The kids are living in a postmodern world

‘We can’t just be satisfied with resolving to give clear, biblical answers to the questions people have; we also have to be showing people the questions they ought to be asking.’
Gavin Perkins[1]



The sun is hot. Giraffes look weird. Babies cry too much. Reading is important. If you drive your car into another car you should pay for it. Right?

Wrong. Truth is truth, only if you decide that it is. This is the world we live in. It’s called postmodernism.

Theorists and psychologists and thinkers have written volumes of journals and articles considering the implications of post modernity. The kids however, probably don’t even know what you’re talking about - ‘Post-mo-what!?’

That’s ok. The kids don’t need to know what they’re talking about. But one thing is for sure, they will certainly be affected by it.

The globalisation of the world, advanced by the development of the internet and modern communications, has ensured that all across the world the idea of postmodernism is picking up pace.

Here’s a quick history lesson. The world our grandparents grew up in was steeped in modernism; this is a worldview that began in the 18th century, the time of the scientific revolution.

The basic gist of modernity was that the disciplines of science and reason could lead humanity to truth. There was truth out there, and logical experimentation would reveal it. Ultimately modernists believed that all the problems of the world (war, famine, pollution, disease etc) could be solved through science and reason. Although modernists were quicker to put their faith in human intelligence and reason than they were to put their faith in God, at least there was a general understanding that objective truth and morality could be found.

It wasn’t until around the 1960’s that this worldview morphed into what we now call postmodernism. Postmodern was, first and foremost, an art fad. Artists were encouraged, and encouraging others to bend the rules and push the boundaries to create art that challenged the popular idea of truth. Jazz music for example, is essentially built on a musician’s ability to create music that defied standard technique and elements. The ‘arts’ opened the door to postmodernism and many other aspects of life followed closely behind. All of a sudden, people were bending the rules and pushing the boundaries in ethics, religion, communication and morality.

The postmodern way of thinking allowed people to discover and invent their own truth. Gene Veith states in his book, Postmodern Times, ‘The only wrong idea is to believe in truth; the only sin is to believe in sin’.[2]

Modernity was a time where artwork was what it was. A yellow and black giraffe painted onto a canvas was exactly that; a yellow and black giraffe. Towards the business end of the 20th century though, artists decided that they could put anything they wanted onto any artistic medium they like and call it what they want, all in the name of art. And people embraced it…

Now don’t get me wrong; postmodernism has reinvented the ‘arts’ in a positive way; more than anyone will really realise. It’s not the ‘art’ that I’m concerned about. Rather, it’s the notion that bending the truth in ‘art’ encourages us to bend the truth in ‘life’.

This idea that something is only something if you say it’s something has caught on in other areas of life.

Laws only need to be followed when it suits us and when we believe it’s appropriate, we say.

Domestic violence is only violence when someone lodges a complaint, we say.

Murder is murder, unless it’s self-defence, we say.

The institution of marriage is to be upheld when and where it is reasonable to our situation, we say.

Essentially what postmodernism does is skew every single thought process we’ve ever had. It questions every single thing we thought was right, and gives us a possible outlet to do whatever we want, whenever we want, as long as we’ve thought through the consequences and justified our actions to a degree that we’re satisfied with.

This is the world that our kids are now living in.

Ironically though, postmodernists still follow ‘truths’ all the time. They eat healthy food because they know that the truth is that they’ll die of a heart attack if they eat junk food all the time. They shower daily because they know that the truth is that they’ll stink if they don’t. ‘Postmodernism’ can be a way of life and a philosophical world view if you choose it to be. Or it can simply be a word that defines that way that a number of people choose to live – lives devoid of morality and centred on self.

One person who doesn’t accept that truth is in the eye of the beholder is Dr Phil. Dr Phil, born Phil McGraw, has the second most watched show in the United States of America and earns a reported $38 million a year, telling people the truth.[3]

Dr Phil began his career on Oprah, but moved on to his own show, called Dr Phil. He now makes a living telling people the blatantly obvious.

‘We live in a world of spin,’ he says. ‘The media spin things. Politicians. Our leaders in all categories of life. But I’m a strong believer that people know truth when they hear it. So I tell the people the truth as I see it. I’ve grown up in a very reality-based world…’[4]

Dr Phil has shown millions of people around the world, that problems can be solved when someone has the guts to point out the facts and tell the truth.[5]

We can either choose to accept that things are the way they are, and nothing we can do will help our kids from being sucked into the innocuous vacuum of postmodernism truthlessness, or we can contend[6] for the truth.

Mark Driscoll, a popular missiologists says this about contending for the truth in our postmodern world, ‘Not only must God’s people personally believe the gospel of Jesus Christ, but they also must publicly contend for it. This is because the gospel is under continual attack by Satan, the ‘father of lies,’ and a seemingly endless army of false teachers…’[7]

The apostle Paul and his verbal sparring partner Peter rarely minced words as they contended for the gospel throughout Acts and the letters of the New Testament. Almost all the apostolic letters in the New Testament contain words that plead with the readers to beware false teachers, or ‘truth-benders’.

Driscoll puts Paul and Peter’s warnings about false teachers this way [8] -

‘The false teachers of Biblical times are called, dogs and evildoers[9], products of a shipwrecked faith[10], demonic liars with seared consciences[11], peddlers of silly myths[12], the spiritual equivalent of gangrene[13], chatty deceivers[14], destructive blasphemers[15] and antichrists[16]’.

Paul and Peter are not holding back. They were not willing to sit back while false teachers infiltrated the churches they had invested so much time and love into. They were not happy to just sit back and watch what was going on, rather they were knee deep in truth-contending. The way that Peter and Paul describe the false teachers of the New Testament would seem narrow-minded and intolerant in their culture, but they knew for certain that truth was truth and it was worth fighting for.

Nothing’s changed. We cannot let our kids go without a fight. We must seek to understand more about our culture and the strategies that it uses in seeking to steal our kids away from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We must then fight for it like our life depends on it.

[1] Gavin Perkins in The Briefing May 2009. Issue 368. Matthias Media.
[2] Gene Edward Veith Jr., Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), 196.
[3] The Sunday Mail, ‘The doctor will see you now’, May 24, p 62.
[4] See footnote 9.
[5] Although I often disagree with Dr Phil, at least he has the guts to stand up and call a spade a spade, or domestic violence, domestic violence (if you know what I mean…).
[6] Or ‘fight’ for the truth.
[7] In The Supremacy of Christ, p133
[8] In the Supremacy of Christ p133
[9] Phil 3:2
[10] 1 Tim 1:19
[11] 1 Tim 4:1-2
[12] 1 Tim 4:7
[13] 2 Tim 2:14-18
[14] Titus 1:10-14
[15] 2 Peter 2:1-3
[16] 1 John 2:18