I am currently reading The Next Reformation, by Carl Raschke. The subtitle not only gives away the store, but also the point — “Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity.” The proliferation of books like this help to highlight why I am interested in attacking postmodernism, and all its demon spawn, while howling in the grip of battle fever like an evangelical banshee. Allow me to nuance this a touch.
The first issue may not be so obvious, and needs to be underlined. For a number of years, one of the themes of our ministry here has been that we are officially tired of the Enlightenment, which I have in the past labeled the Enblightenment. We have, in our own modest way, pounded away at rationalism, propositionalism, and all other isms except for prisms. We have advanced poetic knowing, rejected theological engineering, and have generally given the raspberry to varied forms of Hellenism and Cartesian neo-Hellenism. I am not a foundationalist, unless believing that Christ is the ultimate and only cornerstone makes me one. Then along come these epistemolgical schmoozers, and in the name of attacking these very same things, make a fatal alliance and a fatal set of compromises. So an important reason for attacking postmodernism is that an interested bystander could be excused for thinking that our reasons for attacking the Enlightenment are the same as those held by the postmodernists. But they are not.
Co-belligerency can make a certain kind of sense, if you have your wits about you. When Hitler and Stalin were fighting each other, we were fighting Hitler too, and so it made sense to wait until Hitler was down before we attacked the Stalinists. But if, once Hitler was down, we and Stalin had become chums, that would have been missing the whole point.
If modernity is gasping for air, as all the postmodernists delight in telling us, then that means the only enemy standing is postmodernity. Now is not the time to abandon our commitments to the absolute, objective, ultimate and tri-personal reality of the Christian faith. If we continue to chase after the allure of postmodernism, this will be just one more chapter in the long, sad biography of Johnny “Wait-up, Guys!” Evangelical.