Michael Horton has an excellent piece (five-star, in my humble opinion) in this month’s Modern Reformation on postmodernism, and just what in the world are we to do with it. Horton writes:
Postmodernism — or whatever one wishes to designate our brief moment in history — is the culture in which Sesame Street is considered educational, “sexy” is the term of approbation for everything from jeans to doctoral theses, watching sit-coms together at dinner is called “family time,” abortion is considered “choice,” films sell products, and a barrage of images and sound bites selected for their entertainment and commercial value is called “news.” This easily translates into hipper-than-thou clubs passing for youth ministry, informal chats passing for sermons, and brazen marketing passing for evangelism, where busyness equals holiness and expository preaching is considered too intellectual. It can account in part for homes where disciplined habits both of general domestic culture and of instruction in Christian faith and practice give way to niche marketing and where churches become theaters of the absurd.
Horton also poses the question, “Why must change in the faith and practice of Christians parallel change in technology?” Horton sees little reason, and I agree. This may have something to do with our obsession with communication, which I’ve written about before, but I think that we also tend to equate technology too closely with human nature.
Evolutionary theory has something to do with this–after all, most evolutionists (I assume) think that people of today are much more advanced than the people of yesteryear. While certainly we have learned from the past, if we take away the pillars of technology which we have been given by our predecessors, I doubt if we would be any wiser than an Abraham or Moses.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about here, my apologies, but if you read the article, along with Horton’s magnificent conclusion, I think you’ll have a better sense of what’s happening in our culture a way to deal with it.