Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

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something akin to the virtual reality of contemporary [high-tech] life. It is interesting that
Nietzsche describes this modernist trait well before the computer age. Lyotard also
acknowledges the impact of computer technologies, which have also affected, as he calls
it, the language game. He insists, “there is a strict inter-linkage between the kind of
language called science and the kind called ethics and politics” (Lyotard 1984:8).
Science, as such, is closely interwoven with government and information, and therefore
participates in this ‘apparent’ world.
As if Western societies were not materialistic enough already, postmodernism
engenders and encourages an even deeper level of superficiality. “Image is everything,”
and facades are encouraged. Life becomes a collage of inner fragmented experiences that
mean little. Postmodern eclecticism embraces whatever the individual deems valuable.
Fragmentation is perfectly acceptable, even if it means embracing only portions of
concepts, making truth and morality artificial, or unreal. Magical realism, for example, is
widely popular in the arts, where movies such as The Chronicles of Narnia, the Harry
Potter series, and Lord of the Rings have been hugely popular in the West.
In this postmodern, relativistic, eclectic, fragmented and nearly meaningless world,
there is little need for a religion, like Christianity that deals with sin, because good and
evil no longer exist. Sin is based upon [so-called] Christian truth, but is not the truth all
people accept. Therefore, in ‘politically correct’ postmodern culture, there is only worse
and better, and the relativists are not even sure of these. This truth relativism has deeply
impacted the church, especially historic, mainline Protestantism, which still today is
ensnared in synthesis, compromise, and accommodation, having lost its grip on the need
for antithesis, truth and dogma, which are critical to the very existence of the church. As
Francis Schaeffer argued so passionately: “Christianity demands antithesis, not as some
abstract concept of truth, but in the fact that God exists, and in personal justification”
(Schaeffer, 1990:47).
As with all relativism, postmodern claims are self-defeating, self-contradictory and
logically inconsistent. D.A. Carson said if “there is no objective truth that binds all
cultures together and evaluates them, then epistemologically, there is only truth for the
individual, or for the individual culture, or for the diverse interpreting communities found
University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa