Dethroning God: The Collapse of Orthodox Christian Theology in a Postmodern and Postsecular World

By Dr. Larry Ivan Vass

Postmodernism has spawned a dichotomy of relativistic views on whether God is sovereign or not and whether if He even exists at all. If everything is relative, how can God be sovereign, and how can Jesus Christ be the only way to God? What is right for you may not be right for me!

Dethroning God is a book that defines postmodernity. It discusses the moral consequences of the ideas of philosophers from John Locke and Friedrich Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida and Stanley Fish; how parallelism influences intertextuality in the Bible; the cultural manifestations of late capitalism, postmodernism, and anthropology; how contextualization competes with globalization; and the postmodern and postliberal challenges to modern liberal Christian theology.

Finally, it defines and explores the sovereignty of God, his sovereign will as Creator of all things, how postmodernity denies the sovereign will of God, how his sovereign will infringes on liberty, and what attitudes we should have toward the Creator of the universe.

Doctor Vass rejected being a member of the Christian family for years. Being made alive has fostered a desire for Jesus Christ so fervently that Doctor Vass feels as though he has no option but to counter the culture that has for a hundred years tried to marginalize God and his redemptive work through his Son. There is a noticeable lack of theology today of proper doctrine and understanding of just who God is. Not only did He create all that there is, He owns and controls all that there is. Teaching and preaching abound on peripheral matters, but professing Christians are woefully deficient in understanding the nature and character of God and how secular beliefs impact what understanding Christians have. Doctor Vass earned his PhD in theology researching and writing on the reformed view of God in the postmodern world. The time has come to share this information with the world, especially the Christian world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Sep 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512797275

Dr. Larry Ivan Vass

Doctor Vass earned his BS degree from Virginia Tech, his DDS from the Medical College of Virginia, his MDiv and his PhD in theology from Trinity Theological Seminary. Doctor Vass served as pastor for four and a half years at Southwinds in Waldorf, Maryland and is currently an itinerant preacher, Sunday School teacher, and a full-time dentist. He and his wife, Charlotte, have three children and six grandchildren. They live in LaPlata, Maryland, a bedroom community of Washington, D.C.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 Dr. Larry Ivan Vass.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®)

Copyright © 2001 by Crossway,

a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

All rights reserved.

ESV® Text Edition: 2016

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

1 [phone]

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5127-9728-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-9729-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-9727-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017912323

WestBow Press rev. date: 09/14/2017

Contents

Part 1

The Development From Postmodernism To Postsecularism

Chapter 1: Postmodernity Defined

Looking at Modernity to Understand Postmodernity

Defining Postmodernity

Philosophical Pluralism

The Two Camps of Postmodernists

Religion’s Response to Postmodernity

Chapter 2: The Metanarrative of Self-Improvement and Self-control

The Moral Consequences of John Locke

Friedrich Nietzsche: The Predecessor to Postmodernity

Postmodern Exegesis Seen in a Different Historical Context

Chapter 3: The Influence of the French on Postmodernism

Jean-Francois Lyotard: Rejection of the Metanarratives of Modernity

Michel Foucault: Power Relationships

Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction

Pauline Rosenau: Deconstruction Analysis

Stanley Fish: "The Interpretive Community and Intertextuality

Chapter 4: Parallelism and Intertextuality in the Bible

Features of Postmodernity

Chapter 5: Postmodernism: Cultural Manifestation of Late-Capitalism

Chapter 6: Postmodernism and Anthropology

David Tracy: What Can Save Theology from Mere Ideology?

Chapter 7: Contextualization v. Globalization

Biblical Theology v. Systematic Theology

Chapter 8: Postmodern and Postliberal Challenges to Modern Liberal Christian Theology

Rudolf Bultmann: Demythologizing the Bible

Chapter 9: Is Postsecularism Poised to Replace Postmodernism?

