Postmodernism

TNG Radio, where today's culture and timeless truths come together. It's reasoned relevant content apologetics, worldview, and answers to the questions that you need to know. From Alex McFarland Ministries, this is Truth for a New Generation Radio.

And now the man who preached in 50 states in 50 days, speaker, writer, and advocate for Christian apologetics, Dr. Alex McFarland. In the book of Romans chapter 1, it talks about a time that is coming when people really can't tell right from wrong, because they had so embraced sin, they had so tried to redefine reality to placate their conscience and to accommodate their sin. And ultimately in Romans 1 22, it says of a darkened sinful world, it says, professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

Professing themselves to become wise, they actually were self-deceived deluded fools. Hi, Alex McFarland here with Tripp Harman. You're listening to TNG Radio. And today we're going to talk about postmodernism.

I call this the redefinitions of postmodernism and the reshaping of our world. And I'll tell you why we've got that title here in just a moment. But I want to welcome our newest staff member at Truth for New Generation, our long time, one of my best friends in the ministry, and now my daily colleague in the evangelistic apologetics work of TNG. But Tripp, it's good to have you back at the mic, brother, and welcome to this program.

Alex, it's always good to be here. How did you discover apologetics? I mean, I know you recognize the need to reach people of different viewpoints, but from the Bible or from, you know, the authors that you and I know as personal friends, like Lee Strobel and Josh McDowell, how did you get into apologetics?

Well, I did know of Josh McDowell and Lee Strobel for my years as a youth leader. And so I was quickly turned on to them. My apologetics pursuit really started with just systematic theology. I was delving back into some systematic theology because of these different world views.

And that systematic theology component in apologetics, it all kind of just came together. And then I found out about SES. And I said, I've got to do it. I got to go.

Sure. Well, you know, I discovered Dr. Geisler in the footnotes of evidence that demands a verdict. This is way back in the fall of 1985. And I remember, you know, I was reading evidence that demands a verdict. I'd been a Christian a very, very short time. And of course, in the footnotes of Josh's incredible book, there's C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton and Francis Schaeffer and Chuck Colson and a lot, a lot of people. But I kept seeing the name Norm Geisler, Norm Geisler. And I began to buy his books. And for those that don't know, he just passed away this year.

But he was a giant. I mean, my goodness, I cannot overstate the importance of Norm Geisler to modern apologetics. And, you know, I would urge everybody listening to begin to build a good library of resources on how you can defend the faith. But we are talking about postmodernism. And two headlines really prompted this broadcast. And what we're going to talk about in the moments that follow, some of the redefinitions, the redefinition of truth, the redefinition of morals, really even the redefinition of God. But a couple of weeks ago, I was reading Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and she's very pro-abortion. And somebody asked her, how do you reconcile your Christianity with your, you know, vehement, vehement lifelong defense of abortion and your mother, too? And she said, well, she doesn't consider herself a Christian anymore.

And listen to this. She said, quote, I left the church at age six, this is Chelsea Clinton talking, when I realized that the church was against abortion. Now, first of all, I question how at age six... What church is that? Yeah, how at age six are you able to really parse out the intricate topic of abortion and pro-life? With the flannelgraph Bible characters on the board for the six-year-olds. Yeah, I really question whether or not any six-year-olds are seriously thinking about the constitutionality and the theological implications of pro-life versus pro-abortion.

But here is the thing that I want your response on, Tripp. She said, the Bible, as I read it, doesn't prohibit abortion. Now, and that's a quote.

She said, the Bible as I read it. So let's talk about, are we at liberty to quote, read the Bible to suit our pre-assumed biases? That is the crux of it. You know, the discarding and that's one of the key, I don't want to say tenets, but that's one of the pillars of postmodernism is the throwing out of objectivity. It's what I feel about it. It's how it, you know, it makes me, does it give me a warm fuzzy? Does it get me angry? It's all about the emotion and not about truth. And of course, an apologetic argument that's been around for years is we demand objectivity in so many areas of life, but I think the enemy's won a big battle in that he's convinced a lot of folks that, well, you know, with God's word, you can just kind of take and pick and choose what you want. You know, we don't do that in other ways. You know, I mean, you know, if you invite someone to dinner and you say, we're having spaghetti, but spaghetti is the way I interpret, it doesn't have noodles or sauce. You're not even spaghetti. What if a cheating husband said, you know, those marriage vows, as I understood them, did not prohibit me from seeing other women?

