(Second of three parts; click here to read Part 1)

You tell me, over and over and over again, my friend, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction," growled Barry McGuire in a hit single that topped the Billboard charts for several weeks in 1965. Though I was not at that time a professing Christian, I remember friends from area youth groups latching on to McGuire's ballad of doom as a bracing sign of the times. While the gurus of the culture were busy savoring their victories in the first skirmishes of the sexual revolution or salivating over the prospect of the Great Society, these kids were dreaming their dreams of destruction. "Apocalypse now, glory tomorrow" seemed to be the motto of the few who clung to the radical or fundamentalist fringe in those halcyon days.

But even though in hindsight I have come to appreciate the foresight of those prophets of doom, I continue to wonder about the way they relished the prospect of ruin. It is one thing to proclaim judgment in a spirit of mourning and lamentation; it is another thing entirely to greet destruction with a joyful heart. What is it about the North American evangelical tradition that makes it seemingly easy for thoughtful Christians to be so blithe about the prospect of cultural demise?

The Irish poet William Butler Yeats knew all about such cultural ruin. "Now days are dragon-ridden," he wrote in the wake of World War I and the failed Irish rebellion of 1916. "He who can read the signs," according to Yeats, "knows no work can stand, / Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent / On master-work of intellect or hand." How, Yeats wondered, could he justify toiling at the work of culture while knowing at the same time of its inevitable ruin?

Yeats resolved this dilemma by articulating his own distinct view of tragedy in poems he wrote in the tumultuous 1930's. For instance, "Lapis Lazuli," a poem written just two years before his death, begins with images of destruction and ends with an expression of tragic serenity. Referring to the perilous state of Europe, Yeats writes that "if nothing drastic is done / Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out" and they will "pitch . . . bomb-balls in / Until the town lie beaten flat." And the terror of modern Europe, it turns out, is but one form of the universal fate of culture: "Old civilizations" are "put to the sword. / Then they and their wisdom went to rack." We do our work with the knowledge that it may be "beaten flat" or fade into oblivion. Nevertheless, we persevere in a spirit of tragic gaiety, committed to the desperate struggle to preserve as well as to the inevitable need to rebuild what we have failed to protect from ruin: "All things fall and are built again / And those that build them again are gay."

The sounds of towns being "beaten flat" and "old civilizations being put to the sword" reverberate through the pages of three new Christian assessments of postmodernism. Each book traffics in the language of crisis and cultural demise. Near the end of their work, for instance, J. Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh assert that modern culture "has disintegrated into language games and hyperreality," has "degenerated into violent and deadly tribalism," and has "become a grim nightmare of economic contraction . . . and environmental collapse." Seeming to echo Yeats, they ask, "Might it be the case that the very foundations of Western culture are weak, and we must engage in a painful process of dismantling and rebuilding again?"

In like manner, Stanley Grenz sounds the note of destruction in A Primer on Postmodernism. Imitating Tom Wolfe and Michel Foucault--who are masters of the art of detecting sweeping cultural trends in isolated historical incidents--Grenz names the founding event of the postmodern era: "Postmodernism was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m." On that day, the Pruitt-Igoe housing project was "razed with dynamite." According to Grenz (who cites for authority the architectural critic Charles Jencks), "this event symbolizes the death of modernity and birth of postmodernity." Grenz's metaphors are mixed, but his message is clear. Whether it is seen as a writhing body, a blasted building, or a decaying organism, the modern world has reached its end, and we should be glad:

Our society is in the throes of a shift of immense proportions. Like the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, the edifice that housed thought and culture in the modern era is crumbling. As modernity dies around us, we appear to be entering a new epoch--postmodernity.

Brian Ingraffia's Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology also draws upon images of cultural conflict, negation, and destruction, but it is a work of another order entirely. The books by Middleton and Walsh and by Grenz have a secondhand quality about them; in large measure they read like summaries of accounts that others have given of the postmodern era. Ingraffia's work, on the other hand, is the product of an intense engagement with major figures of postmodern theory, particularly Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. Ingraffia has studied these thinkers with care, and his critique is sustained, sophisticated, and substantial. The confidence with which he maneuvers his way through postmodern theory is refreshing, as is the critical charity with which he engages its proponents, who are his opponents. Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology is a major achievement and a superb example of Christian engagement with contemporary scholarship.

Yet for all its differences of substance and argument, Ingraffia's work shares with the two other books a profound skepticism about the culture of modernity. Ingraffia explains at the start that his goal is to examine Nietzsche's relentless quest to expunge from Western culture the "'shadow' of God which lingers after his death." He argues that "postmodern theory has been intent on completing Nietzsche's project of vanquishing God's shadow," and he offers his provisional support for the project: "we should . . . vanquish god's shadow, the shadow god created by human reason and imagination, that we might seek the revelation of the living God in the cross of Christ."

