Wrestling with Postmodernism

Postmodernism has been on my mind most of this semester. For my Historical Theology class we were to write about the effects of some sort of influence on a Doctrine of Scripture. I chose the effects of Postmodernism on Sola Scriptura. I have heard many things called postmodern in the church, but I was never quite sure what people were referring to. Hopefully this will provide better insight on what postmodernism is, and also the danger postmodernism entails.

The Doctrine of Sola Scriptura has been largely under attack by the Postmodernist movement over the past several decades. This battle for the Christianity’s future, has its origins in the fall, the fall of the liberal and fundamentalist Protestants. This fall has been widening almost since the beginning of the Reformation. Seeding back to the Protestant revolt, which held that Bibles, not popes, were authoritative, and that every believer was a priest, Sola Scriptura has long been under siege. Even still the Reformation and Enlightenment era birthed the individualistic authoritarianism. This is continually threaded through out recent history with the mascara of Tammy Faye Bakker, the emphasis on personal responsibility, the separatist-oath Bible-thumpings of James DeForest Murch (former editor of the magazine of the National Assn. of Evangelicals), who in 1949 labeled the interdenominational peacemakers in his ranks “Ecumaniacs.[1]” In the 1960’s Fuller’s Seminary in Los Angeles California claimed thought the bible was still “infallible,” it was no longer “inerrant on all matters of science and history.” Conservative Fundamentalist labeled this sad day as “Black Saturday.[2]” In 1995, historian Roger Olson wrote about a "new mood, if not movement" in theology called "Post-Conservatism." Post-conservatives see doctrines based on the bible, whether liberal or fundamentalist, “as merely human—fallible interpretations through which divine light can leak from time to time.[3]” Evident in each of these events is the philosophy of postmodern thought.
As much as there was a need to fight the effects Modernity placed on the Scripture, the effects of Postmodernism should be guarded just as much if not more as a further step in the wrong direction. Modernity assumed that knowledge and power of education would lead to the freedom of vulnerability to nature and social bondage. Modernism becomes what it is by engaging in self-criticism in order to purge itself of what it is not. While postmodernism, in contrast, moves from “an awareness of the connectedness between what is acknowledged as its own and what it excludes.[4]” The past several decades have produced more technological advancement and social law than the world has ever seen; yet, humanity still lies vulnerable to natural and social bondage. Instead of creating “a better world” like Modernists believed, a more cynical postmodern one ensued with Friedrich Nietzsche’s words ringing in the late 1800’s, “God is dead.”

This essay seeks to put forth only a few of the ways postmodernism’s attack of Sola Scriptura. First, it will overview the topsy-turvy world of interpretation and hermeneutics of Scripture in our postmodern setting. Here it will be shown that the only certainty when reading Scripture through the scope of the cardinal doctrines of postmodernism is that there is no solid ground. Second, it will suggest that this state of affairs is directly derived from moves in the larger world of philosophical hermeneutics and literary analysis, a condition that is by no means novel in the church's use of Sacred Scripture. It is important for confessional communities to understand this shift. Third, to reveal the frequent methodological ambiguity of postmodern authors, and their jettison of postmodern philosophy into the Market Place of the church and its’ understanding of Sola Scriptura. Finally, the claims of Sacred Scripture will be urged as the claims of Christ which are radically and foundationally antithetical to postmodern hermeneutics. This is a time where yet again, Christ stands over against culture in a manner that is explicit and evident for those formed by the history of Israel and the life of Jesus. Like the saints in every epoch before us, we must be prepared to stand with Christ over against the prevailing culture and say with Luther, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.[5]”.

Origen-and Basic Understanding of Postmodernism

The exact origin of postmodernism is disagreed on. There is an overall belief that the term was coined in the 1930’s. Arnold Toynbee who wrote Study of History could not decide if it was birthed in the 1930’s because it did not become a cultural phenomenon until about three of four decades later. Artists, architects, and thinkers were all attracted to postmodern theory…they were seeking radicals looking for alternatives to the dominant culture of their days. There are two major umbrellas under the rain of postmodernism: structuralists and deconstructionist. Structuralists argue that language is a social construct and that people develop literary documents in an attempt to make sense of the meaningfulness of their experiences…maintaining literature (text including but not limited to Scriptures) provides categories to help organize and understand our experience of reality. While deconstructionists say meaning is not inherent in the text itself. Rather it merely emerges with interpreter’s dialogue with the text, making the text have as many meaning as it does readers; in doing this, “Postmoderns often seek to undermine the concept of the powerful originating author.[6]” Consequently, applying this philosophy to the historical understanding of contextual reading of Scripture, this train of thinking becomes hostile to the Scriptures.

