Section III

The Apologetics For Postmodernism

The most important question for any Christian to face is how to reach his own generation.  We understand that the only really important question is the eternal question and understanding our culture has always been a key to reaching the culture.   Douglas Groothuis wrote, “Our souls reflect our worlds and our worlds reflect our souls.  One who aspires to understand the nature of the soul ought, then, to be an auditor of culture.”[65] But there have always been disagreements over the appropriate ways to reach each generation in their own culture.

It is easy to ignore the changes in culture and refuse to “become all things to all men” but it is also easy to become what the culture is in order to reach it.  Franky Schaeffer, in 1981, lamented the over-reaction by the new Christian left in reaching this new generation:

Today, we still have this kind of utilitarianism.  However, to complicate matters there is a new breed of utilitarianism, which has come about largely through those who (often for correct reasons) have rebelled against the materialistic consumer-oriented utilitarian activity for activity’s sake position of the church.

Unfortunately, those who have rebelled have latched on to another nineteenth-century phenomenon and have been infiltrated by it and just as damaged as those they have rebelled against.[66]

It seems to this author that either extreme is wrong.  Nothing is compromised by learning about the culture in which one lives, nor by trying to think like they think.  We cannot retreat out of the world to win the world.  But while learning about our culture, we must not adopt the philosophy and life-style that is contrary to God.  Retreat is wrong and capitulation is wrong, but infiltration with confrontation must be accomplished.

There are four areas in which the Christian must keep the right balance in a postmodern age.

Truth and Reality

The Apostle Paul tells us that we must have “our loins girt about with truth” (Eph 6:14).  God’s Word is filled with the importance of standing for truth as a testimony to God in the world.  We are to “buy the truth and sell it not” (Prov 23:23), that is, we must give everything we have to get it and once we have it, we must not give it up for any price.  The reason for this emphasis on truth in God’s Word is that lying, or being contrary to what is true, is a denial of God’s reality.  We are told that God cannot lie (Titus 1:2) and in fact it would be impossible for such a thing to happen (Heb 6:18).  God’s very nature is truth and our very ministry is “For the truth’s sake, which dwelleth in us, and shall be with us for ever” (2 John 2).  God’s world was a perfectly truthful world until Satan introduced an element that is contrary to God’s nature—a lie (John 8:44).  Man’s selfish nature is inclined to agree with the lies of Satan in opposition to the truth of God.  This opposition may manifest itself in false claims, actions that are contrary to God’s will, thoughts that arise out of a selfish heart, immoral actions contrary to God’s holy character, breaking the laws of the land or any number of “lies.”  The believer simply cannot agree with a lie whether by word or deed.  Such a thing is sin for him because it is contrary to God and the way He made the world.

As our study has shown, never in the history of Christianity has truth been more under attack, not just the truthfulness of certain biblical propositions, but the very existence of truth as a possibility.  Without the possibility of truth, the postmodern man sees no reality in history or science.  Francis Schaeffer, some years ago wrote, “History as history has always presented problems, but as the concept of the possibility of true truth has been lost, the erosion of the line between history and the fantasy the writer wishes to use as history for his own purposes is more and more successful as a tool of manipulation.”[67] Believers must not give in to this same manipulation.  Ron Mayers points out, “The individual who says he is a Christian, but does not live like a Christian, actually gives the lie to his own testimony.  Unfortunately, unbelievers interpret this contradiction as an indication of the absence of truth in the claims of Christianity.”[68]

In reaching the postmodern whether by words and actions or by worship styles and homiletics, Christians must show the reality of God and His hand in this world by displaying an unswerving loyalty to truth.  One recent article lamented, in the onslaught of attacks on truth, that “the church in North America is not answering postmodernists effectively, and we are losing ground so rapidly that many church leaders are ready to join the new postmodern consensus.”[69] Such capitulation must never take place.

