The text-only issue.
I suspect that many of our friends have said to us at one point or another: “Isn't Christianity just about going to church and obeying rules?” Or, “Isn't Christianity just like other religions—it's all about living a moral life?”
At this point many of us (probably now frustrated) would clarify what Christianity is really about. It's not all about being good or church attendance or obeying rules (though these make up important parts of the Christian life). Rather, we'd explain, it's about reliance on Jesus Christ, and then we would proceed by talking about sin, punishment, the cross, new life, and all that the gospel message entails.
Of course, there are various ways in which people misconstrue Christianity, but in most cases they result from oversimplifying the true Christian message. The reason is that the comments that people make on Christianity don't arise from careful inquiry; instead, they come from ill-formed sources, hearsay, platitudes, or ignorance.
Though our non-Christian friends may be apt to ignorance or oversimplification, there is also tendency among Christians, I fear, to commit the very same crime. If I am right, there is a tendency to reduce opposing systems of thought—such as philosophy, psychology, or history—to mere platitudes. That is, there is a tendency to oversimplify and reject out of hand any perceived threat to Christianity.
Take postmodernism. Popularly defined as “there is no absolute truth,” postmodernism seems to challenge that absolute truths—even ones determined by God—don't exist. Upset with this claim, the Christian quickly replies that “to say that there is no absolute truth is itself an absolute truth,” thus showing the claim to be self-refuting.
Postmodernists, however, say no such thing, and what they do say is as varied as its expositors. According to at least one of its brands, postmodernism does not deny the possibility of absolute truth but rather denies that absolute truth is available to humans. In other words, postmodernism doesn't deprive us of our strongly held beliefs and convictions; it simply says that there is no absolute measure by which we can decisively judge between those competing beliefs and convictions.1
Another example is deconstruction. Presumably the Christian is unsettled when deconstruction seems to tell him that words have no fixed meaning. A standard response to the unsettling claim is, “but the fact that we're communicating and understand each other is evidence that words have meaning.” Or, “authors on deconstruction claim that there are no meanings in texts, but they (ironically) assume and insist that their books will be correctly understood.”
What deconstructionists say, again, is not so obvious or simple. Most of them would not say that there is no meaning at all, but that meaning comes (and can only arise) out of one's contextual and historical situation. What they reject are meanings that are anchored in some stabilised and absolute meaning, free from any contextual situations.
As we can see from just these two examples, oversimplification can severely misconstrue. And because of it, the Christian thinks that he has a knock down argument for its main claim, and can easily (and completely) dismiss it as stupid or absurd. The dismissal, however, is not so easy or complete because the claims made by postmodernism and deconstruction are not so simple. Indeed, it would take a fair amount of reading simply (not the right word) to come to grips with them, let alone understand and criticize them; and from what we have seen so far, the threat postmodernism and deconstruction pose to Christian thought isn't so obvious (or even there).
Why, then, are we so eager to oversimplify and dismiss?
I think there are at least three reasons. The first is that Christians seem to have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that appears anti-Christian. In fact, the reaction is desirable, because it makes us proceed with caution; but the danger lies when it does not allow us to proceed at all, or it halts us at some point of simplification.
The second reason is laziness. A large amount of intellectual effort is required in order to competently understand any complex system of thought such as postmodernism, deconstruction, whatever. It is easier to learn a set of simplistic statements (and its ready-made rebuttals) that takes only a few minutes. It is much harder—and takes much longer—to research a topic extensively and critically.
The third reason is arrogance. (I've been guilty of this one several times.) As Christians we know that we have the truth; but knowing that we have the truth can unfortunately lead us into two problems. First, we may think that we don't need to learn much, if anything at all. Second, we are likely to judge something from the world as bad, however appealing or good it is, because we'll know that ultimately it is not true or important.
The underlying problem is that we do not have epistemic humility—we think that we know a lot—whereas the fact is there is so much more we can learn, from the Bible and elsewhere. I think that we can learn much from the differing disciplines of the world, which may or may not be contrary to the Bible. In fact, we may be surprised to find (as I have found) that the theories we've been looking into are not as pernicious or absurd as we first thought (one of mine was postmodernism). Indeed, they may provide some useful insights in matters of interpretation or sin or moral law, or any number of things important to Christians.
Oversimplification, in short, is undesirable. It neither helps us to deal with the real issues that systems of thought offer nor be intellectually honest. It shuts down our ability to discuss and analyse them accurately. And it makes us prone to arrogance, whereas our posture should be that of humility. I am not saying that we uncritically accept theories such as postmodernism, but that we do not dismiss these theories out of ignorance. Just as we hope that the world will investigate Christianity honestly, let us do the same for them.
