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[Upper Room] The Gospel According to Postmodernism
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Lord, if we had a thousand tongues to sing, it would not be enough. It would not be nearly enough to sing your praises. Lord, thank you for your truth that you have revealed to us in your word. Thank you, Father, for introducing yourself to us, revealing us to revealing yourself to us in Christ. Help us tonight as we think about this thing called postmodernism and all the ways in which it monkeys with even the concept of truth. Remind us, Father, that you are the truth, that you speak truth, and you've given us everything we need to make contact with the truth. Lord, so that we can believe it, so that we can apply it, so that we can speak it, so that we can share it, so that we can love it and love you and know what you've called us to here in this world. Help us tonight as we think about these things. Tether us to your word, send your spirit to shed light on our understanding. We pray that you do this with and for us. For Jesus' sake. Amen. Alright. So tonight, I don't know how much I'll use this, but I'm pulling it into position anyway. Tonight we are talking about postmodernism. What's that? Anybody? You've heard the term, right? It's a term that gets thrown around in church circles and uh more conservative political circles sometimes. Postmodernism, this big bad boogeyman that's uh made a hash. What's that, buddy?
SPEAKER_04Aftermodernism, that's that's the word.
SPEAKER_05After modernism is an excellent guess, and we'll talk about that in a second. But if you had to, based on what you know and what you've heard, if you had to define it, if you had to guess or get hazard a guess, what is postmodernism?
unknownEurope.
SPEAKER_05Europe? Okay, Tony, what do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_02You know, the continent of Europe.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I know, but what makes you say that Europe is postmodern? I think you're right. They've traded truth for relativism. Hey, uh, traded truth for relativism. And what is relativism?
SPEAKER_00Your own personal truth.
SPEAKER_05Your own personal truth. Which is not absolute. Which is not absolute, it's relative. That's a true thing you just said. Oh, rare. Uh-oh. Yeah. Alright, so imagine you're in a Bible study. You're in a small group Bible study, and you guys are studying um Philippians 4.13. I can do all things through a proof through a text taken out of context. That's not what it says. It says, I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Now imagine you're going around the circle and everyone's kind of sharing their thoughts and you're talking about it, and someone in the circle says, You know, I really love this birth, this verse, because I feel like God is saying right here that Jesus will give me everything I need to quit my job and start a new successful business. That's what this verse means to me. Now, while we're imagining someone sharing that in the group, imagine the small group leader from across the circle pipes up and they say, that's really interesting. Uh thank you for sharing that. I think it's really important that we remember that when Paul's talking in this passage, what he's talking about is how Jesus has given him the power to be content in all of his circumstances, whether that means he's starving in prison or he's well fed and free. It's important that we remember that. That that's kind of what that's what Jesus is talking about. And it's not necessarily a personal promise that you can do whatever you want to do because God will give you the strength to do it. Imagine the small group leader said that, and everyone in the circle just kind of scoffs at him. And the person who shared the first reading looks and says, Well, that's your interpretation. I like mine. Have you ever had a small group experience like that one? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I had a career like that one. Bill just said he had a career like that one. I heard you, and I'm sharing with the group. Yeah. Well, if you've ever been in a discussion like that one where there's a kind of tension between what it means and what it means to me, and what it means to me seems to be the trump card for what it means, then you've experienced the influence of postmodernism. Now, as the name would suggest, and as Caesar aptly observed, postmodernism is basically what comes after modernism. And modernism or modernity, it's this era, you know, and we can trace it roughly to the Enlightenment and the 18th century. It's an era characterized by confidence in autonomous individuals and our ability to break free of tradition and to use our own reason to chart our own path forward. It was it was very much marked by autonomy and by this sort of illusion of the sovereign self. Postmodernity is actually the logical conclusion of that radicalized individualism, where man becomes the measure of all things. That's a statement from the ancient Greek sophists, the sophists by the name of Protagoras, if I remember right, that man is the measure of all things. That we we experienced this period known as modernity where we thought that, you know, me, individual man, by use of my unaided reason, I can kind of achieve this godlike view from nowhere, and I can discern all the deep truths of the universe from my easy chair. And in postmodernism, it's like, uh, nope, that's um yeah, you you don't realize how how situated you are, how influenced you are by your environment, how you are not the pure objective observer, you're a wash in subjectivity. Right? So historically, the rise of postmodernism, it's a development in time, but there's a a French philosopher by the name of Jean-Francois Lyotard, who wrote a book healthily titled What is Postmodernism? And in that book, he defined it as incredulity toward meta-narratives. So, in smaller words, unbelief in big stories. We don't trust big stories. That's what postmodernism is. Uh the big stories that Leotard had in mind are the meta-narratives or the grand stories that's that encompass everything, right? They tell the story of the world and our place in it. And could you guess what kind of big stories he had in mind?
SPEAKER_08Creation.
SPEAKER_05That's what you would think. Yeah. Interestingly enough, that's included, but that's not where he started.
SPEAKER_08Resurrection.
SPEAKER_05Nope. For Leotar, the big stories that he had in mind are stories like Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Or Rene Descartes when he's sitting by his warm fireplace, and he's like, I need to find a firm foundation on which to ground all thought. So I'm gonna doubt everything I could possibly doubt until I get to something I can't doubt anymore. Okay, I can't doubt my own existence. I think, therefore, I am. So that's my firm foundation, and I'm gonna build everything on top of that. That's that's the the move called rationalism. Or John Locke, who is kind of the opposite of that, empiricism, where the story he tells is of human beings as a blank slate. You're born a blank slate, and then you experience things through your senses, and it's though your sense experience is riding on that slate. For Leotard, these are not like discoveries that are made in nature, these are just stories about about ourselves and stories about the world and stories about how our thinking works. And so he says postmodernism says, hey, we have no good reason to believe those stories over any other stories. So maybe we tell our own stories. Now the Christian story is very much implicated of that, implicated in that. For postmodernism, it takes the Christian story of creation, fall, resurrection, uh, consummation, all of that. It takes it to just be one big narrative that should not be given any privilege over any other narrative. And so if we get rid of all the big narratives, what are we left with? We're left with little narratives. We're left with little stories, all competing with one another for their own claim on reality. So the stories we tell at a cultural level, like the stories we tell about what is America and what it means to be American. They're the stories we tell on a tribal level, you know, what does it mean to be a southerner, right? Uh, they're the stories we tell on an individual level. Remember, we talked some about critical theory and intersectionality and the different stories we have, the different stories we tell. And everything, truth, right, wrong, all of that becomes a function of the little stories that we're telling. And the not the knock-on effects of that uh impact everything. Because they erode our common foundations and they leave us all adrift. We're real abstract right now. So we're gonna descend the ladder of abstraction to get concrete and start to make sense of this. Three key areas we'll talk about that are really affected by postmodernism: epistemology, which is the philosophy of knowing, like knowledge and truth, ethics, which means living and moving in the world, right and wrong, what we ought to do, and expression and sense of how we construe our personal identity. So, really, knowledge, morality, and identity is what we're talking about. And postmodernism has a really big impact on these things and how they're construed in our society. So, epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, how we come to know things. If I were to just ask you, how do we come to know stuff? How would you answer that?
SPEAKER_03Experience, yeah.
SPEAKER_09Scripture.
SPEAKER_03What's that?
SPEAKER_09Scripture.
SPEAKER_03Scripture, yeah.
SPEAKER_05From where we were raised in the way. Teaching is one way we acquire knowledge, yeah. That's good. Relationships. Relationships, yeah. Observations, observations, yeah. Uh so observations, also intellection, like thinking, thinking things through, exploring, uh that sort of thing. So in the classic, in a classic picture of knowledge, so it's it's basically this the classic understanding of knowledge is the conformity of the concept of our in our mind with to the reality of the object. So take this can of Polar Seltzer Jr. Mermaid Songs. That's what this is. So I I experience this can, right? I process it through my senses, I feel it, I smell it, I read it. Uh intellectually, I compare it to other cans of soda or seltzer water I have, I've had. So I develop this kind of concept in my mind of what this is. And insofar as the concept in my mind lines up with the reality of what this really is, I have arrived at truth about the seltzer can. Now, that's a classic picture of knowing, right? And it seems pretty commonsensical to all of us, right? We just kind of get it intuitively. Now, in the 18th century, a philosopher by the name of Immanuel Kant completely changed the way we think about knowledge and how we acquire it. It's it was so radical that they called it a Copernican revolution. And they called it that because instead of treating this can as the sun around which all of us revolve as knowers, what Kant said is that the knower is the sun, and everything revolves around him or her. So, you know, coming back to this can, in the classic view, I'm a passive observer taking in information about the can and and uh I'm sorting it out in my mind. But according to so my mind is receptive, right? According to Kant, the mind is not receptive, the mind's not passive, the mind's actually constructive. So even though it seems like I'm taking in passively information about this can, my mind is going to work on it with the concepts that already exist in it, and it's forcing the sense data of this can to fit into my concept. So it's fitting the categories in the world, it's imposing order on them using the categories in my mind. And so what that does is it sets up a firewall between the knower and the object to be known. There's the world as it exists in itself, this is the numeral world, and then there's the world as we perceive it, and that's the phenomenal world. And the cash out of that is that there is no way that any of us can possibly know the reality of the can. The only thing we can know is the experience of our can. Now, Bill.
