Modernism’s Impact on Christians

Introduction

Most of these have an element of truth, which is why we struggle.

Part of modernism is that it presses us towards making everything into absolute statements (maybe you see where I’m going there).

So we take something that is true “in so far as it goes,” but we take it much farther than it goes.

Sacred Secular Divide

Here is the belief that we can have areas of life where we can operate together without a common belief in God.

Secular is “just what is” while the religious involves “what people believe.”

This is often the atheist’s charge, “I deal in facts, not beliefs.”

Many have conceded that we can teach history and science and certainly math without the need to talk about God.

But choosing not to talk about God is never a neutral decision.

Objective/Subjective Divide

Because modernism points to absolute truth, it relegates all imprecise knowledge (truth) into the category of subjective.

The reality is that objective and subjective run on a spectrum not rigid categories.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: beauty falls in the subjective category and therefore cannot be considered in objective terms.

Humanism/Materialism

Human comfort became the measure of all progress and achievement.

Spiritual realities and solutions became a “private” concern not to be considered in the public square.

This causes us to rely too much on science and education.

Mechanistic View of Creation

Everything (including humans) is viewed in mechanistic terms.

It is all about efficiency and inefficiency.

So we circumvent natural processes because they are inefficient

Clean ox stalls.

Fragmented Homes and Churches

The exaltation of the individual has destroyed ideas of responsibility to the whole.

The desperate need to individual identity has made it hard for us to participate in larger identities that drown out our individual identity.

It is hard for us to even conceive of homes in a first century context.

We hear and maybe even preach sermons about “be yourself!” This is modernist nonsense.

Liberal Theologies

We need to set aside assumptions about divine revelation and evaluate the Bible like “any other book.”

Maybe this or that author just got it wrong.

The Bible can still be valuable as a helpful moral guide or book containing real human wisdom.

It can help us fix the problem of human suffering and so is valuable in so much as it accomplishes that.

Fundamentalist Reaction

The Bible is inspired and therefore infinitely precise in every particular.

Or, at the very least, we can use the scientific method and determine exactly where to draw lines of fellowship and necessity in all cases.

Exaltation of Practical Over Merely True and Lovely

A sermon that describes glorious truth about God but is hard to put into immediate practice is devalued in favor of “five ways you can change your life today.”

This has led to more therapeutic preaching and less textual preaching.

Conclusion

We cannot help but be modernists.

But we can acknowledge and recognize where we are affected and work to mitigate those influences in our own hearts and in our preaching.

More on that in our final lesson.