Leadership Journal

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.

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."

In addition to being known for what it's not, postmodernism has a few distinctives. Here are just two:

First, postmodernism doesn't put much stock in the progress of humankind, that things will be getting better anytime soon. Modernity believed science would save the world. Today, science by no means is dead; it still rules in the universities. But the postmodern outlook has nicked it.

"Postmodernity is suspicious of science to a certain extent," says Roger Olson, professor of theology at Bethel College. "It's saying, 'Science is good as long as it stays where it belongs-investigating the empirical realm.' "

Another distinctive that gets a lot of press is the postmodern notion that all truth, even to some extent scientific knowledge, is biased and socially constructed. That is, truths are relative and depend on what one's culture regards as truth. The forefather of this view is Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Nietzsche said humans have no access to reality, that everything is a matter of perspectives. "In fact, [Nietzsche] claims there is no 'true world,' " writes Stanley J. Grenz in A Primer on Postmodernism. (Was anyone really surprised to learn that Nietzsche went insane?)

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