The Normative Postsecular (Kantian v. Hegelian tradition)

The Sociological, Historical, and Political Postsecular (Model v. Practice Pluralism)

Phenomenological Postsecularism (Individual v. Collective Experience)

Part 2

The Living God Is Sovereign

Chapter 10: The Sovereignty of God Defined

The Sovereign Exercise of God’s Power

The Sovereignty of God in the Implementation of His Mercy

The Sovereignty of God in the Implementation of His Love

God’s Sovereignty Can Be Seen in the Exercise of His Grace

God Shows His Sovereignty in Whom He Delegates His Power

Chapter 11: God’s Sovereign Will: Creator of All Things

Proving God Exists

The Creative Commands of a Sovereign God

Chapter 12: Can Postmodernity Fit with the Sovereign Will of God?

The Isms that Counter Christianity

Man’s Attempt at Marginalizing the Sovereign Will of God

God’s Decretive Will and His Perceptive Will

Chapter 13: Infringement on Liberty by the Sovereign Will of God

Where Is Freedom of the Will?

Chapter 14: What Attitudes Should We Have toward the Sovereignty of God?

God Is Sovereign in His Love to Those He Saves

The Doctrine of God’s Sovereignty Deepens Our Reverence for His Character

True Religion Is Based on the Foundation of God’s Sovereignty

Knowing that God Is Sovereign Lends Comfort in Times of Sorrow

His Kingdom Has No Bounds

The Sovereignty of God Disavows the Heresy of Salvation by Works

There Is Absolute Security in the Sovereignty of God

Knowing that God Is Sovereign Guarantees Triumph of Good over Evil

The Sovereignty of God Provides a Resting Place for the Believer

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

Radical Hermeneutic

Radical Relativism

Radical Pluralism

Radical Morality

Radical Pragmatism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Also by Dr. Larry Ivan Vass

A Reformed View of the Sovereignty of God in a Postmodern World

Hell’s Too Good for Some People

Running for the Cross

To my wife, Charlotte, who proofreads my papers and books using lots of red ink. To Dr. R. C. Sproul, whose lectures and ministry have inspired me to search the scriptures for answers. And to Dr. Sinclair Ferguson, who has shown me how one can paint beautiful pictures using only words.

God is dead, surmised Nietzsche.

Nietzsche is dead, God could have proclaimed with certainty in his omnipotence and sovereignty.

PART 1

THE DEVELOPMENT FROM POSTMODERNISM TO POSTSECULARISM

CHAPTER 1

Postmodernity Defined

P ostmodernity has spawned a culture of relativism. Relativism is a belief in changeable standards, the belief that concepts such as right and wrong, goodness and badness, or truth and falsehood are not absolute but change from culture to culture and situation to situation. Postmodernity has advocated that there are no absolutes. If this is true, then God is not absolute, and if God is not absolute, He cannot be sovereign. The problem then becomes this: Are postmodern Christians going to allow themselves to believe and rely on the sovereignty of God or not? Are preachers going to continue to stand in pulpits Sunday after Sunday and give the message that God is in control of everything, or is Christianity going to be marginalized? Is Jesus Christ going to become just another way to God, or are Christians going to stand up for the sovereignty of the Creator of the universe and declare the Bible to be the inerrant Word of God that says Christ is the only way to the Father?

To answer these questions, we must begin our investigation into postmodernity and review the way it relates to the sovereign will of God. First, we must uncover the meaning of postmodernity? Speaking broadly, Jean-Francois Lyotard says the term refers to the condition for knowing that designates the state of our culture following the transformations, which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts.¹

Lyotard was the author of a highly influential work on postmodern society titled The Postmodern Condition (1984). The work was a critique on the then current state of knowledge among modern postindustrial nations such as those found in the United States and much of Western Europe. In it, Lyotard made severable notable arguments, one of which was that the postmodern world suffers from a crisis of representation in which older modes of writing about the objects of artistic, philosophical, literary, and social scientific languages were no longer credible. Lyotard suggested that the postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste, permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and delves into new presentations—not to take pleasure in them but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.²

Lyotard also attacked modernist thought as epitomized by grand narratives or what he termed as the Mets (master) narrative. In contrast, Lyotard stated that an all-encompassing account of a culture cannot be accomplished.³

Looking at Modernity to Understand Postmodernity

Any attempt to define the meaning of the term postmodernism often fails because of the lack of satisfactory clarity regarding the scale and meaning of modernism. Therefore, we must make a distinction between modernity and postmodernity, words that refer to specific historical periods, and modernism and postmodernism, terms that are used to denote theoretical or philosophical discourses. Since postmodernism comes out of modernism, it is necessary to first discuss modernism.

