall parallels the fall of the Tower in Genesis. And with what are we left? Just like in the Genesis account, we are left with the curse of a confused, scattered worldview called postmodernism that is hard to pin down, because it relishes in being hard to pin down.
What can Christians take from all this? The Bible has already given us everything we need to know to confront the errors of modernism and postmodernism, or every other -ism that comes down the pike. We must realize we are engaging in a philosophical/cultural war on two fronts. Yes, there is still the battle to be waged against such things as Darwinian evolution (modernism), but to think that is the predominant battle field today is to miss the cultural revolution (postmodernism) that is going at break neck speed right under our noses. A fuller discussion on the features of postmodernism will be discussed next time.
"If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point." -- Martin Luther
Yours for the sake of truth,
Chris