The language of "dismantling, crumbling, and vanquishing" that permeates these books calls Yeats to mind again. In his most famous apocalyptic poem, "The Second Coming," the Irish poet announces: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Yeats has a vision of barbaric power and indifference supplanting the "twenty centuries of stony sleep" that have been the Christian era. The general nature of the coming age is not in doubt; only the specific form of its incarnation is uncertain: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

For all the talk there is of "things fall[ing] apart" in these Christian cultural analyses, of these authors only Ingraffia seems to detect any beasts slinking across the postmodern desert. He alone identifies the militant atheism at the heart of Nietzschean postmodernity and names it for what it is--a blunt denial of the existence of God, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the body. Given the frequent equivocation of Christian academics on this point, one is grateful to Ingraffia for his clarity: "Nietzsche's philosophy cannot be understood without a critical appraisal of his attack on Christianity. . . . Nietzsche is not attacking only hypocritical Christianity," asserts Ingraffia. "Rather, he is attacking Christianity itself as originally and unavoidably hypocritical and 'mendacious.'"

Yet because Nietzsche and the postmodernists couple their attack upon Christianity with an assault upon ancient and modern rationalism, Ingraffia also considers them allies of a sort. Postmodern critique compels the church to make a choice: "either biblical theology or post-modern theory. Only as a theology of the cross will Christianity recover its prophetic voice." For Ingraffia, at its best, postmodern theory sharpens the distinctions between Christian revelation and the vain imaginings of human culture. It is the beast that can drive us to the beauty of Christ.

No Yeatsian beasts stalk the sands of Middleton and Walsh's postmodernity. Indeed, the only thing to be spotted slouching in their book is the archetypal college graduate who lurks in the background of their analysis and to whom their work appears to be primarily addressed. Middleton and Walsh view postmodern people as aesthetes who wander from experience to experience and who are anxious about their confusion but happy for their freedom. Yet even though postmoderns are restlessly superficial and show little capacity for sustained argument or attention, they also are, according to Middleton and Walsh, primed for the Christian gospel and surprisingly receptive to the daunting demands it places upon their lives.

To their credit, in their response to postmodernism, Middleton and Walsh place a useful emphasis upon the all-encompassing nature of the biblical narrative.

It is . . . our story, no matter who we are, capable of speaking to us even in the midst of a postmodern crisis. In answer to the question What's wrong? the Scriptures tell of our rebellion against our creator, of our willful bondage to futility and our entrapment in no-exit situations (even the situation of postmodernity).

And to the question "What's the remedy?" Middleton and Walsh respond by speaking of "God's passionate desire to answer our cries of desperation and meet us in our need, intervening in our no-exit situations to turn our bondage into freedom."

In Stanley Grenz's account, postmodernity is neither a lair for the beast of unbelief nor a dormitory packed with angst-ridden aesthetes. Instead, Grenz depicts it as a halfway house for a genial destroyer, with whom Christians can join in the "assault on the modern epistemological fortress." While we storm together the Enlightenment castle, this postmodern agent of ruin won't mind us quibbling about his assertion that because "all interpretations are in some sense invalid, they all [are] equally invalid." After all, once the battle has been won, and modernity vanquished, we will be able to sit down and talk with the angel of death. After we have patiently listened to him catalogue "the longings of the postmodern generation," we will respond to his needs; we will "embody and articulate the never-changing good news of available salvation in a manner that the emerging generation can understand." And thus, finished with his works of destruction, the warrior will have become a consumer, a target market for the merchandising church.

In marketing its "available salvation," the church may use whatever language it sees fit to promote its products. In two revealing paragraphs tucked away in his final chapter, Grenz speaks disarmingly of his willingness to have the church barter away its symbolic heritage for a brief increase in its marketing powers. To Grenz, words such as sin and grace, reconciliation and divine power are merely "categories" that we "appeal to" in order "to bring into an understandable whole the diverse strands of our personal lives." Doctrinal statements neither point to the divine truth about God nor mysteriously mediate the Word of God. Instead, the words of our creeds are functional ciphers meant to serve the purposes of a romantic self in a managerial age: "The encounter with God in Christ is both facilitated by and expressed in categories that are propositional in nature." Grenz thus imprecisely labels individual words "propositions" and argues that their purpose is to "serve the conversion experience" by giving expression to "our new status as believers." Words are tools we "employ" to get "others to encounter God in Christ and then join us on the grand journey of understanding the meaning of that encounter for all of life."

(Second of three parts; click here to read Part 3)

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 20

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