Theorists of the Postmodern Hermeneutical Landscape

The Postmodern hermeneutical landscape is the idea of the infinite amount of possibilities of proposed directions via interpretation. The postmodern hermeneutical landscape can be seen most widely in three of Anthony Thiselton’s writings: The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description (1980), New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading (1992), and most recently Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self (1995). These provide an inlet into understanding the perspective on the vast landscape of issues and proposed directions of postmodern hermeneutics. To summarize this literature and the contemporary landscape, David Lyon, professor at Queen's University states: "Only tribal truths and tribal decisions about right and wrong can be made.”[7]

This view "that all truth is tribal:" of course, radically marginalizes any claim to an absolute truth, making truth a multiplicity of collages with no center. Though the ideas of relativism and pluralism seen in this philosophy are not new, the postmodern variety differs from previous forms. The postmodern consciousness, in contrast, focuses on the group. This tribal mentality provides various havens for relativistic thinking, allowing the focus to be on the groups understanding of what they believe truth to be.

There are many venues at which the theorists arrive at this conclusion. Roland Barthes (1915-1980), for example, argues that the

“result of semiotic theory is to unmask the status of codes which are assumed to
mirror the world as no more than particular habits of minds or cultural
constructs.”[8]

This means that people assume that language reflects the external world. Furthermore, it argues that to suggest more would be deceptive because there is no possibility of objectivity. Its claims are culture bound making them ultimately and absolutely arbitrary. The logic of this position leads to a view that everything remains "intralinguistic[9].”' Meaning, a text does not describe states of affairs about the external world because the meanings are endlessly fluid and plural. Consequently, this view allows no room for the historical inerrancy of Scripture and makes the truth something that is socially conditional.

To pick another theorist, Jaques Derrida's deconstruction is unequivocal. Every statement invites a plurality of interpretations and possible meanings multiply. He views interpretation as arbitrary and holds that no external or objective state of affairs can be maintained. The following is the epitome of postmodern assumptions:

There is nothing outside the play of writing, nothing that guarantees that our
words refer to the world. The loss of a transcendent signifier-the Logos-thus
follows hard upon the death of the author. The result is a textual Gnosticism
that refines to locate determinate meaning in the literal sense. Every truth
claim is dissolved in a sea of indeterminacy.[10]

This allows for a multiplicity of interpretation that is a void of any universal or stable meaning. There is no absolute truth; truth is relative to the community in which one participates. The unique appeal to today’s society is that “Postmoderns do not seek to be wholly self directed individuals like our modern fore fathers, but rather ‘whole’ persons[11].”

Postmodern Hermeneutics in the Marketplace

The postmodern theorist influence does not end in the university. Rather the fallacies of postmodern theorist are cultivated in the Universities, transported to the churches via pastors, and flushed out into the congregation through the pulpit. The logic of postmodernism has begun to be more publicly owned by central and defining institutions of our society. Hence in the University of Chicago's Record for October 23, 1997, there is a paper by John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison, a distinguished service professor. The piece is entitled "The Aims of Education at Chicago:' He writes with respect to the university's aims:

I believe that this university has three main goals in educating its
undergraduates. First, it aims to teach you to think critically. Second, the
University seeks to broaden your intellectual horizons. And third, it tries to
promote self-awareness in each of you[12].

Although these goals may appear to be modestly generic, however, the “non aims of Education at Chicago,” are not so esoteric and are very revealing. In Professor Mearsheimer's words:
There is a powerful bias at the University of Chicago against providing you with the truth… to put the matter in slightly different terms, we expect you to figure out the truth, if there is one[13].

[He continues,]Not only is there a powerful imperative at Chicago to stay away
from teaching the truth, the University also makes little effort to provide you
with moral guidance. Indeed, it is a remarkable amoral institution[14].

There is no masking the admission of the University that truth nor are moralities purposes of the University. Furthermore, this same article spends an adequate amount of time explaining how archaic Rockefeller Chapel has become. What was once a place where the Scriptures were preached has now become a place where they are denounced by men who claim to be followers of the God of the Scriptures. This lecture is a precise of where many prestigious universities now plant their feet.

