Telling the Truth: Evangelizing Postmoderns

PART ONE

Opening Plenaries

CHAPTER 1

AN ANCIENT MESSAGE, THROUGH MODERN MEANS,

TO A POSTMODERN MIND

Ravi Zacharias

In April 1981 Daniel Yankelovich, a social analyst, wrote a very insightful article in Psychology Today. His principal thrust was to analyze how Americans were thinking about life and where we were headed should such ideas go uncriticized. It was a warning to the West. In his opening remarks, he defined the role and the imperative of culture. Quoting sociologist Daniel Bell, he said, Culture is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existentialist situations that confront all human beings in the passage of their lives (Yankelovich 1981, 36).

To define culture even in these terms may well be outdated now. Some months ago I was lecturing at one of the universities in the country when a student stormed up to the microphone and bellowed, Who told you culture is a search for coherence? Where do you get that idea from? This idea of coherence is a Western idea. I replied by reminding her that all I had done in that instance was to present a sociologist’s definition that culture sought coherence. Ah! Words! Just words! she shouted back.

Let me ask you this then, I pleaded. Do you want my answer to be coherent? Some laughter rippled through the auditorium. She herself was stymied for a few moments. But that’s language, isn’t it? she retorted.

I asked her if language has anything to do with reality. Must words not point to a referent? If you are seeking an answer that must be coherent, but culture itself does not have to be, from whence do you get this disjunction? One could sense the turmoil within her. Indeed, later on I was told that this individual was a rather outspoken person whose lifestyle was radically aberrant from the normal. Her struggle for coherence was rooted in her very physiological dissonance.

This student may well be the quintessential postmodernist. Our bodies and proclivities are defining our reason for being. That is how intense I believe this struggle is becoming. Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault—both brilliant yet tragic figures—can be seen as the definitive bookends of the twentieth century. Foucault, of course, was a leading French intellectual who, owing to a very promiscuous life, died of AIDS at the age of fifty-eight. He was a lover of the writings of Nietzsche, who, ironically, had died at age fifty-four in the wake of his pitiful bout with venereal disease and insanity.

So even as we look for our cultural moorings and try to understand the radical shifts that have disrupted the shared meanings of the past, attempting a coherent answer becomes a prohibitive challenge.

Walter Truett Anderson humorously gives us an insight into this in his book Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be. He reflects on our predicament by presenting an analogy from baseball. A premodern baseball umpire would have said something like this: There’s balls, and there’s strikes and I call ‘em as they are. The modernist would have said, There’s balls and there’s strikes, and I call ‘em as I see ‘em. And the postmodernist umpire would say, They ain’t nothing until I call ‘em (quoted in Middleton and Walsh 1995, 132-33). In brief, all reality is subject dependent. The postmodernist frames reality by naming aspects at his or her whim.

You and I have in some ways been so influenced by this culture that we too cannot get ourselves completely outside of it. We are locked into this postmodern mindset, or at least some elements of it. Perhaps the most radically affected of all are our children. If you talk to your teenager after a movie that your son or daughter wanted you to see, you suddenly hear comments such as, I’m sorry, Dad, but I hadn’t noticed all the bad language until you were sitting next to me. It is almost as if they live in that world, and they don’t even notice it anymore until somehow, someone with a counterperspective is sitting next to them. And then they mutter, Oh-oh. I’ve blown this one. The disorientation is thus double-edged, both external and internal. Reality is redefined, and our own thinking is unwittingly reshaped.

THE CENTURY OF CHANGE

How did we get where we are today? I perceive that five major shifts in this century have brought us to where we are. No doubt there are others.

The first major shift was the popularization of the death of God movement, the bequest of Nietzsche. Remember how poignantly he talked about the madman running with a lantern, looking for God and unable to find him? That parable stabbed at the heart of reality, offering a different way of looking at things. Then Nietzsche says, Indeed, this has been such an enormous shift, even as the philosopher’s blade has dug into the heart of theism. He warns his readers of the disorientation that would ensue: Who gave us a sponge to wipe away the horizon? What sacred games will we need to invent? Is there any up or down? Must not lanterns have to be lit in the morning hours? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing? Can we not feel the breath of empty space? He writes of this radical shift that has come about—there is no up; there is no down. New lights have to illuminate our path. New sacred games need to be invented. Finally, he concludes that the shock is too staggering to immediately gain a footing. Maybe my time has not yet come, he says. It takes time for ideas to completely take hold in the mindset of a culture (Nietzsche 1954, 125).

Nearly one hundred years later, his time has come. There is a popularization of the death of God. The idea of God’s nonexistence now either explicitly or implicitly permeates almost every major discipline in secular universities. In fact, a parent recently told me of his daughter’s initial orientation at a prestigious university not far from here. In their video presentation, the closing testimonial to the university’s intellectual strength was given by a young graduate. Borrowing from Richard Dawkins, she looked into the lens of the camera and said, One of the best things this university has done for me is that it allowed me to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Imagine promoting a very sophisticated university with a testimonial of atheism to prospective students.

The second major shift is the disorienting blow of religious pluralism, principally within the context of Western culture. In 1893 at the Chicago Conference on World Religions, one of India’s renowned philosophers, Swami Vivekenanda (who incidentally was not one of the program speakers), got up from his chair and went up to the podium. He said this:

We who come from the East have sat here on the platform day after day and have been told in a patronizing way that we ought to accept Christianity because Christian nations are the most prosperous. We look about us and see England, the most prosperous Christian nation in the world, with her foot on the neck of 250 million Asiatics. We look back into history, and we see that the prosperity began with the invasion of Mexico. Christianity wins its prosperity by cutting the throats of its fellow men. At such a price, the Hindu will not have prosperity. I have sat here today, and I’ve heard the intolerance. Blood and sword are not for the Hindu whose religion is based on the laws of love.¹

I am not questioning whether he was right or wrong. His facts clearly were tendentious and at least equally offensive to those he was charging with discourtesy. But beyond the polemics, this is the reigning perspective in the way the Middle Easterner and the Far Easterner think about Christianity. I have spoken in some of the toughest settings in the Middle East. In two rare opportunities, I had the privilege of addressing audiences in Damascus, Syria. Half of the challenge is removing the prejudice of Christianity’s baggage across the centuries. But as a result of the infusion of those worldviews into North American, the same prejudices have taken hold in the West. You soon begin to realize how disorienting this has been to Western culture, which has borrowed from Christianity’s capital but does not know how much it has borrowed. Now, in numerous academic settings, the most vitriolic attacks upon religion are leveled almost exclusively against the Christian faith.

The third shift is the power to inform through the visual and the blurring of reality and imagination. The visual has changed the way people arrive at truth. Is it not interesting that every previous movie production of the sinking of the Titanic sent the audience away feeling sorry for what had happened and very shaken up by the tragedy but that in this latest production, the plastic heroes have surfaced to the top from the sinking ship? The romance of the arts through the eye gate has sunk reality and glamorized the artificial personalities of stage heroes. In fact, now the Titanic is to be rebuilt and will set sail in 2002, ninety years to the day from the original voyage. Some will pay hundreds of thousands for the best suites, even as this is now branded The Ultimately Unsinkable. Reality has crossed swords with imagination and lost. William Blake warned of the peril of the eye: This life’s dim window of the soul / Distorts the heavens from pole to pole / And goads you to believe a lie / When you see with and not through the eye.²

We are intended by God to see through the eye, but with the conscience. Now we see with the eye, devoid of a conscience. The English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge tells of the time he was in Biafra and some prisoners were about to be executed. The guards lined up the prisoners, and the officer shouted the countdown: Ready, aim— Just then a photographer for one of the major networks shouted, Cut! My battery is dead! The execution was momentarily suspended until he could get a fresh battery pack. Then the countdown resumed: Ready, aim, fire!—bang, bang—and the prisoners lay dead. Muggeridge wondered what some future generation would say of the barbarism and where it lay. Would they blame the viewers? Would they castigate the cameraman? He said, I strongly suspect somebody may plump for the cameras (1977, 64). Muggeridge may have a point. The medium does become the message, and this blurring between the real and the imagined is really locked into the medium itself.

The fourth shift is the lost center of cultural molding. There is a vacuum at the heart of our culture. Saul Bellow argued in his 1976 Nobel Laureate lecture:

The intelligent public is waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy and social theory and what it cannot hear from pure science. A broader, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. If writers do not come into the center, it will not be because the center is pre-empted; it is not. (Quoted in Smith 1992, 2)

There is no center to hold things together. Or to put it differently, there is no metanarrative to life, no overarching story by which all the particulars can be interpreted. But while no story is dominating our culture, the means to knowing have taken over as the ends of knowledge. In Beyond the Postmodern Mind, Huston Smith makes this comment: If modern physics showed us a world at odds with our senses, postmodern physics is showing us one that is at odds with our imagination. We have made peace with the first of these oddities, but the problem of the new physics cannot be resolved by refinements in the scale (1992, 7). How do you measure the imagination? There is no scale.

If I were to identify a handful of fearsome realities, this would be near the top. The pursuit of knowledge without knowing who we are or why we exist, combined with a war on our imaginations by the entertainment industry, leaves us at the mercy of power with no morality.

On several occasions while I was driving and listening to music, every now and then a piece would come on that I found either unmusical or jarring. I would shut the radio off. But then one day I was taken to see a play called The Phantom of the Opera. Suddenly I realized that some of the music I had not quite enjoyed was from this play. I was amazed at the difference knowing the story made, whenever I heard the music subsequently. In fact, the music in some portions is utterly magnificent. The love songs, the discourses, even the arguments make sense when you know the story. Life needs a story to understand the details. Life needs to hold together at the center if we are to reach to distant horizons. But our culture neither owns a story nor holds at the center.

The final significant change is the shifting of power to a younger world. I have heard it said that over sixty percent of this world’s population is under age twenty-four. If you talk to a Hollywood mogul today, he will tell you that in producing films, if one can win the following of an eighteen-year-old male, it will be a blockbuster hit. Teenage girls will go to see a movie that their boyfriends want them to see, but the reverse does not hold. The extraordinary economic power of this younger generation increasingly defines cultural priorities.

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL IMPACT

What, then, have been the results of these shifts? I will underscore just five of them.

The first is philosophy’s move to the existential. The power of a Jean Paul Sartre or an Albert Camus was significant in the decade of the 1960s and 70s. Historian Paul Johnson points out the devastating impact of Sartre on the intellectuals of the Angka Loeu movement in Cambodia that destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands in that Gentle Land³ Indeed, a tremendous power was unleashed as philosophers, through drama and literature, handcuffed the intellect of society’s power brokers. Stories were introduced to tell us that man is the measure of all things, but they never told us about the entailments of evil men and women who wrested power and developed the means to destroy their own people. Sartre’s recantation on his own deathbed notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that philosophy’s shift to the existential cut a wide swathe in our world.

The second result is the artist’s move to the sensual. When God created humanity, two very clear sanctities were imparted. One was the sanctity of life itself; the other was the sanctity of sexuality. Artists are creative people. When they lose the vision of the grand Creator, the greatest artist of all, they will attack the very things that he branded sacred—life and sexuality. With such surrogate creators now in full expression, what do we see? The celebration of violence and eroticism. The desacralizing of the human body has mangled life, and our culture slides pitifully into indulgence of the erotic and the perverse. A repeated, painful refrain in numerous conversations is a mother who is troubled about finding erotica in her young teenage son’s possession. The proliferation of erotic material—from books to magazines and now to the internet—has undermined this generation. Recently in England mothers have been outraged because teen magazines are peddling sexual topics, and they argue that this material is making their daughters sex-mad. Foucault’s death from AIDS moves one between compassion and confusion when we realize that it was the willful embodiment of a philosophy that drove him there.

The third result is religion’s move to the mystical. Buddhism has become one of the most popular religions of our time because of the widespread interest in spirituality; feelings are constructed into techniques and aphorisms. Buddhism is a classic example of how to be good without having God—how to be ethical without having absolutes.

A fourth result is education’s move to the skeptical: You can’t believe anything anymore. You can’t be sure of anything anymore. From fuzzy logic to relativism, the homeless mind has moved to the homeless idea. To argue for truth today is to stir an immediate debate, as if a heresy of devilish proportions has been invoked. The so-called death of God spelled the death of theology, but the morticians of the Absolute were not content to stab God-talk. Inevitably God’s undertakers were marching to their own funeral, with all of knowledge being pronounced dead.

Here we see our fifth result—the individual’s move to the transcendental. That is, he is his own divine being. The reader is sovereign over the author. As you read anyone else’s story, you deconstruct it and reshape it to your own interpretation. Philosopher Richard Rorty says in his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: [The Nietzschean self] would seek consolation, at the moment of death, not in having transcended the animal condition but in being that peculiar sort of dying animal who, by describing himself in his own terms, had created himself (quoted in Lundin 1995, 30). Here is self-deification in the making.

A DIVIDED WORLD

How, then, have East and West responded to these phenomena? If I were to draw a continuum, I would put the Western world on the left and the Eastern world on the right, based on the following generalizations. In the West, Christianity has become marginalized, and in some cases even ridiculed. In the East, Western religion is criticized and Eastern religion is protected. In the West, Christianity struggles with higher education and trends in academia. In the East, there is a resurgence of aggressive pride in ancient wisdom.

In the West, theology has been replaced by religion. In the East, religion has always been seen as a pursuit and thus continues. In fact, one of my colleagues who works with us in India says that India never moved from premodern to modern to postmodern. India just leap-frogged over modern, moving from the premodern to the postmodern. In the West, objective truth has been displaced, and there is nothing to replace it. In the East, displacement of objective truth was not felt because the cultural focus was elsewhere.

Some time ago I was addressing men and women from the bar association of a major city. I knew it would be a challenging audience because words and arguments are their daily fare. I began by recounting a television news item I had just witnessed. A major network had as their first item of news a survey asking people if words meant anything specific at all. Do words such as affair and adultery have particular public meanings, or could the person speaking fuse them into his or her own private meaning? In our salvation-by-survey culture, the journalists asked people if anything meant anything anymore. Having concluded that there were significant variances in the way people used words, they next inquired if morality was purely a personal matter, or if there were indeed absolutes. Every person interviewed on the street answered the same way: No! There is no objective morality; we have to define it in our own terms. First item: Were words subject to the user? Second item: Was morality a personal matter? Having settled on a confused answer that left the individual lord over reality, the newscaster went on to discuss a third item on the news—a warning to Saddam Hussein. If he did not stop playing his word games, we were going to start bombing Iraq. How ironic, I thought. We arrogate to ourselves moral authority and deny referents to words, except when we deal with others who play the same game. It was fascinating to see the expressions of those in the audience change and to see them recognize that communication is impossible if we do not grant univocal meaning to our words.

WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY

If this is our culture, where does that leave us? The challenge, as I see it, is this: How do we communicate the gospel to a generation that hears with its eyes and thinks with its feelings?

First, postmodernism may be one of the most opportune thought patterns presented to us for the propagation of the gospel because, in a sense, it has cleared the playing field. All disciplines have lost their final authority. The hopes that modernity had underscored, the triumph of Reason and Science that many thought would bring in utopia, have failed in almost every respect. With all of our material gains, there is still a hunger for the spiritual. In virtually every part of the world, students linger long after every session to talk with me and plead for answers to their barren lives. All the education one gets does not diminish that search for inner coherence and a story line for one’s own life. I can picture many of their faces as I read hundreds of letters that come, confessing to spent lives and bankrupt hearts.

As much as postmodernism has confused language and definitions, there is a yearning that the postmodernist’s own cavalier attitude does not diminish. But our response becomes more difficult because of what I call the Vietnamization

of the conflict. Classical techniques don’t work anymore. There is no front line or single column to attack; the conflict is on many fronts. Maybe postmodernism is a legitimate child of the confusion of the 1960s. But I assure you that it has cleared the playing field.

In February of this year I spoke at the University of Sheffield. When I walked into the auditorium the opening night, the place was packed to capacity. At the end of the forum, one student came to me and said, I came in here straddling two worlds. I cannot leave the same way. Can you help me? What a joy to observe a young Sheffield student give his life to the Lord. Indeed, there is still an openness. Postmodernism may not be as daunting as we may sometimes portray it.

Second, there is just enough of the modern worldview left so that reason still has a point of entry. But we have to use this knowledge wisely. We cannot give an overdose of argumentation.

Third, there is a tremendous search in the postmodern mind for community. Only in the gospel message that culminates in worship is there coherence—which in turn brings coherence within the community of believers, where both individuality and community are affirmed. Worship, says Archbishop William Temple, is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by his holiness, nourishment of mind by his truth, purifying of imagination by His beauty, opening of the heart to His love, and submission of will to His purpose. All this, gathered up in adoration, is the greatest expression of which we are capable (quoted in Watson 1976, 157). The worship of the living God is what ultimately binds the various inclinations of the heart and gives them focus. And a worshiping community binds the diversity of our culture, the diversity of our education, the diversity of our backgrounds, and brings us together into a corporate expression of worship. One of the most powerful appeals to the postmodern mind is a worshiping community.

Fourth, we must be observant of God’s sovereign intervention in history. When Princess Diana died, the whole world was hearing with its eyes. A few days later when Mother Teresa passed away, the world was again listening with its eyes. One was a woman who despite having everything lived with rejection in her innermost being. The other, having nothing, spent her life taking care of the rejected of this world. I think these are sovereign moments in history. I remember being in the Czech republic a year ago and being told how when the power of Soviet ideology was broken, the churches suddenly became full. People came expectantly, but somehow, there was nothing there. That moment was squandered.

And last, we are living at a time when G. K. Chesterton’s dictum has proven to be true. Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain, but meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure. We have exhausted ourselves in this indulgent culture.

I began by telling of Yankelovich’s description of the titanic changes that are underway. He said in his article that the stakes in such changes are high. He conducted some case studies of numerous couples to see where we are headed and arrived at an astounding conclusion. This is what he said about one of those couples, whom he called Abby and Mark:

If you feel it is imperative to fill all your needs, and if these needs are contradictory or in conflict with those of others, or simply unfillable, then frustration inevitably follows. To Abby and to Mark as well self-fulfillment means having a career and marriage and children and sexual freedom and autonomy and being liberal and having money and choosing non-conformity and insisting on social justice and enjoying city life and country living and simplicity and graciousness and reading and good friends and on and on. The individual is not truly fulfilled by becoming ever more autonomous. Indeed, to move too far in this direction is to risk psychosis, the ultimate form of autonomy…The injunction that to find one’s self, one must lose one’s self, contains the truth any seeker of self-fulfillment needs to grasp. (1981, 36, 50)

What an opening to lead to the cross of Jesus Christ!

The most dramatic truth about the gospel is that it contradicts us in the way we experience ourselves as alive and compels us to redefine drastically what we mean by life. Jesus contradicts our routine in the way he contradicted the first disciples, even while he was heading toward the cross. They were the ones marked out for death; he, the dead one, was really the living.

With all that the cultural terrain presents to us, the dictum that "to find one’s self, one must lose one’s self contains a truth any seeker of self-fulfillment needs to grasp. This the church must keep in mind too. The windows of opportunity are momentous. He who has ears, let him hear what the Lord has provided for us.

References

Johnson, David L. 1985. A Reasoned Look at Asian Religions. Minneapolis: Bethany House.

Lundin, Roger. 1995. The Pragmatics of Postmodernity. In Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World. Edited by Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.

Middleton, J. Richard, and Brian Walsh. 1995. Facing the Post-modern Scalpel: Can the Christian Faith Stand Deconstruction? In Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World. Edited by Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.

Muggeridge, Malcolm. 1977. Christ and the Media. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1954. The Gay Science. In The Portable Nietzsche. Edited by Walter Kaufman. New York: Viking.

Smith, Huston. 1992. Beyond the Postmodern Mind. Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books.

Watson, David. 1976. I Believe in Evangelism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Yankelovich, Daniel. 1981. New Rules in American Life: Searching for Self-fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down. Psychology Today 15 (4): 35-91.

CHAPTER 2

THE TOUCH OF TRUTH

Ravi Zacharias

My challenge in this second address is to underscore the points of contact we still have in this desensitized culture in which we live. I have selected as my text the twenty-fourth chapter of the book of Acts. Paul is on his way to Rome. But here he stands before Felix to make his defense. Tertullus the lawyer has finished with his prosecutorial speech and thrown down the gauntlet. Paul makes his response and assures Felix that he has not violated either the law of the land or the Law of God. He is sure that the real reason for his accuser’s opposition is that he has become a follower of the resurrected Jesus Christ. Felix then makes his pronouncement on what he has heard:

Then Felix, who was well acquainted with the Way, adjourned the proceedings. When Lysias the commander comes, he said, I will decide your case. He ordered the centurion to keep Paul under guard, but to give him some freedom and permit his friends to take care of his needs.

Several days later Felix came with his wife Drusilla, who was a Jewess. He sent for Paul and listened to him as he spoke about faith in Christ Jesus. As Paul discoursed on righteousness, self-control and the judgment to come, Felix was afraid and said, That’s enough for now! You may leave. When I find it convenient, I will send for you. At the same time he was hoping that Paul would offer him a bribe, so he sent for him frequently, and talked with him. (vv. 22-26)

Many of you may have read the following poem in one commentary or another, or seen it in some devotional book. Unfortunately there is uncertainty as to who authored these lines. That aside, it may be rightly inferred that they were penned either by someone in Christian ministry or by someone very close to someone in ministry:

When God wants to drill a man, and thrill a man, and skill a man;

When God wants to mold a man to play the noblest part;

When He yearns with all His heart to create so great and bold a man

That all the world might be amazed;

Watch His methods, watch His ways.

How He ruthlessly perfects whom He royally elects.

How He hammers and hurts him, and with mighty blows converts him,

Into trial shapes of clay which only God understands,

While his tortured heart is crying and he lifts beseeching hands.

How he bends but never breaks, when his good He undertakes.

How He uses whom He chooses and with every purpose fuses him,

With mighty acts induces him to try His splendor out.

God knows what He’s about.

The longer I have been in ministry, the more I have reflected on the extraordinary ways in which God molds and shapes his chosen instruments. An old adage says: He who shapes the back for the burden, also shapes the burden for the back. The Scriptures are filled with narratives of God’s shaping process. He raised Joseph in a desert in order to use him in a palace. He raised Moses in a palace in order to use him in a desert. In that glorious passage in Luke’s third chapter we read: In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene—during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the desert. Did you hear that? There were seven larger-than-life characters punctuating the historical landscape, yet the word of the Lord came to a rather strange man wearing strange clothes and eating strange food, appointing him to stand before the Herods of his time.