We must be careful of evangelistic stealth ministries.  If we are trying to draw the postmodern into our churches by presenting the things he likes (music, style, language, technology, etc) while at the same time hiding fundamental Christian practices (prayer, communion, baptism, self-denial, piety), it will backfire on us.  It is not that the postmodern will be turned off by this.  That is the bedrock of his world.  There is no absolute truth and all practices are to be individually selected according to each person’s likes and dislikes.  In an ironic way, Christian ministries that cater to the postmodern’s likes and dislikes, are actually agreeing that Christianity can be taken or left as each individual (or generation) pleases.  These people will stay around as long as it benefits them to do so.

Worship and Immanence

To the postmodern, worship is mere technological symbolism over substance.  We have discovered that in his world the symbols are the substance.  Groothuis writes, “The image is everything because the essence has become unknown and unknowable.”[70] Because he sees reality and truth as being constructed at the moment, worship need not go beyond the worship act.  This amounts to worshiping worship.  The more “real” the worship service seems, the less a postmodern person needs or wants anything beyond that.  Some years ago, Vance Havner quoted Newton D. Baker as saying, “The effect of modern inventions has been to immeasurably increase the difficulty of deliberation and contemplation about large and important issues.”[71] I believe it was Hitler who was the first to mesmerize audiences with multi-media presentations which made the individual forget his personal struggles and become caught up in the emotion of the moment.

We must proclaim God as transcendent—but not too transcendent.  His ways are not our ways and He is above the limitations of the world.  But He is not so far away that we cannot know Him.  And we must proclaim God as immanent—but not too immanent.  He condescends to men of low estate.  But He is not the world itself, nor the music, nor the emotion of a worship service.  We are not converted by “getting in touch” with the immanent.  C.S. Lewis wrote, “Until a certain spiritual level has been reached, the promise of immortality will always operate as a bribe which vitiates the whole religion and infinitely inflames those very self-regards which religion must cut down and uproot.”[72] We must be very careful not to give the sinner what he wants, but rather what he needs.  And usually, in the spiritual realm, what a sinner needs is not at all what he wants.  Pascal wrote centuries ago, “They imagine that such a conversion consists in a worship of God conducted, as they picture it, like some exchange or conversation.”[73]

Perhaps no word has grown up in our worship services like the word “community.”  Active churches are seeking community among attendees in order to draw them into the “group” and thereby seek a commitment from them.  The fellowship of believers cannot be minimized in the New Testament nor in our churches.  But understanding the postmodern man, we must be careful how the newcomer sees the group relationship.  Francis Schaeffer, a sage of sorts concerning the coming postmodern era, in 1971 warned:

Now we are ready to start talking about the community.  I would stress again, however, that a person does not come into relationship with God when he enters the Christian community, whether it is a local church or any other form of community.  As I have said, the liberals have gone on to promote other concepts of community.  They teach that the only way you can be in relationship to God is when you are in a group.  The modern concept is that you enter into community; in this community there is horizontal relationship; in these small I-Thou relationships you can hope that there is a big I-Thou relationship.

This is not the Christian teaching.  There is no such thing as a Christian community unless it is made up of individuals who are already Christians through the work of Christ.  One can talk about Christian community until one is green, but there will be no Christian community except on the basis of a personal relationship with the personal God through Christ.[74]

It would be abnormal if Christians did not want to reach the present generation in any way they could.  But because we are also of this postmodern age, we must ask the sobering question:  Are we changing our worship style because it is what will reach the lost?  Or are we changing our worship style because it is what we like?  The early church reached the lost by doing what God wanted them to do in order to worship Him.

Culture and Moral Law

We are coming dangerously close to believing that culture is morally neutral.  Most definitions, however, will necessarily include some word like “expression” or “achievement” to describe the thing called culture.  We ought to remember that the root of culture is “cult.”  It is a society, or at least the norms of a society, that have been formulated by the members of that cult.  That is why John Leo can decry the absence of truth by saying, “This casualness in popular culture is reinforced by trends in the intellectual world which hold that truth is socially constructed and doesn’t exist in the real world.”[75] That is why gangs develop strict codes concerning the clothing they wear, language they use and attitudes they must have, because their cult has necessarily created its own culture.  The moral value of such culture is abundantly expressed in the mores developed by the people of that culture.

