Postmodern Trauma - Vol 3 No 2

Actual picture of Mike's syllabus on Postmodernism

Terrified, traumatized… meaningless

The “Trigger Warning” above is an ACTUAL PICTURE from Mike's syllabus for his class on Postmodernism.  Students taking this class are warned that Postmodernism, if understood correctly, should RIGHTLY threaten everything they care about in this world.  And indeed, it does!  If you embrace what they are teaching (and they are hoping you do, as tens of thousands of college students are), then you will  "at some point feel terrified, traumatized, overwhelmed or struck with an acute sense of meaninglessness." What is this teaching they are proposing that will wreak havoc in your life?  

Postmodernism distilled

As the name describes, postmodernism is the cultural and philosophical period that follows modernism.  Moderns were intoxicated by the ardent strides of human progress enjoyed in the late nineteenth century and the majority of the twentieth century.  Exalting science and its empirical truths to the status of godhood, moderns had the mindset of those building the Tower of Babel, "There is nothing that man cannot do. Man can improve mankind." Looking back now on two World Wars, numerous genocides, and ideological terrorism, the Modernist god has toppled. Its shattered pieces are the disillusioned and disappointed shards that are now postmodernism.  What happened?  Where do Postmodernists place the blame? 

Claims to truth are attempts to exert power

            Postmoderns laid the blame of the failure of mankind to improve itself at the feet of truth itself.    Claims to truth came to be seen as man's attempt to exert power over other men, and that was the problem.  As a result, the Bible being replete with assertions of absolute truth, became suspect, then rejected, then hated.  One of the most influential men to lead us down this path to "an acute sense of meaninglessness" was Friedrich Nietzsche.  He purported that morality must come from inside us.  When people look for morality objectively, like from the Scriptures, they are enslaving themselves and denying their human potential.  That is the ultimate felony for the postmoderns, negating individual human potential.

The quest for knowledge

Postmoderns say human potential is bound up in a quest for knowledge, but the rules (which is ironic since they claim that there are no such thing as rules!) are that knowledge cannot be obtained by using any shared belief in truth or shared understanding of overarching principles.  For instance, for millennia mankind has relied on overarching structures for belief that most of us agree upon to consider life around us.  Things like the fact that there is such a thing as absolute truth.  That God can be known.  That marriage is fundamental to our cultures and societies.  That marriage is between one man and one woman.  These and all other commonly held overarching schemes are called "metanarratives."  Remember that term.  You will hear it a lot because they are all about deconstructing and destroying the metanarratives which they claim exert power over us by claiming to be true.  So what metanarratives must be destroyed? Essentially anything that has been used over the years to provide structure and meaning to our lives....anything that has traditionally provided a foundation for thinking must go. They say we must create our own micronarratives, our own ideas of what knowledge and living is without the constraints of pesky little things like rules, truth, law, or boundaries.  Sound contradictory? Of course it is, but the euphoria of thinking yourself to be the very arbiter of your life decisions, that you "create your own truth", that you are the "captain of your soul" and determiner of your "potential" is hard to resist.  And so the popularity of this illogical, prideful, rebellious metanarrative of postmodernism (sic) is rising.  And the natural consequences are being realized as Mike was warned of in the syllabus pictured above.

Marriage is something we've all made up

With all the young faces eagerly ready to absorb the wisdom of this tenured professor, put forth by this university as one of their elite, a member of the Board of Regents, he begins the class by saying, "Nothing I say is absolutely true."

With a twist on the usual "Is that true?"  Mike smiled and said,  "How often are you wrong?"

The professor flashed a wry smile at Mike and moved on. 

"The woke culture which was once asleep is now awake. Being woke means that we can now see what previous generations could not see, such things as marriage being a metanarrative. Marriage was something that everybody held to in some form. The metanarrative of marriage is thousands of years old, but what we have discovered as postmodernists is that marriage is something that we've all made up, and something that is unnecessary, and it's a product of cultural construction."

He went on, "I've been married so many times I can't remember them all.   Just to show you how steeped in the metanarrative I was, I insisted that my first two wives take my name when they wanted keep their own. I was stealing their identity, and exerting power over them.  See the connection?  The metanarrative of marriage is imaginary, something that we have made up, and because it's imaginary we've got to overcome it. We've got to disassemble it in our culture."

God made marriage

He turned to the class.  "So what do you think marriage is?  How do you look at marriage?"

"A trap that women set for men as a meal ticket," spit one.

"A partnership between two people to live together," offered another.

"Well, it has been a mechanism of servitude for women, but we're changing that!"

"It's whatever people want it to be to meet their needs."

Mike boldly raised his hand.  "Marriage wasn't invented by man, so man really doesn't have the right to change it."

The class turned to listen.  "It was invented by God.  It is His institution that he created for the happiness of the man and the woman.  Jesus Himself blessed it as a covenant promise between a man and a woman for life.”

There were visceral responses of disdain, and some in the class known to be in same sex relationships laughed out loud.

"My wife and I have been married for forty years this year.  We have a deep love for God and for each other, and our marriage is one of the greatest blessings we enjoy in this life.  It pleases God and provides stability for our family and our community as God intended.  I know that many of you have not witnessed or experienced marriage as it should be, but that may be because you have not sought to consider it the way it was intended to be by God. I'd love to talk to you about that." Class ended, but not without Mike clearly declaring the light of God's truth as the foundation of knowledge, and thus Mike is bringing hope and light to an otherwise dark scenario. Postmodernism agrees with the Scriptural truth that separation from God wreaks havoc in your life; it is terrifying.  Far from promoting that which "terrifies, traumatizes, overwhelms and strikes with an acute sense of meaninglessness," Mike is clearly and boldly supplying the source of meaning, comfort and TRUTH in God through Jesus Christ. 

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