It is no secret that evangelical thought today is in crisis. The crisis has blown up from within as well as from without. Just about the time international communism collapsed at the start of the 1990s, evangelical Christianity in the West began eyeballing an intellectual challenge of a magnitude it had never before confronted. The challenge was protean and elusive. It was neither a heresy that undermined the essentials of the faith, nor an obvious new style of paganism in competition with classical Christianity. It could not be strictly or reliably characterized, but at least it had a name: postmodernism.

During the past several decades, while postmodernism has altered the face of academic culture, particularly in the arts and humanities, it has only recently begun to pound at the door of evangelical thought and faith. Although "postmodern ministry" has become something of a buzz term among new urban evangelicals, it denotes more cultural style than theoretical weight. Overall, postmodern theology and philosophy have been reviled in the evangelical community as a kind of agent provocateur - an outlook and habit of thinking that fosters nihilism, moral relativism, as well as emotionalism and irrationalism.

Interestingly, these accusations are the same sorts of calumny that liberal theology brought against postmodernism over a decade ago. The caricatures are symptomatic of the breakdown of the modernist paradigm of rationality and religious discourse that has reigned since at least the seventeenth century and has powerfully influenced evangelical Protestantism. The malaise of modernism has grown profound as we enter the third millennium. The efforts of evangelical theology to shore up its fundamental commitment to scriptural authority have been damaged by its own dependence on various sorts of metaphysical theories of truth, such as inerrancy, which are neither truly biblical in origin nor persuasive to nonbelievers.

Postmodernism - or "pomo," if one wants to be colloquial - was already stirring up dust in both popular and academic literature long before it became a bone of contention in the evangelical world. The locution had even entered the American political lexicon, largely as a shibboleth of the culture wars that were then raging in the university and gaining rapt attention in the media. Social conservatives - or neoconservatives, as they are called - roundly condemned postmodernism. They deployed many of the same terms old liberals had drawn upon during the 1960s to condemn the campus protests and the arguments of what was known in those days as the New Left. They cited a familiar syllabus of dangerous and erroneous isms - anarchism, relativism, and nihilism.

Mainline liberals, called neoliberals, were equally and instinctively suspicious as well. But they had slightly different cause for anxiety. They despised postmodernists as incurably narcissistic and individualistic.

Political liberals feared they were rendering an entire generation of political activists apolitical. Theological liberals were aghast that the postmodernists seemed to be erasing their long and hard-won success in making Christianity socially relevant and scientifically acceptable. They regarded religious postmodernism tout suite as a kind of scholarly spiritualism, as a sophisticated subterfuge for speaking in tongues, where obscure and baffling pronouncements by the gurus of the movement were adulated, validated, and circulated with little shame, only to corrode the critical and moral armor of the greater populace.

At the center of the cyclone was Jacques Derrida, an Algerian Jew from France who had scorned protocol not merely by accenting the last syllable of his surname, but also by making himself into an intellectual celebrity without leaving himself beholden to any academic institution or constituency. Not only did he write book after book that was translated from French into English for the leading university publishers; he also became the darling of both the Parisian cafe scene and the American bicoastal media culture. And he did so with a panache that even the most astute academic entrepreneurs in this country could barely imagine, let alone bring off. A philosopher by training and temperament, Derrida gained fame initially, and in the beginning almost exclusively, within the literary set. Though he did not actually coin the word, Derrida became known almost singularly in the 1970s and early 1980s for having invented a new, and disarming, method for reading literary texts: deconstruction. The expression alone was unsettling, especially to those who were unable to follow his seemingly ad-libbed style of composition that came across as a curious combination of anthropological obiter dicta, couch confessions, notebook jottings, and tedious exposition of passages from ancient sources in their original languages. It was often daunting to understand what Derrida was actually saying. One had simply to follow along and try to catch the drift, which often required reading him as rapidly as he could churn out one book after another.

Because Derrida in both profile and profession shattered every conceivable mold, he became an object of both reverence and derision. He was the quintessential Frenchman, which was bad enough. A joke that made all the rounds during the early Reagan years (at a time when the Godfather movies created a mystique for the Italian Mafia) summed up all the primal fear and fascination that America's learned elites had toward the Derridean phenomenon. Question: "What happens when you meet a deconstructionist in a dark alley?" Answer: "He offers you a deal you can't understand." Though Americans feared they couldn't understand postmodernism at all, they knew they had to deal with it and to take it seriously - very seriously.

By the late 1980s postmodernism and deconstruction fortunately were no longer identified in the public mind as one and the same. In a relentless effort to communicate Gallic sensibility to America's barbaric soul, the French ministry of culture began subsidizing a stream of English translations of many of Derrida's own intellectual contemporaries. Derrida himself had never had the pride of place in Paris that he was enjoying in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and southern California. Because he was a philosopher and not one of the abundant cultural theorists of his day who spoke almost exclusively to French concerns and French dissatisfactions, his reputation in the United States far surpassed his influence on the Continent. Derrida was an exotic attraction to which American arts and letters, chafing from years of dowdy academicism, were drawn like a moth to the flame. But his popularity also whetted the American appetite for everything French and trendy. A motley assortment of postwar figures - such as Giles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Emmanuel Levinas, and Maurice Blanchot - well known for years among the Parisian set, began to see their works increasingly appear in translation. Soon the concept of postmodernism increasingly came to mean everything and anything that was au courant among the intelligentsia.

