LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1998, Page 74

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74

CONVENTION ESSAYS AND BIBLE STUDIES

ern age, for all practical purposes, is over! Welcome to postmodernity. We are living in a new age.

The Relativity of Truth
The postmodern mindset offers to the Christian church a
unique challenge. Unlike the modern rationalist, the postmodernist will not challenge the truth of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ. He will merely say, “Yes, but it is your truth.”
The issue is no longer truth versus error, or right versus
wrong, as was the case in the modern age. The concept of
error, or wrong has been removed from the postmodern vocabulary with one exception—it is wrong to say that someone’s worldview, religion, culture, philosophy, or experience
is wrong. It is an error to say that someone is in error.
While the postmodern philosophy has sounded the death
knell of classic liberal theology, the rationalism of the modern age has been replaced with postmodern relativism.1 For
the postmodern thinker, truth is relative and emerges out
of a specific community or culture. It is neither objective
truth nor absolute truth since such categories, in the postmodern mindset, do not exist. The new multiculturalism,
for example, validates every culture as being equal. Only
those seeking to exercise power over other people will claim
that their way of living is better than the way others live.
The same is true of religion. For the postmodernist, Christians have their truth, Muslims have their truth, and the
proponents of the New Age philosophy have their truth.2
Not only is the claim of absolute truth rejected, but those
who claim to possess such truth are scorned. While the
postmodern thinker freely adopts all the open-minded religions of the world, those narrow-minded Christians who
claim to have absolute truth—which must be believed in
order to be saved—are the objects of scorn and ridicule. It is
such haughty individuals who cause nation to rise against
nation, people against people, ideology against ideology,
and, of course, religion against religion. While we have the
right to declare our truth, we do not have the right to criticize “the truth” of others.3 Only mean-spirited people seek
to exercise power over others by saying, “I am right, and
you are wrong.”
As the postmodern philosophy has invaded the church,
the result has been “a kinder and gentler theology.” For the
postmodern theologian, polemics, the practice of exposing
error and heresy, is no longer wedded to dogmatics since it
is politically incorrect to consider any theological system
wrong. Heresy no longer exists.4
Consequently, the postmodern age has produced a new
approach to ecumenicity. It is no longer necessary for denominations to resolve obvious doctrinal differences by poring over the text of Scripture. In fact, for one group of
Christians to claim they have the correct understanding of
the Scripture pertaining to their doctrine is arrogance. The
new approach does not seek to resolve differences but to
merely discover a common language in which to tell the respective stories.
In his classic book The Closing of the American Mind,
Dr. Allan Bloom wrote, “It might not have been the best of
times when Catholics and Protestants were at each other’s
throats, but at least they knew what they believed.”

From Rationalism to Irrationalism
In the modern age, the rationalist questioned the supernatural nature of the Christian message. Miracles, a virgin
birth, and a resurrection were outside the purview of modern science and therefore unreasonable. Today, nothing is
unreasonable. Outlandish claims that would have been rejected by the modern rationalist are allowed to stand as private truth by the postmodernist. Truth no longer corresponds with objective, evidential reality. Many today claim
they have been abducted by aliens. If their claims are challenged, the usual irrational response is “How do you know
that it didn’t happen?” Obviously, you don’t, since it is logically impossible to prove a negative. Therefore, it is your
responsibility to let them have “their truth,” no matter how
absurd their claims might be.
The postmodern mentality is not openly critical of any
brand of spirituality. Books promoting the author’s spiritual experience, which would have been dismissed as fantasy if not bordering on insanity in the age of reason, are
now accepted as a legitimate expression of the author’s
search for spiritual meaning.
Consider, for example, how the media responded to the
recent Heaven’s Gate suicide compared to the response
some years ago to the events in Jonestown. While demented Jim Jones, according to the media, led a group of
disenfranchised paranoids to their death, Marshall Applewhite, the Heaven’s Gate guru, led his well-educated, welladjusted followers to fulfill their spiritual convictions. The
New York Times raised the question, “what was the underlying pathology that led such seemingly bright and articulate people to a tragic misjudgment?”
Misjudgment? When I hit a 6 iron instead of a 5 iron and
come up short of the green, that’s a misjudgment. If I
should eat poisoned pudding thinking that I am leaving behind my physical container in order to ascend to a higher
level of existence on a spacecraft hiding in the tail of the
Hale-Bopp Comet—that’s insanity!
Postmodern spirituality also appreciates Jesus. He was
a great teacher and an enlightened spiritual master who
accepted and experienced His “Christ-consciousness,” as we
are also capable of doing.5 Jesus is not the unique Son of
God, Savior of the world, and the exclusive way to the heavenly Father.6 He is another Jesus. He is not the Jesus
promised in the Old Testament and revealed in the New
Testament.
This again presents a unique challenge. We have to
overcome a former way of thinking. In the past, if people
claimed to believe in Jesus we usually embraced them as
Christians because the only people who really believed in
Jesus were Christians. The exceptions, of course, were the
classic cults: Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Science. Today, every new spirituality, without exception, has something nice to say about Jesus.7 Therefore, to
avoid confusion, we must clearly define our terms.
Consistent with the swinging of a pendulum, the age of
rationalism has been replaced with the age of irrationalism.8