There is a growing confusion over the nature and source of biblical authority. David K. Clark clarifies “the functional view of authority makes a grievous error to the degree that it collapses the critical distinction between the recognition of the Bible’s authority by the church and the Bible’s inherent possession of authority. For evangelical theology, a community’s act of recognizing a document as authoritative for its thought and life is essential, but this is not the reality, the power, or the force that gives a document its divine authority. That is, the church’s act of receiving the Bible as divine is not the ontological ground of the Bible’s being God’s Word. Rather, for evangelical theology, it is God’s act of inspiration that grounds the Bible’s status as God’s revelation. So this is the salient distinction: the ontological ground of the text’s authority is not the same as the epistemic acceptance of the text’s authority. For evangelical theology, the first idea, the ontological ground of authority, lies rooted in the objective reality of the triune God speaking through the Spirit’s inspiration. The second concept, the subjective recognition of the Bible as God’s Word by a believing community, is the appropriate human response to the authority of Scripture. These two ideas work together, and both are absolutely necessary. The objective authority of the Bible rooted in God’s inspiring action stands against allowing any contemporary agendas to gain control over the theology. The subjective recognition of the Bible as authoritative guards against a dead orthodoxy that pays lip service to divine truth even as it pursues other agendas.” From David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology, ed. John S. Feinberg, Foundations of Evangelical Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2003), 65.
Tag Archives: Postmodernism
Do All Roads Lead to God?
Here is an excellent video by Christian philosopher William Lane Craig:
“Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” – Acts 4:12 (1 Tim. 2:3-5; John 14:6)
What is Postmodernism?
Maybe you have heard the term thrown around but aren’t quite sure what it is. Philosopher Paul Copan has written a very helpful article on what Postmodernism is:
“In one of his dialogues, Plato cited the thinker Protagoras as saying that any given thing “is to me such as it appears to me, and is to you such as it appears to you.”1 This sounds rather contemporary. We hear slogans declaring “that’s true for you but not for me” or “that’s just your perspective.” These statements reflect the postmodern mood that continues to affect and shape Western culture.
How did postmodernism descend upon our civilization? What is postmodernism? What are its defining characteristics? We will look very briefly at these questions.
1. How did postmodernism emerge? Obviously, the term postmodernism presupposes an era that preceded it—modernism. But we must also understand what modernism was reacting to—namely, premodernism.
Premodernism: Before the 1600s, people in the West generally believed that God (or the transcendent/supernatural realm) furnished the basis for moral absolutes, rationality, human dignity, and truth. This is expressed by the noted Christian theologian Anselm (b. AD 1033), who said, “I believe that I may understand” (credo ut intelligam) he spoke of a “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum). That is, the starting point for knowledge and wisdom was God, who provided the lens through which one could properly interpret reality and human experience. By having faith in God, the world could be rightly understood.
Modernism: Then came philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). As a Roman Catholic, he was troubled by the philosophical skepticism and (due to the Protestant Reformation) the theological uncertainty of his day. So he embarked on a “skeptical voyage” in the pursuit of absolutely certain knowledge. As part of his project, he determined to doubt everything: Maybe an evil genius was tinkering with his mind – or maybe everything is an illusion. But he concluded that at least he knew he was doubting, which is a form of thinking. He concluded: I think; therefore I am (or, in Latin, cogito, ergo sum). So without realizing it, Descartes’ project removed God from center stage, replacing it with the human knower as the starting point. The effect would be momentous. The rationalism of the European Enlightenment (c. 1650-1800) reflected this shift. This period was both optimistic about human potential and reason, but was also skeptical about church authority/state churches and Christian doctrine (“dogma”).
This was just one of many modernist projects that assumed that human dignity, truth, and reason could be preserved without God. Besides rationalism (with its emphasis on reason), there were Romanticism (with the emphasis on feeling), Marxism, Nazism, and other utopian schemes that sought to displace God as the starting point for understanding and living. The Jewish-Christian worldview that had deeply influenced the West was now being challenged.
Postmodernism: Then, in the wake of two World Wars, a postmodern climate started to permeate the West. Confidence in human progress and autonomy was shattered on the rocks of Auschwitz and the Soviet gulags. The systems or “grand stories” (“metanarratives”) of Nazism, Marxism, scientism, or rationalism ended up oppressing “the other”—that is, those marginalized by these systems such as Jews, capitalists, etc. These systems proved to be total failures. So with postmodernism, not only was God excluded as a foundation for making sense of reality and human experience; we cannot speak of any universal truth, reason, or morality. We just have fragmented perspectives.