Culture is the spirit of the age.  It can be a healthy spirit expressed by believers, but because it is the expression of human beings, it is usually a sinful spirit.  The New Testament combines the word “world” (kosmos) with the word “age” (aion) to give us this picture.  We are not to be conformed to the “aion” (Rom 12:2); when we were lost, we walked according to the “aion” of this “world” (Eph 2:2); Demas forsook Paul, having loved “this present aion” or actually, this “now age” (2 Tim 4:10).  We walk in this world, the “kosmos,” because we are creatures here, but we do not walk by its spirit, the “aion.” Peter said we should not be “fashioning ourselves” (1 Pet 1:14) to this world by our selfish desires.

Many secular culture-watchers have argued for postmodernism’s affect on the culture in a moral way.  Steven Connor, professor of English at Birkbeck College, London University writes, “In popular culture as elsewhere, the postmodern condition is not a set of symptons that are simply present in a body of sociological and textual evidence, but a complex effect of the relationship between social practice and the theory that organizes, interprets and legitimates its forms.”[76] Edward O. Wilson writes, “If these premises are correct, it follows that one culture is as good as any other in the expression of truth and morality, each in its own special way.”[77]

Sadly, it is the churches that have been slow to realize and admit that current culture cannot be adapted and used in any way it chooses.  While church leaders have ignored the moral implications of popular culture, other Christian leaders have had to sound the warning.  Ravi Zacharias writes, “History is replete with examples of unscrutinized cultural trends that were uncritically accepted yet brought about dramatic changes of national import . . . Cultures have a purpose, and in the whirlwind of possibilities that confront society, reason dictates that we find justification for the way we think and why we think, beyond chance existence.”[78] David Wells writes, “Culture, then, is the outward discipline in which inherited meanings and morality, beliefs and ways of behaving are preserved.  It is that collectively assumed scheme of understanding that defines both what is normal and what meanings we should attach to public behavior.”[79] David Chilton, writing about liberal Christian revolutionaries, says, “Revolution is a religious faith.  All men, created in the image of God, are fundamentally religious: all cultural activity is essentially an outgrowth of man’s religious position; for our life and thought are exercised either in obedience to, or rebellion against, God.”[80]

Though culture is often ignored by unwary believers as having moral significance, the postmodern attaches meaning to almost everything he does as well as to what the church does.  Veith reminds us, “Every cultural artifact is thus construed as a ‘text.’ That is, every human creation is analogous to language.  To use a postmodernist slogan, ‘The world is a text.’  Governments, worldviews, technologies, histories, scientific theories, social customs, and religions are all essentially linguistic constructs.”[81] We were better instructed by Robinson Crusoe, watching the cannibals devour their comrades and saying, “whose barbarous customs, were their own disaster, being in them a token indeed of God’s having left them, with the other nations of that part of the world, to such stupidity and to such inhuman courses.”[82] We should be so observant of the spirit of our own age.

Normally we react to the situation which we have observed firsthand, especially if we have grown uncomfortable with obvious inconsistencies.  Douglas McLachlan responds to cultural abuses from conservatives:

Fundamentalists have tended to limit the application of Christian truth to personal life styles while failing to see its application to the great cultural issues of our day.    There are occasions when we will have to turn our attention away from such things as hem lines and hair lengths (and there is a place for dealing with modesty in both dress and grooming—Paul and Peter did!) and to focus on such issues as encroaching secularism, avaricious materialism, pervasive evolutionism and defiant feminism.[83]

In the conservative church-growth scene, however, many are sounding alarms against those who see no difficulty in bringing today’s culture into the church.  William H. Willimon says, “In leaning over to speak to the modern world, I fear we may have fallen in.”[84] John MacArthur writes, “The culture around us has declared war on all standards, and the church is unwittingly following suit. . . . It is, once again, a capitulation to the relativism of an existential culture.”[85] Francis Schaeffer wrote, “Furthermore, if we acquiesce, we will no longer be the redeeming salt for our culture—a culture which is committed to the concept that both morals and laws are only a matter of cultural orientation, of statistical averages. . . If our reflex action is always accommodation regardless of the centrality of the truth involved, there is something wrong.”[86] Groothuis adds, “It is no coincidence that those churches that most readily incorporate elements of contemporary culture into their worship services are also least likely to appreciate the need to confront and to transform contemporary culture according to biblical truth.”[87]

