Postmodernism
Why Modernism is a problem for Christians

The Enlightenment elevated human reason to a position of supremacy. The Enlightenment principle was that all man needed to know about life, including God, was available through human reason. And, in understanding there was no need or room for revelation. Reason was sufficient. Enlightenment thinkers sought to establish objectivity in science, morality and law that was not dependent on history, location or culture of the individual. Louis Dumont describes the Enlightenment man as “ an independent, autonomous, and essentially non-social human being”.

G.F.W. Hegel, in his essay “Uber die Religion der Griechen und Romer”, sets forth how the Enlightenment affected religion. Religious particularity was a function of culture and political specifics. However, there are really universal truths found by the reasoning intellectual elites…an unadulterated universal ethical religion based on reason. To Hegel, Christianity was one of the manifestations of the ethical religion of reason. Alister McGrath explains Hegel’s view of proper Christianity:
“The only way in which progress could be made was to maintain a commitment of some sort to Christianity, while simultaneously undermining its claims to uniqueness or universality.”
In other words, Jesus was a wonderful teacher of ethics but He is not the only way. A refrain oft repeated since Hegal came on the scene.

This intellectual impulse spawned the cultural idea of Modernism (Mo). It was the seeping into our daily living of the enthronement of reason. Modernity sought to eliminate God from the picture of life by securing all knowledge through the structures of human rationality. Modernity also deliberately rejected the past and believed man, through pure reason, could understand and master the world. This Mo has affected everything, including Christianity.

One of the problems Mo created was in propagating the Gospel. Christians tried to make the Gospel of Jesus Christ intelligible to the world. It was here that the concept of Christianity as another “worldview” developed. Unwittingly, such an approach gave credence to all the other “worldviews” or “isms” afoot in the cosmos. It was like this…”our worldview based on the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ is more sensible that any other.” While it is true that faith is reasonable, faith is not based on reason. It is a supernatural revelation from God. Mo had Christians playing on its terms, already dismissing revelation.

This was especially a problem for the Reformed folk who were powerfully influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment’s Common Sense philosophy. The Princeton Theology, evidenced by Hodge and Warfield, is based on a high degree of confidence in human reason. George Marsden has commented that Princeton was dominated by the idea:
“…that any sane and unbiased person of common sense could and must perceive the same things…basic truths are much the same for all persons in all times and places.”
The obvious danger is that Christianity could be reduced to a set of mentally accepted concepts or principles discerned by human reason. This is an accommodation to Mo. And, from those who believe in the total depravity of man!

[This is adapted from an article that first appeared in the SGM Magazine as “Mo, Pomo and the Christian”]