Alongside of this intellectual nihilism is a more pervasive and persuasive parallel which we will call "the marketplace hermeneutic of postmodernism." In an article entitled Why the Devil Takes VISA (written for the Pew Charitable Trusts and later appearing in Christianity Today) Rodney Clapp describes the grammar of contemporary consumerism. Its ubiquitous character is felt by all of us:

But consumerism is much more pervasive and much less obvious than smog or
billboards. Look harder and you can see it at work all around - shaping
attitudes, bending behaviors, grinding an endless series of lenses through which
to see and experience the world in a particular way. You see it at the medical
clinic, where doctors must pump a certain number of patients through their doors
to meet required profit quotas of their H.M.O. You see it on the calendar
defined not so much by holy days as by a string of commercially hyped holidays[15].

The key in the catechises of consumerism is choice. The study for the Pew Charitable Trust points out that the rise of choice within and between churches has a parallel in early twentieth century revivalism:

By underscoring the importance of making a decision for Christ, Charles Finney
and other revivalists helped along the sanctification of choice, a key component
of today's consumerism. Revivalism encouraged rapturous feelings and a malleable
self that is open time and again to changes of conversion and re-conversion.
This was simply translated into a "propensity" toward "conversion" to new
products, a variety of brands and fresh experiences. In fact peddlers were
fixtures on the fringes of revivalist meetings, where they hawked counsel and
medicines promising transformation of the buyer's lives. Modern advertising grew
directly out of the patent medicine trade[16].

Along with the sanctification of choice, this hermeneutic of the human being sees dissatisfaction and the manufacture of endless felt-needs as central to who we are. Affluence and consumer-orientation have moved us well beyond the undeniable efficiencies and benefits of refrigeration and indoor plumbing. Instead, in a fun-house world of ever-proliferating wants and ridiculous unsatisfied desire, consumption entails most profoundly the cultivation of pleasure, the pursuit of novelty, and the chasing after illusory experiences associated with material goods[17]. Thus, insatiability becomes a fundamental function of the human being. The consumer is nurtured in insatiability. He or she is never to be satisfied - at least, not for long. The consumer is tutored that people basically consist of unmet needs that can be appeased only by commoditized goods and experiences[18].

If you examine this marketplace hermeneutic you'll note how it is crafted for a radical individualism. Family, friendship and commitments to more than the moment of acquisition are minimal or nonexistent. But before critically addressing this hermeneutic, I'd like to suggest that more than the academy's version of postmodernism, this way of understanding “who” we are has had and continues to have devastating results on our use of the Sacred Scriptures. A very rigorous and penetrating analysis of just this point is provided by Philip D. Kenneson and James L. Street in their recent study Selling Out the Church: The Dangers of Church Marketing (1997). One of the first points they make is how consumerist thinking robs the Christian vision of central commitments:

Consumers are more aware than ever of the enormous power they wield. This
realization has created an entirely new way of thinking rooted in the convention
that other people ought to be prepared to satisfy our desires. Thus friendship
and marriages increasingly reflect the consumer orientation with their easy
dissolution often viewed on a par with changing brands[19].

The casual manner in which many members change congregations or church confessions need not be mentioned. It is pervasive in our ethos as well. When one views the entire world through the marketing lens, the notion of gift disappears. So, instead of God's grace, the consumer chooses his religion around the notion of a self-interested exchange. Thus, Pelagian categories submerge the free grace of God. Our relationship with God is not simply self-interested exchange. God's most precious gift is his presence. God is not a means to some other end that we desire. Rather God's presence is its own end and its own reward. Thus, marketing categories corrupt the church's embodied witness to the mercy and grace of the Triune God. They reduce this relationship to transactional moments that are discrete and separate from God's character and our nature. If the very character of marketing relationships is impersonal and dehumanizing than it does not make sense for the church to adopt a marketing orientation in the name of Christian outreach. When the chief authority is no longer Sacred Scripture, but the current felt needs of people who believe their choices are sanctified, then the church is right back in the Garden of Eden with Adam choosing the tree of death.
Once the church's fundamental identity has been constructed as a business whose purpose it is to serve its constituency by attempting to meet its insatiable and undisciplined desires and needs? The church is no longer in a position to describe the Triune God of Sacred Scripture[20]. Diettrich has written:

The theological understandings of the church and its calling must serve as the
criteria by which the discoveries of the social sciences are critically analyzed
and utilized. Thus effectiveness must be in the service of faithfulness, and
indeed, when considered in isolation may lead to unfaithfulness[21].

No social phenomena should navigate the theological course of the church. The study of God revealed through His written Word is the compass the church should adhere to. However, the pressing ideology of postmodernism has infiltrated the Church making the church is becoming impacted rather than making an impact. As one scholar has put it:

To give the whole story away to match what this year's market says the
unchurched want is to have the people who know least about the faith determine
most about its expression[22].

The body of Christ from Ephesus to present the church has been commanded to be captive to the Word of God. Never has a church continued to represent the glory of God when it abandoned the truth of Scripture and allowed the demands of the contemporary culture pervade upon the doctrines of the church.

The Challenge to Postmodern Deconstruction

Sola Scripture challenges postmodernism in a fundamental and foundational manner. Over against the fragmentation of knowing whether it be epistemological, where every truth is tribal and there is no language for the particular, or economic, where we are reduced to discrete moments of acquisition, the prophets and apostles present an inclusive claim and view of reality that will not permit the bifurcation or division of the cosmos into a meta-realm of ideas and a foreign realm of the flesh. Sacred Scripture calls our broken culture and schizophrenic habits to a unity and wholeness that is true and redemptive. This unity is anchored in the Incarnation of the Logos, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.[23]

Conclusion

Postmodernism assumes various forms. It is embodied in certain attitudes and expression that have not been touched on in this paper. Such expressions range from fashions to television and include such pervasive aspects of popular culture as music and film. Postmodernism is likewise incarnated in a variety of cultural expressions, including architecture, art, and literature. Above all of these venues, postmodernism is an intellectual outlook that can infiltrate the mind of the believing Christian if not examined and rejected. Postmodernists denounce the pretenses of those who claim to view the world from a transcendent view point and claim and absolute canonical meaning. They have replaced the ideals of the Reformation and Enlightenment with the belief that all claims to truth—and ultimately even truth itself—are socially conditioned and non absolute.

The deconstructions of postmodern hermeneutics have followed the grammar of historical-critical methodology to its final and sterile end. They seek to find meaning layer by layer but desire there to be no internal core. There is no connection with and ‘word’ in the world, let alone the “Word.” Under Sola Scripture, Christ and those who are his will stand radically and fundamentally over against postmodern culture. The way the church thinks about herself, about her children, about her parents - all will be markedly and definitively different. Christians, by God's grace, need to confess Christ not in the enthusiasms of their private, choice-driven religiosity, but in the catholic creeds and confessions which expound the Christ whom the prophets and apostles described. When that Christology is confessed, then every moment is defined as being significant for it is lived before the Triune God who has clearly defined in Scripture the beginning and the end and everything in between. May God grant such clarity of confession and such wholeness in Christ to each of us in this fragmented epoch - and may that wholeness reflect the light of Christ's presence in a Scriptural confession in the twenty-first century. In closing, I would like to acknowledge the truth in the words of Charles Spurgeon who fought the same battles that the church today is fighting who we would be gracious to repeat. He said,

“I am a Radical in many things, but in the doctrines of the gospel I would have
you to be Conservative to the backbone, not for an hour yielding any point of
truth to the most brilliant thinker that the world can produce. Thinkers are not
appointed to tinker up a gospel for us; thank God, we have a perfect gospel
already. Their shifting gospel changes about every ten years, and comes out
spick and span as a new theology, but we have grasped the old infallible truth,
and we mean to hang to it for dear life, being strong in faith, giving glory to
God[24].”

[1] “ Jesus with a Genius Grant” LA Times, November 23
[2] http://www.alanrifkin.com/beta_test/articles/jesus_with_a_genius_grant.htm
[3] Pinnock, Clark “Confessions of a Post Conservative Evangelical Theologian”
[4] Genz, Stanely p. 8
[5] Sproul, Light and Darkness, P. 38
[6] Grenz. Stanely A Primer on Postmodernism p. 21
[7] Lyon, 103.
[8] Thiselton 82.
[9] Ibid. 83
[10] Vanhoozer, 109. (Fortress 1990).
[11]
[12] Mearsheimer 5
[13] Mearsheimer 5
[14] Mearsheimer 5
[15] Clapp. 20
[16] Clapp, 22.
[17] Clapp, 23
[18] Clapp. 28
[19] Kenneson and Street 39.
[20] Kenneson and Street 72.
[21] Kenneson and Street 130
[22] Keenan and Street, 48.
[23] The Fatherhood of Adam and Abraham (Genesis 1-2; 12-22); The Genealogies (Genesis 5-10; Matthew 1); The Nations (Genesis 11); The Unity of Humanity (Psalm 104) (Psalm 19) Genesis 1-2; Isaiah 65: Revelation 1-21
[24] Spurgeon, “Strong Faith” Preached on the morning of July 15th 1877.