This gigantic movement continues unhindered. What is it? How does the church reply? The post unabashedly has a definite point of view. As we move along, I ask questions and challenge Postmodernism.

Let’s begin.

I.. Introduction

A.. Challenging questions

Postmodernism is leveling multiple challenges at longstanding interpretations of the Bible and at the sacred text itself. There is nothing wrong with reinterpreting a text. But here are some questions that postmodern practitioners and theorists ask about the Bible. Are there such things as facts, specifically historical ones? Can we distinguish between the historical and the fictional? Are there any objective interpretations? How do we decide? Does that even matter? What would happen to the plain meaning of a passage if a psychoanalytical reading were applied? Would God the Father come out like a tyrannical father of a Freudian nightmare? Is God abusive?

B. Postmodernism and the church

Looking at the big picture, how do we define Postmodernism, slippery as it is? What do we know about this dominant trend among intellectuals? How does Postmodernism influence the church, particularly in the West? Most of the church knows little or nothing about Postmodernism except by hearing the word now and then. But can we depend on our blissful slumber?

Let’s accept the challenge and see what we can come up with.

II.. Postmodernism and the Certainties of the Enlightenment

A. Brief intro.

Postmodernism flows out of Modernism, and the latter movement began in the late 1800s. Many believe that Postmodernism began in the 1960s, or perhaps shortly after WWII in 1945. Personally, I cannot detect a dime’s worth of difference between the two movements. The real innovators were the modernists, while the postmodernists were the borrowers.

B. Definition (?)

Now let’s define it more clearly, if we can.

To get a general idea of the contours of this massive intellectual movement or trend, a postmodern theorist provides a working definition. Stuart Sim in his Preface to the second edition of the Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (ed. Stuart Sim, 2005) defines it in these terms, as follows:

In a general sense, postmodernism is to be regarded as a rejection of many, if not most, of the cultural certainties on which life in the West has been structured over the past couple of centuries. It has called into question our commitment to cultural “progress” (that national economies must continue to grow, that the quality of life must keep improving indefinitely, etc.), as well as the political systems that have underpinned this belief. (p. vii)

Thus, Postmodernism rejects cultural certainty and progress. Indirectly and in the big scheme of things, Postmodernism relates to the Enlightenment (c. 1600-1800+) in an adverse way. Sim writes on the same page:

Postmodernists often refer to the “Enlightenment project,” meaning the liberal humanist ideology that has come to dominate Western culture since the eighteenth century [I would say from the seventeenth century; dates are not firm in major movements]: an ideology that has striven to bring about the emancipation of mankind from economic want and political oppression. In the view of postmodernists, this project, laudable though it may have been at one time, has in its turn come to oppress humankind, and to force it into certain set ways of thought and action not always in its best interests.

I challenge his interpretation of the Enlightenment (see the section “Prefixation” below). For now, what is the response of Postmodernism to this “oppression” that the Enlightenment produces–never mind that it has provided the seeds of great freedom and prosperity? Sim continues:

It is therefore to be resisted, and postmodernists are invariably critical of universalizing theories (“grand narratives” or “metanarratives” as they have been dubbed by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard), as well as being anti-authoritarian in their outlook. To move from the modern to the postmodern is to embrace skepticism about what our culture stands for and strives for. (p. vii)

In future sections, Sim’s definition will be filled in, particularly as Postmodernism critiques the Bible. But it is clear that postmodernists are not friends of Western political systems and economies-the very ones that provide them with enough prosperity and freedom and leisure time to criticize the systems. The irony is rich.

One main target of Postmodernism, therefore, is the Bible, which has provided the moral code and restraint of human excesses.

The Law Teaches Virtue and Restrains Vice

And there is no clearer code of virtues and exposure of vices than the Bible. Without it the West will corrode over a slow, long time–or perhaps rapidly with the worldwide web pushing it forwards.

Do postmodernists know which systems should replace the current ones? Maybe far left systems, but I have not figured out whether they do know in specific terms.

C. Transmogrification

While writing this series I have grown to appreciate this odd and big word. It is a theme of this post (and the series on which this post is based) because it describes the postmodern project perfectly. Webster’s Dictionary says that the origin of the word is unknown (Postmodernism plays with origins or nonorigins). It means a “great” change or alteration, “often with grotesque or humorous effect.”

In most cases I would take out the word “great” and put in “small” because Postmodernism is heavily indebted to earlier trends. Being a borrower, Postmodernism is not all that innovative. Anyone who has seen a modern and postmodern sculpture or painting or has read a modern and postmodern novel can grasp that Postmodernism has been influenced by modernism and modernist trends (hence the prefix “post”). But Postmodernism is “grotesque” and “humorous” in many ways–its fine art and literature demonstrate this. Postmodernists should appreciate all of these terms, since they love irony and language games.

D. Prefixations

To latch on to the word “skepticism” in that last excerpt by Sim, Postmodernism, in my opinion, is nothing more than a transmogrification of the hyper-skepticism begun in the Enlightenment and given a large push by post-Enlightenment thinkers like Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and a long list of others. This hyper-skepticism and its transmogrification stretch from the late nineteenth into the twentieth centuries and gain momentum after WWII. Transmogrifying Postmodernism comes into its own after WWII and in the 1960s, but firm dates are hard to pin down in huge trends and movements, and Postmodernism overlaps with Modernism.

In the article “Postmodernism and Philosophy” in the Routledge Companion, Sim agrees with my own assessment about the skeptical roots of Postmodernism. He writes:

One of the best ways of describing postmodernism as a philosophical movement would be as a form of skepticism–skepticism about authority, received wisdom and political norms, etc.–and that puts it into a long-running tradition in Western thought that stretches back to classical Greek philosophy. Skepticism is an essentially negative form of philosophy, which sets out to undermine other philosophical theories claiming to be in possession of ultimate truth, or of criteria for determining what counts as ultimate truth. (p. 3)

I attach the prefix “hyper” to skepticism because most ordinary Westerners have even a little skepticism. But professional philosophers of a certain kind take things to excess, doubting even simple facts that we all take for granted in our daily lives, such as scientific truths or the world outside of us existing independently of our minds and in its own right. These kinds of thinkers do not doubt only “ultimate truth,” as Sim says. Any ordinary thinker does that. Rather, the professionals take things well beyond that-hence the prefix “hyper.” Parts Three and Four in the series will explain.

Therefore, transmogrification (a synonym is transformation) and hyper are themes that run throughout this series.

E. Who are the Postmodernists?

Two postmodernists apply the hyper prefix in another context besides philosophy. In their Preface and Acknowledgments, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner promise their readers that they will sort out the mainstream theorists and practitioners of Postmodernism, and they do a good job of it, too. But they accurately describe the postmodernists as “more radical than radical” (Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, Macmillan, 1991). They write:

In this book we shall sort out and appraise the contributions and limitations of these perspectives which present themselves as the newest avant-garde in theory and politics, more radical than radical, and newer than new: the hyperradical and the hypernew. (p. ix)

This is mostly an accurate description of mainstream postmodernists. They are indeed hyper-radical, but not so much hyper-new. Anyway, their assessment agrees with mine, namely, that postmodernists merely took over the hyper-skepticism begun in the Enlightenment.

Then Best and Kellner dedicate their book to the new generation of intellectuals and activists, calling them “radical”:

We would like to dedicate this book to the next generation of radical intellectuals and activists who we hope will use the insights of postmodern theory and other critical discourses to develop new theories and politics to meet the challenges of the current decade and next century. (pp. x-xi)

Postmodernists are radical intellectuals and activists, Some particularly zero in on the Bible on a scholarly level, but more often in the populace, applying postmodern interpretations. My own analysis of their movement and project concludes that most are, on the whole. So I appreciate Best’s and Kellner’s honesty, written intheir own words. We have been fairly forewarned.

F. Summary

Some literary scholars and philosophers provide an alternative version of the origins of Postmodernism. They divide western history into the modern (typically the Enlightenment project) and the postmodern. However, this version gives too little credit to Enlightenment thinkers, who challenged the Medieval Age with all its systematization of knowledge and theology. And their version gives too much credit to postmodernists who borrow more than they innovate, at least in my opinion. Their version has the break between the two as too abrupt and sharp. As Nietzsche once observed, philosophers too often do not know how to deal with history, glossing over or omitting historical events like those in the bulleted list. But those real-life events actually happened, and they shook people to their core. Modernism and Postmodernism emerge from the events, as well as from the hyper-skepticism begun in the Enlightenment. So, yes, the Enlightenment produced certainties, but it also contained within its structure the seeds of its own destruction–deconstruction.

Therefore, make no mistake: the Age of Enlightenment, also known as Age of Reason, valued reason and clear thinking, even lines, a revival of classical beauty, symmetry, rigid meters in poetry, references to classical standards in poetry and sculpture and poetry. Restrictions apply. In short the Age of Enlightenment was a return to the classics; it is all about the neo-Classical. It is neo-Classical.

However, Modernism, which as morphed, imperceptibly (in my opinion) into Postmodernism, is a gigantic takedown of the Enlightenment. Literature has thrown off the shackles of order and symmetry. Modernist and postmodernist painting has broken free of representational painting seen in neo-Classical painting. The Old Order must be taken down. Chaos and disorder must dominate. Wildness and boundary breaking–boundary smashing– is the main feature of Modernism and Postmodernism. The center does not hold. Objective  truth and morals no longer come in first.

