Postmodernism is a popular worldview in culture today, with many people–even those who profess to be followers of Christ–embracing many of its key tenets.
One defining element of Postmodernism is subjectivism, or the rejection of objective truth. Unlike Biblical Theism, which looks to Scripture as the framework of unchanging, objective truth for understanding reality and the world around us, Postmodernism leaves moral and ethical standards to individual judgment.
In contemporary society, the subjectivism of Postmodernism plays out in a number of negative ways. Truth is subjective to each individual, and if an individual tries to take their truth and apply it to someone else, they risk being viewed as oppressive or as using language as a weapon of power. This results in a selective tolerance for other beliefs.
Postmodernists also tend to adopt self-contradicting beliefs because there is no standard other than what feels right to them in the moment. A Postmodernist would have no issue with maintaining conflicting ideas or beliefs. For example, they may claim “there is no absolute truth,” even though by asserting this claim, they have in fact stated an absolute truth. For a Postmodernist, circular thinking or contradictory claims do not in any way refute the ability of the individual to decide such things for themselves.
Finally, Postmodernists can often experience a crisis of belief, expected to discern for themselves what truth really is but being unable to do so. They often choose different aspects of “truth” that are blended together but end up being unsatisfying or lead to uncertainty in answering the questions of life.
Another defining element of Postmodernism is radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is even possible. Instead, this worldview emphasizes that our understanding of knowledge and truth is a matter of “social construction,” i.e., society determines and “constructs” meaning for us through language. But just as a society can construct meaning, it also can “de-construct” or be incorrect about meaning. Therefore, our shared understanding of meaning is unreliable. Similarly, language that is used to construct social meaning and even human experiences are seen as distorted by power relationships. Social meaning and conceptions of truth (as in metanarratives) are suspect and unreliable because this power dynamic is in place.
By contrast Biblical Theism provides sure confidence in the unchanging truth rooted in the character, nature, and word (logos) of God. We can seek and find truth that is reliable, knowable, and unchanging. We are made by God in His image (imago Dei) for His purposes and His glory. His story is the true metanarrative that we can trust to order our lives. But in Postmodernism, with no reliable shared social meaning, individual subjectivism prevails. It is left to individuals to decide for themselves right and wrong, the basis of ethics and morality, and to discover their own “truth” and to write their own “narrative”.
A third key element of Postmodernism is its insistence on radical pluralism that affirms individual subjectivism–the idea can be summed up in the idea that “something may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” Any and all narratives are fair game and can be adopted by the individual for understanding and ordering life. Postmodernists have little difficulty with individuals creating their own views of reality, or narratives. But they distrust metanarratives, that is, large, all-encompassing, universal explanations of reality– especially biblical Christianity–as an overarching framework to explain the world.
Postmodernists believe individuals who operate under a metanarrative, such as religious individuals, are tricking themselves into believing that there is something bigger than themselves, or they are using the metanarrative to perpetuate power. Stories that form metanarratives give us meaning, Postmodernists argue, but they do not give us any sense of reality. There are no rational ways to arrive at a conclusion on reality. Therefore, Postmodernists tend to be very skeptical of religious individuals. Instead, they believe that language provides the best way to convey meaning. Since verbal communication is done through language, the closest thing to truth is the meaning conveyed through language. But even language can be used unreliably, or it can fluctuate over the course of history as some languages die out of existence or change over time.
Today’s common use of the idea of “narratives” or the need to “frame the narrative” reflects the prevalence of Postmodernism. But we see this worldview in many other ways. The idea that “your truth isn’t my truth” or “that may be true for you, but not for me” is another example. Our general distrust of authority figures (political, spiritual and the like) or the perpetuation of “fake news” are additional examples of the skepticism and intellectual corrosion inherent in Postmodern thinking. We suspect that what we are seeing is less than completely factual and have no sure lens through which to discern what is true.
We especially see expressions unique to the Postmodernist worldview in contemporary culture, particularly in film, TV, advertising and in social media.