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with Jim Leffel
"I believe more and more that this is truly the central task of the Christian, to give the Lord the opportunity to exhibit his existence." (Letters, 63,4).
Dynamics of postmodern culture
Ideological considerations
"At times it seems that we can no longer talk to one another. Or rather, we can talk--and shout, demand, and vilify--but we cannot reason. We lack agreed-upon standards to which we can refer our disputes. In the absence of shared notions of justice or equity, many of the issues we confront appear increasingly to be unresolvable. . . Increasingly, debates take place between antagonists who deny their opponents’ ability to understood their plight. Inevitably, that turns such clashes into increasingly bitter ad hominem attacks in which victim status and the insistent demands for sensitivity are played as trump cards. . . Of course, sensitivity to the needs and concerns of others is the mark of a civil and civilized society. But the victimist demand for sensitivity is more problematic. To be sensitive is not to argue or reason but to feel, to attune one’s response to another’s sense of aggrievement. . . One can be insensitive without intending to be; only the victims can judge."
--Charles Sykes, A Nation of Victims
Understanding postmodern culture
"We assume beliefs are under conscious control at all times. But beliefs can be created merely by passively accepting information without attempting to analyze it. . . [W]hen distractions derailed their train of thought, volunteers in psychological experiments who had been given reason to doubt false information nevertheless tended to accept that information as true."
-- Bruce Bower, Science News (January 5, 1991, 14)
1. The power of social consensus
2. The opportunity to provide a compelling case for the gospel by causing uncertainty and tension
- Some thoughts on relativism statistics
- How inclusive and tolerant is postmodern relativism?
"Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator’s armory. . . In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalistic democracies--the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. . . Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures." -- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
1. Beliefs and values shaped by media
2. Media is not trusted as a source of truth
- Jerry Springer and Geraldo in mainstream news
1. Loss of trust, alienation
- Why truth claims can not be trusted
- Why relationships don’t work
"Now if selves are defined by their preferences, but those preferences are arbitrary, then each self constitutes its own moral universe, and there is finally no way to reconcile conflicting claims about what is good in itself. All we can do is refer to chains of consequences and ask if our actions prove useful or consistent in light of our own value systems. All we can appeal to in relationships with others is their self interest, likewise enlightened, or their intuitive sympathies. Where sympathy or already congruent values are not enough to resolve moral disagreements between ourselves and others, we have no recourse except to withdraw from them." -- Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart
2. Witness of Christian family and marriage
- Live so that your life can be observed and shared
1. General cynicism
"An undergraduate tells of an art history course in which the instructor observed one day, ‘As we now know, the idea that knowledge can be objective is a positivist myth that has been exploded by postmodern thought.’ It so happens that the student is concurrently enrolled in a political science course in which the instructor speaks confidently about the objectivity of his discipline as if it had not been ‘exploded’ at all. What do you do? The student is asked. ‘What else can I do?’ he says. ‘I trash objectivity in art history, and presuppose it in political science.’" -- Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars
2. Relevance, clarity and authenticity still make a difference
- Unavoidable tension between the real world and how people think
- Idealism without a basis
1. Tolerance and openness: Nothing can be taken too seriously
2. Necessity of pre-evangelism: Biblical view is hostile to today’s spirituality
3. Thankfully, nominalism is dead: Non-Christians know they’re non-Christians
Spiritual authenticity: The power of grace and the witness of changed life
Background issues
What is true spirituality?
Practical outworkings
Necessity of biblical Christianity: Building a positive case
"The truth of Christianity is that it is true to what is there." -- He Is There And He Is Not Silent
Metaphysical necessity of God
Presuppositions as hypotheses
"The strength of the Christian system--the acid test of it--is that everything fits under the apex of the existent, infinite-personal God, and it is the only system in the world where this is true. No other system has an apex under which everything fits." 81.
Christian communicators need to work from this position.
"If this were not so, we would have had a God who needed to create in order to love and communicate. In such a case, God would have needed the universe as much as the universe needed God." (15,16)
Epistemological necessity of God
Failure of rationalism (humanism)
Universals: Meaning, absolutes
Particulars: Individual things, finite people
Humanism deals with reason, but not the big questions. So reason leads to despair. Existentialism and mysticism deal with the big questions but not with reason.
Hypothesis: An infinite personal God exists
"The same reasonable God made both things, namely, the known and the knower, the subject and the object, and he put them together. So it is not surprising if there is a correlation between these things. Is that not what you would expect?" 69.
". . . all men constantly and consistently act as though Christianity is true." 70.
"At the one-word level, the words learned most readily are those that refer to objects and events already well-established in prelinguistic intentionality. The word becomes attached as additional property, a kind of ‘handle’ to the already existing prototype in terms of which the object has been conceptualized. The fact that these words refer to things already known explains the startling rapidity of the growth of the child’s vocabulary. . . Beneath the welter of lifeworld (worldview) perspectives and the differences among individuals who share the same perspective, there is a level of thought and interaction on which people everywhere have pretty much the same outlook. Here is where the relativism of the lifeworlds comes to an end." -- Donald McIntosh, "Language, Self, and Lifeworld in Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action," Theory and Society 23:1994, 22.
Schaeffer makes a vital contrast:
"This is the modern man’s alienation; this is the blackness which so many modern people face, the feeling of being totally alienated. A couple can sleep together for ten or fifteen years, but how are they going to get inside each other’s heads to know anything about the other person as a person, in contrast merely to a language machine?" 57.
"Though we do bring our own backgrounds to language, which gives the word a special cast, yet there is also, with reasonable care, enough overlapping on the basis of the external world and the human experience to ensure that we can communicate even though we fall short of an exhaustive meaning of the same word. In other words, our words overlap, even while they do not fit completely." 73.
"But reading the Bible every day of one’s life does something else--it gives one a different mentality. In the modern world we are surrounded by the mentality of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, but as we read the Bible it gives us a different mentality. Do not minimize the fact that in reading the bible we are living in a mentality which is the right one, opposed to the great wall of this other mentality which is forced upon us on every side--in education, in literature, in the arts, and in the mass media." 78.