Anything goes.

III. Origins of Postmodernism

A. Brief intro.

As noted in the previous section, the Enlightenment (c. 1600-1800+) shook Western civilization down to its foundation. Taking their cue from ancient Greek skeptics, philosophers like Descartes (1596-1650), Hume (1711-1776), and Kant (1724-1804), advanced skepticism beyond all historical bounds, hence the prefix “hyper.”

B. René Descartes (1596-1650)

He is called the founding father of modern philosophy for good reason. Modern philosophy, especially epistemology, is characterized by heavy doubt. (Epistemology studies how we acquire and define knowledge.) Thus, in his First Meditation he says that he set out on a project to reject everything that is not “plainly certain and indubitable.” In the same way he would reject things that are “patently false,” if he finds a reason for “doubting even the least of them.”

This criterion of discovering truth is extremely high: “plainly certain and indubitable.” This last word means “unable to be doubted.” Elevating certainty to such unattainable heights gives Descartes free rein to doubt anything, even if it is the existence of his body or the outside world. He even doubts the truth of mathematics. What does he come out with from his systematic doubt? He cannot doubt that he is thinking, a thing that thinks. “I think, therefore I am,” he says elsewhere. Even if he is dreaming, then he thinks and therefore exists, for only a thinking thing can dream. And a thinking thing exists. If an evil genius deceives him, then at least he thinks and therefore exists, for only a thinking thing can be deceived. And anything that can be deceived must exist.

Descartes’ systematic doubt places the individual in the center of existence. How does this impact Postmodernism? To apply his doubt to the main topic of this series of articles, how does such doubt affect the interpretation of texts? He seems to have discovered a foundation, the self. And in the rest of his Meditations he works hard to restore certainty. But certain later philosophers conclude that his efforts are unconvincing. He let the genie of hyper-skepticism out of the bottle.

Outline of Descartes’s Meditations I and II

C. David Hume (1711-1776)

Hume also challenges our ability to know with certainty. In his Enquiries concerning Human Understanding, he says, for example, that our knowledge of cause and effect, the basis of science, is not founded on demonstrative knowledge. This high level is reserved only for mathematical proofs, as in geometry. Then what is the basis for our knowledge of cause and effect? Before we answer that, let’s look at some examples of the nexus or connection of cause and effect.

Gravity causes unhindered objects to fall earthward (effect). Water causes salt to dissolve (effect). To use some of Hume’s examples, can we know that an egg, just by looking at it for the first time, could nourish us? No. If a visitor came to this planet “of a sudden,” says Hume, can the visitor know what would happen to a billiard ball if anyone pushed it on the table? How would the visitor know that it would not go upwards or straight through the table?

The visitor would know its direction only by experience. He would have to play with the billiard ball for a while, rolling the ball down the table to discover what would happen to it. So the foundation of our coming to know cause and effect is experience. And what is the foundation of experience? It is the accumulation of experiences with cause and effect. And this accumulation Hume calls custom or habit. That is our foundation of our knowledge of science-custom or habit. This is quite shaky.

How can we arrive at any secure knowledge of Biblical texts, especially when the texts proclaim miracles on nearly every page? Hume did not believe that they could happen. More relevant still, will postmodern interpreters of the Bible assume that miracles do not happen?

For more on Hume’s hyper-skepticism as it relates to miracles, begin a series on miracles here.

Outline of Hume’s Theory of Knowledge

D. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Credit goes to Kant for bridging Descartes’ rationalism and Hume’s empiricism, but that is not the central point of this brief survey. In Kant, we find a philosophy that challenges our objective knowledge. He says that our minds constitute and shape the world around us. When our five senses feed the raw data of the outside world into our understanding, it simultaneously organizes the data. This disagrees with the common-sense notion that the outside world is the fountain of our knowledge and that we can come to know the outside world objectively and independent of our mind restructuring it. I use a basic introduction to philosophy to help us navigate the deep waters (Norman Melchert, The Great Conversation: an Historical Introduction to Philosophy, 5^th ed. Oxford UP, 2007). Kant writes:

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. (Critique of Pure Reason, quoted in Melchert, p. 427)

So far, so good. This is the common-sense notion we all experience (or assume that we have). Objects exist “completely independent of our apprehension of them” (Melchert). However, Kant is about to reverse or overturn our assumption. After he says that “all attempts at establishing our knowledge of objects . . . have . . . ended in failure,” he overturns the old ways, writing:

We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success . . . if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. (qtd. in ibid, emphasis added)

“Objects must conform to our knowledge.” That is a remarkable statement. One interpreter of Kant explains:

Perhaps the objects of experience are (at least in part) the result of a construction by a rational mind (qtd. in Melchert p. 428).

Kant’s philosophy, like that of Descartes and Hume, lands us in the world of uncertainty. Can we know the world of objects without our own minds shaping and reconstituting those objects? Can we know them as things in themselves? Oliver A. Johnson, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, answers that question in his article “Immanuel Kant,” in Great Thinkers of the Western World, ed. Ian P. McGreal, Harper Collins, 1992. Johnson says:

We can have no knowledge of things as they are in themselves, existing independently in a physical world. (p. 283)

This troubling conclusion means that we cannot separate our subjectivity from how the world exists in its own right. Our near-objective knowledge of the world has frustratingly been pushed back out of reach. So now we can ask this question as it relates to Biblical studies: Can any interpretation of a text be solid, or is it always shaky and deferred and out of reach?

E. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

He should not be considered an Enlightenment thinker. Just the opposite. As a philosopher, he has been called the “anti-philosopher.” As a writer, he is frighteningly powerful. He proclaims that God is dead, so we must create our own morality, that of the Übermensch or Overman or Superman. This is the superior human whose will to power takes him to the top. Incidentally, he opposed anti-Semitism and did not sheepishly follow nationalism. But it is a terrible blind spot in him—so insightful otherwise—not to figure out that his ideas could be taken to extremes (as if his ideas were not extreme enough) in anti-Semitic Germany and Europe. If he were so prophetic, he should have seen the fatal misinterpretations coming, a mere three decades after he died.

In any case, our focus is on his notion called perspectivism, which existed in milder expressions in earlier philosophers, such as Montaigne (1533-1592). Perspectivism means that “every view is only one among many possible interpretations . . . especially Nietzschean perspectivism, which itself is just one interpretation among many interpretations” (Douglas J. Soccio, Archetypes of Wisdom: an Introduction to Philosophy. 3^rd ed. Wadwsorth, 1998, p. 566). Nietzsche says in this brief excerpt that facts do not exist, but only interpretations do. He writes:

Everything is Interpretation: . . . Against those who say “There are only facts,” I say, “No, facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations.” We cannot establish any fact in itself. Perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing. (qtd. in Louis P. Pojman, Classics of Philosophy, Oxford UP, 1998, pp. 1015-16, emphasis original)

In the next excerpt Nietzsche says that there is no meaning, but countless meanings.

Insofar as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise. It has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings (qtd. in ibid. emphasis original)

One philosopher puts Nietzsche’s perspectivism in perspective (pardon the pun). Note the word “postmodern.” Soccio writes:

There is, however, a characteristically postmodern quality to Nietzsche’s perspectivist assertions: By repeatedly calling attention to his own aesthetic perspectivism, Nietzsche models what he asserts in a flagrantly self-referential way. He exuberantly adopts points of view. (Soccio, p. 566, emphasis original)

Still another interpreter of Nietzsche describes the logical outcome of Nietzschean perspectivism. Nehamas says:

Every view is only an interpretation, and . . . as perspectivism holds, there are no independent facts against which various interpretations can be compared . . . If perspectivism is correct and, as it seems to claim, every interpretation creates its own facts, then it may seem impossible to decide whether any interpretation is or is not correct . . . (Alexander Nehamas, qtd. in Soccio, p. 566)

Nietzsche is the one man who was a large stick of dynamite—with its fuse lit—in a crumbling monolith, though only parts of the monolith were weak.

It is easy to see how perspectivism is a source of Postmodernism, particularly in its interpretation of texts. It can make grounded interpretations of the Bible difficult or even impossible. If we cannot establish any fact in itself, then how do we anchor truths in our minds about the world outside of us? If we cannot anchor such truths, then historical investigation is even more difficult. And if we study an ancient text like the Bible, then how can we bridge the chasm between our interpretation and historical knowledge of the context from which the Bible has emerged?

F. Modern Trends

The three previous philosophers shook the foundations of western thought, and the shaking opened up new ways of seeing (or not seeing) the world. But Postmodernism has more influences working on it. Beginning in the 1870s and reaching to WWI (1914-1918) and WWII (1939-1945), many movements and ideas and events circulated around Europe and influenced modernism (or modernisms), which has now been transmogrified into Postmodernism. Here is a partial and sketchy list.

• The Second Industrial Revolution moved more agrarians from the farm into the city. From 1850 to 1911, urban dwellers increased from 25 to 44 percent in France and from 30 to 60 percent in Germany. Other nations saw similar increases. Urban squalor and poor sanitation were deadly. Plus, who should get the new wealth from industrialism? Socialism says the masses should.

