This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

The Siren Song of Postmodernism: Why Christians Are Obligated to Reject It

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, well-pleasing to God, your rational worship. And cease being fashioned according to this age, but be transfigured by the renewing of your mind, in order for you to put to the test what is the good and well-pleasing and perfect will of God. (Romans 12:1-2, Orthodox New Testament*)

For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty of God to the pulling down of strongholds, overthrowing reasonings and every high thing which lifteth itself up against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of the Christ, and holding fast in readiness to avenge all disobedience, whenever your obedience should be fulfilled. (2 Corinthians 10:4-6)

Beloved, cease believing every spirit, but keep putting the spirits to the test, if they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. In this know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ hath come in the flesh is of God; and every spirit which confesseth not that Jesus Christ hath come in the flesh is not of God. And this is that spirit of antichrist, which ye have heard that it is coming, and now already is in the world. (1 John 4:1-3)

Introduction

Postmodernism is the term given to a diverse, though related, set of disciplines, philosophical paradigms, and even worldviews, that are said to be, as a whole, the successor to modernism. We are said to be now in the “postmodern era.” Postmodern themes generally revolve around sociopolitical, epistemological, and philosophical concepts such as relativism, diversity, pluralism, deconstruction, sociopolitical liberation, the hermeneutics of suspicion, the decentering of privileged texts and narratives, classes and sexual orientations, the hegemony of reason as a tool for the oppressor, and so on. Just as skepticism critiqued the presumption of rational inquiry, postmodernism is largely a movement of critique, seeking to end what it takes to be the hegemony of reason by exploiting reason's inherent self-contradictions. Postmodernists tend to accept much of the modernist tenets from Immanuel Kant's conclusions in his Critique of Pure Reason, but they do so subversively, to undo the project of reason from within. More to the point, Friedrich Nietzsche is the postmodern prophet, who, having been relegated to relative obscurity for much of the first half of the twentieth century, with the advent of deconstructionism in the last quarter of the twentieth century was propelled into one of the major forces for postmodernism.

Postmodernism is a confluence of disciplines and theories from Karl Marx's dialectical materialism, Soren Kierkegaard's subjectivity of truth, Nietzsche's will to power, Martin Heidegger's existentialism, Claude Levi-Strauss' anthropological structuralism (which gave rise to a multi-faceted poststructuralism) are all the progenitors of what was first called, if I remember correctly, “postmodern” by Jean Francois Lyotard in his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition.

It took a bit more than a decade and a half for evangelicals (and then their mainline cousins) to jump on to the postmodern bandwagon. Since evangelicalism was stuck for most of the twentieth century in the modernist wars, either fighting modernism on its own terms in anti-modernism, or seeking to defend Christianity in modernist terms, it took some time for them to see the benefits that postmodern critiques provided for Christian apologetic. But having seen these benefits, it didn't take them long to accelerate their own acceptance of postmodernism. That acceleration was due primarily to evangelicalism's innate ability to market ideas and practices, and, adopting postmodern terminology as its own, the strong movement in evangelicalism to see postmodernism as inherently friendly to the Faith, the transformation from postmodern antagonists to postmodern converts was complete.

For the record, I, too, was once an advocate of postmodern tenets. I, too, could see the strategic benefits of the postmodern critique. The postmodern mind might relativize all narratives, but I at first thought that to be a blessing in disguise as it meant that Christianity should then able to compete horizontally with other ideas. No one could disparage my Christian narrative on its face lest they contradict postmodernism's central tenets. But it soon occurred to me, neither could I then promote my narrative over theirs. It soon became clear that postmodernism's path was to end in a Nietzschean will to power. Politics and force would triumph over truth.

Thus it is my contention that Christians, no matter their sincerity, no matter their intent, cannot espouse postmodernism without ultimately deconstructing their own faith. Postmodernism's essential nature is to be corrosive. It matters not to postmodernism whether it eats away at reason, and modernism, or faith, and Christianity. In other words, Christians, for the sake of the Gospel and their own salvation, must reject postmodernism as necessarily of the spirit of antichrist.

A Brief Historical (Meta)Narrative

It will be helpful, first, to situate historically this “postmodernism.” (Warning: metanarrative ahead.)

Philosophy, at least in the West, is generally accorded to have begun in the Mediterranean with the sixth century, with thinkers who came to be called, unimaginatively, the Pre-Socratics. These men began the radical quest to know the world as it was and on its own terms. They sought to understand what were the basic building blocks of metaphysical reality, what was the stuff of which the cosmos, the ordered universe, was composed. Their philosophical progeny, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, took up their assumptions, critiqued their conclusions, and developed the science of knowing and essential reality to an awe-inspiring degree. It was taken for granted that the cosmos was an ordered and orderly reality to which humans were uniquely fitted. Though humans shared certain characteristics of being with plants and animals, humans were unique in that they alone, of all living things, reasoned. It was evident to Plato, Aristotle and indeed all of classical and late antiquity, the ancient skeptics notwithstanding, even into the medieval era that reality was there and could be known, if we were but attentive to it.

This classical ideal lent itself to the cultural and philosophical phenomenon known as the Renaissance, that flourishing of human achievement in Europe that paved the way for the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of the Enlightenment, or modern, era.

The so-called “postmodern era” is not very recent, really. One can trace its origins directly to Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century, though many consider Descartes to be the father of the Enlightenment (or modernism as a philosophy and worldview). It was Descartes, after all, that reduced metaphysical knowledge to little more than method, and methodological doubt proved to be not a foundation but the undoing of knowledge.

Indeed, just when the Enlightenment seemed to have established itself in the eighteenth century, along came Scotsman David Hume and revived the skeptical arguments of Sextus Empiricus' Outlines. Hume's attack on reason woke Prussian Immanuel Kant from his dogmatic slumbers and so to rescue reason from the skeptics' attacks, he disconnected it from essential reality and bound it forever in the realm of appearances. By then, reason, and modernism with it, was philosophically dethroned. In the nineteenth century, the so-called “masters of suspicion,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche (and later Sigmund Freud, who also spanned the twentieth century), finished off reason as a “going concern” for good. All that was left was the revolution in class warfare and the will to power.

By the time the twentieth century arrived, reason had been reduced to language, and language itself limited to games and structures which had rules that could be manipulated and self-contradictions which could be exploited. Michel Foucault deconstructed the power grid inherent in social arrangements, structures which necessarily self-perpetuated, even under the guise of reform. And Jacques Derrida, unleashing the genie from the bottle, reduced text to surface and argument to play. He was making metaphysical arguments regarding language and reality, which means he would inevitably be misused by English departments in colleges across the country. But once loosed, the liberator would not be coddled into domesticity and ultimately Foucault was reaffirmed: truth is merely the power wielded by the powerful. The Enlightenment began with a Frenchman, and therefore it is fitting that two Frenchmen were not merely somewhat responsible for its radical deformation. They may not have begun such a radical metastasizing, but they most definitely accelerated it.

With this sketch in mind, I will now proceed to offer my reservations with the falsely called “postmodernism.”

Problems with (So-Called) “Postmodernism”

Let's start first with the fact of “postmodernism” being a misnomer. Postmodernism is not “post” anything. And anyway how could one whose perspective is necessarily limited to the now know that modernism has died, and this postmodernism is a different thing? Indeed, when one considers further the tenets of postmodernism, one sees that postmodernism accepts the tenets of modernism on their face. Postmodernism itself is merely the outworking of modernism's internal and inherent contradictions. Postmodernism exploits these contradictions. Essentially postmodernism is a critique, it is not a science. It does not, because it cannot, organize the data of knowledge into an organized body of information. But this is not a step beyond modernism so much as it is modernism's own collapse upon itself. And, in any case, the postmodernist hermeneutics of suspicion were explicated and catalogued long before by the ancient skeptics such as Sextus Empiricus in his Outlines of Pyhrronism--except that Pyhrronian skeptics were much more consistent than postmodernists.

But if postmodernism is fundamentally the collapse of modernism, if it cannot offering anything but a critique, in what way can Christians utilize postmodernism without the knife turning back on themselves and slicing off the hand of the wielder?

Postmodernism, then, necessarily divorces narrative from truth because truth is not discoverable. There is no foundation on which a discovery of truth can be built. On every point reason fails. It fails to offer a foundation that meets its own criteria. It fails to offer a defense of itself that is not mere assertion. And it fails to eliminate the circle by which it authorizes its own authority. But if truth is not discoverable, than any account (i. e., a narrative) that attempts to deliver truth to its adherents is necessarily doing nothing more than offering a play of words. No narrative can be true because truth is not discoverable. (This, of course, is postmodernism's own inherent contradiction, along the lines of “all truth is relative.”) Truth is tantamount to ideology. The Gospel narrative, then, is nothing more than the play of words which we may freely re-author ourselves. It is ideology.

But if the Gospel narrative cannot fundamentally be connected with truth, Christians have no story to tell. The relativization of all narratives can potentially get Christians a hearing in the postmodern agora, but it can give no impetus for belief. It may or may not be found entertaining, but the spirit of carnival need only make ephemeral webs of connections, points of ever-shifting coherence. It never need anchor or found itself on anything, for there are no foundations.

But if narratives are divorced from truth, then postmodernism necessarily divorces truth from being. It may well be that there is truth out there. It may well be that being really is. But reason cannot, as Kant has shown, “get at” these things. We are condemned always to merely dancing along the surface. All we have are appearances. But appearances are not real. They deceive us. They are merely that screen which blocks us from “real truth” and “real being.” Truth, then, is not, in the radical sense of “is.” It is an appearance, an illusion. Something we can never “get to.”

But if narratives are radically separated from truth, then the Gospel is not true in any meaningful sense. It is a play, it is a kaleidoscope of colors, but is ever shifting and never still. We can never “capture” its meaning, and so the Gospel is nothing more than mere appearance.

