THE “FREEDOM” OF POSTMODERNISM

Years ago, Bob Dylan sang the song, “You Gotta Serve Someone.” The more I thought about it, the more I saw that he was onto something. The baby serves his or her instinctual survival needs. They cry when they are hungry and know to drink the mother’s milk. When we mature, we begin to serve other needs – both emotional and psychological. Later, these demanding needs become social, as we seek approval and a place among our peers.

However, somewhere along the line, we also have to learn how to restrain our desires. Our conscience begins to kick in along with social norms. These tell us that we cannot always serve our desires. We cannot fight and scream when we don’t get what we want, or can we?

Our postmodern culture is now telling us that can have it all. In fact, you should have it all. We should have our desires, even if it means that we surgically change our sex. If that is not enough, society will now penalize those who speak out against this insipient I-want-it-now mentality.

How did postmodernity achieve this revolution? It has convinced us that:

·       Repression is bad. It inhibits us. Instead, we have to be who we are and desire whatever we want.

·       We have to be all that we can be.

·       Exercising self-control makes us less authentic.

·       The conscience interferes with our finding self-fulfillment.

·       Those we had regarded as authorities are all wrong.

·       Instead, we are the authors of our own reality, captains of our own ship, and we should empower ourselves to pursue our dreams.

·       We create our own reality. There is no other reality but what we create.

·       There are no higher truths or principles to tell us that we have done wrong. We should be our own judge and jury.

However, the freedom that postmodernism has promised is just another form of servitude. Instead of serving ideals, we now abandoned to serve our feelings and desires. The external ideals – objective moral law and our cultural inheritance – have been destroyed. Left alone to our feelings and desires, we find ourselves without a roadmap to tell us what to do with these desires. We are left to serve them. We now live with open borders, tyrannized by demanding desires.

I know that this sounds a bit extreme. So I want to try to illustrate how the removal of moral authorities has stripped us and has left us vulnerable to a more destructive and tyrannical set of authorities.

Have you ever noticed that when you get in a fight, it is always the other person who is in the wrong? I certainly have! In fact, the resulting feelings are so powerfully authoritative. I believe that I have been wronged, victimized, and humiliated. We want revenge, even if only in our own heart or the use of the silent treatment.

When objective principles of right and wrong have been crushed under foot, there is nothing remaining, nothing higher than our feelings, to correct us and show us that we have been wrong in our assessment and determination to seek some form of revenge. Our desires are left unchecked to tyrannize.

Our choices can kill. I had been convinced that my wife had wronged me, and I resented her for this. However, I had forgotten how many times she had forgiven me, but even recalling these wasn’t enough. My feelings had been so strong that they stomped down every other consideration in their path. Instead, these feelings dictated that she always misconstrued what I had said and she always would. I was livid.

If I was a postmodernist, my feelings would have remained king. They would have presided over any pragmatic concerns for my own welfare.

I needed protection from myself and to be convinced that my unforgiveness was absolutely wrong and that my failure to receive her back into my heart was an absolute betrayal of love and commitment. I needed far more than what postmodernism could offer. I needed to know that there is something higher than my feelings and even a cost/benefit assessment. I needed to be told that I was absolutely wrong.

This is what Scripture tells me. No, it comes crashing down upon me, indicting and correcting me, and ultimately, restoring us. I need God’s Word to break through my coercive and imperialistic feelings and desires and to put them in their rightful and humbled place.

I don’t know how other couples make it and how they can stand up against this postmodern madness. When caught cheating, a husband explained,

·       “Well, having multiple partners is just what I am about. This is my truth. You have no right to dictate to me your truth. Keep your own truth for yourself.”

Of course, they divorced. They no longer shared the common ground, a higher truth. Instead, postmodernism damned them to divorce. They had become captains of their own ships and were their compass was leading them to separate ports.

There is no escaping it. We have to serve someone. It will either be our own desires or it will be something above us, hopefully, Someone who dignifies our service.

A PORTRAIT OF SELF-DESTRUCTION

Does rationality lead to atheist? Not according to the late German philosopher and atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche:

·       “I have no knowledge of atheism as an outcome of reasoning, still less an event; with me it is obviously instinct.” (Os Guinness, The Journey, 154)

The late British novelist and atheist, Aldous Huxley, concurred:

·       I had motives for not having the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption… The philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation… from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. (Ends and Means quoted by Guinness, 214-15)

Guinness adds that Huxley later turned to Eastern Mysticism “because he admitted that these early choices of meaninglessness had led him to despair.” (214)

When we reject God, we also reject any possible objective basis for both morality and meaning, condemning us to a flat, sterile, and barren world, bereft of depth, color, and contour. The Book of Proverbs illustrates a sorry plight that starts with pleasure but succumbs to pain:

·       “Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the LORD, would have none of my counsel and despised all my reproof, therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way, and have their fill of their own devices. For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them.” (Proverbs 1:29-32; ESV)

The Bondage of the Self

In a speech of August 16, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. identified the most powerful and pervasive form of slavery:

• As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery.