• Karl Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto in 1848. It challenged the middle class as the French Revolution, instigated by the middle class, challenged the aristocracy. In Europe, 1848 was the year of many revolutions, caused by many factors other than Marx’s little book. He simply reflected the spirit of his times.

• Socialism–a new way of distributing power and the wealth created by the Second Industrial Revolution–dominated the political trends from that time through WWI and II, and even today. Communism, barely distinguishable from socialism, was preached and practiced, with devastating results in the decades ahead.

So What’s Wrong with Socialism, Anyway?

• Though the literacy rate in the nineteenth century was appallingly low, the masses were getting more and more educated and picked up new reading material. Primary education was growing. The masses, too, could read about the latest trends.

• Darwin, though he believed in God, said that we evolved from earlier and primitive species as a result of secondary causes derived from the selection of nature, not as a result of first causes derived from God.

• Freud said we have no soul, but are a collection of chemicals in the brain which can be acted on by external social and family causes, in the superego. If we do not have a soul, then we lose our essence as humans. Also, God is a projection of our need and wish for a father.

• New opportunities for women arose. New colleges were founded. Employment developed with the Second Industrial Revolution, but many left the work force after marriage or the birth of their first child. Women won the right to vote after WWI. This changed politics forever.

• Revolutions in physics overturned existing mechanical models of how the universe worked. The theory of relativity says that space and time worked together on a continuum, and measuring space and time depends on the observer and instruments and other forces. Subatomic particles behave in unpredictable and strange ways. We lose scientific realism.

• WWI and WWII produced carnage that the world had never before witnessed. In WWI, in one battle, prolonged over months, one-half or three-quarters of a million soldiers could be lost. WWII was a global conflict, living up to its name of a world war. Many millions of lives were lost around the world. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Plaguing the human psyche, these two wars can be said to influence modernism and Postmodernism more than any other events.

• The Holocaust. Six million gone.

• From the 1870s to the present, new art gouged and scarred an accurate representation of the world or denied and deferred a pleasing look at or hearing of it. Painters and sculptors saw the human form as broken. The vanishing point and perspective collapsed or “vanished.” Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon  demonstrates how far we have come from Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.  The same is true of literature. James Joyce’s novel  Ulysses  has many pages of stream-of-consciousness or unedited thoughts. Composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky take us far from Haydn and Mozart.

• Mass communication and new technology, such as cars, films, and radios, provided a bigger megaphone for artists to preach their unsettling message, whatever it was. People could drive in cars to a museum, or trucks could bring newspapers reporting on these odd ideas and styles directly to the home of a farmer or traditional citizen in the suburbs.

• Most important for this series on Postmodernism and the Bible, from which this post is taken, higher biblical criticism questioned traditional interpretations. Miracles of the Bible did not happen, but they are myths that hold timeless truths. (Go here to begin a series on miracles that questions an anti-miracles starting point for interpreting the Bible.) The Church was under siege.

These movements, ideas, and historical events, merely sketched out here (and some omitted), either directly or indirectly influence Postmodernism. But all of them together are like many ripples in a once-still pond, each colliding with the other. Some ripples are bigger than others, but each moves the pond water, causing flux.

What do the items in the list have in common?Uncertainty and instability.

But compared to what? Simple. Compared to traditional viewpoints, old ways of life, and common sense. Tradition says that women should stay at home and have no or little political power; traditional viewpoints say that God, who exists and is not a projection of the human wish for a father, created all life–from the amoeba to the human; common sense says that the world exists in its own right apart from our understanding; the middle class dominates; people are uneducated; the universe conforms to a mechanical model; traditional religion says we have a soul and the Bible is inerrant.

Many of these trends on the long bulleted list, of course, are positive, but they still shake time-honored traditions and our grandparents’ common sense. This shaking that transmogrifies will continue with Postmodernism.

G. Summary

As noted, the last three hundred-plus years can be characterized as times of uncertainty and instability. The old order has been cracking during this timeframe. Debatably, this ethos or general character was most visible first in philosophy, which then transmogrified other areas, such as politics, social customs, and economics. We lose a solid foundation. We lose our essence as humans. We lose the real world out there, existing objectively and in its own right, apart from and independent of our perceptions and understanding, apart from “our worldview.”

It did not take long for the hard-hitting philosophy to be adopted by Bible scholars. Traditional viewpoints, espoused by the church–both Catholic and Protestant–were and are under siege. Generally, in response the church divided into liberalism and conservatism, which is closer to the center than fundamentalism. The theological Left largely adopts the nontraditional intellectual criticisms and social trends, whereas the theological Right challenges the new social trends (though not all of them or in the same degree) and explains why the traditional viewpoints on the Bible are still valid and reasonable. Both the Left and the Right have variations, but this brief assessment of the church’s reactions to modernist trends is adequate for our purposes.

And it must be noted, however, that not all Bible scholars interested in applying postmodern interpretations are hyper-skeptical; maybe they know nothing about the sources that flow into Postmodernism, as outlined in the list, above. But too many seem to blithely apply farfetched interpretations, for what end, I don’t yet know.

Nonetheless, postmodernist interpreters of the Bible are mere borrowers with few innovations. Postmodern Bible interpreters reflect the uncertainty and instability in society and intellectual trends and infer that discourse (how we communicate in a variety of ways) is likewise uncertain and unstable. This uncertainty and instability is especially apparent in a variety of interpretations of the Bible, which has been locked up and strangled by traditional interpretations, so they say. Apparently, it is the passionate goal of postmodernist interpreters of the Bible to free it from the stranglehold. If meaning in all discourse is uncertain and unstable, then they intend to demonstrate how the meaning of Scripture is likewise uncertain and unstable, dethroning any privileged viewpoint along the way, even time-tested and steady ones.

IV. Towards a Description of Postmodernism

A. Brief intro.

I had titled this section “Towards a Definition,” but decided that was too strident and optimistic.

Postmodernism is hyper-skeptical of the following, which make up, as it were, the ingredients of the postmodern truth soup.

B. Hyper-skeptical of origins

This and the next three characteristics of Postmodernism have been summarized best by Kevin Hart of Notre Dame University in his superb introduction, Postmodernism: a Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2004). He has a chapter titled “The Loss of Origins.” That is a perfect result of Postmodernism.

Ole fashioned scholarship and interpretations of the Bible place high value on the original, historical and textual context. Once this search has been done, scholars decide on the best meaning according to the context. I am not so naïve to believe that the process is easy or every jigsaw puzzle can completed.

However, Postmodernism says that language is always in play, and the origins and meaning of words may not be simplistically limited by their context. Words retain their “traces” or tracks (as in footprints), regardless of their placement in a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire book. This perpetual playing implies that we cannot nail meaning down.

To apply momentarily the loss of origins to Biblical studies, does it mean that the New Testament, which emerges from the apostolic community and was written by those who knew Jesus or who had access to those who did, lose its authority? Karen King doubts the criterion of origins in determining “normative” or orthodox Christianity. She writes:

The ancient discourse of orthodoxy and heresy has affected not only the goals and substance of the study of Gnosticism but its methods as well. I suggest that in the development of modern historical scholarship the concerns of the ancient discourse with origins, essence, and purity were transformed into disciplinary methodologies. (What is Gnosticism? p. 279, emphasis added)

That quotation reflects the main thesis of her insightful book. She advocates getting away from those three criteria. Does this mean that we should accept second, third, and fourth century Gnostic scriptures into the canon of Scripture? (Canon originally meant “measuring stick,” and it now refers to any body of writing that enjoys a privileged status; in this context, it is the New Testament, which is the standard by which we measure all rivals.)

The next three characteristics reveal the fallout of the loss of origins.

C. Hyper-skeptical of essences

As Freud says, humans do not have a soul, so they lack a permanent essence. Hart writes:

One of the most widespread forms [of anti-essentialism] amounts to the contention that there is no natural or universal essence to being human. (p. 26)

In the context of literary interpretation, which lands us in the realm of interpreting the Grand Text, the Bible, anti-essentialism means the following, in contrast to how postmodernists interpret texts. Hart clarifies:

The [postmodern theorists] will also point out that essentialists or humanists usually attempt to unify the work by way of interpretation. (p. 27)

Thus, non-postmodern (to pile on the prefixes) interpretations are naïve, if they seek unity in interpretation. So how does an anti-essentialist postmodernist read a work of literature? Hart answers:

Read the same work through anti-essentialist lenses, [postmodernists] suggest, and you will not be hampered by focusing on truths that can be universalized or by trying to see the whole text in a single sustained vision. It is more likely that you will seek to put what you learn about characters and their situations to use in politics and ethics . . . As an anti-essentialist, you will not be tempted to bypass, overlook or reduce these episodes or descriptions that run counter to an overall interpretation. In fact, those things might suggest rival interpretations of the work that do not cohere and do not go away. (p. 27)

Some of Hart’s assessment of interpretation does not at all conflict with time-tested biblical interpretations. Many such commentaries discuss rivals. Or is there a proper interpretation(s) of the Bible?