There is contrast that can be drawn between what is called modern and what is called postmodern. When it comes to reasoning, modernism is from the foundation up, whereas postmodernism consists of multiple factors on multiple levels of reasoning. It is web-oriented. When it comes to science, modernism demonstrates a universal optimism, whereas postmodernism consist of a realism of limitations. Modernism says that the parts comprise the whole; postmodernism says the whole is more than the parts. Modernism suggests that God acts by violating natural laws or by immanence in everything that is. On the other hand, postmodernism says that causation is from the top down.⁴

Modernity takes its Latin origin from modo, which means just now. Postmodern then literally means after just now. Posts of reaction from within postmodernism are associated with other posts—postcolonialism, poststructuralism, and postprocessualism.

Modern philosophy and theology had their beginnings in the epistemological investigations of Rene Descartes (1596–1650). It came to fruition in the latter part of the eighteenth century during the Enlightenment with its highlight on the autonomy of the human being. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) visualized a new constitution of the self, one free from all heteronomous influences, which included tradition and dogma. In his essay What Is Enlightenment? in 1784, Kant chose the word enlightenment as a sort of self-conscious naming of an era that expressed a new hope of political and philosophical freedom from the restrictions of former traditions and ideals. Kant said, Dare to be wise. He urged the newly announced modern subjects to think outside the box, to think for themselves, to not rely on the heteronomous traditions, particularly religious ones. Modernity was indeed founded on open hostility to religion.

In his metaphysics Kant explored the limits of human reason, its ability or inability to understand the transcendental concepts of truth, goodness, beauty, and the idea of God. Per Kant, a human being is comprised of the experience of the world around them. Every individual has constructed his or her experience of the world by an innate set of universal transcendental categories fixed within the mind of that individual. The arrangement of knowledge in Kant’s overall tripartite project was to establish a metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics thoroughly grounded in human reason and rationality.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) instituted the theological response to the epistemological limits Kant placed on metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic discourses. Schleiermacher’s pietistic background influenced his Romantic reaction to Kant’s narrow attention on human reason. In his rejection of the various forms of dogmatic theology, Schleiermacher discovered the origin of theological discourse within the emotion of the recently constituted modern human being—more so in the feeling that the modern person can have of absolute dependence on a higher cause (identified with God).

After Kant, modern theological discourse turned its attention away from doctrine, which was viewed with suspicion as a heteronomous influence and on the objective, being of God as the source of revelation and turned to the rational, emotive, and aesthetic activities of the human being. The philosophical discourses of modernity turned on the emphasis of the activity of human reason and rationality. Modernity found its expressions in the progress of scientific, technical, and industrial pursuits.

The discipline of sociology emerged in the nineteenth century as a response to the crisis of modernity, which was precipitated by the rise of capitalist economies and life in modern urban cities. Modern urban life brought on a breakdown of traditional societies. It led to disintegration with its attendant social, economic, and political problems.

Max Weber noticed the loss of traditions and religious explanations in the modern world. When there was a disenchantment of the modern world, there was an increase of inhumane, bureaucratic, scientific, and technological understandings of the world and also accompanying practices that served to further promote social fragmentation and the loss of human meaning and experience. This disenchantment destroyed the foundation of traditional worldviews and left no possibility for a rational grounding of norms for human life in the modern world.⁵ The only thing that a human being can accomplish after this is the choice between the varying and competing norms that are forever ripped free from what originally gave them cogency and more force, namely traditional premodern society.

We see this resulting in the relativism found at the foundation of both modernity and postmodernity. With its project for modernity, the heart of the Enlightenment is an instrumental rationality. Unfortunately, it does not lead to human emancipation or freedom but instead to the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality.