How does that wife feel about that? You know, yeah. We've got to take a brief break. This is TNG Radio, Truth for a New Generation Radio with Alex McFarland and Trip Harman. Stay tuned because when we come back, we're going to talk about the redefinitions of postmodernism and the reshaping of our world. From I Am a Watchman Ministries, here's today's I Am a Watchman Minute. The I Am a Watchman ministry believes the rapture can happen at any time.

Are your friends and loved ones spiritually prepared for the return of the Lord? Because the I Am a Watchman ministry is concerned about those who will be left behind, we've created a new resource called The Rapture Kit. This resource is profiled on rapturekit.org website. Rapture kits are designed to help individuals share their faith before the rapture and provide both spiritual and practical information for those not taken in the rapture. The digital resource includes nine ebooks, a dozen teaching videos, evangelistic tracts, a Bible, a 120-page digital binder of helpful information, and more.

Please visit rapturekit.org for additional information on this potentially life-saving resource. Be bold. Be faithful. Be a watchman.

I am a watchman dot com. At Liberty University, you'll earn more than a degree. You'll earn the satisfaction of seeing what you can accomplish and what God can accomplish through you.

Choose from more than 600 degree options from an associate to a PhD and study 100% online more affordably than you think. Discover God's truth through every degree at Liberty University, where we train champions for Christ. Go to liberty.edu backslash explore to learn more.

That's liberty.edu backslash explore to learn more. We care about justice and aren't afraid to ask hard questions. In fact, we care about a lot of things. We have passion for truth. We are engage magazine dot net, an online group of millennials brought together by a common goal to share truth, apply scripture, and to get involved in our lost and hurting world. Engage magazine dot net. Host discussions that help you apply a biblical worldview to your daily life.

Engage magazine dot net. The TNG Unashamed Conference is coming to Richmond, Virginia, October 11th and 12th. Experience core truths that make for an unshakable faith with Tina Marie Griffin, Todd Starnes, Kamal Shalim, Miki Addison, Chuck Chrismeyer, and William Federer.

Romans 1 16 says, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ for it is the power of God to salvation to everyone who believes. Come to the truth for a new generation conference and get equipped, empowered and inspired to confidently share the gospel of Jesus Christ. TNG is committed to impacting our nation for Christ and the future and equipping you to be a difference maker. Register now by calling 877-YES-GOD-1. That's 877-YES-GOD and the number one or visit the TNG website at truth for a new generation dot com. The TNG Unashamed Conference, Richmond, Virginia, October 11th and 12th.

Dive deeper into your faith. For apologetics resources, books by Alex McFarland, and to find out where Alex is speaking, visit alexmcfarland.com. Come back to TNG Radio, Alex McFarland and Tripp Harman here.

We're talking about postmodernism. And I do want to remind everybody that coming up in Richmond, Virginia, October 11 and 12th, Cincinnati, Ohio, November 15-16, we've got Truth for a New Generation. And we've got great speakers like Josh McDowell, Erwin Lutzer from Moody Church in Chicago, Todd Starnes from Fox News, Tina Marie Griffin, the Counter Culture Mom, Exposing Hollywood, Kamal Shalim, former Muslim, now a dynamic Christian leader, and so much, much more. Folks, the website truth for a new generation dot com.

That's truth for a new generation dot com. We were in Fayetteville earlier this year. We've done dozens of events around the USA.

We just had a camp. Many people have said that the Truth for New Generation conferences are life changing. In fact, and I give God the glory, but we had somebody come to our big event in Fayetteville, North Carolina. They said they learned more at the Truth for a New Generation event that they had learned in ten years of being a Christian. And so, look, this is for God and country.