As noted in the previous section, Karen King doubts that we should look for the essence of early Christianity, though she does not analyze in detail the New Testament as a possible source for the essence and purity of early Christianity (see pp. 224-28). She denies its essence and purity as a useless pursuit. Gnostic texts seem to stand on an equal footing and are equally essential, original, and pure.

D. Hyper-skeptical of binaries

Some binaries have an either / or dichotomy, which exclude the middle. Traditional Christian theology says that God is wholly other from all other created beings and his essence excludes everything else. But deconstruction may challenge this and say that other gods provide a continuum. The issue which is relevant for today is the male / female binary. Men have a different gamete–they produce sperm, while women produce the ovum. However, this is not the only definition of male and female, so it is placed on a continuum. The male / female binary has no excluded middle–it has no exclusion, period. David Knights and Deborah Kerfoot, for example, write in their abstract to their online article “Between Representations and Subjectivity: Gender Binaries and the Politics of Organizational Transformation”:

The distinction between male and female and masculinity and femininity continues to polarize relations between the sexes in ways that generally subordinate, marginalize, or undermine women with respect to men. The gender literature has recently challenged the singular and unitary conception of gender identity, arguing that there are a multiplicity of masculinities and femininities that are often fragile, fragmented and fluid.

My critique of the above statement is that they have confused categories. Because there has been social obstruction to womankind over the centuries, they believe that in tearing down the obstruction, they can deconstruct basic biology.

How does this relate to the Bible? Genesis 1:26a-28a says:

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness […] So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. ²⁸ God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number” […]

God gave mankind and womankind their respective gametes which contribute to procreating new life. Postmodernists wish to deconstruct (that is, destroy) this biological binary and replace it with new social constructs, again confusing the categories of biology and sociology. It is a sleight of hand, a card trick, a shell game, which can easily deceive the unwary.

E. Hyper-skeptical of realism

One way to define realism in a postmodern context is to point out its opposite, anti-realism. Hart explains:

Many postmodernists hold forms of both metaphysical and truth anti-realism: there is no reality independent of the mind, and no truth that enjoys that status either. Usually, they will deny that there is a correspondence between language and reality. People who take this stand urge us to accept that language does not simply transmit information but partly constructs what it communicates. We cannot have objective knowledge of reality because we cannot step outside language. (p. 28)

But anti-realism shows up in science as well. Shockingly, scientific anti-realism and King’s book on Gnosticism share an ideology. King writes:

Only a few plots [of studying Gnosticism apart from the orthodoxy and heresy models] remain open to us, constrained as we are by our own cultural codes, and not least by our notion of time. The new physics, from relativity to subatomic particle studies, is in the process of reconceptualizing the Western notion of time. In quantum physics, the relationship between events is a consequence of measurement; the causal relation between two events is not perceptible, except as a gap (p. 234)

I must confess that the moment I read that passage, I was stunned. She has swallowed or at least chewed on a hyper-radical view of time.

She goes on in the next paragraph to discuss Paul Ricoeur’s “unrepresentability of time” in narratives (or stories). Then, referring to Michel Foucault, a prominent postmodernist, King concludes, “This new form of time is discontinuous and unpatterned; it is not serious, real, or true” (p. 235). So what does this mean to the study of texts, specifically the New Testament and Gnostic scriptures? I concede that narratives (or stories) play with time, collapsing and stretching it, for example. But King’s brief view of time is radical, by any objective assessment (yes, I believe in objectivity. There really is a computer monitor in front of me). Quantum level may behave in unpredictable, strange ways, but up here in our level, time is one thing after another, tick, tick, tick . . . . I hope neither she nor anyone else believes that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated three years from now in the future and in the past. That would be absurd.

Maybe King needs to embrace radical skepticism about time because one of the grand omissions from all of Gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi collection is a clear demarcation of time (and place) in narratives. Not even the Act of Peter in the collection adequately deals with narrative time, contrasted with the narratives of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and, yes, even John. Whoever of the ancient world put together those codices that make up the collection had a tin ear for storytelling.

F. Hyper-skeptical of foundations

Generally, hyper-skepticism about foundations is known as anti-foundationalism, which means that “our knowledge of the world rests on no secure ground” (Hart, p. 29). Hart goes right to Nietzsche in defining anti-foundationalism. Hart writes:

Nietzsche himself has responded differently to the nihilism that he had diagnosed. We have lost the ‘real world’ and the ‘apparent world,’ he thought, and it follows from this eerie situation that there are no facts, only interpretations. With that breathtaking claim we broach the doctrine that Nietzsche called ‘perspectivism.’ It is a shorthand for a group of different doctrines — that truth is perspectival, that logic is, that knowledge is, and so on . . . There is no absolute, Nietzsche declared: being is always becoming and ‘being human’ is fluid rather than fixed. (p. 35).

After describing Nietzsche shifting the definition of the “good,” Hart returns to the process of interpretation within anti-foundationalism. He says:

There is no unconditional ground for reality — no absolute perspective, no God’s eye view of the world — only a plurality of forces that form themselves into groups, break apart and reform in other combinations. Each constellation of forces interprets the others in a robust sense of ‘interpret,’ one that comes from a possible etymological source of the word-pretium or value. To interpret is to negotiate value (Hart, p. 35)

One New Testament scholar defines anti-foundationalism as a refusal to establish a starting point. A. K. M. Adam writes in What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism? (Fortress, 1995), as follows:

Postmodernism is antifoundational in that it resolutely refuses to posit any one premise as the privileged and unassailable starting point for establishing claims of truth. (p. 5, emphasis original)

Not having a starting point is one of the major themes of the heavy promoters of ancient Gnosticism, such as Karen King, Elaine Pagels, and Marvin Meyer. They seem anxious to dethrone the canonical writings and replace them with the Gnostic ones, or at least to set up a new throne next to the old one. On what grounds? All truths are equal in regards to canonicity. In early Christianity, the powerful won the day and imposed orthodoxy. Now these Gnostic scholars are on a mission to rectify the situation.

G. Hyper-skeptical of metanarratives

“Metanarrative” is a big word for “grand narrative.” Jean-François Lyotard, a prominent postmodern practitioner and theorist, says:

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define  postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives” (Postmodern Condition, p. xxiv, quoted in Adam, p. 16, emphasis original).

Adam gives examples:

Metanarratives (or “grand narratives”) are the stories we tell about the nature and destiny of humanity: Hegel viewed all history as the gradual self-revelation of Spirit (Geist) through time, while some people talk about the progressive recognition of innate human rights and of emancipatory evolution toward liberal democracy, while others talk about the inevitable rise and fall of capitalism. (p. 16)

But what about the Bible? Does it offer a metanarrative of which we should be suspicious? Adam explains and then defends the Bible, somewhat. He says:

A critic who stresses metanarrative incredulity as the definitive mark of postmodernism may want to chastise the (Christian) Bible’s pretension to tell the story of everything from Creation to Apocalypse: there are sources galore for metanarratives here, as the history of interpretation has well illustrated. Yet one may well observe that there is no single clear metanarrative of the Bible (in its Christian forms, even less so in the Hebrew Bible). The various components of the Bible interweave and argue among themselves. A careful reader is as likely to come from the Bible amazed at its internal contestation as she is to see its tyrannical, monotonous unanimity. (pp. 17-18)

There is much here on which non-postmodern or traditional interpreters can agree. The tensions revealed in Scripture are palpable. However, “tyrannical” and “monotonous” stack the deck against the unity of Scripture — “unity” is frequently derided by postmodernists. Karen King says that a prominent New Testament scholar proposed abandoning “the dominant master narrative” in the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy (What Is Gnosticism? p. 111). As noted, King is heavily influenced by postmodern thinkers, so she doubts orthodoxy on the grounds that it cannot be pure and original and essential. And neither can heresy or Gnosticism, so the orthodoxy / heresy categories should be dropped. But this only creates an extra-sloshy postmodern truth soup.

H. Hyper-skeptical of totalities

The term “totality” means theories and storylines that complete any big jigsaw puzzle as if all the pieces can fit together. But we today have purchased a defective puzzle. It was never intended to be put together as a well-ordered whole. Adam writes:

[Postmodernism] is antitotalizing because postmodern discourse [communication in a variety of ways] suspects that any theory that claims to account for everything is suppressing counterexamples, or is applying warped criteria so that it can include recalcitrant cases. (p. 5)

Ihab Hassan is a major theorist on Postmodernism. In his article “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective,” in The Post-Modern Reader, he quotes Jean-François Lyotard, as follows:

Thus Jean-François Lyotard exhorts, “Let us wage war on totality; let us be witness to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the name of honor.” (p. 196)

One of the many outcomes of New Testament scholarship these days, such as that of Karen King and Bart D. Ehrman (Lost Christianities, Oxford, 2003), is to reject so-called orthodoxy. The directions of early Christianities (plural) were never a foregone conclusion, but a struggle that one side won, the so-called orthodox. The net result of these scholars’ storyline is that they create a postmodern truth soup in which all truths are equally valid or invalid, tasteful or distasteful. Thus, it is not the case, according to them, that orthodoxy should win – never mind that it told a better story without a lot of complications that permeate Gnostic scriptures, for example. Whoever originally wrote those Gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi collection were deficient (a favorite Gnostic term) storytellers. On the other hand, the canonical Gospels reflect simplicity itself and therefore tell a better story for average persons in the Mediterranean world, who could not read or could barely read. This is only one among many reasons that orthodoxy rightly carried the day, in my opinion.

