On Being Truly Postmodern

Posted on November 18, 2008 by R. Scott Clark at the Heidelblog

There is a good deal of talk in contemporary evangelicalism about the rise,

nature, and effect of so-called “postmodernism,” a movement in architecture,
literature, philosophy, and religion associated with a circle of French writers
such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In some circles this movement
is thought to be a threat to Christianity. Other wings of evangelicalism, such as
the emergent and emerging movements, see postmodernity as a boon to
Christianity and seek to adapt Christianity to it.
This essay argues that, because of it’s core convictions reflected in its doctrines of
revelation, God, man, creation, sin, Christ, imputation (federalism), predestination, and
the church, confessional Reformed theology is not only, in some sense, postmodern, but
more precisely, it is consistently anti-modernist.
In the biblical faith there is only one sovereign Creator and Redeemer: the Holy Trinity.
Scripture says that, in the beginning, God spoke creation into existence, it teaches that
all three persons of the Trinity were involved. The Father spoke, and nothing came into
being that came into being except through God the Son, the Word (John 1), with the
Holy Spirit hovering over the face of the deep (Gen 1). This picture of the transcendent
and triune God acting freely to create ex nihilo (from nothing) sets the pattern for God’s
dealing with humanity in providence and redemption. God acts through his created
agents (Exod 9:16) and with them (which Reformed theology describes as “concursus”)
but never in dependence upon created agents. The Bible faith, confessed by the ancient
church, is that the triune God made humans in his image. It is that image-bearing status
that constitutes us as human. We confess that we freely rebelled against God, violating
God’s law, introducing sin and death into the world. God the Son became incarnate as the
Last Adam, obeyed, died, and was raised on the third day for our justification. In God’s
joyous transaction, our sn was reckoned to Christ and his righteousness was credited to
all who believe, to all whom God has given the grace of faith. Christ committed this faith
for safekeeping, administration, and proclamation to a visible, institutional community,
the church.

Christian Antiquity
This was conceptual framework within which the Christian church thought, taught, and
acted from the ascension of Christ until the modern period. The great question that all
Christians asked, and to which they gave different answers was: What has God said?
The sovereign, authoritative self-revelation of God was an article of faith just as much
as “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” The Roman and
Protestant communions developed different views of where God’s authoritative Word
could be found, Rome says it can be found in two places: Scripture and tradition and
Protestants says that it is found in Scripture alone (sola scriptura) which is read and
confessed by the church. Both communions agreed, however, that God has spoken and
that his revelation is normative.