SPEAKER_07Yes. That's how I know.
SPEAKER_05You can't know the can, you can know your experience of the can. And that may sound abstract and like one of the ridiculous things that isn't important that philosophers think about and talk about. But what you have in that is a distinction between a correspondence view of knowledge and truth and a constructive view of knowledge and truth. So on the one side, truth, in the classic sense, is understood as the correspondence between what's in my mind and what's in reality. Now the constructive view is truth, is whatever understanding I impose on reality. You see how that works, right? So correspondence trades on the fact that there is a God who made the world and made us to know the world, and that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight, right? Proverbs 9:10. That's a correspondence theory of truth. A constructive theory trades on the idea that there is no God and the world is filled with raw material that we use to construct our own reality. That's the postmodern view of truth. So if you have the classical view, the correspondence view, you come back to the Bible study example. God reveals himself in scripture, he inspires its very words, he gives us the Holy Spirit to illumine our reading of Scripture. And so we can actually come to know truth about who he is, who we are, what the world is, what we're supposed to do in the world, all of that. God's given us the ability to know him rightly and truly. That's what we believe in, a classical understanding of knowledge and truth. When in the postmodern understanding, meaning is not something that you find in the text of scripture. Meaning is what you make of the text of scripture. And that's how we come back to that situation in the Bible study where it's like, well, that's just your interpretation. I have my own interpretation. Who's to say yours is any better than mine? Pamela.
SPEAKER_08Weren't the transcendentalists though making the same claim that you create your own reality?
SPEAKER_04I'm not a hundred percent familiar with transcendentalism. Does it arise out of romanticism?
SPEAKER_10No, it's actually, I mean, yes and no. Um, but it's just it's different. But like Emerson says create your own reality.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Um eyeball that thing.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_04But that's definitely before modernism even.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, transcendent Emerson's coming after modernism and after the enlightenment.
SPEAKER_10Um oh, if you're creating modernism with the enlightenment, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm speaking post-modernism.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, postmodernism. You have the roots of it in the enlightenment, but you get it as a kind of philosophical movement more in the 20th century. Uh, transcendentalism, there might have been a mystical streak to that.
SPEAKER_04There was through Emerson and Throwe.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, where it's actually you're creating the reality.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_05As opposed to in a postmodern view, you're kind of walled off from reality. And it's you're it's it's a subjective creating of reality, right? It's uh we don't have access to reality apart from our own categories that we impose upon it. So it's it's more of an epistemological and intellectual creation of reality as opposed to I'm actually changing the world with my thoughts. Does that make sense? Right.
SPEAKER_00Um, so once somebody has this has happened a few times, uh, found out that I am a Christian and uh all of that, then I am told that I'm just a figment of their imagination. And then it starts that circular argument, which I just don't know what to do with it, just wears me out, and I want I want to just walk away, and I don't know what to do with it.
SPEAKER_05If that's what you're describing. No. I mean uh you're talking to someone who says they're you're just a figment of their imagination, right? Like they're a brain in a vat.
SPEAKER_00That's what I'm saying. You know, that uh truth is the like that can. It's something that's it's it's a reality, the reality is the experience. Yeah, and it sounds like to me, it's uh you're saying that everybody here's uh something your mind just created, and and it's in your imagination, and then everybody, and then you're part of mine, and on and on and on. That's and that sounds like the definition you're giving.
SPEAKER_05Well, there is reality, right? So when I'm talking about the postmodern understanding of truth, it's you have to make a distinction between knowing and being. Reality exists outside of us, right, and independent of us. What we're talking about is our access to reality. So it's it's being everything is being run through my filter. And for you know, mundane things like the can, whatever, we're all pretty much gonna have the same experience of it. But when we start dealing with abstract things like morality, which we'll talk about in a little bit, or even gender, right, you might say, you know, it's it's this kind of thinking and this kind of mood where it says, well, you got the biology, you got the parts, clearly it's a man. Or they say, well, you know, what is a man? Where did you find the concept of man? Is man not just a category that you impose on certain persons who have certain biological realities? If it is, then who are you to say what a man is and what a man must be? You see how this kind of thinking goes. It's a disconnect between what we know and what actually is. Tony, I start your hand. This whole thing about postmodernism maybe think about eegesis.