William Bennett, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Secretary of Education, as well as the author of many books dealing with culture, writes, “My worry is that people are not unsettled enough; I don’t think we are angry enough.  We have become inured to the cultural rot that is settling in.  Like Paulina, we are getting used to it, even though it is not a good thing to get used to.”[88] Perhaps we have lost our zeal for God and gained a zeal for the success that cultural relationships brings.

In 1941, Vance Havner wrote these timely words:

There was Demas, who forsook Paul, having loved this present world.  Doubtless he had started out in dead earnest, maybe with plenty of fire, but the pull of the old life and the charm of the world were too much for him.  Think not, however, of Demas merely as the sort lured away today by dances and movies.  Certainly all that belongs to this present world, but we are in danger of restricting “worldliness” to a few pet evils, forgetting that what is in mind here is the age in which Demas lived.  The spirit of the times got him, and he got into the tempo of it, was carried away with the surge of it.[89]

Repentance and Faith

A.W. Tozer wrote, “To the question, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ we must learn the correct answer.  To fail here is not to gamble with our souls; it is to guarantee eternal banishment from the face of God.  Here we must be right or be finally lost.”[90] This must be our bottom line with the postmodern man.  Here we cannot be content to have learned what it takes to gather people together week after week, to have been culturally savvy enough to attract attention, or to have been well-liked and accepted by our generation.  The postmodern man can follow every demand we make of him, even pray whatever we ask him to pray, and in his mind simply be adding Christianity to the file of other practical self-helps.

If we are truly interested in being “culturally relevant” in the most important thing, we will study our generation to find out how we can bring them to repentance and faith.  If all we are doing is winning their approval we have failed.  It is not success for a Christian simply to “build a church” or “gather a crowd.”   Years ago J. Gresham Machen wrote:

Faith is being exalted so high today that men are being satisfied with any kind of faith, just so it is faith.  It makes no difference what is believed, we are told, just so the blessed attitude of faith is there.  The undogmatic faith, it is said, is better than the dogmatic, because it is purer faith—faith less weakened by the alloy of knowledge.[91]

The postmodernist may be the easiest sinner to invite to faith that we have seen in two hundred years!  The problem will be whether we can know if that faith is the biblical faith of the New Testament.

To begin with, we must remember that the postmodern man doesn’t regard history as having actually taken place.  As Craig says, “Indeed, it is not clear whether there really is such a thing as the past on a thoroughgoing post-modernist view.”[92] Or as Benjamin Woolley writes, “Artificial reality is the authentic postmodern condition, and virtual reality its definitive technological expression . . . . The artificial is the authentic.”[93] This is why we are evangelizing on thin ice when we turn our church services into technological playlands for the postmodern’s sake, and then ask him to respond to a real, historical message.  It is existentialism, not Christianity, that talks much about faith but admits we cannot know the historical facts behind the faith.

Connor, in a chapter on postmodern performance, argues that the medium is what is real to a postmodernist, and the message behind the medium has no urgency or reality after the medium is finished.  He writes:

Sound and image are simultaneous with the ‘real’ music that is being performed (although, of course, in the case of most contemporary music the ‘original’ sound is usually itself only an amplified derivation from an initiating signal), even if it remains obvious that what is most real about the event is precisely the fact that it is being projected as mass experience . . . .  In the case of the ‘live’ performance, the desire for originality is a secondary effect of various forms of reproduction.  The intense ‘reality’ of the performance is not something that lies behind the particulars of the setting, the technology and the audience; its reality consists in all of that apparatus of representation.[94]

The critical point for the presentation of Christianity is that the message of salvation must be believed as historically true regardless of the quality of the medium.  If Adam and Eve did not live, then perhaps we have no real sin for which to repent.  If Jesus Christ did not live, die and resurrect as the Bible says, then there is no Christian message.  Of all the world’s religion, Christianity is the only one that depends solely on a historical miracle being a fact!  Machen wrote, “Salvation does depend upon what happened long ago, but the event of long ago has effects that continue until today.”[95] The postmodern man is in a precarious position of denying, or at least doubting, everything in the past and yet still claiming to have faith.  He tells the Christian to “get real” but has bought into the notion (i.e. “Minimalism”) that nothing is real outside of his own mind.

