The Riddle of Our Postmodern Culture
January 1, 1997
Books trendmeisters, speakers on the pastoral circuit-all proclaim, prophetlike, "The culture we minister in has changed. We live in a postmodern world."
Uh, what's a postmodern world? Is that where people read Wired, drink double cappuccinos, and buy alternative rocker Alanis Morissette's hot-selling CD?
Postmodernism is a throw-away word that means everything and nothing. J. I. Packer, theologian at Regent College says, "Postmodernism is a word that has never secured a dictionary definition. Different people use it in different ways."
Postmodernism is, in short, a hackneyed word ill need of definition.
Mother of all negation
I fondly recall a silver-haired woman in a church I served. She never met a new idea she liked. She criticized everything, was never for anything. Her contribution (if that's what you call it) was negation.
She shares much in common with postmodernism, which is a reaction against something. It's the mother of all negation. Postmodernism, a phenomenon of Western culture, is defined best by what it's not. "The only agreed-upon element," says Packer, "is that postmodernism is a negation of modernism."
Modernism, which began roughly in the 1700s and allegedly ended in the 1950s, is the cultural outlook that put its faith in optimism, progress, the pursuit of objective knowledge, and science. Packer says, "Modernism … assumed that it was in the power of reason to solve all the world's problems and to determine what anybody needed to know."
Most "isms" have a bad reputation, and so does postmodernism. Packer says unflatteringly, "The heart of postmodernism is parasitic; it has no life of its own, [it has a life] only by a denial of what other people believe."
Modernity spurned
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