Modernism must not be confused with what is referred to as modernism within the Roman Catholic theology and history. In Roman Catholic theology, the term modernism refers to a European aesthetic movement of the early twentieth century. Within the study of the arts, the term modernism explained a movement from 1880 to 1930 that included symbolism, cubism, and expressionism. Modernists included such writers as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Adeline Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Marcel Proust.

Like postmodernism, modernism has no set limits on its meaning or any set terms for its artistic practices. Modernists rejected nineteenth-century forms of artistic expression, especially the realist expressions in word and image. The artists of the modern period rejected the notion that there might be a single objective reality or an integrated human subject. There was an alienated experience of people in the urban, technological, and industrial societies that worked with an aesthetic self-consciousness, a self-consciousness that continued to remind the reader/observer of a work of art, directing attention to the media itself as a human creation.

Modernism was a world of realism, being the platonic doctrine that universals or abstractions have being independently of mind.⁶ Realism is a mode of writing that seeks to represent the reality of the whole world or form of life. Realist ethnographies are written to allude to a whole by means of parts or foci of analytical attention that can constantly evoke a social and cultural totality.⁷

In realist literature a story could be narrated from an objective or omniscient perspective, whereas in modernist literature the author might explore the perceptions of a character and move from one event to another in no sequential order, which many might consider stream of consciousness. There seems to be a disappointment in the idea of progress and a fear of what the industrial revolution and the development of technology have wrought. This was particularly true after the horrors of the First World War.

After the disappointment of the revolution of 1848, Marxists started to see in works of art the manifestation of much bigger social concerns and confusion in the establishment of modern philosophy.

Some Western Marxists like Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) applauded the possibility that modernist art could be worked in social and political liberation from the oppression and repression seen in the middle of modern industrial capitalist society. Employing elements of the Kantian critique of philosophical discourse and the Marxist analysis of society, there arose in the social theory of the Frankfurt School of Social Research an attempt to understand the rise of fascism and the phenomenon of a mass culture. Out of this school came an attack on the project of modernity and its promised enlightenment. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer depicted the Enlightenment project, which was centered on reason and progress, as an oppressive, repressive, and even regressive one.⁸ They see in the horrors of fascism the logical end of the Enlightenment. The project of reason ended as Weber had predicted—the iron cage of modernity.

Defining Postmodernity

Postmodernity comes on the scene displaying many faces. It is a critique of Western representations and modern supreme fictions, a desire to think in terms sensitive to difference (of others without opposition, of heterogeneity without hierarchy), a skepticism regarding autonomous spheres of culture or separate fields of experts, an imperative to go beyond formal filiations (of text to text) to trace social affiliations (the institutional density of the text in the world). In short, postmodernism exhibits a wiliness to accept the ideas present nexus of culture and of politics, and to affirm a practice resistant both to academic modernism and political reaction.⁹

Postmodernity is the state or condition of being postmodern. Logically postmodernism literally means after modernity. It refers to the incipient or actual dissolution of those social forms associated with modernity (Madan Sarup 1993). The archaeologist Mathew Johnson has characterized postmodernity or the postmodern condition as disillusionment with Enlightenment ideals (Philip Johnson 2010). In his seminal work, The Postmodern Condition (1984) Jean-Francois Lyotard defines postmodernity as an incredulity toward metanarratives, which is somewhat ironically a product of scientific progress (Lyotard, 1984: xxiv). Postmodernity concentrates on the tensions of difference and similarity erupting from processes of globalization and capitalism, the accelerating circulation of people, the increasingly dense and frequent cross-cultural interactions, and the unavoidable intersections of local and global knowledge.

Some social critics have attempted to explain the postmodern condition in terms of the historical and social milieu that spawned it. David Ashley (1990) suggests that modern, overloaded individuals, desperately trying to maintain rootedness and integrity … ultimately are pushed to the point where there is little reason not to believe that all value-orientations are equally well-founded. Therefore, increasingly, choice becomes meaningless. Jean Baudrillard, one of the most radical postmodernists, writes that we must come to terms with the second revolution, that of the Twentieth Century, of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. Whoever lives by meaning dies by meaning (Jean Baudrillard [1984] in Ashley 1990).