For this man, everything is a “text” which tells him the usability of what he is seeing.  To dress like him, talk like him, play his music and recreate his world inside the church (or even inside the individual Christian life), may well be telling him that the church’s message is no more “real” than his own, individualized message.  This doesn’t mean he won’t like it or commit to it:  it means that he never buys it as really real.

In 1 Corinthians 14, Paul was concerned that when lost people came in the church, they might see the same kind of emotional displays that they saw in their pagan temples and simply add their Christian experience to their pagan experiences.  “But,” he writes, “if all prophesy, and there come in one that believeth not, or one unlearned, he is convinced of all, he is judged of all: and thus are the secrets of his heart made manifest; and so falling down on his face he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth” (1 Cor 14:24-25).  We ought to be concerned when the postmodern man comes into our services and is as comfortable there as he is in his own world.

John Knox wrote, “The man, I say, that understands and knows his own corrupt nature and God’s severe judgment, most gladly will receive the free redemption offered by Christ Jesus, which is the only victory that overthrows Satan and his power.”[96] We have to trust the power of the gospel message and the work of the Holy Spirit enough to believe that when a man is uncomfortable and feels out of place in church, though he may be far from his world, he is close to the kingdom of God.  This is the path of conviction down which everyone must come if he is to come to Christ.  Yet, to feel uncomfortable is the epitome of wrong for the postmodern man.  Truth does not matter, but protecting one’s space matters most.  The gospel appeal, therefore, is a delicate moment for the postmodernist.

When Machen wrote in 1923, he was writing to the modern man and his social and liberal tendencies.  This excerpt, however, may still be exactly our problem reaching the postmodern man.

The fundamental fault of the modern Church is that she is busily engaged in an absolutely impossible task—she is busily engaged in calling the righteous to repentance.  Modern preachers are trying to bring men into the Church without requiring them to relinquish their pride; they are trying to help men avoid the conviction of sin.  The preacher gets up into the pulpit, opens the Bible, and addresses the congregation somewhat as follows:  ‘You people are very good,’ he says; ‘you respond to every appeal that looks toward the welfare of the community. Now we have in the Bible—especially in the life of Jesus—something so good that we believe it is good enough even for you good people.’  Such is modern preaching.  But it is entirely futile.  Even our Lord did not call the righteous to repentance, and probably we shall be no more successful than He.[97]

We must not find ourselves agreeing with the postmodern man.  Our stewardship is to preach the wonderful grace of God through the gospel of Jesus Christ.  No generation has been promised that such a task would be easy or popular.  But the call to ministry is a call to the proclamation of truth and to believe that what God asks us to give is exactly what our generation needs.

Conclusion

We are all asked to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15).  It may be easier to recognize error than to find a way to combat it.  The churches of Jesus Christ must search the Scriptures for truth and then give it out without violating sacred principles.  There will always be room for variation as we take the gospel to the people where we live.  The concern in this section has been that we do not think we are reaching the postmodern man just because we attract him.  The success syndrome may be harder to fight with this generation than ever before simply because this generation can and will follow anything with little or no real commitment.  There must be a telling reason why our churches are as large and active as any time in recent history and yet the commitment levels of those making professions of faith are so low.

When we stand before Christ we will be asked to give account of “how” we built on the foundation, not “how much.”  Our stewardship is to proclaim what our King has given us to proclaim.  It is an awesome task and sometimes we feel inadequate.  But the rewards for faithful service will be worth it all.

The apologist, C.S. Lewis, once finished an argument this way.

One last word.  I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist.  No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.  For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar.  That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the Reality—from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself.  That also is why we need one another’s continual help—oremus pro invice

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