In another brief interval the phrase came to be applied to thinkers, writers, and forms of writing that were not distinctive in any sense other than they were novel and perchance controversial. Not too many years later, Marxists in both the English-speaking world and on the European continent began to speak out against the Derridean phenomenon as self-indulgent and injurious to the mobilization of the masses. Ironically, neoconservatives in this country had at the same time been making the opposite point. Deconstruction was no different than Marxism, they harangued, because it weakened cultural backbone and the norms of truth and authority. Neoconservatives, of course, had been training their assaults on the tenured radicals in academia who had gone from revolution in the streets of the 1960s to renovation of the curriculum in the 1980s, replacing Shakespeare with contemporary feminist novelists, the speeches of Lincoln with the biographies of black slaves, Plato and Aristotle with the Little Red Book of Mao-Tse Tung, and so forth. These people were Marxists, or at least Marxists of the more rarefied variety, and the fact that they also read and talked about Derrida was sufficient proof that deconstruction had been cut from precisely the same cloth.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, on the other hand, the Marxists received their comeuppance. Suddenly and spectacularly, the allure of free markets and open societies in the former Soviet client states made Marxism seem economically irrelevant. "Cultural Marxism" - an expression invented again by conservative critics of what was going on in colleges and universities - had already captured the flag during the curriculum wars of the previous decade. And these unreformed detractors now began to sneer publicly at the emergent global consumer civilization with the same verve as conservatives once had attacked the Marxists themselves. Frederic Jameson, one of America's leading cultural Marxists, referred to postmodernism as the "cultural logic of late capitalism." Updating Marxism, which for a century and a half had regularly predicted the culminating crisis of capitalism, Jameson construed postmodernism as a true sign of the end. The worldwide span of capitalism no longer depended on the accumulation and control of capital in the financial sense. Yet, Jameson insisted, it had now spread its tentacles even across former Communist societies. Through mass media and pop culture it was enchaining them not through outright poverty, but by stuffing their heads with name brands and celebrity puffery, alchemizing them into mindless consumers.

A similar, but more idiosyncratic, interpretation citing the rise of cyberculture was proffered by Jean Baudrillard, who talked about something called hyperreality. Hyperreality was "more real than real," Baudrillard crooned. It was an unreal reality where effigies produced by dancing electrons on television and computer screens were no longer distinguishable from real places and real things. Baudrillard's philosophy, which had always been mildly Marxist and was now at its height of popularity in France, inspired the ground breaking motion picture The Matrix, released in 1999. The cultural Marxists succeeded in doing in reverse what their conservative opponents had also done ten years before. They popularized the concept of postmodernism even more by virulently attacking it. Now postmodernism was becoming something of a bon mot among conservatives, even religious conservatives. Malls and megachurches were now labeled postmodern, along with the new hip, informal fashions of so-called Generation X, which was amassing publicity. When evangelical Christianity began adapting its message and ministerial modus operandi to the new cultural landscape, particularly with music and styles of worship, all at once something recognizable as the postmodern church flashed onto the screen. But past controversies continued to haunt the environs.

EVANGELICAL BROADSIDES

In his book Truth Decay: Defending Christianity against the Challenges of Postmodernism, Doug Groothuis, professor of apologetics at Denver Seminary in Colorado, launched the same vicious volley of imprecations against "postmodern Christianity" that neoconservatives had hurled against cultural Marxists a decade earlier. The "postmodern temptation," Groothuis asserted, "is to entice souls to create a self-styled spirituality of one's own, or to revert to the spiritual tradition of one's ethnic or racial group without a concern for objective truth or rationality." Furthermore, said Groothuis, postmodernism is the same as "nihilism," the fashionable view, emerging in the late-nineteenth century, that there is no supreme or enduring truth other than what anyone arbitrarily wills or chooses that truth to be. "Truth decay is a cultural condition in which the very idea of absolute, objective, and universal truth is considered implausible, held in open contempt, or not even seriously considered." The fault is wholly that of postmodernism. For "postmodernist thinkers," according to Groothuis, "the very idea of truth has decayed and disintegrated. It is no longer something knowable by anyone who engages in the proper forms of investigation and study. Truth is not over and above us, something that can be conveyed across cultures and over time. It is inseparable from our cultural conditioning, our psychology, our race, and our gender. At the end of the day, truth is simply what we, as individuals and as communities, make it to be-and nothing more. Truth dissolves into a host of disconnected 'truths."'

The value of Groothuis's book was not that it had anything of substance to say, philosophically or theologically, against postmodernism. Groothuis rarely cited or presented the offending texts of postmodernist writers, preferring instead to use the familiar rhetorical device of associating the term "postmodernist" with every avant-garde intellectual trend that has come down the pike since the Vietnam era. Postmodernism thus was equivalent to virtually all the isms of the twentieth century that traditionalists had been pounding against for more than a hundred years - libertarianism, subjectivism, feminism, relativism, sociologism, psychologism, Marxism, social constructivism, fascism, and so forth. In an interview with the online magazine Antithesis, Groothuis went so far as to identify postmodernism with everything (wrong) about American culture itself.

If you think critically, in terms of either/or or antithesis, then you can't hold contradictory beliefs, and your goal - your ideal - as a thoughtful being is to have a consistent and coherent set of beliefs that matches reality, that corresponds to fact. And I'm afraid that many Americans, in their sense of spirituality, have lost that as an intellectual ideal. It's like a smorgasbord: take a little of this and a little of that. As long as you don't get indigestion - "What's the problem!? A little bit of Buddhism, a little bit of Taoism. . . . Oh, Jesus was a wonderful spiritual figure. . . . I go to church - sometimes I go to New Age seminars - and I find they all help me. It's not what is true, what is rational, but what feels right - what seems right, what helps me and gives me a sense of community and solidarity and so forth."