SPEAKER_02It's like postmodernism is the eegesis of the natural world. Whatever you want to do.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, in a certain sense, a postmodernist would say, well, you think you're doing exegesis. You think that you're an objective, detached observer who can just know the world as it is. You only think that because you're hopelessly deluded. You don't realize how affected you are by your own cultural conditioning and by your own training and all of that. And you know what? That's one of the areas in which postmodernism is kind of right. Not fully right, but helpful. Because part of the problem with modernity, with people like Immanuel Kant, is where they thought that human beings are just brains on sticks. And that if we all just think really hard about things, we're all going to arrive at the same conclusions about everything. And that there's nothing of us wrapped up in the way we think about things. The postmodern comes in and says, hey, I think you need to be a little more critical of yourself because I don't think you're as objective as you think you are. And yeah, that's part of what it means to be a human being. You are a human subject. Now there's a discipline that we should all engage in so that we kind of submit our thinking to reality and the best ways of knowing reality, but we can't escape our subjectivity. So it it it ought to humble us. That's the that's that's the good gift that postmodernism. Can give us to humble us about what we know and how we know it. But if it humbles you to the extent of being skeptical about whether you can actually know the truth about everything, that's when it's gone wrong. Karen, I saw your hand.
SPEAKER_09How would you just uh define, you know, the like I want to call it a bad movie, the word deconstruction.
SPEAKER_10Yeah.
unknownYou know, kids today are deconstructing their faith.
SPEAKER_09You know, is how would you explain what is the process that they're doing?
SPEAKER_05So deconstruction is a very postmodern move. Because, you know, the kind of mood behind it is that we've received this thing from our parents in the generation before. This thing is faith, evangelical faith, the gospel, whatever. It's this package, right? But there's kind of like a duty that we have to deconstruct it, to pull it apart, to get back to brass tacks and rebuild it. And that, you know, deconstruction is that kind of move where it just, it the assumption it makes is that we have this thing that's been handed to us, it's just a thing that's been handed to us. So we're free to do whatever we want to do with it in order to construct something new moving forward. And there's less of an understanding that this thing that's been handed to us actually is a good gift. That's not just from the generation before us, but the generation before that, and ultimately from God Himself. So, yeah, there's a sense in which we need to be humble and we need to submit that. Just like when Jesus had a problem with the Pharisees, he said, Hey, you've got your traditions, and by way of your traditions, you make void the word of God. That's not cool. Every generation needs to be willing to submit what we've received to the word of God and to truth and science and senses and all that sort of thing, but that doesn't mean we reinvent the wheel with every generation. And that's kind of the move that deconstruction makes.
SPEAKER_07Does it also include a rejection of things in the past like uh slavery or something like that? Postmodernism? Um deconstruction.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, deconstruct it could, right? It depends on deconstruction's targets. And this kind of gets us into our critical theory talk, where it's let's say that you have a view or that you've been convinced that your conservative evangelical faith is a tool of oppression, and you kind of that view has been given, sold to you partially based on slavery and Jim Crow and ongoing segregation and lack of racial reconciliation, so on and so forth, then you might come to think that it's incumbent upon you to deconstruct your faith that's been handed to you by white oppressors so that you can build something that's sufficiently woke, that's no longer taking part in oppression. Right? So that's that's how that gets mixed up with deconstruction. Wendy?
SPEAKER_08So is this like I had a friend at work who didn't believe that um the Holocaust happened. And she asked, you know, how do you know? And which is an excellent question. I happen to have an aunt that was born in a concentration camp, so I have first-hand knowledge, and she couldn't refute that, but it was you know, it's other events too that you know it kind of like allows conspiracy theories to just blossom and explode.
SPEAKER_05It can. I mean, it's postmodernism mixed with skepticism, mixed with an unprecedented democratization of knowledge. What I mean by that is because of social media, virtually everybody in the world is a publisher. Right? So it's we are in living in a wild and unprecedented phase in history. It's like the moon landing, yeah, right? And you know, don't be offended if anyone here is skeptical of the moon landing, but come on. We know a lot of people who are skeptical of the moon landing, right? And and we have like there's a whole list of arguments that you can just make in conversation. It's like, well, what about the rocks? What about the equipment they left on the moon that you can see with the telescope? What about what about the lasers that we use to measure? What about you know the Soviets who are watching our every move and didn't say and so on and so forth? And you know, it's um, you know, if you're talking to uh a moon landing skeptic, they've got arguments for everything, right? Right, and that's that's kind of the world we're living in. It's it's wrapped up with postmodernism, and I'm I'm not prepared to go too far down this road, but it's wrapped up with this idea that whatever you want to believe, whatever is your thing, however niche it might be, you will find a community of people online who share that belief, and you can pool knowledge or pool ignorance or whatever, and you can create a movement around even the craziest, most unfounded stuff. So you'll find all the support you need in the world to believe whatever you might want to believe, even if it's very unfounded in reality, and you'll have strategies to kind of get around that. It's like that's what they want you to think, right? Or that's that's the lie, that's the conspiracy. Yeah. Alright, that's epistemology. Let's talk about ethics, morality, right and wrong, right? That's what we're getting at. Uh if you've read Judges somewhat recently, can anyone think of what the theme verse is from Judges?
