If Christians are to think well about living faithfully to Christ in a postmodern world, we must realize that we are dealing with the interrogation of language, the interrogation of thought, and ultimately the interrogation of reality. And this thinking has permeated nearly every thread of our society.
It could be said now that anyone who tries to understand postmodern philosophy and its claims will quickly become frustrated. You may feel like there’s a lack of order and conclusion. And here’s the thing: that’s the point. You’re not supposed to be able to make sense of the framework because the system itself is skeptical of frameworks.
An Absolute Text in a Relative Age
Yet, God intends for people to receive his Word objectively and to submit themselves to it. There is no biblical category for analyzing God’s Word and questioning it and being skeptical of it and bringing our own experiences and cultural understandings to bear on it.
No, God’s Word claims to be divinely inspired and authoritative, and we are to bring it to bear on us. We are not the standard for judging God’s Word, God’s Word is the standard for judging us.
We don’t approach the Bible critically; we approach it willfully ready to conform to it. Why? Because it is the unchanging Word of God (Isaiah 40:8, Matthew 24:35).
The First Postmodernist
We cannot compromise on his Word. It must be a hill the church dies on. Because here’s the thing, Satan is an old dog, and old dogs don’t learn new tricks. Foucault and Derrida and Lyotard were not the first ones in human history to sow skepticism about words, and the day in which we live is not the first time that there has been doubt raised against the Word of God.
We see this all the way back at the beginning of human history, with the serpent in the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve.
Consider God’s revelation in Genesis 2:15-16: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
This is objective revelation straight from the mouth of God to Adam. Genesis 1 and 2 make some things very clear. God is the Creator; God is in charge. Adam is subordinate; Adam is dependent.
God interprets Us
Adam has one means with which to make sense of himself, to understand his purpose, to make meaning of the world he’s been put in, to understand the wife he’s been given, and that means is the spoken revelation of God. See Jeremy Pierre, The Dynamic Heart in Daily Life: Connecting Christ to Human Experience (Greensboro: New Growth Press, 2016), 126-128.
And they are not to question God’s Word, criticize it, or change and adapt it to fit the context of their cultural situation. They are called to receive his Word and obey his Word. Period.
Whatever God says about them, they are to accept it. Whatever he says to do, they are to do it. Whatever he says not to eat, they must not eat it. There is no relativism; there is no subjectivity. Not open to interpretation. No, this is objective, and it is absolute, and Adam and Eve are to submit to it gladly.
What do we mean when we say that truth is objective rather than subjective? When we say truth is subjective, we mean we are allowing our own personal feelings and interests and motives and wishes to play into interpreting the data. When we say the truth is objective, we mean nothing inside of us can be brought to bear on it. Truth is what it is, regardless of how one feels about it. That’s how Adam and Eve were to treat God’s Word.
Satan’s Oldest Trick
But notice what the serpent says when he comes on the scene. Look at Genesis 3:1: “Did God actually say….” The serpent tempts Eve to question the objective Word of God. Not, “Does God actually exist?” but, “Did God ‘actually’ say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?” And he twists God’s Word because God never said they couldn’t eat of any tree in the garden. Look at Genesis 2:16. God actually says, “You may eat of every tree of the garden” except one.
So, Satan, by casting doubt about legitimacy of God’s Word and twisting it, successfully sows cynicism in Eve’s mind about the accuracy of God’s Word and her ability to know his Word. He does not tempt her to question her belief in God but rather her ability to know what he has said and know what he means. The legitimacy of God’s Word is challenged, and Her interpretation of it is challenged. Do you see this?
Postmodernism and the Self
So, what does this have to do with the way in which people today interpret themselves and the world they live in? Well, in short, it has everything to do with it. The modern LGBTQ+ movement and the rise of transgenderism, along with all the destructive components to these, are allowed to thrive because postmodern thought has become the normal epistemological framework for the greater Western society. The once shocking statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body,” only makes sense in a world in which people look to themselves and to the culture around them to interpret themselves rather than looking to the objective revelation of God to define them.
Because people suppress the clear truth about God in unrighteousness (Romans 1:16) and pursue their own sinful passions as they follow Satan and the course of this world (Ephesians 2:2-3), we must look to God alone to repair us and define us.
A New Self in a Broken World
But thanks be to God, that despite whatever lies the spirit of this age tells, God has prepared his plan for redeeming and repairing humanity since before the ages began, and he has accomplished this plan in his Son, Jesus Christ (Revelation 13:8; Colossians 1:26-27). In Christ, God renews and repairs the Self. He does this as we “have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Colossians 3:10).
And just like God interpreted Adam and Eve in Genesis 1-2 and defined their meaning and purpose, he has defined for us, on whom the end of the ages has come (1 Corinthians 10:11), exactly what his goal is for the new self: to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers (Romans 8:29). May we point the many broken “Selfs” in the broken culture to the God who made them, defines them, and delights to repair them.