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Christ in a Postmodern WorldYesterday, I summarized The Next Reformation, a book by Carl Raschke that challenges evangelicals to embrace postmodernism as a way of returning to the principles of the Reformation. Today, I am summarizing  Above All Earthly Pow’rs, a book by David Wells that challenges evangelicals to resist postmodernism as a way of returning to Reformation principles. 

Assessing the Landscape

David Wells’ Above All Earthly Pow’rs seeks to provide a robust Christology for our postmodern world. Wells acknowledges two motifs that are transforming our culture: the postmodern ethos and religious pluralism.

In the first section of his book, Wells seeks to provide an accurate description of our modern life and to show how these recent cultural movements affect us internally. Of course, a proper understanding of today’s world must take into account the philosophies inherited from the Enlightenment – philosophies centered on freedom from the past, from God, and from external authority.

The development of society has paralleled the principles of the Enlightenment. Consumerism teaches us that consuming is essential to the nurture of self. Therefore, our purchases are often an attempt to buy reality, to find individuality in our style. We have traded the idea of unchanging virtues for the terminology of “values,” which are not normative for all people.

Postmodernism represents a rebellion against the ideology of the Enlightenment. Aspects of this rebellion deserve to be celebrated.

But Wells differs from those who cheer the new postmodern turn in that he does not see a “clean breach with the modern world.” Instead, he believes postmodernism merely reflects a different aspect of modern culture. The new philosophy is not faith triumphing over unbelief, but “unbelief taking revenge upon unbelief.”

The Death of Meaning

Postmodernism is notoriously difficult to define, which leads Wells to point to the common denominator he sees in all postmodern outlooks: meaning has died.

In the wake of the Enlightenment’s failed promises and stifled progress, postmodernism questions rationalism’s basic assumptions. But this questioning leads to a skeptical view of human reason, which in turn leads to further fragmentation and further departure from the idea of a metanarrative (a totalizing worldview).

Wells believes that postmodernism’s critique of modernism goes too far. He implicitly upholds the correspondence theory of truth, saying, “When we speak of truth, we are asking whether it is possible to have an understanding of reality which corresponds to what is there.”

Wells recognizes that humans have certain biases and presuppositions. He understands that rationalism cannot build a tower that allows us to see the world in its fullness.

But in taking away any vantage point from which to judge between truth and error, postmodernism leaves us without a worldview, without truth, and without purpose.

An Age of Pluralism

New social developments now offer plausibility to the rise of religious pluralism. A new wave of immigration in the United States has made America the most religiously diverse nation in the world.

Immigration has led to a downplaying of religious identity. People see religion as institutional and organizational. Many prefer a generic “spirituality” that can be discovered and practiced outside the church. The appeal of the new spirituality is in the way it separates the private world from the public world, offering an experiential grounding of belief that does not have to correspond with outside reality.

Christ Against the Gnostics

Wells sees the postmodern spiritual yearning as a seeking after consciousness, an inward turning for authenticity. Reaching back to the patristic period, Wells compares this new movement to ancient Gnosticism.

The Gnostic worldview contradicted the Christian faith. It required confrontation, not adaptation. Wells finds this confrontation in historic Protestant theology that portrays God finding the sinner, not the sinner looking inward to find God within himself.

Wells calls upon Christians to respond to this new type of Gnosticism by insisting upon the historic understanding of human sinfulness. This understanding views human beings as fragmented and flawed, not morally innocent.

Furthermore, Wells reminds us that Christianity concerns public truth, not private spirituality. And despite the myriad of spiritualities on the market today, only Christianity provides the personal relationship for which postmodern people yearn. Only Christianity gives us a divine summons from a personal God.

In short, Christ is the answer to our empty spirituality, the answer to our meaningless existence, and the answer to our sense of being “de-centered.”

Unfortunately, evangelicals are busy accommodating the postmodern mindset instead of confronting it. Evangelicals have deemphasized doctrine and religious identity and instead promoted values and principles for bettering life here and now. The church has been transformed into a place where the gospel can be marketed as a product to consumers.

Wells urges evangelicals to recapture the voice of “proclamation” of divine truth and not succumb to the consumerist temptation of secular society.

written by Trevin Wax. copyright © 2009 Kingdom People Blog.

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