SPEAKER_09Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.
SPEAKER_05That's absolutely right. Judges 21, 25. In those days there was no king in Israel, everyone did what was right in his own eyes. That is an incredibly apt summary verse for the postmodern ethical mood. There is no king in the sense of there is no supreme legislator, so everyone does what's right in their own eye. Uh Alistair McIntyre, he is a moral philosopher. He wrote a book called After Virtue, which is really important, really helpful on ethics in the postmodern world. And he said in that book, I can only answer the question, what am I to do, if I can answer the prior question, of what story do I find myself a part? I can only answer the question, what am I to do, if I first answer the question, of what story am I a part? And that is um that is deeply true. If you're presupposing a Christian story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. Right? As human beings, of what story are we a part? We're part of a story in which God is the Lord and He has the authority to tell us what to do. We're part of a story in which God is a good creator who wants what's best for us and tells us what we need to do in order to experience a full and blessed life. Uh, we have a story of the world where God is a heavenly father who loves us and is invested in making us the right kind of people. So if that's the story, right, that gives us contact with reality. But remember, postmodernism doesn't like the big story. That's the kind of meta-narrative that postmodernism rejects. So if there is no big story, if there's no creator, if there's no supernature above nature, then uh meta-narratives, stories that we tell in order to locate ourselves in the world and to give us some sense of right and wrong, they're all ultimately power plays. They're all a function of might making right. They're an imposition of the oppressor over the oppressed, they're a tool for control. So what postmodernism leaves us with is an inconsistent form of relativism. Because it's up to us to decide whether the us is a country or a community or even an individual. It's up to us to decide what's right and what's wrong. How's that work? Does that sound right? Moral relativism? Does it sound like it can work? No. Right? Postmoderns will often argue that right and wrong really is a function of a community or a culture. But, you know, if if you know you guys just believe that that's wrong. Like you guys just believe that gay marriage is wrong because you're conservative Christians, you have your Bible, and that's you, that's your community. You do you, right? But don't enforce your morality on right on us over here. That may be wrong for you, that's not wrong for us. Okay. Try and apply that same postmodern ethical procedure to something like honor killing. You know what I'm talking about? So in Pakistan alone, roughly 1,000 women are executed each year in honor killings.
unknownWow.
SPEAKER_05You know, for the egregious crime of picking their own spouse or seeking a divorce or committing adultery. You also see it in Iran, you have it in India, and increasingly you have it in Europe. Wonder why. Now, is that right or is that wrong?
SPEAKER_00I see what you're going. I see where you're going. It's wrong in our eyes through our classes, but it's not right in their eyes.
SPEAKER_05So it's right in their eyes.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_05But it's wrong in our eyes. Because of our community. Okay. And our culture. So now it being right in their eyes, does it make it right?
SPEAKER_08No.
SPEAKER_00When you look through the lens of uh God's law, no. But if you look through the lens of community and culture, it's it depends on where you are.
SPEAKER_05Alright, I'll ask the question again. Does their believing it's right make it right? Oh. No. Right? Yeah, we could say that. You don't have to say if you look through the lens of God's law, you say no, right? Al. Whether you look through that lens or not.
SPEAKER_02There's a story about uh one of the uh English uh cavalry generals of India, the I think 17ths, maybe 1800s, but uh there was some big man who had died, and the custom among the Hindus was the wife would be burned.
unknownYeah. And he said, Um, no, you can't do that. I said, No, that's our custom.
SPEAKER_02You can't you can't mess with our custom. No, you can't mess with our religion. He said, Okay, tell you what, you can honor your customs, but our religion says that someone who kills someone else uh would be uh die. So anyone who's involved with that, I would hang them. You can go ahead and murder her, but we'll hang them and they decided maybe that wasn't such a good custom to keep.
SPEAKER_05You observe your custom, I'll observe mine.
SPEAKER_02No, he had the power of might though, that makes it was an important factor in his regards, but uh still he uh did impose Christian morals.
