When our suspicion about truth-telling becomes suspicion that there isn’t truth, we’ve become postmodernists. Christian writer Samuel James calls this bad habit “negative epistemology.” This is the idea that we don’t need to figure out what’s true, we only need to believe the opposite of whatever our political enemies say.
In the history of the world, the wholesale rejections of the supernatural is a quirk of Western secularism. At the same time, it will not ultimately survive the human longing for transcendence and communion with the supernatural, no matter how far technology advances.
Sometimes Christians think of “culture” as all the “bad” stuff “out there.” But culture is simply what humans do with the world. When God told Adam and Eve to fill the Earth and subdue it, He was telling them to make good culture. The result is that there are stories, art, music, and technological inventions that glorify God and build His Kingdom. Christian believers’ contributions to culture and the arts have been historically some of the most beautiful and influential in the world. But evil corrupts culture-making, too. That’s why humanity also makes art that spreads bad ideas, lifts up false idols, and hurts people.
As we have seen, one of Satan’s great deceptions is convincing lost people that they are not lost. A second deception is convincing Christians that lost people are not truly lost.
The spectrum of postmodern thought ran between an uncertainty of knowledge to a focus on power. Describing this way of thinking, Angela Franks recently wrote in First Things, “[W]e are not controlled by a puppet master. Rather, we live in a vast network of demands, commandments, inducements, sorting mechanisms, disciplines, and more. ‘Power’ has no center. It is the aggregate of multiple, shifting relationships.”