So postmodernism empties being of content. The self is not a deep foundation on which is built our identity. Rather, the self itself is constructed. The self indeed does not exist per se, it is the flattened surface of the body on which is built a concept that has not meaning. The self, then, is nothing but the body, this fleshly thing to which we may do what we will, a storehouse of cascading experiences, ever moving, never at rest. We mark our bodies with ink and scars. Our bodies serve as little more than tools. We are our bodies, but not in any transcendent sense, for there is nothing deeper to the body save an amalgamation of mostly mechanical processes. Our body is a canvas, a framework, on w hich we may do experiments, for experiments are nothing more than planned experiences. Our body is malleable clay, and so, too, are our identities. We are what we make of our bodies.

But this is utterly incompatible with the Christian dogma of Christ's Body, from which we derive our understanding of our own bodies. If there is nothing deeper to the body than surface, then Christ's own Body was nothing more than body. Christ's self was not transcendent. His self was not God, or if God, god only of the belly, which is to say, only the permeable and corruptible excretory processes of the body. For postmodernism, God, or “god,” can be no more transcendent than a good shit. But with postmodernism we have quickly and necessarily descended to blasphemy.

Postmodernism divorces truth from narrative and being, self from transcendence. It can only then replace truth with politics. This makes utter sense if the self is engineered by us via the manipulation of the body, then it is only a step, and a necessary one, to say that the self is socially constructed. This can only result in the fundamental manipulation of the body politic. For if the self is socially constructed, so, too, is society. Here tribalism reigns, but the tribal boundaries are ever-shifting allegiances, and the “tribe” itself constructed on ideologies. Thus one is a Marxist in economics, a feminist in politics, and an atheist in theology. The project is reconstruction, but not along the lines of any meaningful paradigm. We may raze the present society, only to later demolish what we have built on its ashes. Indeed, having begun to construct one city, we may simply abandon that project and begin where we are at with another. Bricolage is not an art, but a method, or if an art, it is merely technique.

But if tribes are constructed, if our social identity is nothing more than what has been enscribed on our bodies, Christian allegiance to the Body of Christ is meaningless. Indeed, the identity of “Christian” is an identity of our own making. We make of the Church what we will, which is to say, the Church is nothing more than the accumulation of fragmentation. It is not, cannot be, a whole. It is not a Body, but a plurality of bodies. Bodies socially arranged as we will, but with nothing deeper underneath such arrangements than our own ideologies.

But if the self is nothing but social engineering, nothing but politics, then politics itself must be devoid of any meaningful allegiance, for such allegiances must always be shifting, unanchored as they are and must be from anything transcendent

But this makes of Christian unity nothing more than pragmatic promotion of Christianity's ideologies. We are one so long as we are united in the construct of the social self we want to achieve. But when we differ on what self must be constructed, there is nothing left but competition and conflict. That is to say, truth becomes little more than will to power. We will our fluctuating wills to social control and authority. We manipulate (literally) others. We may as freely promote their ideology as forbid them to speak of it. And tie those prohibitions to the manipulation of the body through incarceration and economic penalty.

But the way of Christ is not the will to power, but the way of kenosis, and the two ends could be no more diametrically opposed. Indeed, in postmodernist politics, kenosis itself is empty and littler more than manipulation by passive aggression. Postmodern kenosis is the ideology of victimhood.

For all these reasons, as well as others I could delineate, postmodernism necessarily corrodes the Gospel. It necessarily opposes the Gospel. It is antichrist, not because it denies Christ came in the flesh, but because it asserts that Christ was nothing more than flesh.

Conclusion

I have given the most broad, more theological implications to the problems of postmodernism noted above. But it is not difficult to get even more specific.

The postmodern church's a la carte style of engagement with the past makes a mockery of the Church's history, for it assumes that the life of the Church can be reduced to bricolage. The postmodern church claims that such borrowing is fundamentally an attempt to make real the Christian faith today, an attempt to reach out to those who are put off by the historic Church, but yet who are seeking for something deeper than the postmodern condition. However one does not free ideological captives from ideology through more ideology. And what else is the self-referential piecing together of items of the Tradition than ideology? It is a making to fit one's own presuppositions that which is Other. It is not a reception of the Other as Other. It is a construction of the Other in one's own image.

But fundamentally the espousal of postmodern themes, though rooted in good intentions, cannot but distort the Gospel. Postmodernism is an alien “tradition,” an alien mind. It is not the Church's mind. There are surface similarities (tribe as community, epistemological humility, the body as incarnation), but these similarities are actually contradictions. It may be that Christians are merely trying to learn the language of the time so as to communicate the timeless Gospel. But postmodernism is not a language. It is a polemic, a tactic. Christians may learn the polemic, may come to understand the tactic, but only so as to defeat it, not so as to accept it.

For the sake of their faith and the Faith, for their bodies and the Body, Christians must reject postmodernism.

*All New Testament citations are from The Orthodox New Testament, © 2004 Holy Apostles Convent.

Posted by Clifton at February 17, 2005 12:08 PM | TrackBack