I. Hyper-skeptical of canons

Recall that “canon” originally meant a measuring stick, and it refers now to any body of writing that enjoys a privileged status, such as the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, and so on. Hassan explains that canon should go well beyond a list of required books in a Western civilization course.

In the largest sense, this applies to all canons, all conventions of authority. We are witnessing, Lyotard argues again, a massive “delegitimation” of the mastercodes of society, a desuetude of the metanarratives . . . Thus, from the “death of god” to the “death of the author” and “death of the father,” from the derision of authority to revision of the curriculum, we decanonize culture, demystify knowledge, deconstruct the language of power . . . (p. 196).

What will Postmodernism put in the place of all canons? New canons? Fair enough. But what then? I notice that postmodernists would like to revise curriculum. How? In which directions?

The overly strong promoters of the Gnostic scriptures say that these writings contain truths, and all truths are thrown into the soup. Even though the New Testament emerges from the apostolic community that was closer to the life of Christ, and even though Gnostic scriptures come about later and do not enjoy this privileged access, origins have no bearing on breaking the deadlock between the canonical New Testament and Gnostic scriptures and deciding on orthodoxy. Why have a canon? It should be dethroned. Or at least another sparkly, jewel-studded throne should sit beside it.

J. Summary

I would like to conclude with questions directed at the church, wherever it is found around the world.

• Can the church rightly universalize truth? Granted, “God-language” may not ultimately describe the pure essence of God adequately, but does that mean all is lost?
• Has Postmodernism become a metanarrative? It seems so, at least to me. Should the church give up all metanarratives (Ephesians 1:9-10)?
• Can we arrive at foundational truths?
• Should the church give up on interpretations of the Bible anchored in facts and origins and historical reality?
• If interpretations are not based on facts, particularly our interpretations of the historical document, the Bible, then do truths become lost in the whirlwind of perspectives? Does Whirlwind rule, as the fifth-century Greek comic poet Aristophanes says in his play Clouds?
• Is the following true? As we shall see in a future article, postmodernists claim that they do not hold all interpretations as equally valid; some are better than others.
• However, do all of their interpretations still amount only to “language games” (Wittgenstein, Lyotard) in the face of the Ultimate, the Deity? Nietzsche said that God is dead.
• What does Postmodernism put in place of rationality and reality and canon and foundations? That postmodern, totalizing, hyper-radical metanarrative is still being written.

While the church grapples with those questions, I believe that along the way reputable and high-quality scholars like Karen King and Bart Ehrman, and many others, have swallowed too much of the Postmodernism truth soup. These scholars’ application of Postmodernism and their hyper-skepticism turns history and objectivity and canon into a soup in which all ingredients and flavors are dissolved into an indistinguishable liquid. And unfortunately their troubling conclusions about the Bible and rival texts have needlessly and heedlessly confused the Church and society.

However, I suggest that we not be too hasty in abandoning our common sense — so derided by postmodernists — about foundations, knowledge, truth, facts, origins, essences, purity, interpretations, and even reality itself.

V. Deconstruction

A. Intro.

It seems that everyone in the media uses the terms “deconstruction” or “deconstruct.” A film critic deconstructs a popular movie because he does not like the lighting. A book reviewer deconstructs a short story because he thinks a character is underdeveloped. A man deconverts and calls it his deconstruction. The words have broad meanings, so maybe the critic and reviewer are not so far off in using them.

However, what does deconstruction mean according to the experts, particularly Jacques Derrida? Most importantly for this series, how does it influence Biblical studies? This article is Part Four in the series on Postmodernism and the Bible.

We first very briefly look at two other movements and interpretive strategies, structuralism and poststructuralism, so we can orient ourselves to understand deconstruction.

In the big picture, how does Postmodernism and poststructuralism and deconstruction fit together? For our purposes, Postmodernism is the biggest category, poststructuralism fits under it, and deconstruction is a poststructuralist strategy or activity. “We might say that postmodernism subsumes poststructuralism” (Stuart Sim Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, 2^nd ed., ed. Sim, 2005, p. x). And I would add that poststructuralism subsumes deconstruction. Other scholars come up with slightly different classifications, but the foregoing is adequate for our series.

Following the standard procedure in the series so far, I quote extensively from the practitioners and theorists of these movements, so they can explain themselves in their own words. Along the way, we keep track of the prefix “hyper,” and in one instance the theme of transmogrification is noted. Recall that the strange word has no known origins and means a great change or alteration, “often with grotesque or humorous effect.” Both the prefix and the big word are threads that run throughout the series.

B. Structuralism

To understand the “post” in poststructuralism, we should briefly review structuralism.

In a highly regarded introduction to structuralism as it relates to literature or the interpretation of texts (the concern of this series is the Biblical text), Robert Scholes uses these words to describe structuralism: integrative, holistic, unification, natural ordering, systematic universalism, and universal principles or laws (Structuralism in Literature, Yale, 1974, pp. 1-12).

At the time Scholes was writing (and before), he says that structuralism has a privileged place in literary study. Why? It seeks to establish a scientific basis for the entire field of literature, not just individual works. He writes:

Structuralism . . . may claim a privileged place in literary study because it seeks to establish a model of the system of literature itself as the external reference for the individual works it considers. By moving from the study of language to the study of literature, and seeking to define principles of structuration that operate not only through individual works but through the relationships among works over the whole field of literature, structuralism has tried–and is trying–to establish for literary studies a basis that is as scientific as possible. (p. 10)

Can there be a scientific basis for interpreting literature, which is subjected to language and meaning? Postmodernists say no, and that’s what this present article is about.

Thus, structuralism seeks to circumscribe an entire system for literature beyond individual works, all the way to human culture. In fact, structuralism transforms the individual parts of literature in a “concept of system.” However, we saw in the section about the prefix hyper-, Postmodernism is hyper-skeptical of totalities. And that excerpt from Scholes teaches a totalizing system. So there is a problem with structuralism from a postmodern point of view.

It is the main goal of deconstruction to overturn privileged systems of discourse or communication in a variety of ways. Postmodernism is hyper-skeptical of totalities and the dominance of one concept over another. Postmodernism overturns the thing occupying the privileged position. That includes the canon of Western literature, and that includes the “privileged” Bible.

C. Poststructuralism

Stuart Sim says of poststructuralism:

Poststructuralism is a term that refers to a wide range of responses to the structuralist paradigm-responses such as the philosophically oriented “deconstruction” of Jacques Derrida, the various “archaeological” and “genealogical” enquiries into cultural history of Michel Foucault, and the “difference feminism” of such theorists as Luce Irigaray. Poststructuralism has been an influential part of the cultural scene since the 1960s, but nowadays it can be seen to be part of a more general reaction to authoritarian ideologies and political systems that we define as postmodernism. (p. ix-x)

Sim continues. Postmodernism is:

A broad cultural movement spanning various intellectual disciplines. . . It is to be regarded as both a philosophical and a political movement […]. Poststructuralism called into question the cultural certainties that structuralism had been felt to embody: certainties such as the belief that the world was intrinsically knowable […].  (Sim, p. 4)

Thus, our world is unknowable. This seems Kantian. He said we cannot know a thing-in-itself without our understanding shaping it. But the most interesting aspect of those two excerpts is the political movement. This goal or outcome will be explored, in part, in the next section.

D. Deconstruction

David H. Richter put together an anthology or collection of writings by the major thinkers on interpreting texts (The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, St. Martin’s, 1989). He describes the activity of deconstruction:

In its most general sense, the activity of deconstruction involves the skeptical re-examination . . . of all dialectical polarities that have formed the basis of Western culture, a re-examination searching for the point of privilege upon which standard hierarchies rest. (p. 946)

In my view deconstruction should be called hyper-skeptical, because most ordinary thinkers have some level of skepticism, but most (not all) postmodernists take things to extremes, as noted in Parts One *** and Three.  Most ordinary thinkers do not work to undermine foundations of thought in the West or elsewhere.

What are binary or dialectical polarities, which were a concern for structuralists? Richter explains:

We are used to arguing about various other presences and absences: art vs. genius, culture vs. nature, transcendence vs. immanence, soul vs. body, divine vs. human, human vs. animal, man vs. woman, being vs. becoming, and so on. In each case the first term denotes the presence and the second the absence of something. Derrida uses the paradoxes . . . in an effort to decenter the first term of each pair, to remove it from its privileged position relative to the second. (p. 946)

Taking his cue from that last sentence, Richter gets to the heart of deconstruction, the authority of Western culture:

To the extent that these polarities are at the heart of Western culture, deconstruction attempts to expose the illusions upon which authority in Western culture has been established. (p. 946)

Richter goes on to reference W. B. Yeats’ poem “the Second Coming,” which says in part, “The center cannot hold” (see below to read the poem). Richter then calls Derrida a revealing name: “the anarchistic Derrida calls into question the very concept of the center” (p. 946). That label confirms why he and his disciples should be called hyper-skeptical and hyper-radical.

