Editor’s note: This article is part of a two-part series titled “How to Evangelize Postmodernists.” Part two is available here.

A part of every effective evangelistic strategy is rightly understanding the beliefs of those you are seeking to evangelize. Knowing what your interlocuters believe and what makes them tick, so to speak, will help you be more effective at relaying the good news of Jesus Christ. This is why missionaries seeking to reach Muslims will research Islam and the Quran, and those seeking to reach Hindus will study Hinduism and the Vedas, etc. While it is clear in Scripture that God is sovereign over salvation, we should strive to do our best to be winsome and knowledgeable about those we are seeking to reach.

Though it is not a religion per se, this is no less true for those who embrace postmodernism.  Though very few people would likely choose the label “postmodernist”[1] to describe themselves, the modern West is heavily influenced by postmodern thought. The average person on the street may not know anything about Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard, but that does not mean that their ideas are not mainstream in our culture. Thus, for Christians who are trying to be faithful to reach the lost in the American context, it would be wise to learn about postmodernism so that we can more effectively engage postmodernists.

But before jumping into this topic, I want to say that there are very few original thoughts in what follows. I was greatly helped in my research by D. A. Carson[2], Douglas Groothuis[3], James Sire[4], and Sam Chan.[5] If one desires more information on postmodernism at large, all of these resources would be helpful. With that noted, let’s jump in!

What Is Postmodernism?

To rightly evangelize postmoderns, we must understand what postmodernism is. However, to understand postmodernism correctly, we must first understand what modernism is. Modernism was largely built upon the ideas of foundationalism. Foundationalism argues that knowledge is the result of understanding foundational truths that are either self-evident (those facts that are so obviously true they don’t need to be argued for or proven, i.e., the law of non-contradiction) or those that can be tested and confirmed through our senses. In other words, being rational and using logic to prove something is fundamental to foundationalism. We can make objective decisions to determine truth by using logic and reason. You may have heard the terms “rationalism” and “empiricism” before, and that is what these two “isms” are largely getting at. So, in answering the question of “How do we know something?” moderns would say, “Because our use of reason or testing/verification tells us so.”

With this in mind, let’s consider how to define postmodernism. People have differing definitions of postmodernism, and a consensus definition has not emerged. Getting a descriptive definition that is not obscure is hard to find as well. One of the easier-to-understand definitions actually comes from PBS! They define postmodernism this way: “A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality.”[6]

Don Carson would argue that postmodernity is largely a reaction to the epistemological certainty of modernism.[7] Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines how we know what we know. So, Carson argues that postmodernism takes great issue with how moderns are so certain that they know what they know. If you read about postmodernism more broadly, you’ll notice that most definitions argue that postmodernism is largely a critique of modernism.

What Are the Core Beliefs or Big Ideas in Postmodernism?

One of the core beliefs of postmodernism is the rejection of objective truth. Friedrich Nietzsche famously said that “God is dead.”[8] By this, Nietzsche meant that with the rise of modernism, reason, and skepticism, the traditional conception of God could not possibly be true or viable. And when God is removed from the equation, so is objective truth.

Nietzsche also pondered the essence of truth. He said, “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms–in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically…”[9] In other words, truth is not objectively there. It is described in the language in which we tell our metanarratives (more on this below), but there is nothing more truly there. If we continue to insist that we have the one true story, we are delusional. As James Sire noted commenting on Nietzsche’s thought here, “Those who hang on to their metanarrative as if it really were the master story, encompassing or explaining all other stories, are under an illusion. We can have meaning, for all these stories are more or less meaningful, but we cannot have truth.”[10] From a slightly different angle, listen to the way Douglas Groothuis describes it:

For these postmodernist thinkers, the very idea of truth has decayed and disintegrated. It is no longer something knowable by anyone who engages in the proper forms of investigation and study. Truth is not over and above us, something that can be conveyed across cultures and over time. It is inseparable from our cultural conditioning, our psychology, our race and our gender. At the end of the day, truth is simply what we, as individuals and as communities, make it to be and nothing more. Truth dissolves into a host of disconnected “truths,” all equal to each other but unrelated to one another; there is no overall, rational scheme of things.[11]

And this thought introduces another major point within postmodernism, and that is its focus on language. According to postmodernism, all language is a social or human construct. We create language systems, but language does not describe anything true necessarily. Rather, language is used for practical purposes, i.e., to get things done, and to construct “truth” for that community. Therefore, since there is no objective truth behind language, but rather pragmatism (“pragmatism” is a philosophical view that affirms theories or beliefs in terms of their practical application or their ability to get things accomplished), truth is determined by the community. If language is a communal activity and you can convince enough people to agree with you and what you say, then that is “truth” for that community.