Without a stable and assured source of self-esteem, we condemn ourselves to psychological slavery. This is because we all need to believe that we have value, but we relentlessly pursue this by trying to prove ourselves. In order to believe that we are good and even superior to others, we become obsessed with ourselves, comparisons with others, money, success, popularity, and power – by whatever standard society grants worth.

In the pursuit of these, we deny our faults, rationalize our failures, become dependent on the opinions of society, and ultimately become alienated from both self and others in the process. We convince ourselves that:

• If I could only have this mate (or house, or job, success or money, or…), I will have arrived and will be able to feel good about myself.

However, this moment will never arrive. The richest man in the world, John D. Rockefeller, was asked:

• How much more money will you have to make in order to be happy? 

His answer was very revealing:

• Always a little bit more!

We never arrive! We desperately pursue an unattainable goal. Is there any answer to our internal prison, our morbid self-obsessions?

We must find our worth outside of the arbitrary, changing, and often uncaring standards of society, even outside of our desperate selves! As strong as we might be, there is no way that we can lift ourselves off the ground. We need someone else to do this for us, but a someone who possesses the strength, gentleness, wisdom, and authority to define us in absolute and unchanging terms. Jesus assured His followers:

• "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:31-32)

We are enslaved by the need to relentlessly prove ourselves. Instead, Jesus invites us to define ourselves by His unfailing love and forgiveness. Consequently, it no longer matters what we or others think of us. Instead, if Jesus accepts us, we can begin to accept ourselves and find liberation.

Self-Acceptance and why it’s so Difficult to Attain

Self-acceptance represents peace among our inner warring factions, but it requires ruthless honesty. While one part is determined to convince us of our goodness or worthiness, the other part vehemently protests against this fabrication. How can we then make peace? We have to acknowledge all of our failings.

After a long struggle, the King and Psalmist David confessed that:

• Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place. (Psalm 51:6)

Indeed, God did teach David truth and wisdom, but this was only after enduring a long period of suffering. Looking back upon his travail, David reflected:

• When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. (Psalm 32:3)

David had committed adultery, murder, and even implicated others in his wrongdoing. He then tried to bury the entire matter, even as he was “groaning all day long.”

How was David able to come to terms with his sin?  Truly, there can be no self-acceptance until we do this. Without the confession of sin, denial - the internal struggle to suppress sin - reigns. However, what is suppressed always threatens to resurface in the form of guilt and shame.

David was aware of his “groaning,” but he might have suppressed awareness of his warring factions. How then can we acknowledge what is unseen? Often, it is just too painful to acknowledge. It contradicts our carefully manicured self-image as a “good person.” This acknowledgement is simply too destabilizing. We have become addicted to the darkness and delusions of image-making (John 3:19-21).

In order to break this addiction, our Lord must lovingly take us by the hand and confront us with what we have long denied. He sent a prophet to David to expose his suppressed sin. He does this also with us, but He replaces our addiction to the lie with another – one that we are designed to imbibe. He assures us that our worth, identity and self-definition have now been transferred to Him – the source of all glory and goodness:

• I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)

• Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. (1 Cor. 6:19-20)

Knowing that it’s no longer about us but about our Savior – and He is covering us in every way – is entirely liberating. It’s no longer about me, my performance and my righteousness, but about His! This means that I no never have to bear the weight of my failings. What I am and what I do is entirely in His hands. He owns me, and I no longer have to prove myself. The hammer needs not worry if it is driving in the nails correctly. This responsibility lies with the one wielding the hammer.

This may sound like a renunciation of our responsibility, but not according to Paul:

• But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them--yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. (1 Cor. 15:10).

God takes responsibility for our lives and gets all the credit! Does this mean that I can shirk my responsibilities? No! However, I now understand that as I move forward to do the right thing, I know that I can only do so with His guidance and enablement.

As we grow in the understanding that it’s all about my Savior, we can be transparent and joke about our failings. After all, they are now peripheral to our essential identity. Similarly, it is easy to joke about peeing on our babysitter when we were one. That one-year-old is so distant from who we are today, that it is now laughable. However, peeing down your pants as you deliver a lecture is harder to joke about.

Christ has separated us from our sins and all of those things about which we are ashamed. It is only because He accepts us entirely that we can begin to accept ourselves. This divine acceptance has enabled us to confront our sins and even mourn over them for a season (Matthew 5:4), knowing that, in due time, we shall be comforted. As we humble ourselves in confession of sin, He exalts us.

Self-acceptance is the freedom to face ourselves; it is the freedom from the compulsion to hide and deny. Self-acceptance takes full responsibility. David learned this lesson:

• For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, "I will confess my transgressions to the Lord"-- and you forgave the guilt of my sin. (Psalm 32:4-5)

Self-acceptance basks in the light of truth. It has nothing to hide, because nothing can threaten it.