This is for all ages. This is for the souls of people. And we give God the praise, but people are coming to the Lord. Many people are coming back to the Lord through Truth for a New Generation. So please, Richmond, we're coming to your city soon, October 11 and 12, the great Mount Vernon Baptist Church. Cincinnati, we're coming to Landmark Church November 15-16.

Pray, promote, plan to attend, be a part of helping spread the Gospel, defend the faith, save a nation. And I do want to say a very special thanks to our friend Liberty University for helping us pray and promote. And Liberty is great.

I have two degrees from Liberty and a big part of who I am is due to Liberty University. But, Trip, let's talk about postmodernism. You know, before the break, we were talking about Chelsea Clinton, who said, the Bible as I read it. Postmodernism redefines our understanding of truth. Truth is not objective. Truth is whatever I make it up to be.

But it redefines our use of language, that words don't really mean things, but words mean whatever I say they mean. You had a great illustration of that from the news just this morning out of San Francisco. Well, yeah, in San Francisco, folks, they had a city council meeting, and they're not going to use the word felon because they said it unfairly stigmatizes people. A convicted felon, a law breaker, so we don't use the word felon anymore in the Upper Northwest. We say a quote, justice involved person. Let me just say this, sometimes if we make choices and we do things that are illegal, we do things that are just unhealthy, destructive, ungodly, maybe we need that stigma to get our attention and cause us to, as Nat King Cole used to sing, straighten up and fly right.

So Chip, what do you think about that? You and I both have been pastors. You and I both have been in the ministry more than two decades each. I've done my share of ministry in jails and prisons, and I know you've probably been to prisons too. What does it do when we, people that have done wrong, and we try to shield them from the consequences of their wrongdoing, as a pastor or even as a parent?

What's your response? Well, how do you learn? How do you improve? How do you get better if there's not consequences for actions?

You know, you said as a parent, if you have a child who never experiences any discipline, as a young child, they grow up to be a person who is sometimes out of control. These are the lawmakers who seem to want to coddle breaking the law. Let's not even call them a felon. Let's change the words. Let's change the definitions and let's call them, I believe the term was justice involved, you know, persons, you know, persons who are, I mean, if you were a person involved in justice, you didn't commit a crime. It's a redefinition of terms. And folks, we need to understand that, and I know there are some who will say, well, you're being an alarmist, but we need to understand when it comes to postmodernism, these things are intentional. These redefinition of terms of blurring the lines between right and wrong, of morality and what God wants, even to the point of rewriting history to decide what's right and what's wrong, where we've been, where we need to go. These are all intentional things that are happening in our universities.

It's happening now on a political level, people in government at the highest level. Well, sure. Do you know what? I was talking to a music teacher and when I was growing up, my sister played piano and I played guitar and I still play guitar. I loved the recitals. I mean, I would practice, oh man, I strove and I strove till I learned my recital piece. This particular music teacher said they don't much do recitals anymore.

Do you know why? This is because it stresses the kids to practice and if in the recital, if you mess up, it's very demoralizing and so we don't do recitals anymore. This thing of postmodernism, as different people like George Will have said and different writers and Robert Bork, who wrote the book years ago, Slouching Toward Gomorrah, there is the collective dumbing down of the culture. Lowering the bar. That recital illustration is a great one. If you do not have kids who are one of the biggest parts of – you and I both, we've played some music in front of people on stage. That's one of the biggest hurdles. I think a kid that's going to be a musician, even if they're not that great yet, go ahead and get on stage, get in front of people, get those kinks worked out. But if a kid never learns, we're going to have a bunch of kids in the future who think they're great musicians who really aren't that good and as a whole, music quality comes down. It's the same way in our lives. If we're just going to whatever, we're not going to raise children to a higher standard and ask them to raise the bar, the morality as a whole goes down. I believe it was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the politician, who said defining deviancy down and as a country. Now look, hey, I'm an evangelist.