The foremost practitioner of deconstruction was Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). While in America, he delivered a paper at a conference at The John Hopkins University in 1966. The paper is titled, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences.” It is this talk that gave him fame in America, and Richter includes it in his anthology. The page numbers refer to it.

Before we look at a few small parts of Derrida’s essay, however, it should be noted that in explaining deconstruction, scholars seem always obligated to explain the linguistic sign, page after page. It has been referred to in the previous section in the excerpts from Richter: signifier and signified (see Ferdinand de Saussure). Though it is important, I will not focus on it. Rather, I simply repeat that the linguistic sign is made up of the signifier (e.g. the words on the page or the sounds of speech) and the signified (i.e. the meaning).

Here is a diagram of the sign:

Signified (meaning or definition)
____________
Signifier (words on page or in speech)

Here it is filled in, with a tree:

A woody perennial plant, typically
having a single stem or trunk
growing to a considerable height and
bearing lateral branches at some distance
from the ground.
__________________________________
Tree

That was easy. Too easy.

Now what is the referent, or the thing that the sign refers to? The best answer is to look out your window at a tree. That’s the referent.

However, let’s mix things up a little. Is the the image in this photo the referent to the tree?

Or is a painting of a tree the referent?

Already we have landed in some ambiguities.

But this is child’s play. What about these terms:

????
_____________
God

???????
________
Truth

?????????
__________
Logos

Those are transcendental, metaphysical signifieds. Can their meaning be pinned down? After we establish the definition of those signifiers (if we can), what is the referent to each of them?

It is these ambiguities inhering in language that Derrida exploits. This takes us far from structuralism that seeks to “whitewash” these differences in a unified system of signs, at least according to the critics of structuralism. Exploiting the differences within language, Derrida goes beyond this, however, and uses these differences to unravel the notion of “presence,” a word referred to by Richter in the excerpts in this section. Derrida defines it here:

The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors or metonymies [the concept of the center and origins and their ruptures]. Its matrix . . . is the determination of being as presence in all the senses of this word. (p. 960 emphasis original)

Thus, the word “presence” is shorthand for the West’s confident search for transcendental truths summed up in other words that dominate Western thought, such as “essence, existence, substance, subject, truth, transcendentality, consciousness or conscience, God, man and so forth” (p. 961). Derrida equates presence with a “fixed origin” (p. 960). Recall that in the previous section on the hypers, which defined Postmodernism as an extra-sloshy truth soup, practitioners of this movement are hyper-skeptical of origins.

However, the search for the transcendental signifieds or ultimate meanings is subject to the differences inhering in language, which in turn is subjected to freeplay that fans out into other differences, both in the individual letters to a full book. No one can reach an ultimate, fixed meaning. Language is interlocked with ambiguity and differences of meaning. The privileged center or origin has slipped into the unprivileged absence in the binary opposition of presence / absence. Derrida writes:

….When everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum [to infinity] (p. 961).

So the transcendental signified cannot escape from a system of differences in language.

Example: Derrida knew several languages in addition to his native French, such as English, German, Greek, and Latin. And he says in our first excerpt from him, “presence in all the senses of this word.” What are all these senses? The word “presence” comes from a Latin group of words that mean: to be before, to preside over, to be the chief person, to take the lead; present in space and time; here and now; at hand; immediately efficacious, effective, powerful. Thus, presence in all senses of the word contains within it the very thing that Derrida attacks: power and privilege. It is up to deconstruction to unseat or reverse the occupant of the powerful position. Traditional Biblical scholarship says that often (not always) one interpretation occupies the highest seat. Why not dethrone it, as we shall see in the next article?

But how can Derrida use language and Western concepts to deconstruct such things? Isn’t he being inconsistent? In reply, why would a deconstructionist worry about inconsistency, a less privileged term than its brother / sister, “consistency”? Derrida says:

There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language — no syntax and no lexicon — which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest. (p. 961)

Now we are in a better position to understand one of the concluding paragraphs of Derrida’s essay. The paragraph sums up perfectly the struggle between deconstruction and the freeplay of meaning on the one hand, and traditional interpretations that seek to nail down meaning and eliminate freeplay, on the other. He says:

There are two interpretations of interpretation, of structure [recall structuralism], of [linguistic] sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the [linguistic] sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. (p. 970)

The first “interpretations of interpretation” seeks freedom from freeplay. This fits standard, traditional Biblical scholarship. Now what about the second one? Derrida continues in the paragraph:

The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or onto-theology . . . has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and end of the game. (p. 970)

Earlier in his essay, Derrida cited Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger as exemplars of radical (Derrida’s word) disruptors of presence (p. 961). Now Derrida returns to Nietzsche and says, as Derrida wraps up his paragraph, that Nietzsche showed the way in the second “interpretations of interpretation” (p. 970). We saw in Part Two that Nietzsche forcefully advanced perspectivism, which says that there are no facts, only interpretations. This is why postmodernists, borrowing heavily from Nietzsche and others discussed in Part Two, earn the prefix hyper, when they are contrasted with other thinkers.

E. Deconstruction in a “nutshell”

John D. Caputo ironically uses this word in his book Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Fordham, 1997). I take his term “nutshell” to be ironic because he knows there is no nutshell to contain it. But I could be wrong about this one point.

In any case, at least watch him play with the word.

Deconstruction . . . is the endless, bottomless affirmation of the absolutely undeconstructible. (p. 42)

Caputo explains what this last word means:

But let us keep the metaphorics of the nutshell straight: the “undesconstructible” does not mean the “uncrackable” but, rather, that in virtue of which nutshells can be cracked, in order to make an opening for the coming of the other. The undeconstructible, if such a thing exists, is that in virtue of which whatever exists, whatever poses as assured and secure, whole and meaningful, ensconced, encircled, and encapsulated is pried open — cracked open and deconstructed. (p. 42)

We again let Derrida reduce deconstruction to a reversal and overturning of privileged positions. He writes:

On the one hand, we must traverse a phrase of overturning. To do justice to this necessity is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other . . . or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment (Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, 1971, 1981, p. 41)

The next nutshell definition by prominent literary critic Jonathan Culler agrees that deconstruction is an overturning or reversal of philosophical and discursive privilege and hierarchy (On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Yale, 1982). Culler says:

To deconstruct a discourse [communication in a variety of ways] is to show how it undermines the philosophy it asserts, or the hierarchical oppositions on which it relies, by identifying in the text the rhetorical operations that produce the supposed ground of argument, the key concept or premise. (p. 86)

It was noted in section above on the prefix hyper- that Postmodernism is hyper-skeptical of foundations. Deconstruction also undermines the “supposed grounds of argument, the key concept or premise.”

F. Deconstruction and the Bible?

New Testament scholar A. K. M. Adam explains, first, that there is no absolute reference point for our interpretations:

First, [deconstruction] underlines . . . antifoundationalism [see the previous section about the hypers]; there can be no absolute reference point by which we orient our interpretations: not the text, the author, the meaning, the real, historical event, nor any other self-identical authoritative presence. (What is Postmodern Biblical Criticism? Fortress, 1995, p. 31)

That is a heavy excerpt. No absolute reference point like the text, the author, the meaning, the real (!), the historical event? . . . Without any anchor, the best meaning of a text is lost. Thus, Whirlwind rules, as Aristophanes the fifth-century Greek comic poet says in his play Clouds.

Next, Adam says that deconstruction demystifies the kinds of unquestionable oppositions that we have analyzed above, using the example of history / fiction. “The superiority of one term to the other is built into the decision that is a distinction that makes a difference” (p. 32). So apparently it is a decision that places history over fiction, not facts or truth?

???????
_____________
The Bible

??????????
_____________
Interpretation(s) of the Bible

On the whole, a deconstructive reading of the Bible transmogrifies passages that have a plain direction and flow. Often, such a reading overturns and reverses the clear role of the privileged point of view, such as that of Jesus. Some postmodernists claim that they do not preach “Anything Goes” (Monika Killian, Modern and Postmodern Strategies, Peter Lang, 1998, pp. 3, 17, 40, 144). But it is difficult to avoid the impression that this is precisely what many practice. And it is difficult to refrain from giving many of them the label of hyper-radical.

G. Summary

Here are the features that describe deconstruction:

• Struggle (always about the Struggle for the Left) between freeplay of meaning and traditional interpretations (so traditional marriage is gone and freeplay sexuality is in);
• Deconstruction affirms “freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or onto-theology . . . has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and end of the game” (Derrida) (so the essence of humankind is gone, and so goes his nailed-down sexuality);
• Words, especially the big and abstract ones, have no fixed referent (outside reality, like a tree, so longstanding human sexuality is not a fixed referent that can be referred to in dialogue);
• Deconstruction capitalizes on ambiguity in language (and presumably in discussing sexually ambiguous feelings as well);
• It exploits the gaps and silences of a word or text (including the story of the history of human sexuality);
• It’s a language game (“words, words, words!” says Hamlet to Polonius);
• Reality and the words that describe it don’t match (so how can meaning generally and the meaning of sexuality be described with certainty?);
• Finally, rippling outward to us, deconstruction destroys the metaphysical truths that the West depends on. And when you destroy them, you destroy stability for society (one stabilizing that we depend on is the healthy, opposite-sex, biological family)

It seems, then, that the ultimate goal of deconstruction — and Postmodernism and poststructuralism — is to undermine the foundation of the West, and one of the foundation stones of the West (and increasingly in other nations), the Bible.

