Development of Postmodernism; James 3:15-16
We are continuing a study in James chapter three, and the framework of this particular paragraph is the contrast between human viewpoint thinking and divine viewpoint thinking. What is meant by divine viewpoint is simply this: the Bible in its entirety from Genesis to revelation expresses one viewpoint of reality, and that is God's viewpoint of reality. So we talk about divine viewpoint, that the Scriptures present a viewpoint of every issue of life. It provides the believer with a framework for thinking about life. In contrast to that Satan has his own system. We call it cosmic thinking, the Bible calls it the thinking of the world. We also call it human viewpoint. So we set up our contrast between human viewpoint thinking, the thinking of man, versus divine viewpoint thinking. Human viewpoint thinking is also called cosmic thinking, from the Greek word KOSMOS [kosmoj], what has to do with the orderly arrangement of information, a system. And Satan has numerous systems, all of which are designed to promote his agenda for the human race. His agenda for the human race is that man will be able to find meaning, purpose and value apart from God. His agenda is antagonistic to God and in opposition to God, so he is continually promoting different viewpoints, different ways of thinking about reality.
Every single culture that is produced in human history has its own viewpoint. These viewpoints are al sub-categories of human viewpoint. They have their concepts of whatever is ultimate in the universe, whether it is no God, many gods, polytheism, what kind of polytheism it is, they all have their views on what is ultimate, they all have their value systems. We are all missionaries in a culture that doesn't think biblically. Postmodernism is the term that is used to describe the thinking of our culture at the present time. Modernism has reigned for the last century and a half to two centuries and now that has been dethroned by a new way of thinking, a new approach to reality which is called postmodernism.
We are born into a culture and we grow up in the education system where you pick up the values of that culture. We watch movies and television that express in their stories and everything the values of that culture, that way of thinking. We read magazines and they all communicate all these popular items communicating the value systems, the viewpoint of a culture. This is human viewpoint. The Bible calls it worldliness and says that we are not to be conformed to the world but are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind, the renovation of our thinking. That means that we have to learn to identify these human viewpoint ideas that we have absorbed, that have been taught to us, and that we have picked up from living in our culture. We have to identify them in our own thinking so that we can expunge them from our souls and replace them with principles of doctrine. That is the whole process of the spiritual life in a nutshell: renovating the thinking. And it doesn't just happen haphazardly, it doesn't happen just because we show up at church once a week; it happens because we make it a priority in our lives to learn how to think as God wants us to think and not to think the way our culture has inculcated us to think.
The emphasis is never how we feel because the emphasis on emotion is a typical characteristic of modern and post-modern thought and it is a result of psychoanalysis. If we go back and look at the influence of Freud on our whole culture and the influence of psychological thinking, we see that from Freud this all returns to the fact that people need to think about their emotions. How do you feel about that? How does that make you feel? What were your feelings at that time? Emotion is a very important part of the soul that God has given us, but when we have emotions we need to be aware of what they are. We go through different events in life, some things exhilarate us and give us a lot of enthusiasm and excitement and we revel in certain situations in life. And there are other events that are emotionally difficult. We lose friends, we go through marital break-ups and relationship break-ups, we lose parents and loved ones in death. These are very difficult. But the issue to resolve those problems is not to become self-absorbed and revel in what emotions those are that were generated. The issue is not identifying those emotions, the issue is what has God provided for us so that we can handle any and every situation in life, and He told us how to think about these things and to respond to them in His Word.
In James 3:14-16 we have the characteristics of human viewpoint thinking which is ultimately arrogance, self-absorption, self-centredness. Verses 17 & 18 contrast the wisdom from above which is divine viewpoint.
We have been looking at the basic issue of postmodernism. In postmodernism there is no such thing as absolutes. It is different from just relativism in the sense that in the past the relativism that we have had has been primarily individual, now it is shaped a little differently into a social construct. In postmodernism there is the rejection of truth. According to postmodernism truth is created, not discovered, and postmodernists think that things like reason, rationality and confidence in science are merely cultural biases. So there is a rejection of reason from the outset.
What we have done in the past couple of lessons is we have seen that in analysing history that we can break history down into three broad stages: pre-modernism, modernism, and postmodernism. Pre-modernism would cover that period up to about 1600, and then with the development of the Enlightenment we see the growth of an emphasis on human ability to answer all of life's problems apart from God, that man on the basis of his own innate reasoning powers or on the basis of experience would be able to construct a truthful, accurate view of reality and thus solve all of man's problems. The pre-modern view was based fundamentally on theism, not necessarily that everybody was a believer but everybody believed that there was a God, that truth was objective knowable. They might disagree as to what it was but they believed there was an external, objective verifiable truth that man could come to learn, and that God, however He was defined, was transcendent and imminent, which means He was greater than the creation but was also involved with His creation, and that He had communicated to His creation. With the development of the Enlightenment there was the light of human ability in contrast to the darkness. When we talk about the Middle Ages as the dark ages we are buying into an anti-Christian concept of history at that point. It was dark because it was under the auspices of the church. That doesn't mean that we agree with everything that was going on during that period but it was a theistic concept. But with the Enlightenment there was the rejection of God and man's reason becomes enthroned in the place of God, and that was seen to culminate in the French Revolution and theism was dethroned. In the Enlightenment reason and experience or empiricism become the means of being able to arrive at truth, and it is all done through the rigorous use of logic. The starting point is always man; man is the measure of everything.
