Postmodernism

Postmodernism is the philosophical mood that followed modernism, marked by suspicion of any “grand narrative,” any single story or system claiming to explain reality for everyone. Where modernism trusted human reason and science to reach objective truth, postmodernism doubts that language can reach a truth beyond itself at all, treating truth-claims as constructions shaped by a particular community, history, or exercise of power rather than discoveries of how things really are. It denies that texts, including the Bible, carry one determinate, author-intended meaning available to every careful reader. Some theologians have argued Christianity should welcome postmodernism as an ally against modernist rationalism; others read it as modernism’s own assumptions carried to their conclusion.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession predates postmodernism by three centuries and names no such movement, but it commits Reformed Baptist theology to the claim postmodern hermeneutics denies: that Scripture has “one true and full sense,” recoverable by comparing “other places that speak more clearly,” not an indeterminate range of reader-constructed meanings.¹ The same paragraph is worded identically in the Westminster Confession, the Savoy Declaration, and the Philadelphia Confession, making this a collective Reformed commitment rather than a Baptist distinctive; the principle it states, that Scripture interprets Scripture, has its own fuller treatment at analogy of faith. On the wider question of whether unaided human categories, whether modernism’s reason or postmodernism’s communal construction, can reach truth apart from Scripture’s own testimony, the confession’s opening chapter states the same limits on general revelation that Modernism’s own Confessional Witness section already sets out.²

Historical Development

Lyotard, Derrida, and the rejection of metanarratives

Jean-François Lyotard’s 1979 definition of the postmodern condition as “incredulity toward metanarratives” set the movement’s philosophical agenda: no longer would a single story, whether Marxist, Enlightenment, or Christian, be granted the authority to explain history and ground knowledge for everyone.³ Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction carried the same suspicion into language itself. On Derrida’s account, “language connects only with more language, never with a non-linguistic reality,” so a text never delivers stable access to a reality outside itself. Carter treats this as “the ruthless implementation of postmodern antirealist metaphysics that flows from Kantianism” rather than a neutral observation about how texts work.⁴ On this reading postmodernists are not so much anti-metaphysical as “postmetaphysical,” extremely consistent late modernists who finish what Kant’s turn to the human subject started rather than escaping it.⁴ Modernism’s own article traces this continuity in full: the same materialism, nominalism, mechanism, relativism, and skepticism the Enlightenment settled into resurface in postmodernism, which is why Craig Carter calls it “hypermodernism” rather than a genuine departure from the modern project.⁵

Reception within evangelicalism

Postmodernism’s challenge fell most heavily on the doctrine of Scripture’s authority. Because the challenge follows the history of literary criticism, it presses at three points at once: whether a divine author stands behind the text at all, whether the text itself carries determinate meaning once its author is set aside, and whose reading, if any, should be treated as authoritative.⁶ Evangelical responses to this challenge split. Stanley Grenz, writing with John Franke in Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (2001), proposed a nonfoundationalist, Spirit-centered account in which Scripture serves as the Spirit’s instrument for making God known rather than revelation to be defended on modernist, foundationalist grounds, a proposal that “came under criticism from some evangelicals.”⁷ Carl Raschke’s The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernism (2005) argued evangelicals should adopt postmodern categories more fully still, treating discipleship rather than “propositional truth” as Christianity’s real content and reading claims to propositional truth as a form of cultural imperialism.⁸ Andreas Köstenberger’s edited volume Whatever Happened to Truth? (2006) is a standard evangelical critique of that project.⁸ The Emerging Church movement carried a similar embrace of postmodern sensibilities into local church practice. D. A. Carson’s The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (1996) is cited elsewhere in evangelical scholarship, including in discussions of the doctrine of the biblical canon, as “a more thorough discussion (and critique) of postmodernity and its effects on Christianity.”⁹

Metamodernism

By the early twenty-first century, theorists were describing a further shift beyond postmodernism itself. Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker coined “metamodernism” for a stance that “oscillates between the modern and the postmodern”: it lives as though truth is objectively real while treating that truth as a construction, “seeking forever for a truth it never expects to find.”¹⁰ Alan Kirby, using the term “pseudo-modernism,” makes the contrast with pure postmodernism explicit: where postmodernism disbelieved grand narratives, people shaped by this later stage are “incapable of the ‘disbelief of Grand Narratives’ which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists,” because pseudo-modernism “defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts.”³ The clearest example is the simultaneous claim that a belief (about gender identity, for instance) is both purely subjective and objectively binding on everyone else.¹¹

Objections and Responses

Postmodernism’s rejection of grand narratives is simply modernism’s own rationalist overreach corrected, and Christianity should treat it as a natural ally against modernist confidence in unaided reason. Modernism’s own Objections and Responses section takes up this argument directly: on Carter’s “hypermodernism” reading, the materialism, relativism, and skepticism postmodernism is credited with overturning were already present at the Enlightenment’s founding, so a worldview that only intensifies modernism’s premises offers Christianity no more room for special revelation than modernism itself did.⁵

Postmodern relativism refutes itself: the claim that no metanarrative is true is itself a metanarratival truth-claim. The observation is correct as far as it goes, but Robert Golding argues it lands with little force against the culture postmodernism has actually produced, because people no longer hold the pure relativism the objection targets. They affirm no objective truth exists while treating their own constructed truths as binding on others, so pointing out the theoretical inconsistency in relativism as such is “polemically useless” against a position people have already moved past, even though it remains a sound criticism of consistent postmodern relativism on its own terms.³

Denying that a text has one determinate, author-intended meaning simply describes how all reading works; it is no special attack on the Bible. The challenge nonetheless presses on Scripture’s authority at every stage literary criticism distinguishes, author, text, and reader, at once, which is why it has drawn sustained evangelical response rather than routine acceptance.⁶ The confession’s own claim that Scripture has “one true and full sense” recoverable by comparing Scripture with Scripture stands opposed to this account of reading in principle, whatever textual difficulties remain in practice.¹

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 9. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
Robert Golding, “Swimming in a Sanctimonious Sea of Subjectivity: A Proposal for Christian Authenticity in a Made-Up World,” Themelios 49, no. 1 (2024): 161. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Craig A. Carter, “Interpreting Isaiah 40-48 Theologically,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 3. ↩ ↩²
Craig A. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9. ↩ ↩²
John Thomas English III, “The Evangelical Doctrine of the Authority of Scripture,” in “Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 2. ↩ ↩²
English, 19. ↩
John Bolt, editorial note, in Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science,” n. 6. ↩ ↩²
Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton: Crossway, 2012), 23-24. ↩
Golding, 162. ↩
Golding, 160. ↩