SPEAKER_05But the reason I'm cueing up this moral example is because we know, as God's people, having read scripture, and knowing that murder is wrong, and there's no uh there's no biblical justification for the honor killing, we know it is wrong. It is against God's law, therefore it's wrong. Now, if you're talking to someone who has a postmodern view of ethics, who has this sort of situational ethic where these things are right for these people, right for these people, so on and so forth, you ask them the question, is that wrong? Generally, they're gonna agree with you that honor killings are wrong. Okay, if they agree with you, how do you account for that? Because if your view is that right and wrong is a function of communities, how do you account for the fact that there are some things that are just wrong, even if a community says they're right? Nazi Germany. It wasn't just the Jews, the Nazis who were on board with exterminating Jews, it was a popular opinion. Okay, that's what their community decided was right. Does that make it right? No, it doesn't. Alright, so this is part of, you know, if you want to make a moral argument for God, this these are actually the building blocks of helping someone to see that God must exist because there is a morality that transcends any particular application of it or any particular community in the world. And if there is a morality that trans you know that that transcends all things, there must be a person behind that morality. Because there's no such thing as right and wrong when you're dealing with an impersonal universe. Right and wrong and morality, obligations, requirements, moral deserts, all those things presuppose a person. The universe can't tell you what to do, but God can tell you what to do. Alright, so if you're talking to someone who doubts the existence of right and wrong outside of the community, you can bring up those egregious moral examples to help them get to think, to put the stone in their shoe, right? To help them see, no, no, we can't, we can't just let individual communities decide what's right and wrong for themselves. There's a rightness and wrongness that exists outside of communities, and we're all beholden to it, we're all subject to it. Alright, third thing. Expression. Or our our scroll of human idea identity. Who gets to say who and what you are? Who gets to tell you who and what you are?
SPEAKER_08God.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. So a classical view of the self, right? The one who made you, right? God, the one who made you, the one who designed you. The engineer who built the car gets to tell you how the car works, right? And what it is and what it's for. The God who designed humanity gets to tell human beings who we are and what we're for. And a classic understanding of the self is as it understands the identity to be something we discover. It's grounded in God's creative will, it's grounded in creaturely reality. The goal is to figure out who we are, who God wants us to be, and to grow into that, to develop the skills He's given us and to become that person He's made us to be. That's the classical view, that's the typical view for, let's say, a conservative Christian. But in the postmodern view, in the world we're living in, identity is not something you discover so much as something you create. You are the sovereign individual. Your identity is what you feel it is, what you want it to be, what you make it to be. So again, construction versus correspondence. You're determining the truth about who you are as opposed to the discovering the truth about who God has made you to be. And if that's if that's your view of the self, then identity actually becomes a kind of performance. This gets into feminism. Judith Butler, big name in feminism. She described like an authority in feminism. She described gender as a performance. Maleness, femaleness. It doesn't map onto something you are as a male or a female. It's a performance of what you think you should be according to cultural norms and stereotypes and things like that. So you see how the feminism fits in. You see how transgenderism fits into this. It's this idea that, you know, whatever parts I was born with, I'm just a blank slate. If I need to change things around surgically, I need to cut things off or get things sewn on in order to be who I want to be, who I feel myself to be, that's fine. We have the technology, right? That's a postmodern view of the self. And when we're living in this world where social feedback is amplified by social media, it just pours gasoline on that fire. Because I get to decide who I'm gonna be. I kind of perform that identity in public, and I either move toward it or away from it based on the feedback I get. Uh Dylan Mulvaney, does that name mean anything to anyone?
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_05No. What's that? A trans woman, which means a fake woman, which means a man, who um he was basically adopted by Bud Light as their spokesperson, and everything fell apart because of it. But very, very effeminate, very popular, very performative online, building a social media platform, and the more the platform builds, the more he descended into his delusion and became more and more of the caricature or the character that he was playing online. Um inclined to drink, they would agree with you. But Bud Light's basically water, so it's okay. So are you seeing like with all these different postmodernist issues?
SPEAKER_09Is that they don't have truth? They don't really stand up for one, like I was gonna say a baseline. We go by a baseline, yeah. What whatever that baseline is, yeah. And some people it's it's scripture, yeah, other people, like you said, it's themselves. So I don't know, I'm just thinking there's no solid foundation, no solid grounding. It's right a you know, the wrong thing.
SPEAKER_05That's exactly nature, the created order, right? Uh so we'll take the issue of transgenderism. You see a you you encounter a man who thinks he's a woman, and you you look at this person and you say, you've got these chromosomes, you've got these parts, you've got these hormones, you've got this musculature, you've got this depth of voice, on and on and on. We can say the truth about you is you're a man. In a classical view, in a sane view, that's non-controversial. The truth about you is you're a man. Now the postmodern response to that is who's truth? It's the pilot, Pontius' pilot response. What is truth? Because yes, you have this category that you map on to all of these features, but at the end of the day, that's just an expectation that you developed, or that your community that developed, or that your uh you know, your conservative, prudish, religious tradition developed. That's just the way you guys see the world. The way I see the world is that I am a woman trapped in a man's body, despite all of these things you identify as a man. You keep your truth, I'll keep mine.
