Guest Post: Postmodernism, Evangelism, Apologetics and the Future of the Church

This post has a bold title. But then it makes a bold claim. Yet more reason I'm glad I didn't write it! But I love what Josh has written, and it follows his previous superb post on "Jesus the Word", demonstrating that the best posts on my blog tend not to be written by me! Josh's claim is that Postmodernism is over, and that something else has taken its place. With this in mind, Josh contends that we need to start reacting and adapting to this as Christians...
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Many organisations that are involved in teaching evangelism as well as those considering the methodology and practice of the church's engagement with culture undertake courses and modules in understanding the cultural phenomena of postmodernism, its origins, ideology, and the practical ways in which it affects and influences society.

However I believe that, for the most part, the people of Britain in 2012 have left behind the tenets of postmodernism in most spheres of both academic and public life and progressed towards something more dark and sinister than what many scaremongering Christians term as "postmodernism". If the Bible calls for us to "tear down arguments, and every lofty opinion which raises itself up against the knowledge of God", trusting that the Apostle Paul refers not only to the personal mental battlefields of Christ's disciples but the mental battlefields of the influential ivory towers of academia and public affairs, then surely we should be constantly vigilant in knowing our enemy - that we are not hacking straw men to death with our carefully argued presuppositional apologetics but piercing to the heart of the lies and deceptions of the "powers of the age" manifest in popular culture.

Postmodernism has been summed up succinctly as "incredulity towards metanarratives". Simplistically, that the world is not as it seems - there is a hidden agenda, an unseen paradigm that manipulates life as we know it - worldviews that have been pulled over our eyes - and the truth is that there is no objective worldview but a plurality, all relativistically interacting, rolling and shifting, but never arriving at some sort of concrete objectivity. Is this really how contemporary British people think? It is the nature of cultural criticism to make sweeping statements, but though it is impossible to be precise in the history of ideas, we at the very least can make observations and draw tentative conclusions.

Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have recognized that the political identity and practice of a state is a kind of "thermometer" of it's health. Popular politics over the decades of the 80s and 90s was largely antagonistic - subcultures such as punk rock, though inevitably distorted over time, were at their core profoundly political movements that were opposed to but never detached from political life. But our current political "thermometer" does not read "antagonistic" but "apathetic". Scholars herald the death of participatory democracy. More people engage democratically with reality TV than local politics. Postmodernism was in spite of appearances, a 'positive' ideology in that it had something to say - indeed that was its downfall, sucked into it's own black-hole of cultural relativism. But the atmosphere of Britain is no longer breaking - active, rebellious, revolutionary, creative, but broken - passive, uninterested, purposeless, numb, and ultimately destructive as we saw in the momentous riots of August 2011. All these words accurately describe many people's attitudes towards the government and even towards authority figures on a more domestic level (e.g. education), and thus by our Platonic account of the "thermometer" of politics, give us a good idea of the kind of maladies that afflict people's spiritual lives.

Meanwhile many of the rising, countercultural generation (so-called "millenials") that are rising in response to assumed societal values are sick of a system that boxes them, labels them and processes them to their appropriate pen-pushing careers. Many have flocked in droves to charities and volunteer organisations, and those doing research into the nature of the millenial generation have described this as the "volunteer revolution". And of course, a travelling gap year, "finding oneself", or serving in poverty stricken countries is on the mind of pretty much every school-leaver. But even these voices in the darkness resound hollowly. We see clearly the incorporation of the charitable conscience into the marketing strategies of major corporations - Starbucks is a prime example of this - Slavoj Zizek calls this coffee-shop view of commoditized charity "first as  tragedy, then as a farce"! Ultimately the rising generation of young people seeking for a purpose-bestowing higher cause will not find true meaning significance in half-hearted consumer charity nor in Kony-style, socially networked "slactivism".

Although I do not have a succinct piece of terminology to define the secular culture of 2012, it is my conviction that it is unhelpful to continue to train and educate Christians to engage with outdated societal models that will be unhelpful both at the higher levels of academic engagement and on the ground level of relational evangelism. I do not think that we should stop making Christians aware of some of the problems raised by postmodernism - it can be a useful and productive exercise. But my clarion-call here is for Church leaders to not only refuse to swallow the ideology of secularism but also that ideology which the Church tends to falsely project onto society. We need to be willing to start from square one in our assessment of the living, breathing, people we are dealing with if we are truly passionate to see individual lives and entire communities set free from the bondage of apathy and numbness and transformed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.