Of course, Groothuis found himself making many of the same arguments against postmodernists that American and British philosophers had been making against the claims of Christianity for generations. Oddly enough, Groothuis sounded a lot like Bertrand Russell in his famous, or infamous, essay Why I Am Not a Christian. In that essay, delivered in 1927 to the National Secular Society in London, Russell lambasted the history of the church as a record of "irrational" enthusiasms. Christians are silly and stupid people because they base their beliefs on emotion rather than "argumentation," Russell huffed. Christian beliefs are nonnegotiable when it comes to the use of logical analysis and scientific evidence. The basic quarrel science has with Christianity concerns the doctrine of divine revelation, which reason finds repugnant. Russell put forth as an alternative to Christianity the method of scientific experiment and the rational sifting of details and data which, he opined, allows us to "conquer the world by intelligence." If the world is not as reason would have us envision it, then "we ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others [such as Christians] have made of it in all these ages." But now Christianity itself can play the role that Russell envisioned for science, according to Groothuis, as a "cogent explanation for a whole range of facts in accordance with the essential tenets of logic and criteria for evidence that are required for all critical thinking." Christianity must aggressively challenge "the postmodernist worldview," which "collapses in on itself." Postmodernism "is ultimately a house of cards," the same sort of metaphor Russell used for his attack on the "Christian" worldview.

EVANGELICAL COUNTERPUNCHES

In a little essay simply entitled "Postmodernism," Graeme Codrington points out that postmodernism has carried the day because the kind of rationalism both Russell and Groothuis commend has failed miserably to slake the spiritual hunger in today's world. "Postmodernism is a reaction to the rationalistic outlook of modernism," Codrington writes, "specifically a reaction to the concept that truth can be discovered by simple rationalistic induction. The most common caricature of postmodernism is that it is a complete denial of truth, thus relativizing everything. Postmodern people, however, do not deny that there is truth and objective reality. What they question is our ability to distinguish truth from nontruth."6 Codrington further suggests that this inability to draw such a distinction is what makes postmodernism attractive to believers. Christians, he maintains, do not, and cannot, make judgments concerning truth in accord with their own capacity for systematic thought. The truth that makes us free as Christians comes to us as direct dispensation from Christ. It is a result of our encounter with him. It is not the product of some convoluted, or clever, Aristotelian syllogism.

Stan Wallace adopts much the same approach. Postmodernism redresses many of the intellectual imbalances that modernist thinking, sustaining a siege over many centuries against basic Christian beliefs, left with Western civilization. Culminating in the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, modernism exalted the independent rational subject over the Deity himself in a quest for scientific certainty. It substituted the hypothesis of human progress and social control for God's providential direction and ordering of history. "Concerning reason," Wallace asserts, "postmodernists shun modernist views which inflate reason to the status of an entirely independent, neutral, unbiased and objective instrument with which truth can and will be found." On the subject of historical progress, "postmodernists are quick to point out that, contrary to the optimistic outlook of modernity, we are not 'every day, in every way, getting better and better' [Emile Coue], but rather, in some cases we are creating survival-threatening conditions by the unbridled rush toward technological 'progress.'" It is the same with the premium modernism places on individual autonomy and freedom. "Modernity placed freedom and human autonomy as one of the highest values to be embraced," while the postmodernist suggests our freedom is an illusion.

Wallace, however, concurs with Groothuis that the postmodernist critique of scientific rationality does not necessarily mean the partisans of postmodernism are dependable allies of Christianity. The postmodernist metaphysic, or theory of ultimate reality, is what Wallace calls nominalistic. Nominalism was a movement in European philosophy that began during the late Middle Ages and challenged the classical view, typically called realism, that knowledge mirrors the world as it actually is. Concepts are not "things," the nominalists proposed. They are merely tags, labels, or "names" that we attach to the specific and discrete phenomena we encounter. Postmodernism, so far as Wallace is concerned, follows the nominalist route of rendering the relationship between cognition and reality. Postmodernism is "the rejection of truth as correspondence to an objective, mind-independent world." The truths of postmodernism, or nominalism for that matter, cannot be considered truths at all, because the notion of truth implies universal validity. Postmodern statements of truth "are not objective and absolute, but subjective, bound to the individual and/or culture for their existence and validity."

Wallace, like Groothuis and many contemporary evangelical scholars, tends to confuse a supposedly Christian theory of truth with a narrow philosophical mind-set that is not indigenous, but rather only incidental, to the broader history of Christian reflection down through the ages. Realism and the "correspondence theory of truth" were the mainstay of Christian orthodoxy only during the Constantinian period of the church and the High Middle Ages (ca. 1175-1375), and they were often used as armaments of the Papacy to suppress dissent, especially among those reformers who might invoke Scripture. Martin Luther himself was hardily influenced by nominalism and constantly referred to the "bitch goddess Reason" as the most tawdry of pagan idols to which a Christian theologian might inadvertently pay homage. Very few of the church fathers were realists in the sense Groothuis and Wallace would presume. Tertullian, one of the greatest among the fathers, vowed that faith itself hinged not on any kind of rational consistency in propounding what Groothuis terms the "propositional truth" of Christianity, but was founded on a fundamental "absurdity" - that the infinite Creator took on the form of a finite creature. "What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" Tertullian sneered in dismissing the implication that there could be a Christian philosophy of any serious stature.

The theme of subjective truth, properly understood, has been far more congenial to the expansion of the gospel throughout the ages than any canon of propositional certitude. When evangelical believers undergo conversion by responding to an altar call and offer their own lives to Christ in a personal profession of faith, it is rarely the result of anyone having convinced them through careful and flawless reasoning that Jesus is their Savior. It is usually because God ministering as the Holy Spirit has grappled with them in their private depths of confusion and doubt and given them a whole new inner lease on life. Paul may have convinced a few Athenian citizens that the "Unknown God" they were worshipping was in fact the living Creator. But Paul himself was not drawn to Christianity because some philosopher offered a better argument than the Stoics, Cynics, or Epicureans of his time. Saul of Tarsus became Paul the apostle because the resurrected Lord encountered him on the road to Damascus, said only a few soul-wrenching words to him, and left him speechless and dumbstruck.