But these questions need to be asked. Do other civilizations have scholars that aim to undermine their foundations? Do other civilizations — especially the very religious ones (e.g. an Islamic one) and perhaps the very secular ones (e.g. China) — work hard to exploit the self-destruction that the radicals or hyper-radicals engage in? To be “anarchistic” (Richter’s description of Derrida) is to be heedlessly destructive. What would postmodernists like to put in place of the foundation of Western thought? Worse still, what will force its way into being the new foundation? It is difficult to find out what postmodernists are arguing for.

What comes out of the nutshell that is cracked open? Derrida sees an odd, unexplainable future, perhaps like Yeats’ poem “the Second Coming” (go to Part One, to read the whole poem). Derrida writes in the last paragraph of his essay (1966):

Here there is a sort of question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception, the formation, the gestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the business of childbearing–but with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity. (p. 971, emphasis original)

Deconstruction is giving birth, but to what? In a slow way, one drop at a time on the forehead, postmodernists are destroying the very West that gives these same hyper-radicals and hyper-skeptics the freedom, prosperity, and leisure time to use their weapons against Western foundations.

The “deconstructed” irony is rich and sad.

VI. Postmodern Roots of Leftwing Policies

A. Brief intro.

I see the church is drifting leftward, but do the church-goers understand that leftwing policies are built on hyper-skepticism? Let’s see how by listing practical example.

B. Implementing Worldview Studies in curricula

Christian universities and high schools have accepted perspectivism as if there are no objective truths out there, but only our competing worldviews.  So they teach “Worldview Studies.”

This is the wrong approach.  Instead, reality should shape ideology, rather than our worldview or ideology shaping the truths of the real world.

In concrete policy terms, these universities and high schools need to drop Worldview Studies and just teach Philosophy 101.

But I concede, as I said above, that the worldview education is here to stay. So I have modified my wishful thinking here.

C. Destroying the essence of marriage and gender differences

What is something as simple as a pencil?  If you can find the definition of a pencil, then you have discovered its essence, which distinguishes it from other objects like a pen.  Close, but not the same.

Two men getting married?  Close, but not the same.

However, Postmodernism is hyper-skeptical of essences.

Until recently, marriage had an essence: one man and one woman enjoying a comprehensive bodily union that is unique to them and distinguishes them from all other sexual relations (and even just friendships or family relationships like brothers).  But in a debate over same-sex “marriage,” one advocate for redefining marriage proclaimed: “Marriage has no essence!”  In other words, it’s open to reinterpretation and redefinition.  Perspectivism.

To take Postmodernism to its deeper outcome, it also says human sexuality is fluid, not fixed.  There are no clear gender differences.  The essence of maleness and the essence of femaleness is being shattered.

So now we have transgendered males demanding to be allowed into women’s locker rooms and restrooms, invading the latter’s public spaces that should be reserved only for them.

This policy denies womankind’s safety and privacy.  Ideology over safety and common sense.

Also, the left endorses transitioning children from one sex to the other or maybe to an asexual being. Various hospitals, at the time of this writing, perform transitioning surgeries on teens and others, cutting off various reproductive organs or giving teens puberty blockers.

In reply, we have to look at Genesis 1. Humans are made in God’s image. We dare not trifle with this or abandon the mind God has given us and go along with this recent trend. We must not support dysphoria or mental confusion. Instead, we love the people who suffer from this condition and ask them to surrender to God, pray for them to be filled with the Spirit, and discipled. We must preach the gospel to them.

D. Destroying preborn children

How die we get here? States allow for late abortion if the doctor says yes. But remember: Postmodernism says there is no essence. The baby is just a clump of cells forming into a fetus (not a baby).

However, the cells and fetus are alive, so it’s living. It was alive at conception, too. The zygote was not dead. It is a human (not a chimp), and DNA proves it. And it is an entity or a being. It is innocent, obviously.

Therefore it is an innocent living human being. And it is wrong to kill an innocent living human being.

E. Negotiating with evil politicians

Humankind used to have an essence: a rational soul.  Christianity added that the essence is a contaminated rational soul.  We don’t even need a biblical text to reach that conclusion, which is deduction.  We can observe humans over the centuries.  That’s induction.

Postmodernism, however, denies humankind’s essence.  So why not overlay it with the (naïve) ideology of wishful thinking?  The West has a secular, easygoing, live-and-let-live outlook, so surely everyone else does.

Perhaps this naïveté explains why postmodern leftists can’t reach safe and sane conclusions drawn from the clear fact that the Supreme Leaders in Iran and the regime wreak havoc on the world.  Endangering us and our allies, postmodern leftists deny the obvious and blithely negotiate with demonstrably evil terrorists who masquerade as goodhearted, rational humans.

F. Denying origins

Postmodernism says key concepts, like justice and rights and even God, are up for grabs like a loose ball in basketball.  Meaning is fluid and playful, and the context and original intent do not limit those foundational truths.

So judges, growing up in this postmodern environment at the university, cut the Constitution loose from its original and historical context and interpret it as a living document, subject to the modern, evolving zeitgeist.  The Constitution says whatever they intend per their politics, not what its authors originally intended.

G. Politicizing science

For Postmodernism, science (or cause and effect) has no firm foundation (see Hume).  If we have no secure knowledge, then why not overlay and shape it through political ideology?

Apparently some scientists indeed choose their ideology over facts, so they have fudged the facts to panic or stampede politicians to cough up more money for research grants. Over 1900 scientists have sign a more recent World Climate Declaration that says there is no climate emergency,

Recently nations have signed the Paris climate deal that slams Western economies and redistributes money to “victim” nations.

No doubt there are direct political sources to these wacky policies, like Marxism and its successor ideologies.

But Postmodernism – or hyper-skepticism – also describes the roots of left-wing public policy.  Epistemology – or its lack – also clarifies the battle.

H. Destruction of traditions

This may be the most important one of all, because it is about Marxism or neo-Marxism today. This ideology is all about the struggle, the takedown of traditions, of certainties and stability. It may even destroy millions of people to reach a horrific “utopia.” Recall the section about hyper-skepticism and its denial of essences, especially human essence. In Christian term the human being is made in the image of God.

So how do we win the defense of the West and Christianity, which is socially conservative? We will have to look at the sections after the next one (IX and X).

VI. Deconstructing Gender Differences

A. Brief intro.

The left! Sexual nihilism. Anything goes or nothing goes. So what? Who cares? In that spirit, I don’t know anymore what’s worse: shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater or “confused boy!” in a crowded girls’ locker room (said a clever radio host).

B. Taking over American universities

Michael Walsh in his insightful book the Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West writes about how the Left took over American universities, and their doctrines fell on fertile ears of the leisurely, prosperous students of the 1960s. Then the next generation took over the universities; some of them still teach there today, as old professors, training the new generation of professors.

Walsh continues:

The first step [against the nuclear family] was to mock it (in the 1960s and ‘70s, the idealized “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver” worlds of the pre-hippie era came in for particular scorn), then to accuse it of various crimes against humanity (particularly the newfound charge of “patriarchy”), then to illustrate that there were “really” other sorts of families, just as good, just as loving, just as valid as the traditional two-parent, opposite-sex nest. Finally, the nuclear family was simply dispensed with altogether … (page 75).

C. Long-range goals

What are their long-range goals?

Walsh points out that the homosexual and lesbian branch of the Left, piggybacking on the civil rights movement of the 1960s, wants power through the vote: “If a wedge could be driven between men and women, if the nuclear family could be cracked … then that political party that had adopted Critical Theory could make single women one of their strongest voting blocs” (p. 88).

D. Male / Female binary challenged

Some binaries have an either / or dichotomy, which exclude the middle. Traditional Christian theology says that God is wholly other from all other created beings and his essence excludes everything else. But deconstruction may challenge this and say that other gods provide a continuum. The issue which is relevant for today is the male / female binary. Men have a different gamete–they produce sperm, while women produce the ovum. However, this is not the only definition of male and female, so it is placed on a continuum. The male / female binary has no excluded middle–it has no exclusion, period. David Knights and Deborah Kerfoot, for example, write in their abstract to their online article “Between Representations and Subjectivity: Gender Binaries and the Politics of Organizational Transformation”:

The distinction between male and female and masculinity and femininity continues to polarize relations between the sexes in ways that generally subordinate, marginalize, or undermine women with respect to men. The gender literature has recently challenged the singular and unitary conception of gender identity, arguing that there are a multiplicity of masculinities and femininities that are often fragile, fragmented and fluid.

My critique of the above statement is that they have confused categories. Because there has been social obstruction to womankind over the centuries, they believe that in tearing down the obstruction, they can deconstruct basic biology.

E. Genesis

How does this relate to the Bible? Genesis 1:26a-28a says:

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness […] So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. ²⁸ God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number” […]

God gave mankind and womankind their respective gametes which contribute to procreating new life. Postmodernists wish to deconstruct (that is, destroy) this biological binary and replace it with new social contructs, again confusing the categories of biology and sociology. It is a sleight of hand, a card trick, a shell game, which can easily deceive the unwary.

