by Chris Alexion, Copyright January 03, 2007, all rights reserved. 33 views
Postmodernism's emphasis on the limitations of human inquiry is (or should be) well taken. The facts don't "speak for themselves," and epistemological humility requires that we never claim to have fully "arrived," intellectually speaking, in this life. Our confidence should be mingled with graciousness and tact as we realize that our humanity affects, to some extent, even our approach to Scripture.
But postmodernism's problem is that it pulls up short. As Doug Jones points out in the quote I posted earlier, postmods aren't rebellious enough; they still seek meaning–what's left of it–within the confines of human experience. Yet this is precisely the modern flaw, and unless postmoderns get rid of it, they won't get any farther than Locke and friends. Postmodernity's skepticism of modern claims is good, but without a supernatural perspective, their skepticism can never come in to harbor. To borrow Peter Leithart's words, the problem is the postmodern rejection of an eschaton, a final reckoning in which our tentative human inquiries do arrive at certainty.
Claims to absolute truth, in the postmodern view, are simply tools of oppressive majoritarian power structures. But this claim only makes sense within the Christian framework postmodernism doesn't like. Instead of treading water for itself, relativism is splashing around on somebody else's wakeboard. By failing to look outside human experience, in other words, we lose all chance of assigning meaning to concepts like oppression or suffering.
As usual, Solomon's conclusions in Ecclesiastes are powerful antidotes to both modernism and postmodernism. The Preacher considers "all the oppression that is done under the sun":
And look! The tears of the oppressed,
But they have no comforter–
On the side of their oppressors there is power,
But they have no comforter. (4:1)
Solomon realized that given a completely secular, naturalistic perspective on human experience–a perspective "under the sun"–the only statement we can make about oppression is that it happens. It may bite to be the oppressed, but that's the only judgment to which we're entitled; for all their tears, the victims have no ultimate comfort. Nor do the oppressors fare any better. They may have power and control now, but "they have no comforter." And the same event that befalls beasts happens to all men, predator as well as prey. "[A]s one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath; man has no advantage over animals, for all is vanity" (3:19).
The vanity of human suffering is painfully clear within the framework of materialistic evolution. If one random collection of molecules (called a "majority") happens to enjoy torturing and extinguishing another random collection of molecules (called a "minority"), what does it really matter? Even worse, what will this mean when we're all dead? Efforts to stem the AIDS epidemic, civil rights battles, and the end of South African apartheid lose all moral significance. Eons from now, the overgrown streetlight we call the sun will sizzle and short out, plunging the solar system into limitless night. Inside this ruined cosmos, where life may never again struggle into its absurd existence, who's left to care?
The Christian perspective doesn't seek certainty in Cartesian rationalism; nor does it want to ignore questions of oppressive majorities or human rights. But without the Christian perspective–without the eschaton Leithart mentions–these questions themselves become not only undefined but ridiculous. In the skeptical worldview lived "under the sun," human joys and miseries are so much cosmic BS in the cowpen of eternity.
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