Book Review
My generation grew up saturated with scientific optimism. I was born just a few months before Sputnik took man into space for the first time, and I can vividly remember watching the TV broadcast of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the moon. Science—both physical and behavioral—was succeeding spectacularly. There was just one major world conflict to worry about—the Cold War—and it seemed that if we could just get beyond that, nothing could halt our progress toward a marvelous future of cooperative abundance based in human rational prowess. In the process, everyone knew, superstitions like religion would be supplanted by scientific understanding. We didn’t need God. Man would figure everything out on his own, through his autonomous reason (we said “man” and “his” that way then, oblivious to issues of sexism).
This was the modernist hope and dream. It was wrong.
We were the last American generation to grow up with such rationalist optimism (the last one in Europe was probably earlier). Even for us, that attitude was already under severe pressure. Science had not prevented the Holocaust, and someone like Josef Mengele could even operate under its banner. In the Soviet Union, psychiatry was being criminally employed against dissenters. The atom bomb was metaphorically hanging over all of our heads. When questions of civil rights came to the fore, science and other rationalist approaches had virtually nothing to offer in answer. The ’60s generation began asking “Who am I?” “What’s my purpose?” “Why should I bother with my parents’ morality?” Hallucinogenic drugs, the ultimate in anti-rationality, had their heyday. Religion was beginning its resurgence around the globe.
In short, modernist rationality failed in its promise, and its failure paved the way for postmodernism. How shall I summarize postmodernism? Very carefully, gingerly, and with a strong disclaimer: this brief paragraph will distort as much as it explains. Postmodernism is an attitude as much as a philosophy. It recognizes the failure of modernist, autonomous rationality to explain meaning, value, and truth; and it concludes that any attempt at explanation must be empty, at best an exercise in power. Language is not for representing reality—there is no reality to be represented—but for playing domination games. Religion in particular is about power, not truth. Not just that, but because of many religions’ arrogant confidence that they hold the truth, they represent some of the most dangerous handlers of power.
Now if I were putting that forth as anything like a full description of postmodernism, I’m guilty of a terrible irresponsibility. If on the other hand I have hinted that there is something important in postmodernism, something crucial for Christians to be aware of, to understand and study further, then I may hope I am contributing something positive thereby. For me, born in the mid-1950s, postmodernism is virtually a foreign world. It is the world I live in, however. It is missionaries’ responsibility to understand the culture in which they minister.
Where did today’s relativism come from? What is the real source of “identity politics” (politics of race, gender, etc.)? Why do gay-rights advocates take conservative Christians’ disagreements as “hate language”? How can present-day theologians come up with such disparate interpretations of the Bible? Why do
Christians, we are all missionaries. We have homework to do.
The question is, how to understand this philosophical and cultural current? Postmodernism is infamously confusing. How does one go about learning more about it? Heath White’s Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian (Brazos Press, 2006) is a great place to begin.
It’s well named: it is indeed a 101-level book; very clearly written, with virtually no technical language and hardly any five-syllable words (unless you draw “ism” out to two syllables!). Yet it’s thoughtfully written. I never felt I was being talked down to.
Professor White, who teaches philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, tells us his background is in the “evangelical wing of Protestant Christianity.” Coming from that standpoint, he is clearly not afraid to identify both strengths and weaknesses in postmodernism. For instance, on page 155:
Postmodernism blows the whistle on the many false promises of modernity, which puts its faith in reason and progress rather than God. Postmoderns are remarkably clear-eyed about the failures of modernity and about the sickness, oppression, and death that pervade our world. Their multiple alternative accounts of history have the merit of bringing these evils to our attention. Postmodern though, however, is critical, skeptical, and deconstructive, without any new remedies to offer. It often engenders a worldview of deep hopelessness.
In the face of this pessimism, however, Christianity offers not cheery optimism but divine promises.
He elaborates on those promises, and especially how they relate to modernism and postmodernism. In short, they don’t fit well with either. Neither modernism nor postmodernism proves to be satisfying or coherent in the end. But these are not our only two options. Before modernism there was premodernism, which took human rationality as useful and reliable if applied under the direction and within the guidelines of revelation. Something much like that seems to be the best way forward even today, when modernism’s failures are evident, and where the situation for postmodernism is likely to be along the lines White describes on pages 160-161:
Postmodernism may [someday, eventually] collapse from its own contradictions and its inability to account for historical events, the way many aspects of modernism have. September 11, 2001, may do to postmodern moral relativism what the Holocaust did to modern ideas of moral progress. Alternatively, postmodernism may be sidelined into irrelevance, especially from a Christian point of view. By 2025, two-thirds of Christians will live in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, cultures where the history and guiding ideas of Western civilization—the springs of postmodern thought—are simply much less important than they are in North America and Europe.
It is a fairly safe bet that the general distrust of truth and knowledge that marks postmodernism is temporary. This skeptical syndrome flares up at intervals throughout history; it is a response to intellectual exhaustion and often portends something remarkable and new…. Postmodern doubt is a frame of mind in the same mold, a response to the fruitlessness of modern approaches. Because a new way forward has always manifested itself before, we can expect that it will do so again. The shape of that intellectual revolution to come, however, is not yet clear.
I recommend this book to youth pastors and campus ministers; indeed to anyone in ministry who seeks to understand the last several decades’ cultural changes, and the attitudes of those who are a product of those changes. It’s also good material for interested college students and advanced high school students. Readers who regard themselves as postmodern may see that theirs is not the only cure for modernist failings. Those of us who look on postmodernism as deeply confused will better understand how that confusion arose—and we may be warned against accepting modernist (autonomous) rationality as the only or best alternative.
Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian by Heath White. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006. Amazon.com Price US $12.23. Paperback, 176 pages, including annotated bibliography.
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