We Christians love to have debates with atheists because they share the common belief that truth exists and that it can be found through logic and reason. Unfortunately, we became so preoccupied arguing with our atheist friends on the cultural front porch that we neglected the caravan of postmoderns who slipped into our backyards and kidnapped our children. We were so busy articulating the 5 proofs for God’s existence that we didn’t see our youth being spirited away by the Pied Piper of postmodernism. Our obsession with logic and reason left us so color blind to the relativist rainbow being built into the societal skyline that we didn’t even think to activate an Amber Alert. Now our kids are gone. We tried to fix the problem by placing missing children pictures on our church walls, but instead of alerting parishioners to a cultural kidnapping, these flyers just made our kids the post-er children for the post-modern, post-truth, post-Christian worldview.

We have earnestly tried to get them back but continue to rely on our old, modernist, enlightenment arguments, which just end up falling on deaf young, postmodern, post-enlightenment ears. The problem is we have been pursuing the wrong kidnap suspect. The fingerprints belong to the postmoderns, not the atheists.

We nod our heads when Aristotle posits an Unmoved Mover, but then watch as our kids gaze up at a tree and ask if God is moved when a sparrow falls. We make a point of telling our young people that God is omnipresent, but find that all they want to know is if He will shepherd them through the valley of the shadow of death. We argue for God’s omnipotence by telling them that He can move mountains, but find that our youth just want Him to pull them out of the pit. We teach them that God is omniscient, but all they really want to know is if He has counted every hair on their own heads. We assure them that God is omnibenevolent causing the rains to fall on the just and unjust, but find that they just want Him to send them a life raft when sorrow floods their lives. Postmoderns aren’t interested in conducting intellectual séances to conjure God up from the recesses of their minds. Postmoderns want to brush up against Him as they walk through their day.

While we all have different love languages, we need to remember that we also have different knowledge languages. Our young people no longer speak our language but rather communicate in an entirely different epistemological dialect. We need to find new ways to translate the Gospel into the postmodern vernacular. I am not advocating changing the message of orthodox Christianity in any way, but rather highlighting those aspects of the Gospel that resonate with a postmodern mind.

I believe that part of the problem is that we have become so enamored with Greek thinking that we have abandoned the Hebrew experience upon which our faith is based. Dr. Christian Overman, in his book, Assumptions That Affect Our Lives (1), points out that the Hebrews had a wholistic view of life where everything revolved around God. The Platonists, on the other hand, had a fractured view of the world that divided it into a perfect spiritual realm and an inferior physical realm. This Greek dualism ultimately led to the modern sacred-secular divide that continues to plague our government, schools, and churches. We seem content admiring the size of this divide from our Greek observation platform instead of calling in a Jewish Carpenter to build a bridge across it. How can we worship a Jewish God, who chose a Jewish People, to be the conduit for a Jewish Messiah, and then pledge our loyalty to the alpha omega house on Greek Row? It appears that Christianity has been influenced more by pagans than by the Chosen People, so I have to ask you, when it comes to apologetics, from whom should we take our cues, Plato and Aristotle, or Peter and Paul? We need to spend less time on the demographically challenged atheists and more time on the real threat, the tolerant postmodern majority.

Our youth have exchanged the meat of the Gospel for the empty calories of tolerance and are dying of spiritual malnutrition. While we are saddened by the lack of intellectual rigor in our young people, we cannot just walk away.  If we want to be relevant to our youth we need to walk the experiential walk, as well as talk the logical talk. While debates with our atheist brothers and sisters has certainly sharpened our understanding of our faith, it may have reached its Millennial limit, and now is the time to add new apologetic arrows to our evangelistic quiver. While postmodernism denies absolute truth, it does embrace the value of personal experience as a universal good, which I believe is more in line with the Hebrew experience of God. In order to formulate a postmodern apologetic, I think we need to revisit Tertullian’s question and once again ask ourselves, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

People of faith stumble across God everywhere: in nature, in the Bible, in daily acts of providence. God seems amply evident. But the secular mind sees no such evidence, and wonders how it is even possible to find God in the maze of competing claims. Unless we truly understand that viewpoint, and speak in terms a faithless person can understand, our words will have the quaint and useless ring of a foreign language. (Philip Yancey)(2) 

In my next blog I will suggest some possible approaches to reaching our postmodern youth.

1. Assumptions That Affect Our Lives – Dr. Christian Overman.

2. Philip Yancey – Soul Survivor

Photo by Ben Rosset from Unsplash. Unsplash