Imperishable Inheritance

I was lis­ten­ing to a ser­mon by Al Mohler wherein he gave an anal­ogy to explain the dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tions of pre­mod­ernism and post­mod­ernism in terms of the agent’s per­cep­tion of truth and real­ity. I thought about it, and I would like to expand it to include mod­ernism along with chang­ing the anal­ogy slightly to make it eas­ier to comprehend.

The anal­ogy revolves around a boy, and a tree, and how the boy comes to per­ceive the tree in an onto­log­i­cal sense. In other words, how does the boy come to under­stand what the essence of the tree is, and does the essence of the tree change? I know it’s con­fus­ing at first, but let me extrapolate.

A Boy, Tree, and Premodernity

In the pre­mod­ern world, when the boy comes upon the tree he must then align his think­ing to accom­mo­date the tree. The boy doesn’t try to give an analy­sis of what he per­ceives the tree to be, but instead he has to come to terms with what the tree is.  The boy real­izes that the tree’s sta­tus and def­i­n­i­tion does not get defined in his own imagination.

This is sym­bolic of this age which was dom­i­nated by reli­gions and a the­is­tic world view. In this philo­soph­i­cal age there was no one who ques­tioned that the tree was a tree; like­wise, God and his moral­ity was some­thing that was some­thing to align one­self towards.

A Boy, Tree, and Modernity

In the age of moder­nity, when the boy comes upon the tree he wants to exer­cise his rea­son to dis­cover what the tree is by most notably the sci­en­tific method. The boy refuses to accept any def­i­n­i­tion of the tree until he can prove time and time again that he gets the same results every time. He goes out to sam­ple many vari­ants of this tree and sees they all have sim­i­lar qual­i­ties, and he then there­fore “deter­mines” that it is a tree.

Rea­son and the sci­en­tific method reigned supreme dur­ing the epis­te­mo­log­i­cal ques­tions for mod­ern thinkers. The enlight­en­ment brought a new age of skep­ti­cism that ques­tioned the foun­da­tions of all that was known before, and out of moder­nity we have thinkers such as Dar­win, Freud, and Kant among oth­ers.  Because the pres­ence of a divine being was out­side the scope of the sci­en­tific method many did away with theism.

A Boy, Tree, and Postmodernity

In the age of post­moder­nity, when the boy comes upon the tree he decides that this “tree” is only a “tree” because soci­ety has deter­mined it as such. He believes the lan­guage used to decide what this object has come to sym­bol­ize is sim­ply a “game” that he wants to play a dif­fer­ent way. The boy then, after reflec­tion, decides that he wants this object to be called a “green being;” after all, why can’t he say what this object means to him?

This is an age where skep­ti­cism is taken to a real­ity far beyond the bounds of moder­nity. In this age all “truth” is the result of soci­etal con­struct and “lan­guage games.” This age is full of moral, social, and philo­soph­i­cal rel­a­tivism where many of the great philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions are left up to the “beholder,” and no one can say another is wrong because it is an indi­vid­ual expression.

Con­clu­sion

While this is meant to be a sim­ple illus­tra­tion on how these three ages are defined it’s impor­tant to notice how Chris­tians need to respond. We must embrace truth as the rev­e­la­tion of a sov­er­eign, immutable, and holy God that is most fully expressed in his son. We flatly admit that the sci­en­tific method is sim­ply unable to explain God, because if it were able to then God would cease to be God. We also deny that moral rel­a­tivism that has so per­me­ated the mod­ern culture.

Truth is truth, and the tree is a tree despite what the boy would like it to be.