If we want to reach our postmodern youth then we need to change our evangelistic approach. The rarefied air of traditional apologetics has left our young people divinely light-headed, therefore, we must bring them back to earth to regain their balance and then teach them to dig around in the dirt of common experience to find hidden heavenly treasure.  In my previous blogs, we soiled our knees by exploring the Biblical explanation of our spiritual nature, our belief that the world is good but broken, and the orderliness of life. Today, we will discuss the universal experience of human uniqueness and how it can be used as a postmodern evangelistic tool.

One of the reasons our young people question their faith is because once they enter college they find that their new postmodern friends aren’t the demons we told them they were. They find them to be a rather a pleasant bunch that seem intent on saving the planet, being kind to one another, and lifting up the oppressed. The people we painted as bogeyman actually turned out to be interesting pieces of human art lining the dormitories of higher education. Sadly, our Christian apologetic consisted of warnings to not enter the postmodern gallery instead of instruction on how to be discerning patrons of the postmodern arts.

We need to congratulate our youth for recognizing and promoting human uniqueness, but then push them to explain why they are so obsessed with it. One of the big problems with the postmodern mind is that it believes uniqueness is invented and not innate. The self becomes the makeup and not the face, the clothing and not the body, the slogan and not the mind. Identity becomes a sofa that is constantly rearranged to accommodate the ever-changing cultural Feng Shui. Sadly, “I think; therefore I am,” becomes, “I feel; therefore I am becoming.” Our young people settle for being disposable images drawn on a cultural white boards instead of unique masterpieces conceived in the mind of God. While they may feel empowered to create their own identity, in the end, they will become strangers in their own house, haunted by the ghost of their true self they killed off in a fit of postmodern passion.

We need to explain to them that before they contemplated becoming a new person, they were already a thought in God’s mind. Before they colored and spiked their hair, God had already counted every one of them. Before they sculpted their identity, He already knew their unformed substance. And as they trembled with excitement at the thought of creating their own image, they had already been fearfully and wonderfully made.

Since we all began as a thought in God’s mind we are His intellectual property and any attempt to patent our own personality becomes a violation of cosmic copyright laws. We need to show our young people that life’s yoke is much lighter when they cultivate who they were created to be rather than laboriously manufacturing themselves from scratch. In order to do this, we must allow them to be vulnerable and help them remove the many layers of cultural make-up that has obscured their true identity, and then take them to the mirror to show them that they are, in fact, the spitting image of their Father.

For you formed my inward parts;

      you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

      Wonderful are your works;

      my soul knows it very well.

My frame was not hidden from you,

      when I was being made in secret,

      intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw my unformed substance;

      in your book were written, every one of them,

      the days that were formed for me,

      when as yet there were none of them. (Psalm 139: 13-16)

While we need to congratulate them for acknowledging human uniqueness, we must also warn them that their zeal to maximize individuality has clouded their ability to see the big picture. They have been so intent on creating an all-inclusive acronym of tolerance that they failed to recognize the larger alphabet of man. As they parsed humans into unique individual bytes they didn’t recognize the larger human operating system that made each one of them important.

Christians believe that human worth is found in the structural integrity of its image-bearing dwellings, while postmoderns find it in the gnomes they place on their lawns. They tell us to concentrate on the powerful tolerance of the mighty cultural Oz, but ignore the frail little child behind the curtain struggling to pull the levers of love, courage, and wisdom. Sadly, postmodernism is only interested in selling tickets to everybody’s one man show and not distributing backstage passes to meet the vulnerable actors. If we fail to acknowledge the image-of-God core that makes us special then our performances will define us, and no matter how sincere our act, art will become life. We need to congratulate our youth for caring for the marginalized and oppressed, but then show them that they do so not because they admire their particularly edgy performance, but because we all belong to the same image-of-God actor’s guild.

Postmoderns not only want unique individuality, but they also want to be able to change it on a whim. They believe that personal portraits should be drawn with magic markers that can be easily erased and redrawn to match each new rainbow color on their personal mood ring. The problem with the fluidity of identity is that it blurs boundaries and makes it incredibly difficult to identify uniqueness. Ironically, when identity is defined by choice and not circumstance it destroys categories and prevents postmoderns from doing what they love to do the most, offering aid to the marginalized. For example, the solution to the problem of unequal treatment of women in the workplace becomes a simple check of the male box on a job application. If identity is fluid then elevating minorities is like trying to pick up mercury, it may be really shiny on the outside, but it slips right through our fingers. In the end, relativism and fluidity reduces their rainbow colored world to taupe, and their 31 flavor cultural ice cream becomes vanilla pudding.

Choice is the sacrament of postmodernism and it is offered on a daily basis to those who worship in the secular temple. It doesn’t even matter what the consequences of a particular choice may be because the governmental priesthood has no problem using taxpayer alms to fund the sanctuary clean up. Postmoderns have a heart for the marginalized, but instead of extending a hand to lift them out of the pit of despair, they remodel the hole they dug for themselves with the furniture of cultural accommodation.

We need to show our postmodern youth that God also has a heart for the oppressed, and even though He chose a specific people to be his conduit of salvation, He got quite angry with them when they failed to care for the widows, orphans, strangers, aliens, and poor. When you read the Sermon on the Mount you quickly see that Jesus also had a lot to say about the oppressed, but His speech was not intended to convince people to bake cakes for them, but rather to make sure they were invited into God’s Kingdom kitchen. Jesus was very postmodern to the extent that He invited the marginalized to the wedding feast, but He still insisted that they change for the occasion.

Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore to the main roads and invite to the wedding feast as many as you find.’ And those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good. So the wedding hall was filled with guests. “But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment. And he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.” (Matthew 22:8-14)

The youth of today clearly recognize that humans are unique, but they are confused about the source of that uniqueness. Our Christian apologetic needs to embrace this shared love of individuality, but then take it to the next level and show them that they are special because they are a prized portrait in God’s gallery and not a postmodern painting of a question mark on cultural white board. God made it easy on us by sending His Son, the perfect image of God, to give us an up close and personal look at what we were meant to be; so we have a choice, we can conform to His image, or be deformed by our own. Trying to be like Jesus is not bland conformity but divinely inspired diversity. Understanding our identity is not just an intellectual exercise, but also has eternal implications because when we meet God at the hour of our death we want His heart to leap with joy as He welcomes another one of His cherished thoughts into heaven, and not have Him scratch His head because He doesn’t recognize what we have become. We want God to offer a – “well done, good and faithful servant” – blessing, and not the – “I never knew you” – last rites.  The Good News is that God is in the business of individuality, in fact, He believes image is everything. 

Photo by Tiko Giorgadz from Unsplash