Over the course of time there were reactions to modernism. Postmodernism started to be really recognized by the 1960s. In modernism over the course of time there were various reactions because it was viewed as being somewhat cold, it didn't give real meaning and value to life, and the hard, rigorous logic seemed to end up without being able to arrive at a knowledge of God. The first reaction was romanticism. This came about in the early 19th century: an emphasis on nature, emphasis on the individual, emphasis on emotion. We see this exemplified in theology. This was about the time of Schliermacher the father of modern religious liberalism. He said the way you know that there is a God is because of your feeling towards God, not the revealed Word of God but how it impacts you emotionally. There was the rise of Darwinism and modern science, and along with that modern technology. All of this is built on the foundation of autonomous human reason and experiences independent of God's revelation. Then there was another reaction which is called idealism, exemplified in the thinking of Hegel. Then there was a sort of ping-pong effect back and forth between strict science, strict use of reason and empiricism, and on the other side the reaction which always ends up emphasizing emotion, subjectivism and mysticism to some degree.
Toward the end of the 19th century was the rise of the philosophical system called existentialism. It emphasizes that the only way to authenticate and give meaning and value to your existence is by doing something. It doesn't matter what you do because there are no value systems to determine good or bad; you just do something. The reason this came about was because by the end of the 1700s Emanuel Kant divided reality into two areas: the area of universals, where you would put absolutes, and then the area of all the details of life. Up to this point everybody thought that there was real objective knowledge available to man. They didn't know what it was, they couldn't agree with it, but they believed it was possible. After Kant nobody believed it was possible anymore. Kant said you don't know things in themselves, you only know how you perceive them. So the only thing you can ever know is your own perception. So now there is this brick wall erected between the two areas. If God is in the area of universals and there is a brick wall nobody can get through, the only way you can get there is to have some sort of subjective leap of faith. It is not based on objective data anymore, it is based on the fact that you can't really live your life unless this is there, so I am just going to assume its there so I can have meaning, whatever it might be. So now all truth is subjective and objective reality is being destroyed.
This is what is happening at the university level at the end of the 1700s. It filters down in society and people are thinking this way now. It is infiltrated so that the way the average street person thinks has been impacted by the shift of ideas that took place 150-200 years ago. Existentialism says you have to live as though there is no meaning. If logic comes around and can't produce a knowledge of meaning and value in my life, then I have to have it some way. So I have to somehow confirm my existence.
Summary of existentialism
1) In existentialism there is no objective meaning or purpose in life. Rationalism and empiricism might provide a logical order of life but it dehumanises life. It reduces everything to just raw mechanics. In existentialism there must be a meaning in life even if it cannot be arrived at logically. Logic can't get past that wall between the area of detail and existence and the area where meaning and value and significance is, and where God is. You can't get there logically. On the basis of empiricism and rationalism life ultimately ends up being absurd because there is no meaning there, so you maximise absurdity. A lot of modern art is an expression of this type of worldview, that there are no absolutes, or if things don't exist then you create an abstraction. There is no inherent meaning in life so when you can't arrive at it logically you have to assume it is there and create your own concepts of meaning. The objective realm is absurd based on pure rationalism and empiricism. You can't validate on the basis of pure reason and experience that life has meaning. Without the ability to get to objectivity life becomes rather dark and pessimistic, and it ultimately lead to a worldview called nihilism.
2) Since meaning can't be discovered objectively it can only be determined subjectively. If there is no objective meaning or value that is true for everybody in every place in every time, then the only way to get to meaning is for you to make up your own meaning. As long as you can assign meaning that makes life significant to you that is all that matters. So under existentialism each person creates his own meaning. By their own choices and actions each person then determines his own system of values, his own explanation of life. Everybody comes up with a different set of values.
3) No one can determine that meaning and value for someone else.
4) This then provides the rationale for contemporary relativism. Since everyone creates his or her own meaning in life, their own value and purpose, then every meaning is equally valid. Who then has the right to say the other person's value and meaning is wrong? So if each person determines their own ultimate--in other words, each person is going to make their own decision as to what is in the area of value and meaning, to give meaning and value to the area of detail and existence—then every person can be right and no one is wrong. This then renders religion a purely private subjective matter which can't be imposed on someone else. If you are a Christian and you say you have absolutes, that is going to run head first into this whole way of thinking. The content of someone's meaning makes no difference. What matters is that you make a commitment to that meaning yourself.
5) Existentialism, then, becomes the philosophical basis for postmodernism.
The consequences from all of this
1) A cultural antinomianism (Against law), which is the complete rejection of any kind of absolutes. So whatever I want to do is okay. I can give free rein to my sin nature because there is no such thing as sin or right and wrong. So we see a collapse of values and absolutes and the development of an antinomian culture.