SPEAKER_09But doesn't that take away the whole definition of truth? Of what truth is? Truth is something unchangeable, it's something that's solid. But when you have something that's always changing into someone's own interpretation, I wouldn't think in the definition of truth that would be called truth.
SPEAKER_05Well, that's just your definition of truth. I have a different one. You do your truth, I'll do my truth.
SPEAKER_09So is there anything they agree on of what truth is?
SPEAKER_08Like they have no absolute truth, but they have it.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_05You're absolutely right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Truth is obliquid plastic.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah, truth.
SPEAKER_07It's not something we see, which truth is.
SPEAKER_05Right. Truth is something that's constructed, constructed, it's liquid, it's malleable, it's relative. And it's in harder versions of postmodernism, it's uh it's incommensurable, which means your community has its truth, my community have it has its truth. Since we can't get to the truth, whether it exists or not, we don't know, but we can't get to it. And so the best we can do is find a way to coexist. And if we can't find a way to coexist, well, we're gonna kill each other. And that can look like cancellation, or that can look like one political party trying. Trying to destroy the polit other political party at all costs because it's an existential struggle struggle. Yeah. Political violence, right? That's where these things head. But coming to the identity one, just again coming back to that stone in the shoe sort of thing, identity construction is exhausting. If it's up to you to create who you are, as opposed to discover who God's made you, it's exhausting. How do you know you've arrived? And even if you have arrived, how do you maintain? So this is one of the areas where the kind of rubber can hit the road when we're dealing with someone who's imbibed these kind of postmodern ideas and they've applied them to just the way they're trying to figure out who they are in the world. The gift of identity from your creator and your redeemer is a precious gift that can set someone free. Like you're on the hamster wheel trying to create a whole identity for yourself. You're ignoring or actively violating nature in order to try to foist upon yourself some sort of expectation that comes from who knows where. Wouldn't you like to rest? Wouldn't you like to get to know the God who made you? And find that this whole identity thing is a lot simpler than maybe you're making it. And there's your open door to the gospel. Right? Come and be who God made you to be. Experience the freedom of that. Instead of living in this prison of your own expectations or culture's expectations. Come and be free. Alright, to wrap all of this up, to uh just kind of summarize before we finish. Um epistemology, ethics, and expression. These are the big three effects of postmodernism. Epistemology, postmodernism tells us that we construct reality. The truth is that we ought to take all our thoughts captive to obey Christ, through whom the world was made. The one who's given us the faculties to actually know the world rightly. Ethics. According to the postmodernism, right and wrong is relative. According to the truth, right and wrong is relative to the God who made the world and made us to glorify and enjoy Him. And to do it by doing the right things in the right ways for the right reasons. In existence or expression. You are postmodernism says you are whoever you make yourself to be. And the truth is you are who God made you to be. So at the end of the day, there is only one sovereign subject. Postmodernism tells us that every single individual is the sovereign subject who makes up reality according to their own ideas. But scripture tells us that God is the only sovereign subject, and it's our job to think God's thoughts after him. He is the truth. If we want to know to the truth, we go to him through his son, who gives us the truth, and the truth sets us free. Any questions or thoughts before we sing our closing hymn?
SPEAKER_02I'm an answer for your uh Bible study uh person.
unknownYeah. You probably already had the 2 Peter 1, 20. Knowing this, first of all, that no prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. Yeah. If you don't believe scripture, then it won't make it matter.
SPEAKER_02But um just feels like to me the whole postmodernism is the almost the end result of Satan's question. Did God really say this? Is this really this really true? Is this really a tell yourself? You be like gods.
SPEAKER_10Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It feels like it's really just the way everyone is their own gods.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's and if you get into one of those conversations and if the context is right, you know, that's just your interpretation. That's just my interpretation. Okay. Uh are all interpretations equal? You know, they might say yes, they might say no. If they say yes, you say, okay, I read this verse to mean that Jesus was really a ham sandwich. Is that a good interpretation or a bad interpretation? Well, that's a bad interpretation. Why is that a bad interpretation? Because clearly that's not what that verse is about. Oh, so that verse is about something. What is it about? And how do we arrive at knowledge about what it's about? And then we're talking about the words on the page. Okay, oh good. So words are reliable signifiers, they tell us things, right? They convey meaning. And you can just kind of tease out that conversation because at the end of the day, I don't think anyone really wants to say that any interpretation of scripture is good as any others. Because then we're we're back in Jim Crow, right? And we're back with people using the Bible in order to justify slavery and segregation and so on and so forth. It's like, no, they were reading it wrongly, and we can say that because we actually have the words on the page, and our interpretations are accountable to the words on the page because God has conveyed what we ought to believe by way of the words on the page, and he's given us what we need in order to understand them rightly. He hasn't left us adrift on a sea of skepticism with no understanding and no ability to understand the truth. I I used to have a friend who he was really into Rob Bell, and if you know that name, then he was fond of saying, Jesus spoke, the rest is interpretation. And that's my friend would say that, you know, and it's always you get in the conversation, well, that's only invoked when you don't like my interpretation. Yeah, right? Uh if Jesus spoke and the rest is interpretation, then what are what are we even doing here? Right? There's good interpretation, there's bad. Karen.
unknownI've had this come to me when I'd say, you know, well, I believe that the Bible is true.
