Episode Details

Rummaging around through my digital files last week, I discovered this paragraph: 

The very experience of 21st century living, with its utterly bewildering array of nearly limitless choice—in knowledge, information, entertainment, commodities, interests, lifestyles, and so on—has the psychological effect of fragmenting our lives, and destroying any illusion that there might be one overarching truth or ‘big story’. There is no fixed truth, no unifying story, no galvanizing purpose. There is nothing that explains me, or locates me in the world as part of a fixed tradition or community.  Everything is difference, diversity, plasticity, fluidity. It is up to the individual to try to fashion some satisfactory ‘self’, some thing that is uniquely and authentically ‘me’, by selecting from the google-sized cultural menu.

It’s from an article I wrote 15 years ago reviewing David Wells’s book Above all Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World, which I suspect many of you will never have heard of, but which was quite the thing in 2007. Books are like sermons in this regard. Even the best of them get forgotten; it just takes a little longer.

I came across this article because I was searching for background reading on truth and lies, in preparation for the CCL event on ‘Deception’ that’s coming up next week. (It’s not too late to register!) And Wells’s book casts a fascinating perspective on that subject. He charts the collapse of the modernist confidence of the Enlightenment, that humanity could find its own way to the truth about life and the universe.

The Enlightenment project failed, he suggests, for a number of reasons. At one level, it simply failed to deliver. The modernist dream was that humanity would craft its own destiny, and that science and education would lead us all into a unified bright new tomorrow. We were promised progress, enlightenment, knowledge and an inspiring humanist quest for truth. Instead we got the holocaust, propaganda, a nuclear arms race and environmental degradation.

But it also failed, he argues, because of the very structure of its thought, and all that followed from it. The Enlightenment ideal is profoundly individualistic. Human reason and experience is sovereign, which means that my reason and experience is sovereign—so who are you to tell me what to do? Or to tell me what constitutes ‘progress’? Or what ‘truth’ is?

In the end, Wells argues, the Enlightenment dream buckled, sagged and collapsed under the massive variety and weight of the consumer options that have opened before 21st century Westerners. We didn’t become ‘postmodern’ because we all started reading Derrida and Foucault but because contemporary culture is built on ‘you doing you’ and ‘me doing me’ (as we now say it), and we now have the financial and technological resources for us to try to do just that. Postmodern culture is an individualistic consumer culture in which I define meaning for myself by what I buy and choose and experience; by how I thus create the unique thing that is ‘me’.

So what does this mean for how we think about lying and deception in a postmodern world?

Disappointingly for my preparation, Wells doesn’t explore this angle, nor (therefore) did my review.

His interest lies elsewhere, in how the postmodern crisis of ‘truth’ relates to how Christians preach the gospel.

And so, as is so often the case when you rummage around in old books and articles, I found myself going down a completely different rabbit hole. But it was also one that very much relates to current events and issues.

The big issue for Wells—and it is still very much ours 15 years later—is how secular, postmodern people deal with the fracturing of truth and meaning, and how churches deal with it, as they reach out with the gospel in this environment.

He notes that while church-goi