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Professing to Be Wise ...
In a recent class on Evidences we read the following excerpt on Postmodern philosophy:
“Postmodernism itself is generally regarded as poststructuralist because Postmodernists see their thoughts about language as moving beyond how it functions to its use. Postmodernists think we cannot know the world directly. We only know it as we interpret it. Since our language structures our relationships, our talk about the objects in the world isn’t really about those objects at all; it’s really about ourselves … When your friend says, ‘There is a chair,’ he is not so much commenting on the chairness of the chair as he is making a statement about his own understanding of objects like chairs, about how he himself is not the chair, and how he thinks you should view the world similarly.
“As the German philosopher Martin Heidegger famously said, ‘The unitary fourfold sky and earth, mortals and divinities, which is stayed in the thinging of things, we call – the world. In the naming, the things named are called into their thinging. Thinging, they unfold world, in which things abide, and so are the abiding ones. By thinging, things carry out world’” (Understanding the Times 156).
I realize this is only one tiny slice of the whole Postmodern worldview, but based on other passages of philosophic musing I have read in the past it seems fairly representative of the intellectual navel-gazing that passes for deep thinking.
Of course, philosophic meanderings were already common in Paul’s day, and he commented on intellectualism that led away from God: “Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man – and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things” (Rom 1:21-23).
No doubt those who asserted that asps, scarab beetles and crocodiles were really gods in disguise were thought to be deep thinkers. And while we may scoff at such primitive notions, we have practically deified the process of random mutation and natural selection which has given rise, say evolutionists, to the very animals that were worshiped long ago.
Some thoughts:
1. When God and His word is left out of our thinking, we lose our grounding in reality. “Reality” is how God defines His creation and what He reveals about the spiritual realm. God describes our origin, which imparts dignity and value to us as creatures made in His image. God defines the purpose of our existence – to honor and worship Him directly and by serving our fellow man. And God reveals our destiny which is far richer than naturalism’s extermination upon our final breath. God has made us everlasting beings, and we will continue to live after death whether we acknowledge it or not. When we deny God’s explanation of reality we become hopelessly lost via Rand McNally’s Atheist Atlas to Nowhere.
2. While philosophers sit around with their peers in their enclaves of “higher learning” and debate the meaning of “chair,” God communicates to us via Scripture in ways that can be functionally understood. For example, God gave Moses specific instructions on how to build the tabernacle and all the furniture to go in it. He warned: “See to it that you make them according to the pattern which was shown you on the mountain” (Ex 25:40; cf. Heb 8:5). Moses then related these blueprints to Bezaleel and Aholiab who then similarly instructed others artisans (cf. Ex 38:21ff). Through Ex 40 the phrase “as the Lord had commanded Moses” is repeated numerous times of the successful construction of the tabernacle.
Scripture everywhere speaks in clear propositional truth. For example:
♦ “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” – Rom 3:23.
♦ “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” – Rom 5:8.
♦ “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him” – Rom 5:9.
♦ “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us” – Rom 8:35, 37.
Postmodernists may not know what a chair is, but I can know that while I have failed my Creator He loves me and has made provisions to save me through the sacrifice of Christ. I thus have hope, courage, boldness, purpose and value. Understanding these truths brings tremendous clarity. No philosophic mumbo-jumbo here. Don’t be fooled by the sophistry of “intellectuals” who smugly recline in the very chair they deny is there.
