Postmodernism and the Christian Faith

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I first went deep into postmodernism at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. Yes, that’s correct. A conservative Reformed seminary had me reading books on postmodernism in the mid-1990s. At the time, evangelical writers had begun to digest what Tom Oden had described as the death of modernity and the cultural shift toward a “postmodern consciousness.” Oden began to observe this shift in After Modernity–What? (1990) and Two Worlds (1992). 

What quickly became apparent were three important points: 1) postmodernism was a contested concept (it still is!) and subject to different definitions (see, for example, David Watson’s article on postmodern progressivism); 2) postmodernism was not this horrible development that destroyed the faith; 3) postmodernism made room for a return to and recovery of an orthodoxy that benefitted the Wesleyan Pentecostal perspective. 

Tom Oden and Postmodern Consciousness

Oden saw the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as marking the end of modernity with its Enlightenment foundationalism and totalitarian claims to objective truth. We must remember that it was Enlightenment foundationalism and its views of reason that gave rise to communism and other totalitarian systems and their overarching (metanarrative) claims. In brief, Enlightenment foundationalism espoused the view that all knowledge must stem from unquestionable beliefs. A system must be deduced from certain foundations that are universally accessible through unbiased reason and thus free from tradition or culture. Descartes claimed this foundation was the innate knowledge of one’s own existence whereas John Locke saw it as sense experience. All religious claims had to rest upon these certain foundations or be jettisoned as irrational. Appeals to authority or tradition were useless.   

For Oden, Postmodern consciousness was to be embraced. That is, all evangelicals should be happy about the fact that modernity as a philosophical system or worldview was coming to an end. After all, it was Enlightenment rationalism that gave rise to German higher criticism, Marxism, Nietzscheanism, Freudianism, and other ideologies that supported the rise of modern atheism. Oden differentiated the philosophical stream associated with French writers like Jacques Derrida from what Gene Edward Veith would call “postmodern times.” He saw Derrida and others associated with a particular philosophical perspective called “deconstructionism” as ultramodernists, not postmodernists. Their perspectives still assumed Enlightenment foundationalism as the only approach to objective truth. If the Enlightenment view of objective reason was no longer sustainable, then there was nothing left to objective truth. 

Evangelical Assessments of Postmodernism

In A Primer on Postmodernism (1996), the Canadian Baptist evangelical Stanley Grenz would refer to deconstructionism as philosophical postmodernism. In the short span of four years between Oden and Grenz (roughly the time I was at RTS), a cottage industry of evangelical books on postmodernism erupted from Roger Lundin’s Culture of Interpretation (1993) to David Dockery’s edited volume The Challenge of Postmodernism (1995) and Veith’s Postmodern Times (1994). Evangelicals had begun the arduous process of assessing the emergence of a new cultural consciousness (postmodernism) and all that it entailed, including philosophical postmodernism. 

It’s crucial here to differentiate the broader cultural turn from the narrower philosophical position associated with writers like Derrida or Michel Foucault. Postmodernism, broadly conceived, is not simply the French deconstructionism of Derrida. The evangelical theologian Kevin Vanhoozer (who teaches at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) noted in 2003 that it’s better to speak of a postmodern condition than a singular philosophical position. Vanhoozer was drawing on the language of the French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard, whose The Postmodern Condition was first published in 1979. The point is that you cannot reduce postmodernism to one philosophical position, even deconstructionism. 

Many of us who went through graduate and doctoral studies in the 1990s were deeply involved in this larger evangelical assessment of the shift from modernity to postmodernity. What became clear was the number of trends in philosophy that all coalesced around the need to dismantle Enlightenment foundationalism. Alvin Plantinga had been at the forefront of the philosophical project to dismantle Enlightenment foundationalism. He recognized that Enlightenment rationality stacked the deck against Christianity. If we played by the rules of Enlightenment foundationalism, then we would be led into the skepticism against miracles that David Hume had developed. Plantinga and others developed what came to be called Reformed epistemology as an alternative. It shared with philosophical postmodernism the need to attack Enlightenment foundationalism and build an alternative.