Another focal aspect of postmodernity that is attributed to the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, who is considered one of the founders of the movement, is an “incredulity toward metanarratives.”^[12] A metanarrative is the big-picture story that defines one’s worldview. So, for Christians, we have our story which is derived from the Scriptures. Our story goes that there is a Creator God who created and sustains the world (Gen.1-2; Heb. 1:3) The disobedience of the first couple brought sin and death to His creation (Gen. 3), but He made a way for reconciliation through the life, death, and resurrection of His Son (John 3:16). And on and on. But that is our metanarrative that frames how we view all of reality.

And other people have their own metanarratives, whether they be naturalists who do not believe in the supernatural, Marxists who view all things from the lens of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the Muslim who believes the story of the Quran, etc. Postmodernists believe that no metanarrative is any better than any other. All these stories are equally valid for those people who believe them. If they work for these people, then they are validated and true (at least they are true for those who believe them).

But notice how this quickly leads to relativism. If your community believes that Jesus is God, well, He might be God for you and your community, but not for someone else or some other community who holds to Allah being God. No one’s story, in other words, is any more “true” than anyone else’s. We are all just playing language games, and if your story helps you live a more meaningful life, then good. But you have no business or authority in telling others that you have the one true story. Listen to how Sam Chan describes the implications of this:

In this way, postmodernity recognizes that knowledge is power. The one who gets to tell the story and impose it as a metanarrative upon others is playing a power game. In postmodernity, there is deep mistrust of organized religion, government, and other forms of established authority because that is exactly what authority figures do: they impose their metanarrative upon all peoples and use truth as a weapon to force people to conform to their metanarrative. That’s also why, in postmodernity, we employ a hermeneutic of suspicion upon a narrative or truth claim. We deconstruct the narrative or truth claim by asking, “What power game is this person playing?”[13]

As you have probably already discerned, this view is at the root of a lot of the social ideologies in our current culture like Critical Race Theory (CRT), Queer Theory, Fat Theory, etc.

Additionally, because language is viewed from this perspective, objective interpretation is also impossible. If truth is subject to the fancy of a community, then is there really a right and wrong way of interpretation? This is where the word “deconstruction” comes into the picture. As James Sire notes:

There is as well a problem with the stories themselves. How is the language in which they are expressed to be interpreted? Within the deconstructionist segment of postmodernism, the stories we tell ourselves and others do not have a determinate meaning. They are subject to normal misreading through lack of intelligence or basic background, or difference between the writer’s or speaker’s background or context and that of the reader or listener. There is an inherent indeterminacy to language itself. Stories all contain the seeds of self-contradiction. Texts and statements mean only what readers take them to mean.[14]

Therefore, when it comes to interpretation, authorial intent is often jettisoned. In other words, what the author meant when he wrote something is largely irrelevant. In fact, it’s impossible to recover what the author intended according to this view. This is because postmodernists, under the influence of one of the leaders named Jacques Derrida, adopt a form of a view called referentialism. Referentialism argues that there is no perfect correspondence between words and the meaning that they confer. Therefore, as Norman Geisler argues, “meaning…is ultimately untransferable between writer and reader.”[15] Now, as I will argue in part two, this view is ultimately self-defeating. Nonetheless, it is important to try to understand where they are coming from.

Without going into much more detail, a couple of other aspects of postmodernism that are worth mentioning are complexity and contradiction; postmoderns value that things are not always what they seem. They value complexity, and one of their adamant rejections is that things are never as clear or as simple as moderns often made it. Additionally, postmoderns value concrete experiences. They are not fond of abstract principles but prefer real-life experiences. They desire to define their own reality based on how they feel, what works, and what they think improves their (and others’) way of life.

By way of summary, postmodernism can be roughly defined by the following characteristics (other characteristics could be added, and these appear in no particular order):

1. A critical nature towards rationalism and empiricism (logic and verification to discern truth).
2. A rejection of absolute truth.
3. “Truth” is determined by one’s community.
4. Language is a social construct that is used for pragmatic purposes.
5. A skepticism of metanarratives (no metanarrative is any better than any other).
6. Knowledge is power (hence skepticism of those in power and controlling metanarratives).
7. Objective interpretation is impossible.
8. A valuing of the complex and a rejection of the simple.
9. A valuing of the concrete and a rejection of the abstract.

__________

[1] Throughout this article, “postmodernist” and “postmoderns” will be used synonymously.

[2] D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God.

[3] Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay.

[4] James Sire, The Universe Next Door.

[5] Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World.

[6] https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html#:~:text=A%20general%20and%20wide%2Dranging,objective%2C%20efforts%20to%20explain%20reality.

[7] Carson, The Gagging of God, 57-64.

[8] Frederick Nietzsche’s writings, on multiple occasions, used the term “God is dead.” The first occurrence is found in The Gay Science (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012), 156.

[9] Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 47.

[10] Sire, The Universe Next Door, 211.

[11] Groothuis, Truth Decay, 20.

[12] Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 24.

[13] Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World, 111.

[14] Sire, The Universe Next Door, 213.

[15] Norman Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, 192.