The early church, of course, did have its share of stalwart intellectual defenders of what many today would designate "the Christian world view." But they tended to have an arrogant and exclusivist attitude toward those who were not as enlightened as they were. They were called gnostics - from the Greek word gnosis meaning a special kind of illuminated knowledge. While the writings of the ancient Christian gnostics are somewhat strange and difficult to unravel, a common thread running through all of them is that one must be truly mentally adept to know who Jesus really is. The curious notion that the truths of the Christian faith can, and should, be argued in much the same way as one would prove a mathematical theorem - a notion that has gained momentum in evangelical circles in recent decades - reeks of Gnosticism. Like the ancient gnostics, the new antipomo apologists measure themselves by a false standard and try to be something they are not - secular philosophers - when they should instead be communicating and sharing the heart of Jesus. Much of the current evangelical polemics against postmodernism also has a gnostic edge to it, inasmuch as postmodernists, whoever they might be, are generally accused of being shallow, stupid, excessively emotional or touchy-feely, and uncritical.

But that of course is the same as what the gnostics had in mind when they divided the world between those who truly knew who Jesus was in a philosophical and sophisticated way, and the blind masses, who clung to popular prejudices and superstition. The postmodernist preoccupation with popular culture, which many evangelical theologians disdain, is not necessarily an unchristian fascination with sex and celebrities, but a form of cultural sensitivity and intellectual humility that ultimately offers an evangelical opportunity that hard-core Christian rationalists overlook. Jesus targeted his ministry toward social misfits as well as the intellectually and morally challenged - called "sinners" in the Gospels - rather than to those who held out the greatest promise of becoming theologically correct. It was the Pharisees, not Jesus, who were constantly attempting to rationalize the message of God's kingdom and break it down into conceptually compact segments that made good, philosophical sense. Jesus' preference for speaking in parables surely would have evoked the same kind of clucking about nonsensical rhetoric for which postmodernist thinkers are regularly indicted. It would be gratuitous to call Jesus a postmodernist (throughout the ages he has been identified as the champion of virtually every cause by virtually every advocate of that cause); but it should give us pause that his contemporaries put him down for many of the same grievances for which some attack postmodernists today.

POSTMODERNISM IS CONGENIAL WITH EVANGELICALISM

The bottom line is that postmodernism is neither an amoral and anti-Christian movement, as familiar hyperbole would have it, nor any kind of movement at all. It is simply a descriptor or locator for the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, for better or for worse. As Lord Chesterton reminded us, we marry ourselves to the spirit of the times at the risk of widowhood, but we cannot refuse to consort with it either. The sorts of philosophical trends known as postmodernism have their own genesis and cachet. We need to evaluate them on their own terms, not by hastily lumping them together with anything and everything that disturbs the Christian intellectual and seems to be the common denominator in all manifestations of moral and cultural "decay." Indeed, as we shall see, the postmodernist revolution in philosophy - as opposed to the general usage of the term "postmodernism" in contemporary culture - has tendered an environment where the Christian gospel can at last be disentangled from the centuries-long, modernist gnarl of scientism, rationalism, secularism, humanism, and skepticism.

Daniel Ryan Street offers a trenchant rationale for this sort of revisionary reading of postmodernism. He notes that ever since the arrival of modernism, which historians tend to correlate with the work of Rene Descartes, Christian theology has been in a sort of self-protective funk. Descartes, of course, laid down the philosophical pylons for what has come to be known as foundationalism - the view that all sure knowledge must rest on those clear and indubitable premises that human thought is capable of ferreting out. Descartes is considered a classical, or metaphysical, rationalist; but foundationalism truly took wing in the seventeenth century with the rise of British empiricism, and soared to glory in the early twentieth century with the development of logical positivism. The latter school of philosophy sought to model all cogent propositions, or statements of truth, on what it termed the "verification principle" - the rule that all claims about this world, or the supernatural world, must go before the bar of experiment, observation, and the evidence of the senses. Foundationalism, like communism, all at once collapsed, according to Street, because of its "referential incoherence." It demanded a foundation upon which to assert that foundations were needed. "The statement that all knowledge must be either indubitable, incorrigible, or inferred from indubitable or incorrigible beliefs, is itself not indubitable or incorrigible, or inferred from one of these classes of beliefs. Therefore, it cannot constitute knowledge."

Ironically, during the modern era the mainstream of evangelical theology acquired the habit of defending the truths of faith and the authority of the Bible in terms of the foundationalist argument. The discussion went something like the following: God, the Scriptures tell us, is absolute and sovereign. If we are authentic in our faith, we cannot allow any loose ends or ragged edges to how we conceptualize God's essence and authority. Groothuis lays out what he himself calls a "minimal foundationalism." The kind of foundationalism necessary to apologetics need not be Cartesian through and through. Groothuis asserts:

There is no reason to claim that all our beliefs can be deductively proven from indubitable first principles, or that all our beliefs must be of necessary truths (a triangle has three sides) or be based on empirical evidence (the earth is round). Some beliefs are "properly basic," in that they are not logical necessities, but neither are they proven on the basis of other things more certainly known. One candidate for a properly basic belief is "there is a real past." One cannot marshal evidence for this; it is a presupposition of normal thought.

Groothuis goes on to say that "what is essential to foundationalism is simply that some core of beliefs do serve as first principles; they are not derived from other beliefs, and they are not relative to cultures or individuals." He further contends that Christian beliefs can somehow be defended in this fashion. "There are essential truths of logic that are necessary for all intelligible thought and rational discourse, Christian or otherwise." When Paul confronted the Athenian philosophers at Mars' Hill as narrated in the book of Acts, he utilized these same protocols of reasoning and logic to which Christian apologetics should be attentive, according to Groothuis. Postmodernism rejects these protocols. Thus, within the parameters of foundationalism, "the best way to defend the truth of Christ is by presenting the Christian vision as the most cogent explanation for a whole range of facts in accordance with the essential tenets of logic and criteria for evidence that are required for all critical thinking."