If the French Revolution and the storming of the Bastille in Paris (1789) stands as a picture of the shift to modernism, the fall of the Berlin Wall exactly 200 years later (1989) symbolizes the failure of modernism and rise of postmodernism…” (More)For more resources, visit Paul Copan here…
Ideas Have Histories Where Postmodernism Came From
Here is an article written by my friend and executive director of Summit Ministires, John Stonestreet; enjoy!
Postmodernism comes in all kinds of shapes and expressions. This sort of variety can make it difficult to understand.
Further, postmodernism resists categories and distinctions, and this makes it more difficult to nail down as a worldview. There is a larger intellectual history that must be understood in order to grasp the uniqueness and significance of postmodernism as a worldview.
Ideas Have Histories: How We Lost Our Minds
While dividing history into distinct time periods is not an exact science, there are two major historical transitions that can help us clarify the emergence of postmodernism: (1) the transition towards modernism, typically dated around the 1700s, and (2) the transition away from modernism, which began in the late 20th century.
The transition from what is often called the pre-modern period into the modern period corresponds with the influence of Enlightenment thinking and the scientific revolution. Prior to the Enlightenment, there was a dominant cultural belief in the existence of the supernatural. This was due in large part to the rise of Christianity, and specifically the Roman Catholic church as the most powerful cultural presence in medieval times. This was a world of authority, and authority rested in the hands of traditional institutions, especially the church, since it was entrusted with interpreting and communicating this truth to the common person.
With a belief in God came a strong belief in the concept of revelation, that God not only existed but had revealed Himself and His will in the Bible. This revelation was considered the primary source of truth, and could be trusted to unlock God’s metanarrative (or, “Big Story”) for the world. Believing was the starting point of real knowledge.
St. Anselm typifies a pre-modern perspective on truth: “For I seek not to understand in order that I may believe; but I believe in order that I may understand, for I believe for this reason: that unless I believe, I cannot understand.” This view of revelation and authority did not fare well during the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was a movement among European intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the decades leading up to this time, the church’s authority had been successfully challenged politically (reactions against corruption), theologically (Luther, Calvin and the Protestant Reformation), philosophically (downfall of scholasticism), and scientifically (Galileo, Copernicus, and Baconian method). There was a growing disillusionment with the traditional educational, political and religious institutions, as well as their authoritative sources.
During the Enlightenment, authority shifted from traditional institutions to human reason. A scientific approach to the world yielded tremendous advances in medicine, technology, and communications and challenged the centrality of theology and religious belief as the paradigm for learning. Free from the restrictive shackles of traditional beliefs (thus, modernism), progress seemed inevitable. Immanuel Kant described this period of time in this way: “Sapere aude! ‘Have the courage to make use of your own mind!’ is thus the slogan of the Enlightenment.”
The modern period had begun. The growing skepticism in regards to anything supernatural was matched by growing faith in human ability to know the world, control it, and reap the inevitable benefits. The “Big Story” of the world was not given by revelation; rather, it was to be discovered and perhaps even determined by science, reason and technology. This major transition was at the heart of the modern period.
However, from our 21st-century perspective, it is clear that the predictions of utopia guaranteed in the modern period never materialized. Instead, modernists became disillusioned as military increase brought world wars, failed development policies led to class oppression and colonialism, economic idealism resulted in communism and the Cold War, and our best science created nuclear weapons and the threat of global devastation.
Postmodern writers, beginning with Nietzsche, began to question the integrity of modernism’s metanarrative of progress. In fact, the main casualty of a postmodern perspective is the very idea of a metanarrative. Postmoderns are skeptical of any and all claims to an authoritative comprehensive worldview, absolute truth about reality, and an overarching purpose to the human story. Postmoderns embrace local narratives, not metanarratives; a multitude of stories, not a “Big Story.”
In short, it could be said that religious metanarratives were dismissed by modernism. Man-made ones are dismissed by postmodernism. This is what Myron Penner and others have referred to as “the postmodern turn”: postmodernism is a turn away from the certainty and optimism of modernism. As Jean Francios Lyotard wrote: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”
Answering the Postmodern Challenge
Postmodernism’s impact on Western culture is hotly debated, and various thinkers and writers—including those coming from a Christian worldview—have offered diverging opinions of it. Some see it as a passing fad; others see it as long-lasting paradigm shift. Some decry it as dangerously destructive; others embrace its destruction of the oppressive structures of modernity.
The most helpful contribution of postmodernism is, first, that it has successfully challenged the reigning paradigm of the modern period, which was based largely on naturalistic humanism. Modernism, in seeking to arrive at absolute knowledge through empirical investigation, separated matters of “faith” from matters of objective knowledge about the real world. Postmodernism confronts this dichotomy in ways that are helpful for the Christian worldview.
Second, postmodernism has cast a large shadow of skepticism (and has offered a strong dose of humility) on the modern belief in the efficacy and near inerrancy of human reason. As was seen during the modern period, human reason can be quite productive, especially in the arenas of science, medicine, and technology. However, human reason can also be manipulative and destructive, especially when it produces the totalizing ideologies (e.g. communism, Nazism, colonialism, etc) that characterized the modern period.
Third, postmodernism has demonstrated that objectivity and certainty are not exclusive to the realm of science as was claimed during the modern period. In fact, science is often quite biased and agenda-driven, and is therefore in no place to claim to be the final arbiter on all matters of knowledge. This is especially helpful for Christians, who often feel the burden to play by the rules of modernism and empirically demonstrate every aspect of Christian truth.
Fourth, postmodernism rightly reminds us of the power of our culture, and especially the language of our culture, in creating our frames of reference. The modern period demonstrated that this power can be used to marginalize and oppress others at the personal and the systemic level. For the Christian, then, care should be taken to distinguish scriptural teaching from our cultural perceptions.
Finally, the emphasis of postmodernism on story and narrative fits (to a limited extent) with the way the Bible presents God’s interaction with the world. The Bible is, on the whole, a narrative through which God gives us the Truth about Himself, humanity, and the world. Of course, for the postmodernist, no story is to be considered true in this absolute sense over and above any other story, and propositions from one interpretive community are irrelevant for others.
The Bible does not present a God whose story is one among many, but a God whose story is the story above all others. So, in dealing with the postmodern mind, evangelicals face a difficult situation. For the past several centuries, modernity has relegated Christianity to the category of an unscientific, unrealistic worldview that is simply not believable for thinking people. Some Christians are tempted to settle for having Christianity accepted as a truth rather than face the prospect of being dismissed due to dogmatically claiming to be the truth, and abandoning the concept of worldview seems to be a small price to pay for having at least some claim to “truth.”
Although the dethroning of humanistic scientific reason is (More)
Why Relativism is a Really Bad Idea (with a little help from the Colbert Report)
On October 17, 2005 a new word came into existence that really captures the spirit of our age – take a look at this clip:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Word – Truthiness | ||||
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“It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything…Truthiness is “What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.” It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true.” – Stephen Colbert
What Colbert is describing with “truthiness” goes by another alias = relativism. Now relativism is all over the place – out there and in here…young and old. I could bore you with statistics, but I don’t have time for that just now.
Relativism is everywhere…but what is it? Atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche succinctly defined it this way:
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
Is good and evil, right and wrong, foolish and wise – really just a matter of personal preference? So, Letterman style, I want to count down the 5 biggest reasons relativism is a bad idea.
5. Relativism is self-refuting (self-contradictory). To see this, take the statement “there are no English sentences longer than 6 words.” (What’s wrong here? – 9 words). Now let’s take the statement “Everything is relative.” If it’s true, its false. What kind of statement is it? A relative statement or an absolute statement? Relativism at its core is self-refuting. (e.g., My brother is an only child).
4. Relativism eliminates the possibility of moral reform. If moral relativism is true, then what is “right” is determined by whatever the majority of the culture believes. But this leads to the absurd consequence that those seeking to reform the immoral practices of society (e.g., eliminating racism) are the immoral ones because they are acting against the cultural majority. This is a powerful reason to reject moral relativism. (cf. Martin Luther King)
3. Relativism eliminates the possibility of moral progress. If moral relativism is true, then moral progress becomes, by definition, impossible. According to a consistent moral relativist, not only was someone like Martin Luther King wrong for challenging the deeply held moral beliefs of his culture, but the change he affected did not technically “improve” the morals of society—it just changed them.
2. Relativism removes our ability praise good and condemn evil. Think about this – if relativism were true, then we would have to conclude that there is no moral difference between Hitler and Mother Theresa. We would not be able to universally condemn the holocaust, rape, or genocide as evil. And we would not be able to universally say that self-sacrifice is superior to self-centeredness.
1. It diminishes sin. As my friend Brett Kunkle puts it, “once sin disappears, grace disappears with it.” You see Relativism neutralizes the Gospel and removes (people’s perceived) need for a Savior. Relativism cannibalizes truth. But if there is no truth there is no Good News—just news.
What kind of world would it be if relativism were true?
“It would be a world in which nothing was wrong—nothing is considered evil or good, nothing worthy of praise or blame. It would be a world in which justice and fairness are meaningless concepts, in which there would be no accountability, no possibility of moral improvement, no moral discourse. And it would be a world in which there is no tolerance.” – Greg Koukl & Francis Beckwith
*This connection was made by Brett Kunkle (STR) in his chapter on Truth in Apologetics for a New Generation :
Technical Support:
• Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air by Greg Koukl and Frank Beckwith
• True for You, But Not for Me by Paul Copan
• Ethix: Being Bold in A Whatever World by Sean McDowell