October (Web-only) 2000

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The FDA's approval of RU-486 is an event of immense significance, not only as the single greatest blow to the pro-life cause since Roe v. Wade but also as a harbinger of the most important battles Christians will face in the coming century.

For some time now, a host of Christian thinkers, ranging from philosophers and theologians to church growth consultants, have been telling us that we are living in the wake of a momentous historical shift—the Big Shift from "modernity" to "postmodernity." Like it or not, we're told, we inhabit a postmodern culture, and if we want to be effective witnesses to the gospel we need to understand the new rules of the game. In particular, we need to understand how postmodernity differs crucially from modernity—because many benighted souls haven't noticed the Big Shift and are still proceeding with modern business as usual.

Modernity—you probably know the shtick by now—was the product of Enlightenment hubris: the belief that humans could ultimately understand everything and control a good bit of it. But that project decisively unraveled in the twentieth century. Chastened by history, postmodernists know better.

So the story goes, as retailed in countless books and Power Point presentations. Alas, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Most conspicuously, it fails to account for the fact that the dominant discourse in our culture is the discourse of Science and its product, Technology. Science is all about understanding and controlling, straight from the sources of the Enlightenment.

The theorists of the postmodern have of course noticed this inconvenient fact, and they have tried to deal with it by invoking Thomas Kuhn's paradigms, fears of science of Science run amok, and assorted other phenomena. The ...