1 It has been pointed out to me that most people ascribe (by definition) to the popular version of postmodernism, not the more sophisticated version just outlined. Considering this, the self-refuting criticism would be fair in these cases.
As an arts student, Kenneth Chong tries to not be simplistic. He attends Chinese Christian Church, Milsons Point.
Comments
The examples you have given of postmodernism being misunderstood do not appear to me to be postmodern at all.
It is not postmodern to argue against the possibility of absolute verification of truth. Rather, truth is portrayed as socially constructed norms. The postmodern takes the dichotomy of natural/artificial and severes any concept of the natural, leaving only an entirely man-made reality. I do not think that anything less than this qualifies as postmodern theory.
It is also not postmodern merely that words have no fixed meaning. Obviously words are arbitrary in the sense that any sound or symbol can be set by convention as the referrant to a given object. It is only postmodern to argue that it is impossible for a text to refer to any real object, and that the purpose of language is the perpetuation of social word games.
Given this kind of definition of the term postmodern, I do not see how a Christian could comfortably hold to a postmodern view.
I also think that the brute challenge that you claim simplistic Christians use against postmodernism must be answered if it is to stand as a valid philosophical position. In fact, all epistemological theories must answer to the challenge of verifying their own axioms by those very axioms - internal consistency.
‘Why must they?’ I hear the postmoderns ask. And so the Sophistry continues…
David on 16 September, 2002 8:07 AM
I think that David’s characterisation of postmodernism would be rejected by most ‘postmoderns’ (or, at least, most academic postmoderns).
The claim that “[t]he postmodern takes the dichotomy of natural/artificial and severes any concept of the natural, leaving only an entirely man-made reality,” for instance, seems to stand on pretty shaky ground. If we consult Nietzsche, the well-spring of postmodernism, we find the following understanding of the appearance/reality dualism (which, I take it, is another version of the natural/artificial dichotomy that David points to):
“We have abolished the true world: what world has remained? the apparent one perhaps? ... But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!”
(from ‘How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable’ in Twilight of the Idols)
In other words, postmodern thought does not merely reverse the priority in the natural/artificial dichotomy (performing the merely idealist move of installing illusion in the place of dominance over reality); instead, it overthrows the whole thing. It may be noted (in passing) that, by even making this claim, postmodern thought enters a conversation about metaphysics that stretches back through the entire history of Western thought. Not only does it enter this conversation, but ends up aligning itself with thinkers (like Saint Augustine, for example) who no-one would take to to be either ‘post-’ or ‘modern’.
If we don’t want to consult Nietzsche, however, we can watch Anglo-American analytic philosophy arrive at the same conclusion in the work of Donald Davidson:
“In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.”
(from ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’ in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, p. 198)
This, from what I can tell—the rejection of the whole nature/artifice distinction, which goes by the name of ‘anti-foundationalism’—is what postmodernism is all about. Most post-modern thinkers start here, though they tend to fall away from it fairly quickly—which is what Foucault does by the end of his ‘Orders of Discourse’. But then they are just following in the footsteps of earlier thinkers (Descartes and Locke are two that come to mind) who started with a similar kind of scepticism/anti-foundationalism in order to ‘clear the ground’ of opposing theories, before building their own (foundational) edifices.
Postmodernism—at least of the brand that Kenneth and I cleave to—differs from previous ventures into epistemology only in trying very hard not to fall away from the sceptical first premise.
To be sure, the consequences of all this are far less significant than many self-confessed ‘postmoderns’ would have you believe, (probably because they themselves believe it).
The antifoundational argument that Kenneth characterises as the essence of postmodernism is not “less” than postmodern; rather, it out postmoderns even the postmoderns. It does this because it is an argument, not a position. That is, antifoundationalism answers a specific question about epistemology—it is a belief about belief. Since it is a belief (rather than a set of beliefs), the question of its coherence would only arise if you tried to place it into a structure with other beliefs.
Even if this belief we given a place in your structure of beliefs, I don’t think it would be particularly threatening—it wouldn’t undermine any of our particular beliefs (like belief in the divinity of Jesus, in original sin, or the centrality of the atonement). It wouldn’t undermine any particular beliefs because it isn’t a belief about particular beliefs; it’s a belief about belief in general, and thinking about thinking is very different from actually thinking.
Chris Swann on 11 October, 2002 1:47 PM