THE FOUNDATIONALIST PREMISE

What Groothuis terms "minimal foundationalism," however, is actually an updated version of what the Western philosophical tradition has dubbed "commonsense empiricism," which has prevailed in various guises in English and American thought for centuries. Commonsense empiricism was initially a response to the extreme skepticism of David Hume in the eighteenth century. Hume came up with ingenious arguments to demonstrate that we cannot be certain that even the sun will rise tomorrow, or that the ground on which we are standing is the same terra firma on which we rested even a moment ago. The German thinker Immanuel Kant reacted to Hume by elaborating what came to be known as the "critical philosophy," which overshadowed Western thought for the entire next century. Kant's critical philosophy was one comprehensive variant of minimal foundationalism. Kant maintained that we do indeed have a certain basic understanding of the world we experience because our minds are somehow hardwired, if we may employ a contemporary metaphor, to see and interpret things in certain ways. Kant referred to these tendencies toward a universal and common human experience as "a priori (prior to all experience)" concepts of "understanding." The commonsense features of knowledge that Hume with his extreme skepticism sought to doubt away were what Kant restored as a priori "categories" of cognition. Because of Kant's heavy and not easily translatable Teutonic style, Anglo-American philosophers adopted their own grammar and rhetoric for embroidering many of the exact same themes.

Most of the evangelical broadsides against postmodernism, therefore, have been couched as an indictment of the moral relativism allegedly inherent in it. But these critiques have masked what is perhaps the real animus - the centuries-old hostility between the Anglo-American and European Continental traditions of philosophy. The fact that most attacks on postmodernism have been aimed at either generalities or caricatures of the movement, rather than at specific writers or the texts representing their arguments and positions, suggests that the clash is far more one of apparel than of substance. At the same time, character and style may not be easily disentangled. The view that nowadays in the English-speaking world of philosophy is termed "foundationalism" derives from more ponderous intellectual premises put forth during the seventeenth century. The foundationalist outlook propelled the scientific revolution and ultimately led to the secularist mugging of Christianity.

Faith and philosophy have largely remained compatible in Continental thought, notwithstanding the kind of atheistic materialism that gained a foothold during the French Revolution. But in Anglo-American thought around 1900 under the progressive influence of such figures as Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Anthony Flew, and of course Bertrand Russell himself, the mood turned antireligious. The positivist principle that for any statement to be meaningful it must be subject to the possibility of empirical verification quickly came to dominate the new approach in Anglo-American circles known as "analytical philosophy." The positivist attitude served as a convenient truncheon to beat down the significance of all theological concerns and what came to be somewhat contemptuously labeled "God talk." Foundationalism was riding high in the saddle, but it was in no way sympathetic to the defense of the Christian faith. Quite the opposite was taking place.

The antifoundationalist tack of postmodernism, as evangelical philosopher Bruce Ellis Benson has pointed out, is actually more Christian in many senses of the term than foundationalism itself. In his Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on Modern Idolatry, Benson argues that postmodernism challenges evangelical thought to acknowledge that it is guilty of what from the biblical perspective is considered the greatest of sins - the sin of idol-worship. Because evangelical thinking has adopted by its own means and measure the criteria for conceptual adequacy that were put forth centuries ago by modern philosophy, it has ingested that unique fashion of idolatry. Modernist idolatry, according to Benson, encompasses three main characteristics: (1) a critical stress on the autonomy of the individual, (2) "a strong confidence in the powers of human reason in general and the rationality of the individual," and (3) the pure "objective" character of reason itself. All these three commitments are interrelated and tend to emphasize the priority of the human or subjective stance, even when people employ that stance to underwrite the "objective" reality of God or Scripture.

The point was made repeatedly and with a broad brush by Martin Heidegger, who more than Derrida or Nietzsche should be considered the precursor of postmodernism. For Heidegger, the genesis of modernism as a philosophical movement occurs with Rene Descartes's Meditations, first published in 1641 as Meditationes metaphysiques. Descartes sought to replace medieval ecclesiastical authority, based on dogma and tradition, with the primacy of unaided human reason. In the Meditations Descartes employs the method of radical skepticism, or "hyperbolic doubt," in questioning whether there are any genuine philosophical foundations upon which clear and firm knowledge can be constructed. After he has doubted away even what would appear to be the most commonsense assumptions about how things are - for instance, the existence of a world external to the mind - Descartes concludes that there is one fact of experience that is truly indubitable, the "I," or self, that performs the doubting.

Although this insight was originally set forth by Augustine in the fifth century, Descartes adjusted it to the problem of modern epistemology. If the one thing that thought can think without doubt is the "I" that performs the thinking, then the possibility of thought must arise from that self-certifying reality, ego as a "thinking entity (res cogitans)." The true foundation of truth is the "I" that authenticates the truth. According to Heidegger, the Cartesian insurgency in thought occasions a usurping of the throne of the infinite God and his replacement with the human subject. Cartesianism is the beginning of what Nietzsche terms "the death of God," as we shall show. Modern evangelical thought has unwittingly bought into the Cartesian assumption about the nature of truth. Foundationalism is simply a less tendentious term for modernism. Even a minimal foundationalism, however, does not mitigate the idolatrous predisposi¬tion of all modernism. The kings of ancient Israel would not acknowledge the prophetic claim that, even though they gave lip service to Yahweh, they had actually profaned the temple with the images of the gods of foreign nations. So also, contemporary evangelical theologians have not realized that, although they rhetorically maintain God's unshakable power and presence, they do so by following modern philosophy to midnight worship on the high places.

