In a world of many voices, it is said, each not only has an equal right to be heard, but each is equally right.  For the postmodernist it is arrogant to claim that one can absolutely know absolute truth. Yet, for the modernist Christian, he presents the claims of Christianity through apologetics, propositions, and “timeless truths extracted from the exegesis of the text.”

Facebook is the water cooler of modernist and postmodern conversations.  It claims to have 1.23 billion users.  In the first quarter of 2014 Facebook made $2.5 billion dollars in advertising.  It is an “is.” That is to say it can be used to promote great and noble agendas or it can be utilized for the worst of internet trolling.  But there is a sly and surreptitious use that often goes unnoticed.  Namely, that of really bad theology.  I call it “Facebook fortune cookies” for lack of a better label.  One usually sees it in the form of some artistic photograph with a pithy quote, or worse, a Scripture slapped on top of it.  If Scripture, it usually is taken out of context.  In their favor, the person posting it rarely knows the background of the author of the quotation or the context of the Scripture quote.  And their motive is more than likely to encourage their friends on Facebook.  But more often than not slipped in between the picture and the point is modernist or postmodern heresy.

The term “postmodern” was first used in the 1930s to describe a minor movement within the arts by Frederico de Onis.  In the 1960s French Philosopher Jacques Derrida’ began a philosophical movement known as “Deconstruction.” Essentially, the meaning of a text may well be intentioned by an author but when the pen is lifted from the page, he releases his hold on meaning. The reader(s) bring to the text their experience, culture, and own sets of meaning. Thus a text has no intentionality other than what the reader brings to it.  To insist that the text has one meaning; i.e., that meaning intentioned by the author, is to insist that it (the author’s meaning) can be the only meaning. Therefore it is oppressive and imperialistic. It is considered authoritarian since the reader of any given text brings a multiplicity of experiences and viewpoints to the text.

A text then must be de-constructed before meaning may be derived. This movement of deconstructionism broke out from the linguistic philosophical circles to affect the other disciplines. Its inertia carried itself to the Western World and is now known as postmodernism.  Each person brings his or her own set of meaning(s) to “reality” (whatever that is).  In a world of many voices, it is said, each not only has an equal right to be heard, but each is equally right.  For the postmodernist it is arrogant to claim that one can absolutely know absolute truth. Yet, for the modernist Christian, he presents the claims of Christianity through apologetics, propositions, and “timeless truths extracted from the exegesis of the text.”

This is not to say that all facets of postmodernism are wrong.  Many postmodern Christians rightly criticize the idolatry of modernism which holds that given enough time, resources, and tools one can come to one hundred percent of all the truth.  Were that true one would be God.  One can approach most of the truth, reasonably speaking.  And where God has spoken in the Scripture one can rest assured that it is, as Augustine said, “true truth.”  But inasmuch as postmodernists err in saying that there is no overarching objective truth, modernists err by idolizing truth.

More importantly, for our discussion, is the rejection of “metanarrative” by the postmodernist. A “metanarrative” is a story or proposition offered as an all-encompassing, truth-explaining, and therefore “meaning- yielding” hermeneutical thread that explains “reality.”  A friend of mine put it well: the Internet has “flattened information.”  By that he meant what used to be perceived as a person speaking with authority on a subject has gone by the way side.  A humorous internet meme put it this way, “You may have two doctorates but I read an article on Wikipedia.”

It is ironic, then, in the world of 1.23 billion Facebook users, though not all are postmodern in their thinking, that there is a jockeying for a position of planting a metanarrative truth-stake, a meme-fortune cookie with a picture.  It is as if, on one hand, we are rejecting an over-arching metanarrative while on the other hand reaching for it.  In the process, especially for the unsuspecting Christian, good theology has the metanarrative truth-stake driven through its heart. Take for example this little ditty:

Christ’s followers
Are not called to go buy
Certainty
They are called to walk by faith.

If this is not a typo it certainly is neo-orthodoxy, a leap of faith into uncertainty and out of concert with Hebrews 11:1 which defines biblical faith and Hebrews 12 which illustrates it.  Or this one, “You were not born to fail,” which appears over a church with a sunrise.  Really?  I wonder how the man born blind in John 9, Jeremiah in the cistern, Peter upside down on a cross, or Paul for years in jail would have thought of that picture?

Here is a modernist one; picture a pair of feet at a cross roads:

Everything you do is based
On the choices you make.
It’s not your parents,
Your past relationships,
Your job, the economy,
The weather, an argument,
Or your age that is to blame.
You and only you are responsible
For every decision and
Choice you make. Period.

Now imagine you are the woman at the well in John 4.  How well (pun intended) would that sit with you if you heard Jesus say this to you right off the bat?  It doesn’t harmonize well with John 1:14, “…full of grace and truth.”  I’m not persuaded there is even truth there.  It doesn’t harmonize with the truth to, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Pro 22:6 ESV), which assumes the home is a laboratory where parents intrinsically influence their children’s view of what a man and a woman are, what a parent is, how relationships are to be worked out, what authority is, and how it is to be respected (which then includes the Law).  This little ditty above seems to be based more as a knee-jerk reaction of a conservative against society rather than biblically based.  In other words, it is an excellent example of being conformed to the world (Romans 12:1, 2).

One factor which makes these modernist and postmodernist fortune cookies so slippery when they are slipped under the door is the art.  The photographs are often incredible.  I had a professor in Bible College who was a photographer.  He did a presentation once on the art of photography.  In the presentation he noted that one had to be careful to understand the message being communicated by the artist in the photograph.  The more artistic the photograph the more subtle the message, was his message to us.  The photograph often carried the weight of the message.  One tends to accept the message written if one accepts the message photographed.  And these fit well with the postmodern value of experience.  The postmodernist values the experience almost above everything and the experience of the “art message” combined with a friend sharing it has a visceral experience of meaning.

The solutions are multiple.  First, one needs to have a good understanding of Scripture.  Not just of individual texts of the Scripture.  When I visited castles in Germany there were very old tapestries hanging on the wall.  If you looked behind them you could see threads going in every direction but not grasp a sense of the overall picture.  You had to stand quite a few feet away to see the grand picture.  The same is true of Scripture.  Secondly, you must have a grasp of where culture is and where it is going.  There are a multitude of wise Christian writers who will take you behind the tapestry to trace the threads of culture from a Christian world view.

There are some very soul-hungry people that are looking for answers, wrapped in a relationship, some 1.23 billion of them standing around an electronic water cooler with whom we can chat.

Dr. Christopher Faria is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America. He served as an Army Chaplain for 26 years and as a church planter in Falcon, Colo. He lives in Colorado Springs, Colo.