Weekly Pastoral Message prepared by Rev. Murray Adamthwaite
for Sunday 25th May 1997
From the Pastor: Some Contemporary Buzzwords I: "Postmodernism"
"What in the world is that?" you might well ask. Well, the journos are using
it, it is abroad in the churches, and is becoming part of popular parlance.
"Modernism" as a religious phenomenon goes back to the late nineteenth
century: it is claimed that the supernatural must be eliminated from
Christianity, and man's reason and intelligence be made the touchstone of
everthing believable. Hence out went miracles, inspiration, the Holy Spirit's
agency, the Resurrection, even the Deity of Christ.
Post-modernism, by contrast, is still man-centered but alleges that pure
reason leads nowhere. Experience is the important thing. This started with
the drug culture of the 1960's, but now insists that there is no laws or
rules of any kind, whether in sound, in language, in logic, in morals, or in
belief systems. Thus music has become sonic abuse; grammar has disappeared
from language; belief in Buddhism or Astrology is as valid as belief in
Christianity; right and wrong, if valid at all, is according to prevailing
fashion, not absolute standards. As in the Judge's period. "Everyone did
what was right in his own eyes".
All this has come because of people's desire to be free, but the only way out
of this miasma is to say with the Psalmist, "I will keep Thy law continually
forever and ever; And I will walk at liberty, for I have sought Thy
precepts" (Psalm 119:44-45).
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