THE REFORMATION CONTEXT

In order to understand why modernism and bona fide evangelical faith are mismatched with each other, we need a quick refresher course on what happened intellectually in the West during the two centuries that followed the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. In 1517 Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk from the eastern part of Germany, posted his famous 95 Theses on Halloween, the eve of All Saints' Day. The event sparked a theological and political upheaval throughout Europe that would not abate for at least the next hundred and fifty years. In the 95 Theses Luther mainly challenged the claim of the Pope in Rome to have absolute authority over the souls of individual Christian believers. No church or church prelate can remit sins and grant assurance of salvation, Luther insisted. God alone is the final arbiter of each human being's eternal destiny. Each position Luther took implied a further, and more radical, formulation of what historians have termed the "Protestant principle." The Protestant principle consists in the general rule that there can be no confusion at any level between divine and human prerogatives. During the sixteenth century it could be summarized in the Latin maxim of "initus non capax infiniti (the finite is incapable of [expressing] the infinite)." Luther's attack on the Pope called to task the long-standing Catholic view that God's fellowship with humanity requires both priestly mediators and learned theologians to interpret the divine will and message. There can be no go-between, according to Luther, when it comes to matters of conscience. God speaks immediately to the believer in prayer, worship, and the reading of Scripture. The Bible, in particular, which the Catholic Church had heretofore regarded as opaque in its meaning to the untutored layperson, is God's holy Word. Even the uneducated plowman, if he can read at all, must read the Bible in order to comprehend the whole of God's will and plan for his life.

The notion that one cannot attain heaven without an intimate, personal relationship between the believer and the God in whom he believes is the first of three crucial Reformation tenets. Luther came to this position gradually in his young manhood as he agonized over what seemed to him the impossible task of doing enough good works to obtain favor with God. In a moment of both desperation and clarity, Luther made a discovery about the meaning of Scripture that both turned his conventional world upside down and precipitated a revolution in Western thought itself. Luther had been struggling all his life with a Catholic theology that treated salvation much like a double-entry bookkeeping system. Entry into heaven depended mostly on the balance of good and bad deeds in this life, which could be affected as well by certain "excess" merits contributed by departed saints, or by "infusions" of divine grace. Prayers for dead relatives, and even certain financial fillips known as "indulgences," could also make a difference. It was the practice of granting indulgences, of course, that specifically kindled Luther's ire and spurred him to challenge the Catholic prelates to debate by posting the 95 Theses. But Luther's opposition to indulgences rested squarely on his realization that no effort of a mere mortal to make restitution for sin could possibly meet the standards of an infinite and most holy God. One cannot achieve human "righteousness" even by the most passionate and pious works. The only real righteousness, as Paul tells us in Romans, is attained "through the righteousness that came from faith."

The first tenet was captured in a slogan that became the very watchword of the Reformation - "sola fide (by faith alone)." The second tenet was its necessary corollary - "sola scriptura (by Scripture alone)." The unconditional authority of Scripture, in contrast with the Roman pontiff's pretense to absolute authority, secured what Luther termed the "freedom of a Christian" in relationship to Christ. Through this relationship the Christian learns to trust in what God is saying to him or her through his revealed Word. It is the Holy Spirit who illumines the conscience of the Christian reading the Scripture and discloses the unmistakable meaning of the text. The Christian is subject to no other human being in construing that meaning, or in securing one's own eternal salvation. At the same time, Luther insisted, each is subject to every other believer in Christian love.

Nonetheless, it is the relationship of the believer to Christ, and to Christ only, that matters in the final consideration. Thus we can adduce the third tenet of the Reformation, known as the "priesthood of all believers," which roughly corresponds to the Latin "communio sanctorum." The term "priest" was intended in both an ironic and a literal sense. Moses had called the nation of Israel to be a nation of priests. Luther understood the church in the same manner. But for Luther the term "priest" referred to the faithful and sanctified believer, not to a special office or function. Hence, the "priesthood of all believers" signified the flattening of all ecclesiastical hierarchies in the administration of God's grace. In the grand summation the believer must stand before God and come to a reckoning with him, and him alone.

The singularity of personal belief and the sovereignty of individual conscience were construed almost exclusively as religious considerations during the sixteenth century. Yet by the early-seventeenth century they had been rationalized as well as secularized. The Reformation principle of Christian liberty gradually morphed into the modern idea of political liberty and what Thomas Jefferson dubbed the right to the "pursuit of happiness." The consequence of this transformation was staggering. If the individual is accountable both to God in the religious sphere and to one's fellow citizens in the political arena (just as one is responsible to all other believers within Christ's kingdom), then God's revealed Word cannot be regarded as some kind of privileged truth accessible to only the cadre of believers. It must be commensurate somehow with our own natural knowledge.

Reformation thought had drawn an unmitigated distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" knowledge of God. This distinction was drawn from the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, the same book of the Bible that had provoked Luther to change his mind on the means of salvation. Although "what can be known about God is plain" to all humanity (Rom. 1:19 NRSV), Paul writes, original sin and the corruption of mind and the will have led them to "futility" in their thinking, "exchanging the splendour of immortal God" and the "truth" concerning the divine for an idolatrous "lie." The Reformation theology of Luther, Calvin, and their confreres had stressed the unqualified necessity of approaching God through faith and surrendering the intellect. Luther himself had regarded the preference for rational examination in coming to conclusions about God as a profound sort of spiritual prostitution. He referred to reason itself as "that bitch goddess." Yet by the turn of the eighteenth century the distinction between the natural and revealed truth about God had been fatefully blurred. Modernist rationalism was triumphant, and leading-edge philosophers such as John Locke in England began to speak routinely of the inherent "reasonableness of Christianity."

EMPIRICISM AND RATIONALISM

In Locke's view, and in most of modern philosophy in England and America, the criterion of reasonableness was the natural intellect. Locke's philosophy, which had evolved from the so-called scientific experimentalism of Francis Bacon a century earlier, centered on the contention that all our ideas come directly from sense experience. "Let us then," Locke wrote, "suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: - How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself." Although this outlook came to be known as "empiricism," it can be better characterized in terms of what philosophers nowadays term "physical realism." All symbolic representations are not, as philosophy would later hold, merely subjective constructs of the mind. They signify real things that exist in the external world of matter.

Locke was the first Western thinker to advocate religious toleration, chiefly because he maintained there is no way that the natural knowledge can be reconciled effectively with revealed truth. The only consistent and dependable claims we can make are scientific ones, which have their own kind of "self-evidence." Biblical claims are beyond the ken of natural reason and are not open to theoretical dispute. What makes Christianity reasonable and persuasive is not its account of God's miraculous and supernatural effects, but its ethical effect on each one of us. Christianity, in short, has a pragmatic purpose; it serves as the moral guarantor of democratic politics. Since revealed truth cannot be adjudicated by the fallible intellect, it must be either discarded as a serious prospect for thought and reflection, or left as an item of private conviction. The charge that postmodernism is the source of contemporary subjectivism and relativism, therefore, turns out to be historically inaccurate. The pathology is implanted in the marrow of modernism itself.

Because of his emphasis on the priority of sense knowledge and the liberty of the individual to know and understand God in accordance with his or her own natural intellect, Locke is generally considered the father of modern theological, as well as political, liberalism. The term "liberal" has its etymology in the Latin word liber, which means "[free] will." Locke's philosophical and theological notions, however, were not thoroughly developed or completely consistent. Throughout the eighteenth century - the so-called age of reason - Lockean empiricism functioned more as a cultural sentiment than as a tradition of thought. By the same token, it was not Locke per se, but a Scotsman by the name of Thomas Reid, who had the most forceful and long-standing impact on the theory of knowledge in both a philosophical and theological context.

Reid, at one time a member of the Presbyterian clergy, died in 1796 at the age of eighty-six. His lifetime coincides almost precisely with the time interval that historians mark as the epoch of the Enlightenment. Reid founded what came to be designated the Scottish "commonsense school of philosophy," sometimes identified as "commonsense realism." Rejecting all forms of rationalism and idealism that had preceded him, Reid argued that the objects we experience through the senses are not ideas or representations, but the things themselves. All human beings are capable, according to Reid, of knowing these objects, which he simply dubbed "facts." One does not need a complicated philosophical prospectus concerning how mental phenomena conform to physical events, or entities. What you see, literally, is what you get. In expatiating on this view of knowledge, Reid appealed to universal common sense, the consensus gentium of antiquity, which all human beings possess. Reason is not some abstruse faculty of a highly trained savant. The philosopher himself merely clarifies at a conceptual level what the average untutored person already knows for certain.

Thus Reid gave voice in a philosophical idiom to the anticlerical and egalitarian sympathies of the Reformers, who had demanded a level playing field for simple believers and theologians alike. The upshot, however, was that Reid's commonsense (or what might be described merely as a no-nonsense) approach to philosophy served, if only inadvertently, to deny any special authority to a theology of the revealed word. The natural light of reason, which Reid identified with the evidence of the senses, is sufficient. Indeed, common sense itself is the foundation of our knowledge of God. Common sense is "the inspiration of the Almighty." Reid argued, not inconsistently, that if God had wanted us to know him in any way other than through common sense, he would have endowed all human beings at birth with different habits of cognition. That common sense itself could be a darkened species of intelligence resulting from the fall, as Paul had suggested, did not occur to Reid. In many ways Reid's thinking was the purest expression of the age of reason, which the twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead quipped was actually, as in medieval times, a grand "age of faith" - faith in the power of rationality alone, unaided by the means of grace. Reid indeed held that our own intelligence points to a divine intelligence. In a curious way he also seemed to be saying that the "fact" that ordinary believers experience the reality of God points to the fact of God himself. There is no perceptible difference between the rationality of common sense and the alleged irrationality of simple faith. The difference presupposes a philosophical view of reason that is incompatible with our ordinary human intelligence, which is nonetheless divinely endowed.

Reid's influence was felt in England, but it was most pronounced in America. And it was the marriage of Reid's commonsense philosophy with evangelical Methodism and Calvinism along the American frontier during the nineteenth century that gave rise to what a century later came to be labeled by critics of Christian evangelicalism, usually disparagingly, as fundamentalism. Reid's ideas early found a home at Princeton Seminary in the early 1800s and served as the academic infrastructure for the articulation of the fundamentalist standpoint a century later. Of course, the disparaging term "fundamentalist" was originally appropriated by particular evangelicals themselves in the early 1900s. They used it to tell themselves apart from modernists, particularly in defending the traditional story of creation as compared with evolutionary biology, and in insisting on the veracity of the biblical text as opposed to the new historical criticism imported from German universities.

While German philosophy seemed to encourage subjectivistic and relativistic readings of the Bible, Reid's commonsense method could easily be deployed to further the position that the authority of the Bible is indisputable and that Scripture means exactly what it says. According to Harriet Harris, a historian of theology, Reid's commonsense realism appealed strongly to the evangelical mind of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries because it could easily be conscripted to "defend the perspicuity of Scripture." Moreover, "as new interpretative methods emerged, evangelicals protected the beliefs of the common man against the learned judgments of the scholar and biblical critic." Evangelicals asserted the truth of the "plain sense" of any given biblical passage, which was at the same time the inference of the "plain man." The plain sense of the text, therefore, was tantamount to common sense. Because nature never "lies," said Reid, God hence cannot confuse or mislead when he offers to even the most abject sinner his redeeming and holy Word, according to these early fundamentalists. Scripture is lucid and obvious on its own terms. It does not demand any sophisticated hermeneutic concocted by trained theologians and philosophers. Just as the natural mind presents us with "facts" of experience that cannot be explained away by any skeptical or convoluted strategy of analysis, so the Bible is a collection of facts about God and his workings in human history. When we believe what the Bible says, we are merely affirming what the human mind in a sense already apprehends. The implication of this view, as it was for Reid, is that atheism, or unbelief, is actually ignorance and stupidity. Conversion to the Christian faith could not be construed strictly as the acceptance of a superior truth disclosed to those who set aside reason and take the "leap of faith," as was the opinion of most religious thinkers before and throughout the Reformation.

