Book Review: Postmodern Times

I should have read this book 10 years ago. I could have made more sense of my life if I had. I was a teen in the 80’s and a young adult in the 90’s, one of many who have been thoroughly affected by the postmodern age. My high school and university experiences were prototypically postmodern. Many of my teachers, professors and friends held to mutually inconsistent ideas and rejected any claims of absolute truth. Sometimes I did too. Overused generic terms in my vocabulary, like “dude” and “whatever,” were only given meaning by their usage in my social group. Style was much more valued than substance. Sure, when I walked onto the university campus, I thought I was there to study, research and reason. But when I walked through my graduation ceremony, what I had learned was that the university culture was ruled by ideologues, political correctness and power struggles. Postmodernism is the spirit of the age in which I live. In Postmodern Times, Gene Edward Veith, Jr. has done the church a great service by guiding us through our culture with scriptural wisdom and a missional heart.

Veith’s “walking tour” of American thought and culture takes the reader through postmodern philosophy and its impact on the arts, postmodern society and contemporary religion. Veith contends that he remains open to the postmodern, even as he is critical of postmodernism. This openness is evident in his analysis of postmodern thought and survey of the arts, where he doesn’t label everything postmodern as “all bad.”

This book helped me to see more clearly how postmodernism finds its philosophical basis in existentialism. Both deny that there is any meaning or purpose to life. But while existentialism said that meaning was created by the individual, the postmodernist version says that meaning is constructed by a social group and its language. So while earlier generations sought a stable foundation for knowledge in God, and successive generations sought this same foundation for knowledge in personal experience or reason, now my postmodern generation denies that any foundation for knowledge exists apart from the constructions of one’s particular culture and language. Thus any meaning to be found in life is merely a social construct. Furthermore, since my generation has accepted the postmodern, deconstructionist assumption that all societies are inherently oppressive, every claim of universal truth is automatically treated with suspicion. That makes preaching the Bible more difficult, but it also makes even relational evangelism more difficult.

If I had read this book 10 years ago, I could have made better sense of the artistic and architectural worldview I encountered on a number of trips I have taken, from the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna to the Swan and Dolphin Hotels at Walt Disney World. I have always enjoyed architecture, since I grew up among a family of builders. Veith’s insights help me to interpret postmodern art and architecture more insightfully, particularly when he reminds us that postmodern art does not take itself too seriously. Buildings like these (and on a much smaller scale, a number of the custom homes that I helped build in my former life as a realtor and homebuilder) are playful in design, with eclectic facades that make reference to things other than the real building itself. Postmodern buildings lack integrity and are in-your-face about how they value style over substance. I agree with Veith and prefer postmodern architecture to modern architecture, but my favorite buildings are still the pre-modern ones, like the Nathaniel Russell House in Charleston, with its self-supporting elliptical spiral staircase.

Just as postmodern art is eclectic, so is postmodern culture, which helps me understand why on any given Saturday, I might order Chinese food from a Hispanic waiter at P.F. Chang’s, listen to some R&B by Steve Wonder while driving in my Japanese-built minivan, watch a British-accent fantasy filmed on location in New Zealand, and take a nap on my southwestern leather couch in my neo-traditional tract home. But my culture is not only eclectic, it is also increasingly segmented. Since truth is merely a social construction and primarily a matter of personal preference, I see the people around me aligning themselves ever more deeply with various groups they participate in. In South Boulder, among the people I serve through my church, I observe a startling diversity of individuals who have happened to find other individuals just like themselves: Mountaineering-wannabees, left-wing political activists, home-schooling mothers of six children, and beer-goggling college students. This multicultural atmosphere is fertile ground for a gospel-seed sowing church concerned about how its corporate worship and witness are perceived by their postmodern culture. Heaven will certainly be a redeemed multicultural celebration (Revelation 5:9-10), the Kingdom of God obviously is multicultural and even the local church can be a glorious display of Jesus’ lordship over all cultures.

But the most helpful insight that I gleaned from Postmodern Times is how evangelical churches like mine and how pastors like me are affected by this culture we find ourselves in. How often do I see my people rejecting Biblical truth and embracing something else, simply because “it works for me”? How often do I ignore Biblical instruction for leading the church and embrace other church growth strategies, simply because “it works for us”? How often am I drawn to the potential power of the church and my leadership role in it, rather than to the truth of God and his revealed word? Far too often, I confess. Veith rightly directs Christians in this age to embrace a “confessional Christianity,” one that exults in truth over experience, doctrine over therapy, and “live orthodoxy” over “consumerist religious community.” In a culture that tends to deny truth altogether, an overemphasis on truth, the proclamation of God’s law and the Gospel of Jesus is hardly a danger.

Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture, Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Crossway Books, 1994