SPEAKER_10Yeah.
SPEAKER_09And they say, Well, prove it. How can you prove that your truth is true? I mean, you know, she always go back and say, Well, you have to have faith that it's true. And I'm like, well, yes, but you know, it's like, how do you how do you prove truth? Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I there's so there are a lot of different ways you can go in a response to that. Like you can look at archaeological evidences, you can look at uh logical kind of proofs and arguments, you can do that kind of thing. You could talk about fulfilled prophecies, you could talk about witnesses to the resurrection, so on and so forth. But at the end of the day, you have the reality that there were Pharisees walking around who saw Jesus face to face before and after the resurrection and still didn't believe. So if God is the truth, and if Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and we only come to the truth by way of a person, then bottom line is there is no proof that we can give someone to convince them of the truth. Uh Romans 1, Paul talks about how the invisible attributes of God are written on the things that he has made, such that every human being has knowledge of him. But what do we do? We suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Uh Psalm 14, the fool says in his heart, There is no God. He's a fool because clearly there is a God, but he says otherwise. So at the end of the day, what we can do is preach. At the end of the day, we can demonstrate, we can read the Bible with people, we can share the gospel, but we have to trust the Holy Spirit to come and overcome the noetic effects of sin, the effects of sin on our thinking, in order to cast light and to help people see and embrace the truth. And that's the best we can do. We can do all the other stuff with the evidences and the arguments. Great, have at it. That's all great stuff. We should do it. But you realize if that internal change of the Holy Spirit doesn't happen, they're not gonna buy it. You're not gonna argue anyone into the kingdom. Bill?
SPEAKER_07I'd just like to give a stone in the shoe thing. I heard it said that when a homosexual couple wants to have a baby, they know where to go.
SPEAKER_10Yeah.
SPEAKER_09What does that mean?
SPEAKER_07What our pastor said is that there are people who don't believe that people are assigned being a boy or a girl. We know it takes a boy and a girl to make a baby, even though other people may not say that's true. But when those people want to have a baby, they know they need a boy and a girl.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Nature wins.
SPEAKER_10Right?
SPEAKER_05You get mugged by reality. Romans 1. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Excellent. Thank you all for being here. We have one more of these next week. We will be talking about Buddhism. There will be a dinner next week.
SPEAKER_07That's a good idea. We'll think about it.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. And then we're not sure what's what's gonna come after that. But for now, let's sing. We're gonna sing how firm a foundation. Because we've been seeing how postmodernism denies the foundation, and we're gonna affirm the foundation hard through singing.
SPEAKER_06How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord. It is laid for your faith in his excellent word. What more can he say than to you he has said, to who you who for review, to Jesus have fled. Let's pray.
SPEAKER_05Heavenly Father, thank you for this time together. Thank you for these brothers and sisters in Christ. Thank you for the truth that you have revealed to us. Thank you for the fact that we don't have to wander about listlessly and aimlessly, uh drowning in a sea of skepticism. But you have made us to know you and to know your world, and you've given us what we need to know in your word and in your world. Help us, we have friends, we have neighbors who are very much touched by the postmodern mood, even if they don't know that word or what it means. Help us to be good witnesses for the truth, Lord, not just in our words, but in our deeds. And we pray that by the power of your Holy Spirit you would go before us, that you would come behind, and that you would reveal Jesus to the people in our lives. It's in his name that we pray. Amen. I had two PDFs, and I printed the wrong one. I printed the cut-off one that didn't have the last line.
SPEAKER_06Thankfully enough of us knew the end of that first line. It created a new reality out of each other. Yes.
SPEAKER_01Whether we do it like the maybe we do like Q1 and then Q3, or maybe we eat like the T3.
SPEAKER_05Um but the next thing we do, I've got a series working out weeks in kind of like uh a physical theology of the first technology, it isn't just the function.
SPEAKER_01It's uh tablet in which we engrave whether civilization is not how does it fit in what are the benefits of it, what are the dangers of the easy but it's not easier to do the exactly.