Job one, help people find Christ to be saved. But I'm a patriot and I love America. We're losing our greatness.

We're losing our greatness. I will say this, I've played guitar in a number of churches and kids come up and they'll say, I want to see your guitar. And I'm like, sure, here's my guitar. And I've had plenty of teens bang on my guitar and they would say, do you know this or that song?

And I'd say, sure. And they'll say, well, this is how I play it. And I'm like, yeah, well, that's not how you play it.

But you're right, you're right. Unless there's this objective standard and whether it's salvation and godliness or whether it's practice and excellence, postmodernism pushes back against all of this. Now stay tuned, folks. We're going to talk about the things we've lost. If we continue to embrace postmodernism, what will we lose? Plus, we've got a history lesson of where postmodernism even came from.

So stay tuned because TNG radio is back after this. If you're a Christian parent, you of course want to instill a biblical view of life in the hearts of your children. If you're a pastor, you want to offer ministry that draws young families to your church. This is Alex McFarland encouraging you to check out my new book and video curriculum, The 21 Toughest Questions Your Kids Will Ask About Christianity. Why do bad things happen? I interviewed hundreds of children, ages 5 to 12, and we address actual questions from actual children, the spiritual issues that are on the minds of your kids.

Did Jesus ever sin? The book and video lessons are great for groups of any size and was produced with the goal of equipping kids to stand strong for Christ in any situation. The 21 Toughest Questions Your Kids Will Ask, the book, study guide, and video series. You'll find it at AFASTORE.net.

That's AFASTORE.net. Christians don't necessarily agree with one another when it comes to questions of religious pluralism, homosexuality, the role of government, abortion, and war. Too often we manage these disagreements by ignoring them. Yet we're called to engage the world for the sake of Christ.

How can we be effective if we avoid society's most pressing questions? In 10 Issues That Divide Christians, Alex McFarland challenges us to drill down to the biblical core of 10 current issues, such as social justice, evil and suffering, pornography, and environmentalism, as he echoes the biblical invitation, come, let us reason together. Only by engaging the scriptures deeply, thinking clearly, and speaking truthfully, can we in God's family address our differences and discover the peace that comes with unity of purpose. 10 Issues That Divide Christians.

Find this book and many others at alexmcfarland.com. In the midst of a culture obsessed with relativism, Alex McFarland is a voice you can trust to speak the timeless truths of Christianity in a timely way. You're listening to Truth for a New Generation Radio. We're back at Truth for a New Generation, and we're talking today postmodernism, of course, Dr. Alex McFarland and I am Tripp Harmon. And talking about Alex, you promised when we'd come back, there's going to be a little postmodern history lesson. Well, you know, there's a British historian named A.N. Wilson, and he's a great historian. And I don't know if he's Christian or not, but he has well documented how Europe was changed as Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Wilson wrote a book called God's Funeral, and it basically goes back a little ways. After the Reformation in 1517, Luther preached the gospel and Europe was swept with Christianity and praised God for that.

But out of that very same Germany came liberalism. And there was a man named Friedrich Schleiermacher who critiqued the Bible. Schleiermacher was a minister's son, but he basically died a pantheist. He believed everything is God. And so he wrote some books in the late 1700s that critiqued the Bible. The Bible is not the Word of God.

Today, I would say this, though, Schleiermacher would be more conservative than most liberal pastors today, even though Schleiermacher was, they call him the father of German liberalism. Well, his rejection of the Word of God influenced people like Charles Lyell. Lyell wrote a book in the early 1800s called Principles of Geology that really rejected Noah and the flood and God as the creator.

Then Charles Lyell influenced Charles Darwin, and Darwin published On the Origin of Species. By the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, as early as 18, in the 1870s, we see a phrase called postmodernism. Now, the phrase really came into vogue by 1915, 1920. But postmodernism says there is no ultimate truth. We make our own truth. Words don't have objective meaning.

Words mean whatever we want them to mean. Now in 1914, listen to this, folks. There was a Philosophical Quarterly called the Hibbet Journal. A man named J. M. Thompson used the phrase postmodernism, and it was basically a philosophy crafted as a critique of religion.

Now hang with me, folks. Listen to this. J. M. Thompson in 1914, speaking of postmodernism, he says, the resendetra of postmodernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of modernism. Now modernism says, look, everything's black and white. There's right and there's wrong. There's true and there's false. There's true revealed religion. That's Judaism and Christianity. Religion is not the speculation of man.

It's the revelation of God. There's truth and error. There's God. There's Satan. There's morality. There's immorality. See, the double-mindedness, and by the way, it is a binary world. There's dark.

There's light. There's marriage. There's singleness. You've got to understand, folks, here in the 21st century, when I've debated at universities or people email me if I write an article or if I appear on the media, it's very hip nowadays to slam people that are binary. See, you believe in male and female. No, we're transgender, they would say. But postmodernism doesn't want the world to be binary.

God and Satan saved or lost. No, it's whatever I want it to be. Everything is very fluid. Nothing is black and white.

Nothing is concrete. Everything is in flux. And so postmodernism, a word that's been around for roughly 130 years, it was once the plaything of the unbelieving philosophers, but now it's the worldview of street-level America, isn't it?

Absolutely. And it's crept in even into the churches. You know, when our education system doesn't push objectivity, when our students study history and study literature, and they ask them, how do you feel about this?

What would you have written if you would have been there? And we have pastors teaching the Bible like that on your way home from church on a Sunday. You know, you're pondering not what did God's Word tell me? What does God want? What does God deserve? How does this, you know, relationship with the one true living God work?

Instead, they're thinking about, well, how do I feel about it? Well, hey, let me say, I was in a publishing meeting a few years ago, and you know, one of my books is called Stand, Core Truth for an Unshakable Faith. So a major publisher was looking at that book, but they wanted to use the stand content in a Sunday school curriculum that would go throughout all the country. Well, my book Stand is very true, false, black and white. You know, Christ is born of a virgin. Christ is deity.

So the editor said, here's what I want. I want Sunday school classes to discuss, how did Mary feel the first time she saw the baby Jesus giggle? Again, it's that lowering the bar, that emotional softness, because when it comes down to it, you know, it's not about us. It's about God.

It's not about how I feel about anything. He's done everything for His glory and it's how do I fit into His plan for bringing glory to Him. And so what I think Mary might have thought when the first time she saw Jesus giggle, so what? So what? I doubt when we meet her in heaven that she's going to mention it once.

And do you know what? Part of the reason that the church in America right now is unraveling and every major denomination has plateaued or is declining is because we have deviated from the Word of God. We're not teaching scripture memorization. And let me say, folks, read Matthew 7, 21 through 24.

Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, and Jesus says, I never knew you. Look, there's saved, there's lost, there's true, there's false. And with postmodernism, we have a loss of our moral compass, a loss of rational thought, a loss of social structure, a loss of our national history. And even in the church, as we succumb to the assumptions of postmodernism, there's going to be the loss of the gospel, but most tragically the loss of many souls. And so Tripp, we have to have the courage and frankly the discipline to be vigilant for truth.

Absolutely. And knowing that we'll be in the minority, even among some churches, a lot of churches, we'll be in the minority. This has been Truth For A New Generation and our discussion of postmodernism. Please let us know what you think or email us at alexmcfarland.com. You can also find us at truthforanewgeneration.com. We'd love to get your questions and your comments.

Thank you much. TNG radio is made possible by the friends of Alex McFarland Ministries, P.O. Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina 27404. That's P.O. Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina 27404. Call us at 877-Yes-God-1.

That's 877-Yes-God and the number 1. Or give online at alexmcfarland.com. While you're there, listen to program archives, read Alex's blog, invite Alex to speak at your event or contact Alex with a question or comment, alexmcfarland.com. Thanks for listening today and join us again next time as we bring you more truth for a new generation on TNG radio.