Keep updated! Join the Jesus Cafe mailing list. Your Email Address : subscribe unsubscribe		Truth in the Postmodernist Age The following are excerpts from a presentation given by Regent College theologian J.I. Packer at the Anglican Theological Conference held in February at St. John's Church in Vancouver. This appeared in the May 1998 issue of BC Christian News. POSTMODERNITY . . . is popularly equated with a denial that there is any such thing as universal public truth, the idea being that there is only my truth and your truth, that which is true for me and that which is true for you, but there is no truth that is true for everybody . . . Modernity for two centuries sought to shape society through industrial development, social engineering, urbanization, education and various forms of wealth creation. This process was expected to bring health, harmony and happiness to all the world, but the unmistakable witness of our barbaric, tribalized twentieth century is that it has totally failed to do so, and totally lacks resources for ever doing so in the future. So among intellectuals and particularly in the universities, which are of course the first units of society that intellectuals impact, there has understandably been a major reaction of disillusionment with modernity during the past 30 years . . . [Postmodernity] is wholly individualistic about moral and aesthetic values, inclu-ding those of religion; it debunks other people's absolutes most resolutely, by playful or cynical negation; it treats all public disagreements as nothing more than power struggles between representatives of different subcultures, while remaining itself dogmatically relativist on all ultimate questions; and so it is culturally anarchic in a deeply disruptive way. In postmodernity, the subjectivity of the individual is set in judgment over all forms of supposedly scientific and consensual objectivity; you do not have to go along with anything that others think if you do not want to, for doing your own thing in your own way is the real heart of personal humanness. In this way, individuality without restraints, spirituality without truth, whimsy claiming to be wisdom, desire viewing itself as vocation and masquerading as morality, benevolent tolerance of any idea that does not tell you you are wrong and passionate hostility to any idea that does -- all linked with pluralistic pragmatism as the convention for community life -- have become the leading features, indeed the essence, of postmodern culture. As a way of life, it is the egghead equivalent of Mr. Bean . . . It is going to be perfectly happy with religion -- any sort of religion -- as a private hobby, but it will always be implacably opposed to any requiring of a particular form of religion, on the basis that this religion, whatever it be, is right for everyone . . . Mansions of the Spirit What happens to Christianity when postmodernity prevails? A local author [Bishop Michael Ingham] has recently shown us, in his book Mansions of the Spirit . . . The author's office requires him to uphold Christianity, and that is what he believes himself to be doing. But he appears as an uncritical child of his time, and what he has actually done is recast Christianity in a postmodern frame. Drawing his inspiration directly from the Hindu and theosophical outlook institutionalized in the Parliaments of World's Religions of 1893 and 1993, and in the inter-faith movements connected with them, he offers a philosophy of religion, and a typology of religions, that fits postmodernism as hand fits glove . . . His argument proceeds as follows: The plurality of religions in this world is a fact to welcome. Most of them are true in the sense that they mediate contact with the transcendent to good effect, and thus are health-giving and humanizing, though their doctrines are mutually incompatible. The historic Christian idea that Jesus Christ must be offered to all, as the only Savior for anyone in this lost world, is unacceptable, even in the inclusivist form that posits the salvation through Christ of moral and religious people who never heard of him, or if they did, rejected him. Christians should continue to worship and serve Christ and tell their stories of what he has done for them without supposing that what Christ gives them is unavailable elsewhere, or that Christ is actually needed by adherents of religions other than their own. End of universal public truth The evident strategy of the discussion, first to last, is to get the question of universal public truth off the table. To that end, our author quietly adjusts the meaning of the word 'true.' All religions, he says, are true in the sense of mediating real contact with what some call God; but in the sense of declaring what is everywhere the case, and stating the problem, the provision and the path for everyone alike, none of them is true. This is a thoroughly postmodern ploy. But going this way makes the book incurably problematical, for the Christianity with which it leaves us is not the Christianity of the New Testament, and is indeed an outright denial and abolition of it. Putting the matter more sharply still, the Christ with which Mansions of the Spirit leaves us is not the Christ of the New Testament, the divine Savior and Lord whom Christians trust, love and proclaim, but a figure much less than that. In this book, 'Jesus' and 'Christ' become what Francis Schaeffer used to call 'connotation words,' and what I would call 'weasel words' -- that is, words on whose familiar meaning and associations (semantic field, if you will) a communicator trades while actually denying them, not perhaps explicitly but, as the lawyers say, constructively. I do not accuse our author of doing this with deceptive intent; after all, there is such a thing as what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, which is a polite phrase for muddle in the mind that keeps one out of touch with reality; but I have to say, regretfully, that, wittingly or not, this is what our author actually does . . . Facts are clear Let me set out the facts. It is a fact that from the start the Christian church proclaimed Jesus of Nazareth, crucified, risen, reigning and returning, as God's Christ, the promised Messiah, the centre of world history, now from his throne imparting to his people his transforming presence and power through the pentecostal Holy Spirit. It is a fact that apostolic Christianity was not only good news about personal salvation and supernatural living in the church, the home and the body politic, but was also a philosophy of history celebrating an imperial Lord who came the first time in humility to bear away sin, and would reappear in majesty to judge all humankind, as well as to bring final bliss to his born-again followers. It is a fact that Christians from the start prayed to this Jesus and in due course found words to express the initially unthinkable thought of his personal divinity within the being of God, and the personal divinity of the Holy Spirit also. And it is a fact that the bottom line of the apostolic proclamation was that the enthroned Christ claims the allegiance of the entire human race, here and now. The risen Lord was understood to have told his apostles: "Go and make disciples of all nations" (Mt 28:19). Accordingly, in a world of religious pluralism at least as complex as ours, first century converts "turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead -- Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath" (1 Thess 1:9-10). For they were taught that they must acknowledge the exclusive, permanent, all-embracing lordship of Jesus Christ -- "the crown rights of the Redeemer," to use the old phrase -- and must therefore forsake all contrary modes of religious belief and practice. So it has been in the Christian mainstream for almost 2,000 years, as countless martyrdoms from the first to the present century attest. And since, as the writer to the Hebrews says, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever" (Heb 13:8), it must be held that the apostolic affirmation of Christ's continuing claim on everyone's submission and allegiance is still valid, and always will be. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal Savior-Judge, remains humankind's rightful and exclusive Master. So our author's suggestion that all the world's great religions be seen as belonging to God's loving plan for their own cultural spheres, and as mediating the same saving grace that Christians receive through Christ, is an idea for which there is neither basis nor room. His related idea, that a legitimized plurality of religions is what God has been aiming at all along, is pure fantasy, quite contrary to the plan of history that God has actually revealed. The Christ who will never be lord of all, because his Father never meant him to be, is not the Christ of apostolic and Anglican faith. What we have here is a postmodern downsizing of the universal, public, divinely revealed truth about Jesus Christ. Such downsizings must always be declined. []
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