In consequence, evangelicalism unwittingly succumbed to the kind of facile and expedient rationalism that the Reformers had valiantly exposed in Catholic doctrine and sought to expunge from the practice of the Christian faith. As Harris notes, evangelical apologetics from the nineteenth century onward impaled itself on the same sort of philosophical contradictions that the Reformers had detected in both Scholasticism and the Christian humanism of the Renaissance, wherein "Scripture is defended rationally even while reason is to submit to it." Over the long haul the commonsense hermeneutic has "undermined the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit" while contributing to a "preoccupation with a factually inerrant Bible." The Reformation principle of sola fide was fatefully and coyly distorted. The Reformers had never intended that what Reid's critics called the "judgment of the crowd" should somehow become the touchstone for biblical authority. But that is exactly what transpired. The fundamentalist-modernist controversy was in many ways an intellectual variant of the gangs-of-New-York saga, where two hostile crowds from similar stock for generations were locked in bloody combat over what was by and large the same, paltry piece of territory.

THE END OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT

Unlike modernism and contemporary evangelicalism, both of which are blue-blooded heirs of the age of reason, postmodernism sets its face against what it denotes as "the Enlightenment project." By the mid-seventeenth century this project arose with the failure of the Reformation amid sectarian anarchy and Europe's debilitating wars of religion. It was in every respect the antithesis of the Reformation project, which sought to purify Christianity of its tendency to compromise the glory and majesty of God with human conceits and agendas. The Reformers' distinction between the natural knowledge of God and supernatural revelation was not a mere conceptual courtesy. It served as the underwriter of faith in the genuine, biblical sense. When Luther admonished us to "let God be God," he was expressing the Protestant principle to the fullest. Any effort to make God a plain item of common sense is both gratuitous and idolatrous. But evangelicalism in its century-long flirtation with commonsense philosophy, pseudoscientific rationalism, and the defense of theological "evidence" and biblical "facts" has sunk deeply into the type of anthropocentrism that the founders of the Protestant faith condemned. The peril does not reside in the relativizing propensities of postmodernism. Those tendencies can be found in modernism from its very inception.

What postmodernism as a philosophical movement has accomplished to date is to show up the idolatrous and relativistic proclivities of modernism as a whole. When postmodernism attacks the correspondence theory of truth, or the view of thought that the American philosopher Richard Rorty portrays as a "mirror of nature," it is not relegating knowledge, like Cain, to exile in some distant land of Nod. It is calling attention to the finite boundaries of human knowledge and meaning so that God can continue to speak and disclose himself from his infinite throne on high. We must, of course, admit that the preponderance of present-day thinking that fashions itself as postmodern is not concerned at all with either the claims or demands of classic faith. And we must also concede that there remains within certain strains of contemporary cultural theory a celebration of the turbulent flux of signs, which the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, considered by many as the prophet of postmodernism, heralded "the death of God."

The destruction of the Jewish temple at Jerusalem in 70 by Roman armies created the climate for the rapid spread of Christianity throughout the empire. Thus likewise, the slow dissolution of the old familiar pieties and sureties among the emerging generation prepares a path for the coming of a strong and dynamic new relational faith, which Jesus himself required of his followers. Postmodernism may not be redemptive of its own accord, but it can be rightfully considered as a kind of reveille for evangelicalism. Taken as a whole, postmodernism is neither a social (anti-)morality nor an assault on the citadels of knowledge. Postmodernism cannot, and should not, be equated at all with relativism and skepticism, which for the most part are modernist ideologies. Postmodernism is au fond (at base) a theory of language that lays bare what the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard called the "infinite qualitative difference" between the exhibitions of human intellect and the splendor of our eternal maker. By relativizing language and the theories of signification, postmodernism makes it possible to honor the immeasurable holiness of God in a manner that modern philosophy never could countenance. It also allows for a visionary critique of the myopia and idolatry into which biblical Christianity over the past two centuries has lapsed.

In the succeeding chapters we shall explore the ways in which the postmodernist challenge foreshadows what might be designated as the Next Reformation in the history of the Christian church. As Harris points out, "The roots of the fundamentalist mentality are not the same as the roots ofevangelicalism," even though evangelicalism and fundamentalism have been ineradicably intertwined since the start of the nineteenth century. The roots of evangelicalism can be found in the historic Reformation tradition, which itself consisted of a quest to rediscover the prephilosophical core of Christian experience. One does not need to resort to such tendentious terms as "postevangelical," as writers such as David Tomlinson do, to wrest faith away from the idolatry of fundamentalism. To stand up to both liberalism and fundamentalism we need merely to overcome modernism. If by evangelicalism we mean a commitment in every generation to the perennially saving message and person of Jesus himself, then we do not have to depend on a historically conditioned and beguiling epistemology that sprang largely out of the social and political ruins of England in the mid-seventeenth century after a disastrous civil war.

The Next Reformation will be one that, like the Reformation of the sixteenth century, does not leave any stone unturned in the unremitting pursuit of a compelling vision of the transcendent and mighty God. Along with the Reformers of the sixteenth century we must again exclaim, "Back to the Bible!" But we must insist, as the Reformers themselves did, on a hermeneutic of Scripture and a habit of theological thinking that truly allows God to be God, that does not box him in with some comfortable but subtly irreverent reliance on our own natural intellect. The next generation of reformers will also cry, "Back to the righteousness that comes through faith alone." Back to the Word not as a logical construct, but as the living power and presence, as the testament of the One who gave his life for us! Back to the revelation of the Spirit that searches our hearts and forces us to our knees in repentance for our intellectual pride and arrogance! Forward to the time when we must meet him face to face!

The above was Chapter 1, Postmodernism and the Crisis of Evangelical Thought, from The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity, by Carl Raschke.