Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (20 page)

Postmodernists concluded that the way to challenge claims to absolute
power
was to challenge claims to absolute
truth
. As Eagleton puts it, postmodernism “makes the mistake of supposing that all passionate conviction is incipiently dogmatic” and will “end up with the Gulag.”
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Why is that a mistake? Because it is self-refuting. By rejecting any universal truth, postmodernism undercuts its
own
claim to truth.

Moreover, without some universal standard of justice, there is no way to stand against injustice and oppression—the very things postmodernists were so concerned about. As one philosopher writes, “Without timeless and universal moral principles, it seems that we cannot criticize the values of different cultures or times, no matter how repugnant they may seem.”
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Think of it this way: If all claims can be deconstructed, then what about the claim that the rich should not oppress the poor? Or that we should resist bigotry and racism? Those claims, too, can be deconstructed. Thus postmodernism may appear to be radical, but as Jacobs writes, “it is in fact unable to offer resistance to the political status quo.”
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Lived out consistently, postmodernism leads to complicity with evil and injustice.

The Tyranny of Diversity

Lived out consistently, the theory also leads to the coercive suppression of diversity. That may sound ironic at first, because it was postmodernism that made
diversity
such a potent buzzword in the first place. Postmodernists decided that if totalitarianism results from totalizing metanarratives, then the way to prevent concentrations of power is to maintain a variety of mini-narratives. By celebrating the diversity of communities and their language games, postmodernists hope to avoid the coercion of a society organized by a single absolutized category.

In practice, however, only select groups are singled out to represent “diversity”—certified victim groups based on things like race, class, gender, ethnic group, and sexual identity. Rarely is there a push for intellectual or political or theological diversity, when those views run counter to postmodernism. And the analysis of the problem is typically derived from Marxism: some group is said to be victimized and oppressed, and the path to liberation is to revolt against the oppressors, often through political activism.

This explains why the typical university campus has become thoroughly politicized. In many English departments, literary criticism no longer deals with issues of aesthetics such as style, structure, and composition. Instead the trend is to apply Marxist criticism or feminist criticism or whatever the critic’s preferred theory is. Writing in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
, one English professor said the goal of literary study is to help students decide “which side of the world-historical class struggle they take: the side of the owners of the means of production, or the side of the workers. This and only this is the real question in textual literacy.”
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Frank Lentricchia, a critic so radical he was once dubbed the “Dirty Harry of literary theory,” was finally disillusioned when he observed his own students develop a suffocating sense of moral superiority. They would pass judgment on authors as racist or sexist or capitalist or imperialist or homophobic
before even reading their works
. In dismay, Lentricchia said, “Tell me your [literary] theory, and I’ll tell you in advance what you’ll say about any work of literature, especially those you haven’t read.”
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Politically correct university courses are not liberating students to think for themselves. They are turning students into cadres of self-absorbed reactionaries ready to take orders from the faddish theorist of the moment.

Bruno Latour, a sociologist of science, likewise grew concerned about the oppressive impact of the critical theory that he himself helped found. The attraction of postmodern criticism, he writes, is that it allows you to pose as the superior thinker who humiliates “naïve believers” by deconstructing their beliefs. “You are always right!” Latour says. “Their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don’t see, but that you, yes you alone can see.”
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Postmodernism began with the noble goal of unmasking the implicit imperialism of modernist worldviews. But, ironically, it has itself become imperialist, insisting that postmodernists alone have the ability to unmask everyone else’s underlying interests and motives—to deconstruct and debunk them. It thereby essentially silences every other perspective.

Worse, if you do not share postmodernism’s specific definition of diversity, it is likely to be imposed by force. An article in the
Atlantic
observes that “political correctness morphed into a tyranny of speech codes, sensitivity training, and book banning.”
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The drive for diversity, which was supposed to be the safeguard for liberty, has itself become coercive and homogenizing. Diversity has become a code word for a new form of tyranny.

Losing Your Self

I recently met friends who were grieving because their daughter had rejected her Christian upbringing—surprisingly, at a conservative Christian college. Her major was English, a subject most parents regard as relatively “safe,” where students read Shakespeare and Dickens. Even at evangelical colleges, however, many faculty members have embraced elements of postmodernism and deconstructionism. Within a short time, my friends’ daughter came to question whether there was any such thing as truth at all—including the biblical truth she had been taught in her home and church.

How can we prepare young people for the postmodern theories they will encounter in the classroom?

Like every worldview, postmodernism offers genuine insights—especially in its critique of modernism. The Enlightenment held an exalted view of the autonomous individual in possession of disembodied Reason (often capitalized), which supposedly lifted him above his tiny slot in time and space to deliver a timeless, objective truth. By contrast, postmodernism insists that knowledge is always contextual. Persons are not disembodied consciousnesses. They are physical beings situated within communities, and their worldviews are colored by cultural traditions, economic interests, and power relations.

Yet in reacting against the Enlightenment, postmodernism falls off the horse on the other side. It reduces the individual to a patchwork of historical and social forces, with no stable personal identity. The reason goes back to Hegel’s historicism, the idea that humanity is caught up in the ceaseless flux of evolution. The implication is that there is no such thing as human nature—no stable, ideal blueprint for what it means to be human, no universal standard to tell us who we are and how to fulfill our true nature.

As the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “There is no human nature because there is no God to have a conception of it.”
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Just as species are constantly changing and evolving, so individuals must leave behind all stable standards and immerse themselves in the ceaseless flux of life, constantly creating and re-creating themselves.