There was yet another trend in evangelicalism that became popular in the 1970s. It was called “worldview thinking.” This approach to apologetics came about in the late 1800s and early 1900s as Reformed thinkers like Abraham Kuyper and Cornelius Van Til assimilated German philosophical ideas. For Van Til, it meant an entire approach to apologetics called presuppositionalism in which one questioned the philosophical and religious presuppositions underlying an individual’s perspective. This approach tracked well with philosophical postmodernism’s claim that there was no neutral place from which one might claim to reason objectively. In other words, it was yet another attack on Enlightenment foundationalism. One of the reasons I studied postmodernism at Reformed Theological Seminary was that I had professors who had thoroughly embraced Van Til’s presuppositionalist approach. 

Within evangelicalism there had been a concerted effort to attack Enlightenment rationality, especially, its claims to objective reason. This is an important reason why evangelicals began to assess the entire postmodern turn, which included, but was not limited to, philosophical postmodernism. It was also why some evangelical thinkers saw philosophical postmodernism in the form of Derrida or Foucault as an ally against Enlightenment views. German higher criticism, Marxism, and Freudianism were all indebted to Enlightenment philosophical streams. The postmodern turn could be beneficial to Christianity as long as we properly discern its weaknesses and strengths.

Oden and the Return to Orthodoxy

Tom Oden welcomed the turn to a postmodern consciousness. It meant that he could argue for a return to the pre-modern world of Christian orthodoxy. The entire paleo-orthodox movement Oden (a Methodist) helped to start was premised on the destruction of modernity. To establish paleo-orthodoxy and help renew his own Methodism, Oden called for a “postmodern critique of modern criticism.” Oden was not alone here. He and William Abraham (among others) represented a return within Methodism to a vigorous defense of Wesleyan orthodoxy by a renewal of the classical Christian consensus. 

In Britain, a new movement calling itself Radical Orthodoxy emerged at the end of the 1990s. It built on postmodern criticism to return and renew an orthodox center. Having just returned from my PhD program at Oxford in medieval studies to my alma mater, Lee University, I already had some familiarity with this turn. My own theological journey into a deeper appreciation of my Pentecostal heritage was through a recovery of the great tradition of the faith. I fully embraced classical Christianity at Oxford through a deep dive into the very Christian thinkers Tom Oden and Radical Orthodoxy had upheld. I’m talking about patristic writers like Augustine and medieval scholastics like Bonaventure and Aquinas. 

It was through professors like Bishop Kallistos Ware, Keith Ward, and John Webster that I discovered my own Pentecostalism was part of classical Christianity rather than some aberrant modernist stream invested in the irrationality of the emotions. One of my Reformed (cessationist) professors at Reformed Theological Seminary told me that Pentecostalism was just irrational emotivism. The classical Christian consensus enabled me to recover Pentecostalism as a feature of orthodox Christianity without having to embrace the kind of cessationist, anti-revivalist Reformed theology espoused by places like Old Princeton and Westminster Theological Seminary (and still prevalent in small Reformed denominations like the Orthodox Presbyterian Church).

After I returned to Lee University from my time at Oxford, I ran into two other scholars roughly my age at the annual Society for Pentecostal Studies meeting in Washington state. They were James K. A. Smith and Amos Yong. Both were trying to rethink Pentecostalism in light of particular approaches within postmodernity in the early 2000s. Smith was a Reformed charismatic while Yong had grown up in the Assemblies of God. 

In 2006, Smith authored what has become a standard evangelical introduction to philosophical postmodernism (Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?). Drawing on his own background in studying European thinkers like Derrida, Smith suggested that we could utilize certain insights from postmodernism without embracing it entirely. He followed Tom Oden in calling for a return to a robust confessionalism. Being postmodern meant getting rid of the worst in modernity, which hindered the Christian faith. Smith argued that we must reject René Descartes’s epistemological foundationalism at the root of Enlightenment foundationalism. In doing so, we are making room for faith and for a different approach to objective truth. This was not a rejection of objective truth or the Christian claim of a universal story but a rejection of Enlightenment rationality as the pathway to objective truth. 

