The Postmodern Mind

Many evangelicals have nothing good to say about postmodernity. Too often they equate it with secularism and relativism. (For example, note my comments on the otherwise excellent book The New Faithful by Colleen Carroll.) This is unfortunate, for it not only fails to describe the postmodern mind, it also involves an unstated (and often, perhaps, unknown) assent to modernity--another epistemological stance that contains many pitfalls and traps.

At the root of postmodernity is the awareness that all knowledge is personal, relational, perspectival, cultural, and thus limited (instead of scientific, analytical, objective, unbiased, and unaffected by cultural influences, as modernity assumed). Boastful claims of 100% assurance and absolute knowledge of "absolute" truth are viewed by the postmodern as the height of hubris--the tacit refusal to forget that one, at best, can only know in part. And isn't this what the Apostle Paul taught: "We see through a glass darkly... We know but in part"? Try finding words like "absolute" and "objective" in the Scriptures and then ask yourself which epistemological stance better accords with biblical revelation--modernity or postmodernity?

But one must be careful here: The postmodern is not explicitly denying the reality of absolute (or better, universal) truth. Instead, the postmodern is denying one's ability to absolutely know absolute truth because of the limited, finite capacities of one's own mind and the experiential and cultural baggage that one cannot completely transcend.

Thus, postmoderns are not necessarily secularists. Indeed, they are often more open to the possibility of the supernatural than a modern. Also, postmoderns do not necessarily embrace relativism. Instead, they understand clearly that all personal views are relative ("views from a point" instead of "points of view," as McLaren likes to state), yet this does not eliminate the possibility that a relative view may clearly connect to an absolute/universal reality.

And, in the final analysis, absolute/universal truth is really, in essence, personal, relational, and participatory. Why is this? Because universal truth is not a set of propositions that can be analyzed objectively, but a tripersonal God who can only be known through participation in living relationship through Christ and His Spirit.

One of the best quotes I've found that describes what is at the root in the shift from modernity to postmodernity is found in Dave Tomlinson's excellent book, The Post-Evangelical:

My contention is that the shift from evangelical to post-evangelical is not primarily about surface culture, about moral standards or styles of worship; it is first and foremost about a difference in perception of truth... found less in propositional statements and moral certainties and more in symbols, ambiguities and situational judgments. Not that this necessarily makes it less true, or its followers less passionate to know what is true. Indeed the opposite might be argued to be the case: that when truth remains a fixed certitude, people tend to take it for granted and fail to think it through for themselves, whereas if absolute truth is seen to be always a step beyond human grasp, the need for people to think for themselves and engage in a persistent search becomes much stronger. (p. 90)

Before you make a big deal about all that is wrong with postmodernity, ask yourself one question: Is it possible that you are not really defending biblical truth, but instead, defending modernity and its unique (but overly-confident, outdated, and increasingly irrelevant) way of interpreting Holy Scripture and the message of the Gospel?

© Richard J. Vincent, 2003