Modernity
By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, that consensus began to break down.
By the time the French philosopher Rene Descartes died (1650) an increasing number of
the leading writers and thinkers in Europe were beginning to ask a different question:
“Has God said?” Where the great debates in Christian antiquity had theological (about
God, man, Christ, salvation, the church), the debates in the early modern period centered
on whether one can know anything certainly and if so, where the locus of authority is.
By the eighteenth century many had concluded that “man is the measure of all things,”
that God, if he exists, is so utterly transcendent that he can neither know nor be known.
Some turned to sense experience (empiricism) and others turned to what could be known
through rational process (rationalism). Where God had been, in one way or another, at
the center of pre-modern thought by the nineteenth century, humanity was the center
of the intellectual universe. The leading thinkers and writers had issued a declaration
of independence from all external authorities. The only religion that could be credited
was the religion of morality or perhaps the religion of intense religious experience. From
the Eighteenth century many evangelicals attempted to adapt the religion of intense,
immediate experience of the divine (subjectivism) but humans remained autonomous,
arbiters of what constituted the right sort of religious experience.
With the rise and dominance of the philosophy and religion of human autonomy (being a
law unto one’s self) came a few corollaries beginning, as all theology always does, with the
doctrine of God and including a doctrine of man, sin, Christ, salvation, and the church.
The modern doctrine of God taught that God is the father of all humans in the same
way without distinction. Christians have always taught that all humans are, as creatures,
children of God but relative to righteousness with God and salvation there has always
been a distinction between believers and unbelievers and between the elect and the non-
elect. In the Enlightenment, such distinctions were erased. Where Christianity taught
that humans are sinful because of the fall, modernity taught universal human goodness
and even perfectibility and denied the doctrine of sin. Throughout modernity, the new
“liberal” creed was actually quite illiberal. Those who adopted the modernist creed of the
universal fatherhood of God, the universal brotherhood of man, and human perfectibility
were quite intolerant of any dissent from the new orthodoxy and, by the early 20th
century, the modernists had succeeded in driving those who still believed the old creed
from positions of authority or influence in academia.
The hubris of modernity, the notion that man is the measure of all things, that he
understands (or can understand) how the world works, what can be done and what
can’t be done, was was first shaken in Europe and then destroyed by World War I.
The senselessness of modern war destroyed the modernist universalism and modernist
optimism only to be replaced by totalitarianism, facism, socialism, and existentialism.
The churches of Europe emptied during the 20th century. The optimism of modernity
was replaced with fear, loathing, and nausea. World War I led, eventually, to World War
II and destruction on a scale unthinkable without modern technology. During the 20th
century it is likely that more humans were killed by other humans than at any time in
human history. One has only to recite the names: Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, the Armenian
genocide, Rwanda and so on. As modernity moved from rationalism and empiricism to
Romanticism and subjectivism European writers began to doubt that there is such a thing
as an “objective” reality that can be known. One’s subjective experience of reality came
to dominate. The old modernist optimism was replaced with late modern suspicion. The
dominant question, first in Europe, and later in the USA, came to be “Who’s asking?” By
the late 60s, in the midst of turmoil over civil rights, the Vietnam war, the rise of cynicism
about government and authority the same shift was underway in North America.

Late or Liquid Modernity

Some accounts of modernity describe the late or “liquid” modern period (the subjective
turn) as “postmodern,” but at least a few writers have called that adjective into question.
Taken literally “postmodern” would seem to entail a rejection of fundamental principles
of modernity but there is little evidence that any such rejection has taken place. Few,
if any, of the leading so-called “postmodern” writers have rejected the fundamental
principle of modernity, i.e., human autonomy. Indeed, the subjective turn of late
modernity was anticipated in the 19th century by the Romantics who sought to balance
the early modernist turn to the objective, to rationalism (i.e. the doctrine that only that
is true or real that can be comprehensively understood and analyzed rationally) and
empiricism (i.e. the doctrine that knowledge comes principally or only via the senses),
with intense affective (feeling) experiences. The subjectivism of the current period
emphasizes, e.g., not the author’s intent but the reader’s reception of the text. Evangelical
Christians were, in certain respects, ahead of the curve when it came to this sort of
subjectivism. The religious revivals of the early to mid 18th century bore marks of the
sort affective emphasis that marked 19th century Romanticism. The late modern turn to
the subjective experience of texts was a feature in American evangelical piety for decades
before most English speakers would know the names Derrida or Foucault.
The great unifying theme of modernity, whether early or late, whether optimistic or
suspicious, has always been human autonomy. Inasmuch as late modernity still assumes
human autonomy relative to all other sources of authority, including God, it is still
modernity. To be truly postmodern would be to reject the fundamental principle of
modernity altogether. To its credit, in principle, Reformed orthodoxy or confessionalism
never accepted human autonomy. Beginning with God’s autonomy, self-existence, and
authoritative self-revelation, many of the old Reformed theologians were at war with
modernity from the start. It was a confessional Reformed theologian who diagnosed
Deism (an utterly transcendent, unitarian, unknowing, and unknowable deity) and it was
a confessional Reformed theologian who saw Descartes’ turn to human autonomy for
what it was: an attempt to unseat God and to replace him with humanity and human
experience.