Postmodernism then can be described as a set of discourses developed within multinational capitalist economies that share a denial of the possibility of universal or rational principles, fixed meanings, or objective understandings of truth and trans-historical metanarratives such as history and progress.¹⁰ Postmodernism is suspicious of every claim to truth, preferring truths that are understood to be both partial and plural in place of any belief in a solitary truth. Therefore, postmodern theorists prefer to talk about christianities rather than Christianity. Christianities would engulf the pluralities and diversities of Christian beliefs and practices that manifest themselves in diverse places and times. Postmodernity can be presented playfully with parody and diversity, utilizing a lampoon of styles, ideas, and images. It is therefore possible to see postmodernity as an act of freedom.

Is postmodernity a rejection of what came before it? Or is postmodernity with its emphasis on the partial, the fragmented, and the multiple merely another manifestation of the Romantic rejection of the modern? While some see continuity and direct development beginning with the Enlightenment all the way through Romanticism and modernity to postmodernity, others see postmodernism as an expression of artistic, cultural, and philosophical concepts, ideas, and practices that relate to the specific social, economic, and political conditions of a stage of multinational capitalism.

One of the many faces of postmodernity embraces philosophical pluralism, which has generated many approaches in support of the stance that any notion that an ideological or religious claim is intrinsically superior to another is necessarily wrong. However, the resultant culture wars are profoundly religious and concern fundamental opposing conceptions of authority, morality, truth, the good, revelation, etc.¹¹ Postmodernism advocates propound that the only absolute creed is the creed of pluralism. No religion has the right to pronounce itself right or true and the others false or even relatively inferior.

This view is bound up with the new hermeneutic and with its offspring, deconstruction. The new hermeneutic and deconstruction produce what is known as postmodernism. Biblical hermeneutics belong to the modern era, in which science, scholarship, and serious study were considered proficient to resolve most problems, to answer most questions, and to understand all of reality. Postmodernity has spawned a radical hermeneutic that recognizes the subjectivity of interpretation. This interpretation is influenced by the cultures and subcultures to which the interpreter belongs.

As naturalism started to replace modernity, which had its roots in the Renaissance and in the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, God was either marginalized from the deistic perspective or abandoned in the atheistic perspective.

Postmodernity suggests that we cannot be certain that there is any objective truth to be discovered. Since all interpretation is conditioned by the culture, reason may be nothing more than a tool of domination.¹² If there is no objective truth, then the interpretations are merely personal or at best culturally conditioned options. All interpretations are acceptable, and no interpretation can be given the position of objective truth. An interpretation cannot be dismissed unless the interpreter presupposes some criterion that allows him or her to do so. If an interpreter claims his or her criterion is the truth itself, he or she betrays an old-fashioned bigotry, namely his or her enslavement to an eclipsed modernity.

All thinkers who hold certain emancipatory values are incontestably heirs of the modern era.¹³ These emancipatory values include those qualities that are found in a democratic society—liberty and equality as well as an honest acknowledgment that the scientific revolution of modern times is not just another important event in Western culture but the watershed event that makes even the Reformation and the Renaissance appear like family quarrels.¹⁴

Any postmodern thinker who believes that she or he can now leave the ambiguous modern scene and begin anew in innocence is self-deluding. There is no innocent tradition (including modernity and certainly including modern liberal Christianity). There is no single innocent reading of any tradition including this postmodern reading of the positive and negative realities, the profound ambiguities of modernity.¹⁵ There is a profundity of dissimilarities between modernism and postmodernism, the most prevalent being that modernism yet believed in the objectivity of knowledge and that the human mind can reveal such knowledge. Optimistically, modernism believed that eventually knowledge would transform the world, push God to the periphery or perhaps abandon him altogether, and build a society of glorious knowledge to the great god Science. Most Western universities, however, have abandoned this stance in the postmodern era.

Deconstructionists have displayed a most enthusiastic tone in condemning the modernist vision. Holding that language and meaning are socially constructed, deconstructionists essentially say that these are arbitrarily constructed. What this means is that texts will erratically be interpreted against the setting of the interpreter’s communal place in society and the historical acclimatizing of the language itself. Because of his interpretive independence from the text itself, it seems appropriate and right for the interpreter to remove whatever pieces