2) It leads to a society that is divorced from reality. Each person has his own reality. When you are divorced from reality you are living in the realm of fantasy. Fantasy is built on escapism, avoiding the problems of life through pleasure, entertainment, drugs, any form of distraction. It can even be work. This leads to a cultural drift. You are no longer advancing as a culture you are now in cultural decline, you are just drifting, and that drift will lead to cultural fragmentation. There is a technical term for this: multiculturalism. Because everybody emphasizes their own culture, their own values, their background as being valuable and just as good as anybody else's—unless you are white European male. That's the worst!
The interesting thing about all of this is that there are a lot of problems as a Christian with modernism. Modernism said there was no God; it said that man can find his own truth. Now we are living in a society where people will be more, in some senses, open to the gospel because it is a greater sense of a loss of meaning and values. People want something to hold on to, something to anchor their thinking to. So as believers we have an answer. We can give absolutes and we can give certainty and truth. So in this vacuum there is perhaps an opportunity for Christianity. That is why we have to understand some of these basic distinctions.
So we have three basic periods we have been talking about: pre-modernism, modernism and postmodernism. Then we have some categories: God, man, will, authority, sin and progress. In pre-modern thinking in terms of God man was basically theistic. God existed, He was knowable, He was objective, and He was imminent and transcendent. In modernism there is no God. It is atheistic, you can't know God. He might be there but we can't know Him. In postmodernism really whatever you think is okay but there is this tendency toward spiritism, all of the new age religions, mysticism because mysticism is inherently subjective. That tends to be where postmodernism goes, though they don't all have to go in that direction, many might just be agnostic or atheistic.
In terms of man: As a Christian, in pre-modern thought man is created in the image and likeness of God. He is made up of a material body plus an immaterial soul, and it is that immaterial soul that is in the image and likeness of God. In modernism man is purely material. All that exists is the physical universe and the only reality is determined by sense perception and reason. In postmodernism man is purely social. He is a social being and he is a social cog in the machine. So your values are the product of your social group. They are not absolutes, they are just a product of your social group and we have to figure out what that is so we can deconstruct you.
In terms of will or volition: In Christianity man has free will but that volition has been diminished by the fall. But man is fully responsible for every decision he makes, including decisions for salvation. In Christianity man must be saved, sin is a violation of the character of God. Because God is righteous He can have fellowship only with righteousness, and what the righteousness of God demands the justice of God provides. So when the righteousness of God rejects the unrighteousness of man God had to provide a solution. He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross for man's sins and man is responsible for whether or not he accepts or rejects Christ as his personal savior. On modernism man is completely autonomous, completely in dependent, completely the mater of his destiny, the captain of his soul. In postmodernism he is determined by his culture, so he is not free he is just a cultural construct. Free will is only a product of your imagination. You only think you are free.
In terms of authority: Under pre-modernism the ultimate authority was God and His revelation. God was objective and He had revealed Himself to man propositionally in the Scriptures. In modernism man is the ultimate authority, Man's reason and his interpretation of his experiences is the ultimate authority. In postmodernism the ultimate authority is purely subjective and based on inner impressions, emotion. In pre-modern thought there was such a thing as sin because there were absolutes. So there was sin which was a violation of the perfect righteousness of God. But in modernism there is no sin, so modernism ends up with situational ethics. Under postmodernism there is no such thing as sin, anything goes, there are absolutely no values, no truth. At least under modernism there was still some sense that there was some level of truth but in postmodernism there is absolutely no truth.
In terms of progress: Christianity and pre-modern thought said that there were ups and downs, cycles through human history, and the only hope was going to be the second coming of Christ. Man would eventually be on the virge of self-destruction. In modernism man is very optimistic, he is going to always advance on the basis of science and reason. In postmodernism the very concept of progress is a code word for European white male domination. This is where we are living today.
Now when we read the newspaper and read various stories, editorials and interpretations of events, and we see how a person who is a criminal on trial where there is scientific DNA evidence presented that makes it one chance out of tens of billions to not be that person, you can reject that logically and say the whole thing is a racial construct and declare the man not guilty. This is because we no longer think in even modern terms of absolutes, everything is a social construct—and we don't even know we think that way. But that is why these things are happening in our culture.
So we see that what James is saying in this whole section is that when you start off with arrogance—and modernism and postmodernism are both arrogance because ultimate truth lies with the self—it is always destructive. When we promote and institutionalise arrogance as we have done the result is going to be the fragmentation of our society and the fragmentation of our culture. But there is always hope and there is always a solution, and that is the spiritual solution. That is the solution that is outlined in God's Word. It begins with Jesus Christ because the greatest problem that man will ever face is the problem of sin and Jesus Christ solved that problem on the cross. So if Jesus Christ can solve the greatest problem we can ever face he can solve every other problem. He is the source of meaning, the source of values, the source of happiness for every human being on the planet. The promise of God is that if you trust Christ as your savior you will have eternal life, and if you learn the concepts of God's Word (Bible doctrine) and you let dominate your thinking so that you interpret life and you react and respond to the adversities of life through the application of doctrine, then you can have an incredible joy, peace and tranquillity, and you can live above your circumstances no matter how great they are. Circumstances are no longer the issue.