Marriage and sex? Suddenly for the Left men and women are not different. Not even their brain-sex differences matter in raising children. Anatomical differences? Language games run past them.

F. Solutions

So what are some solutions or antidotes against their deconstructive drive?

One is so simple (not simplistic) you can overlook it.

Common sense is when you observe obvious truths and facts, draw the right conclusions from them, and follow them.

Example: It’s obvious men and women really are different. That’s why the European Olympic Committee used to separate the two sexes during the Olympic Games. They’re following common sense, the kind your grandparents used. However, recently, the Olympic committee allowed men who think they are women to compete against women, but it looks like the trend is to reverse the mixing of genders in female sports.

When I was in graduate school, the Left used to knock and mock common sense. It defies their agenda and exposes their foolishness (lack of wisdom).

Because of their mockery, we must be on the right track, so let’s have more common sense.

Still another solution is for those on the intellectual Right to get into the game. I know you’re out there (and some of you have contributed already). You can read up on the intellectual Left, whose writings can be complicated, and boil it down for the public and expose them for what they are: needlessly destructive

VIII. Grand Meaninglessness

A. Brief intro.

The title to this section is ironical because Postmodernism is skeptical of totalities and the grand narrative that answers all questions. Life and reality are meaningless, too.

B. The center does not hold.

This modernist poem by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is hauntingly beautiful and prophetic, even though I may not understand it entirely. It describes the shaking that modernist trends exert on the old ways. See he Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Rev. 2^nd ed. Ed. Richard J. Finneran, Simon and Schuster, 1996, p. 187).

Yeats writes:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

C. Explanation

In this poem, Yeats, who lived in the Age of Modernism, transmogrifies–changes and alters–the image of the Second Coming as understood by traditional, Bible-educated believers. (Perhaps this specific transmogrification can be called “great,” not “small.”) It is not Jesus Christ who is the subject of Yeats’ “Second Coming.” But something else “slouches towards Bethlehem.”

The movement of a gyre goes in a circle or a spiral. Yeats explains: “One gyre [comes] to its place of greatest expansion and . . . the other to that of its greatest contraction” (p. 493). He continues: “At the present moment the life gyre is sweeping outward . . . all our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous civilization belongs to the outward gyre” . . . . The Old Civilization is expanding outwardly, so “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

What is the Spiritus Mundi? Yeats defines it as “a general storehouse of images which have ceased to be the property of any personality or spirit” (p. 493). Thus, what kind of “rough beast . . . slouches towards Bethlehem”? To take a postmodern liberty with meaning that is always ambiguous even if circumscribed by its context, what kind of rough beast will Postmodernism give birth to and place in “a rocking cradle”? Postmodernism, emerging out of modernism, makes the Old Age fall apart.

IX. Philosophical Replies to Postmodernism

A. Correspondence theory of truth

It is time-honored. Most philosophers throughout history have held to it. At its simplest, it says that our beliefs must correspond or fit the facts existing independently and outside of our mind in order for the beliefs to be true. True belief is called knowledge or truth.

For example, one such belief can be stated in a proposition: “Pictures hang on the wall in the hotel room.” The proposition is true if and only if pictures hang on the wall. I unlock the door and see with my own reliable eyesight that there are pictures hanging on the wall. The proposition that reflects my belief fits the fact. I now have knowledge about that aspect of the design of the hotel room.

The correspondence theory is based on commonsense that our grandparents use (or used) every second of their waking life, such as driving down the road or walking in a room without crashing or bumping into things. The theory also depends on the reliability of our five senses. Yes, my five senses are much, much, much more reliable than otherwise. This theory of truth should be our anchor about reality. The next two theories depend, somewhat, on this one.

I like to keep things simple. In the end, the first theory is my anchor. The last two depend on it in some way and to some degree.

B. Coherence theory of truth

A network of beliefs should cohere together in order to arrive at the truth.

For example, the belief that a man can jump twenty feet straight up without assistance does not cohere with my other beliefs. If I see this happen with my own eyes, then I must investigate it. Thus, more facts have now come in. The fence was blocking my view of a trampoline, and the man who leaped straight up twenty feet has practiced a lot.

Another example of coherence is the clues at a crime scene. The facts—note how I now depend on the correspondence theory of truth—must cohere together in order to point to the suspect (John Fieser and Norman Lilligard, Philosophical Questions, Oxford UP, 2005, pp. 365-77).

C.. Pragmatic theory of truth

It’s about what works. According to this theory, “truths are beliefs that are confirmed in the course of experience” (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed. Cambridge UP, 1999).

To cite a simple example, we come to know that the key is the right one because it opens the lock. Further, in the moral realm, we come to know that murder is wrong because of practical experience and a negative outcome. Murder causes a lot of grief for people, and it tears the social fabric. It does not work in society. That is a negative outcome. So we devalue it and value the opposite, enjoying life, a positive outcome. But note how this theory also depends, at least in part, on facts “out there” or independent of our minds before we can draw inferences that lead us to the truth. A lock and key must exist in the real world, and so must a dead body and our enjoyment of life.

D. Summary

Epistemology, the study of how we define and acquire knowledge, is my least favorite area of philosophy.

A professional philosopher, so hyper-skeptical, if he or she is still reading this article, is chuckling at it. But it is intended for nonspecialists. Of course, philosophers argue over the theories, but together the theories go a long way to safeguard the security of our knowledge, as opposed to postmodern hyper-skepticism, anti-realism, and anti-foundationalism. At least now web readers know that there are alternatives.

Professional philosophers have confused things, and this lack of clarity dominates the discussion. But outside of the office and classroom they live by beliefs that correspond to facts. For instance, if their classroom theories cause doubt about driving a car safely, then their theories fail my driver’s test, as I call it. However, our knowledge of the real world out there can be strong and reliable. We nonspecialists need to know that there are alternatives to postmodern excessive doubt.

On a personal note, my motto has been: I will follow the facts, for they will safeguard me from outlandish conclusions. Thus, the correspondence theory should not be abandoned in favor of postmodern hyper-skepticism that tosses us here and there without an anchor. So I prefer the correspondence theory because I seem to live by it every day without thinking twice about it.

It is commonsense—which our grandparents had (or have). Long live reality and my accurate perception of it with my reliable senses!

For a very good survey of the first two theories, as they relate to Postmodernism, I recommend this book. The Christian author argues most strongly for maintaining the correspondence theory. I agree. We should not give up on it.

X. Application

A. Brief intro.

Maybe I should title this section “Practical Solutions.” Here are some suggestions. They are simple, maybe too simple for professional philosophers. But the entire Theology 101 is for average people.

B. Expose them

From my observations over the years leftists are amoral, anything-goes postmodernists. Use it as a pejorative.

C. Education

Conservatives and committed Christians who have access to the media must educate themselves on this philosophical battle.  They must reject ancient hyper-skepticism, against which Aristotle fought, that has recently morphed into Postmodernism.

Our education system needs to explain Postmodernism, so students can figure out that they are being swept along by hyper-skepticism.  Then they can decide which policies are better.

D. Return or keep the essences of things.

The main thing is that that there really are essences.  Marriage has an essence, and there are essential differences between maleness and femaleness.  Humanity itself has an essence that places it above other mammals.

E. The real world, not utopia

Our policies must be rooted in the real world, not a utopian vision of how we wish it to be. Knowing the historical facts of human conduct that reveals bad human nature will keep us safe and sane.

Don’t deny the obvious that you can see with your own eyes.  Your five senses are an accurate source of common sense.  And common sense has enabled Americans to thrive since our founding – and indeed, most Homo sapiens since they have been walking the earth.  Hyper-skepticism is a minority viewpoint.

Be confident in this: the real world – which really does exist and can be objectively known without our mental games and interpretations – must come before ideology.

F. The role of the church

Well, we must understand these trends. We must educate ourselves about Postmodernism. (Maybe this post can help as an introduction.) We must not shy away from apologetics. Don’t listen to those who sneer at it. They are academics who are above it all. But ordinary people need wisdom and clarity. They need to be reassured that the Bible is true about faith and morals and theology. It is accurate about the real world in its own times, culturally and historically. (I have a section at this website on apologetics, which defends the Bible.) If you not have the time or inclination to get into apologetics, then support channels that do.

Do not deny reality. Do not allow the left to gaslight you. God exists, the Bible is true, and morals matter. A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man.

In our sermons and Bible studies, I recommend that you do not preach this post in detail, but there is everything right if you can say that hyper-skepticism about marriage and life of the baby and other issues is misguided and destructive.

Remember, you do not teach the overflow, but from the overflow.

RELATED

This post was taken from this eight-part series.

1. Postmodernism and the Bible: Introduction

2. The Origins of Postmodernism

3. Postmodern ‘Truth Soup’

4. Deconstruction: A Primer

5. The Deconstructed Jesus

6. The Reconstructed Jesus: What the Bible Actually Says

7. Interpreting the Bible and Finding the Truth

8. Postmodernism and the Bible: Conclusion

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This post also borrowed from these articles:

What Is Postmodernism?

Postmodern Roots of Leftist Policies

Deconstruction: The Language Games People Play

Deconstructing Gender Differences