Strictly speaking, metanarratives are modern accounts (like scientific naturalism) that make universal claims of humanity on the basis of an appeal to a universal rationality. To reject scientific naturalism’s use of science as a universal theory of everything is to reject the use of reason alone to tell the world’s story. As long as metanarratives referred to modernist attempts to develop a theory of everything on the basis of reason alone, the postmodern turn reinforced what Christian tradition had always said about the use of reason apart from divine revelation. The moment metanarrative meant the rejection of objective truth in favor of privatized experience, then it too had to be rejected.  

By rejecting Enlightenment foundationalism, storytelling and narrative opened up as ways of getting at the objective ground of truth. This new approach means that we no longer need to come at the Gospel accounts (which are narratives) through the lens of German higher criticism. For Wesleyans and Pentecostals, it means that our appeal to testimony (telling our own stories) is no longer rejected out of hand as merely an appeal to our own inner subjective and emotional state with no bearing on objective truth. Testimony is a legitimate starting point on the journey to the truth, but it must always be seen as a starting point, not the end in the same way that a saints’ life becomes a doorway into the Christian story.

Advice to Seminarians

Of course, if I were a young seminarian in my first semester at Pentecostal Theological Seminary I would not know or understand the entire history just recounted (in a very oversimplified way). This would especially be the case if I attended a state university where my only exposure to postmodernism was the worst of what evangelicals have called philosophical postmodernism. Because I had only witnessed how deconstructionism was leveraged against Christianity, I might be inclined to see any talk of postmodernism as a sell-out of the faith. And, if I actually heard a professor say that postmodernism was a good thing, I might conclude that this professor was just another liberal. 

I certainly can understand why someone not exposed to the deep evangelical dialogue with the postmodern turn beginning in the 1990s might draw this conclusion. I would sympathize with this seminarian in his or her first semester reading James K. A. Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? for the first time and not having the solid grounding in evangelicalism (let alone Wesleyan Pentecostalism) to understand what Smith was trying to do. But I would tell that seminarian that ignoring the postmodern turn is perilous. For starters, millennials have been raised in the culture of postmodernity. No effective ministry can occur without understanding its positive and negative dimensions. Moreover, dismissing the entirety of this postmodern turn leaves the erstwhile seminarian mired in the very Enlightenment foundationalism that gave rise to Hume’s criticism of the miraculous. 

I would argue that this Enlightenment rationalism is also behind the rejection of the miraculous in cessationsim and the anti-revivalist argument one finds in B. B. Warfield. Once you reject the possibility of miracles outside of scripture, the only recourse is to construct a doctrine of an inerrant text to secure the presence of miracles in scripture on the same rationalist foundations espoused by the Enlightenment project. Why do we believe in miracles? Because God has given us an inerrant text that tells us there were miracles. That’s not what the classical Christian consensus has said nor is it how Wesleyans and Pentecostals approach the miraculous or scripture.

In arguing for the usefulness of specific aspects of the postmodern turn, I would be no liberal. Just the opposite. I would be clearing the philosophical and theological landscape to make room for the kind of classical Christianity that Oden saw as central to Wesleyan orthodoxy or that Smith calls for at the end of his book. I would be arguing for a robust Wesleyan Pentecostalism that helps us see why testimony is crucial, the emotions are rational, and miracles must be part of our “apologetics.” I would be arguing for a Wesleyan Pentecostalism that embraces classical Christianity and the orthodox center. None of this requires me to embrace everything about postmodernism. You eat the meat and spit out the bones.

To make this argument, however, I must take students on a journey of “there and back again,” to borrow a phrase from Tolkien’s The Hobbit. And so, my final piece of advice would be, “Trust me.” The student would have to trust that I know the way because I have been there before. This is precisely the problem, and it’s a postmodern problem. The growing distrust of institutions and scholars today is a deep sign of how much we all have been afflicted by the postmodern condition–and we don’t even realize it. 

Dale Coulter is Professor of Historical Theology at Pentecostal Theology Seminary and a member of the Firebrand editorial board