The Reformed Antithesis to Modernity

 Since the rise of the religion of autonomy, human perfectibility, and
universalism, only one confession has been utterly antithetical: The Reformed
confession. Only the Reformed faith has utterly and consistently rejected
modernity root and branch. In arguing this I am not claiming that the
Reformed churches or that Reformed Christians have escaped completely the
influence of modernity. There are important ways in which we have come
under the influence of rationalism and subjectivism. Cornelius Van Til called attention to
ways in which some segments of the Reformed world sued for peace. Arminianism is one
example of an attempt by some “Reformed” folk to sue for peace in the early days of the
struggle with modernity. The attempt, in the 17th century, of some of the followers of
Cocceius to appropriate Descartes for Reformed theology and J. A. Turretin’s rejection of
his father’s theology are other examples. The collapse of Reformed orthodoxy across
Europe is witness to the failure of those attempts to find a mediating place between
modernity and Reformed orthodoxy. Arguably, bearing in mind the revisions to the story
argued by Paul Helseth, Kim Riddlebarger, and others, even old Princeton Seminary bore
the pockmarks of the ravages of modernity in its sometime attempt to mediate between
the subjectivism of revivalism and the rationalism of the 19th century.
Contemporary evangelicalism has sought a middle way with modernity via religious
subjectivism. The temporary and strategic alliance between revivalist evangelicals and
the Reformation began breaking down in the early 18th century. That alliance was
temporarily revived in post-World War II neo-evangelicalism, but relations between
evangelicalism and the Reformation have returned to the status quo ante. The same
might be said for fundamentalism. Having begun with a conservative version human
autonomy, fundamentalists were temporarily allied with the Reformation faith early
in the 20th century, but the interests of fundamentalism were never those of the
Reformation. When it became clear that the Reformation was a poor friend of religious
nationalism (Christian America) and moralism (tee-totaling) the fundamentalists
abandoned their dalliance with the Reformation. The starting point of most
fundamentalists, however, was never very different from that of modernity: human
autonomy. The fundamentalists sovereignly exercised their autonomy to assert their
election of Christianity and moralism but the core conviction has always been sovereign
human choice.
Nevertheless, the Reformed confession of the absolute sovereignty of the Triune God,
the mystery of the fall, the imputation of Adam’s sin, the mystery of the incarnation, the
wonder of the substitutionary atonement, and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness,
and behind all these, of the mystery of unconditional predestination stand in stark relief
to modernist subjectivism and rationalism. Where the modernist says “the real is the
rational and the rational is the real” and where the subjectivist says, “the real is the
experienced, and the experienced is the real,” the Reformed faith says, “The real is the
revealed and the revealed in the real.”
This antithesis best explains why the modernists have expended so much energy and ink
in seeking to destroy Calvin’s reputation. One has only to google “Calvin” and “Servetus”
to see the evidence. By contrast, the modernists have not sought to deface the image of
Luther in the same way. It is because Calvin is singularly and unfairly associated with
the doctrine that is most utterly opposed to the religion of modernity: predestination.
We have a similar problem with doctrines such as federalism (Adam and Christ as
representative heads of humanity). These two doctrines are utterly unreconcilable to
the modernist assertion of human autonomy. The modernist definition of humanity
entails autonomy relative to all other authorities and actors. The Reformed definition of
humanity begins with God and our status as image bearers. We understand ourselves
as necessarily implicated in tow great corporations, righteous humanity and fallen
humanity. In both cases our state was determined by someone outside of us who acted
for us. Our autonomy is compromised fatally from the beginning.
The emerging and emergent movements seek to be “postmodern.” In fact, to the degree
that they begin with human autonomy, with versions of rationalism (e.g., in their denial
of the atonement), in subjectivism (e.g., in their hermeneutic and quest for the immediate
encounter with God) they are not postmodern as much as they are, as Mike Horton
likes to say, “most modern.” To be truly postmodern would be to embrace the historic
Reformed faith. It would be to become anti-modern, to repudiate the assertion of the
sovereignty of human choice or of human experience or of human rationality in favor of
the the sovereignty of the mysterious Triune God, of the two-Adams, of unconditional
grace, faith, and the church instituted by Christ himself.