To use postmodern terms, the self is fluid and fragmented. Michel Foucault says his goal is “the dissociation of the self” by showing that our sense of being a coherent self is in reality an “empty synthesis” of past events. What exactly does that mean? One philosopher explains that for Foucault, “our identities are fictional anyway—each of us is plural, a congeries of forces pulling in many directions.”
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But if our identities are “fictional,” then who is Foucault? And who is really speaking in his writings? When a postmodernist states that it is impossible to attain objectivity, is
that
an objective statement? The theory undercuts its own claims.

Moreover, it runs contrary to human experience. Each of us experiences the inescapable, irresistible sense of being a coherent self—an active center of consciousness—not merely a passive locus of colliding social forces. Even as we undergo life changes, we are aware of an enduring core personal identity. The universality of this first-person awareness, even among those whose worldview denies it, is a clue that it is intrinsic to human experience. We are so constituted that we cannot live consistently on the basis of the postmodernists’ radical reductionism. And neither can they. The truths of general revelation cannot ultimately be suppressed.

The Trinity for Postmoderns

The problem of how to balance our individual identity with our membership in communities is a perennial question known in philosophy as the one and the many, or unity and diversity. Christianity offers an answer that is surprising and unique. It teaches that the human race was created in the image of a God who is a tri-unity—three Persons so intimately related as to constitute one Godhead. God’s own nature consists in reciprocal love and communication among the Persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Spirit). Both the one and the many, both individuality and relationship, exist within the divine nature.
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The perfect balance of unity and diversity within the Trinity offers a model for human social life—and a solution to the opposing poles of postmodernism and modernism. Against postmodernism’s dissolution of the self, the Trinity implies the dignity of the individual self. Just as each Person within the Trinity is distinct and plays a unique role in the drama of salvation, so each individual person has a unique identity and purpose.

Yet against modernism and its radical individualism, the Trinity implies that we are not disconnected and autonomous but were created for relationship. Sociality is built into the very essence of human nature. Aside from the effects of sin, there is an intrinsic harmony between what fulfills us as individuals and what fulfills us in our relationships—marriage, family, work, church, ethnic group. There is no inherent conflict between being true to oneself and participating in the God-ordained relationships that connect us to one another.

Christianity agrees with the postmodernist critique of the Enlightenment’s notion of the disembodied consciousness. The Bible teaches that God created humans as embodied beings, biologically connected to families, living in particular nations at particular periods in history. We are rooted in the physical, material world—and that is not a negative limitation that must be transcended. On the contrary, Genesis states repeatedly that the material creation is intrinsically good: “And God saw that it was good.”

In the book of Acts, Paul even teaches that our physical, social, and historical situatedness is intended by God as a means to draw us to him. Speaking about the nations (from the Greek
ethnos
, the root of
ethnic group
), Paul says God “determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live, … so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him” (Acts 17:26–27
NIV
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). Our biological and social identity is intended to be a blessing, to inspire us to search for God.

At the same time, Christianity refuses to reduce individuals to their communities, as postmodernism does. Christians are reborn into a redeemed community that transcends all natural communities. Even the family, the most basic biological community, does not determine our primary identity. All who become Christians are “children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will [to have a child], but born of God” (John 1:12–13
NIV
). The Bible’s liberating message is the promise that we can transcend the sin and brokenness of our natural communities because our primary identity is to be children of God.

This trinitarian view produces a wonderful balance in practice. Within the church, diversity based on physical origins—birth, family, gender, ethnicity, nationality—can be celebrated with gratitude as gifts from God. At the same time, these things do not ultimately define us: “Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11).

Remarkably, an atheist Marxist philosopher has written movingly of the gospel’s liberating legacy. Slavoj Zizek says Christianity teaches that we are not “bound by the chains of our past”—that we can “disengage ourselves from the inertia that constrains us to identify with the particular order we were born into.”
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Christianity offers a unique balance of unity and diversity, of particularity and universality.

The church itself is intended to be a powerful apologetic—a visible, living expression of the Bible’s balanced view.
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Every local church is “a letter from Christ … written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God” (2 Cor. 3:3). When outsiders “read” that letter, they should see the trinitarian view of community lived out—not perfectly, but in a credible way. Jesus even said that people will judge whether Christianity is true by the trinitarian love they witness in the church. As the Father and the Son are one, so Jesus prayed that all Christians “may become perfectly one,
so that the world may know
that you sent me” (John 17:23).

Francis Schaeffer called the visible manifestation of love among Christians “the final apologetic,” the single thing most likely to attract the attention of a jaded world.
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The message of our words will bear fruit only when confirmed by the message of our lives.

Escape from Reductionism

Understanding reductionism equips us with a powerful means to “destroy arguments … raised against the knowledge of God” (2 Cor. 10:5). In Principle #3, identifying reductionism was key to showing how idol-based worldviews contradict reality. In Principle #4, identifying reductionism is the clue to showing how worldviews self-destruct.

As we topple idols, it is imperative that we replace it with something better. If the core flaw is reductionism, then the way to build a positive case for Christianity is to show that it is
not
reductionistic. Because it does not deify any part of creation, it does not have to cram everything into a single set of categories. The result is that Christianity has a very rich ontology (theory of what exists). It offers a greater respect for creation than any of competing worldview. Consider how positive it is by comparison: