Postmodern Jon was at it again in the "Readers Write" section of the Christian Standard of November 28, 2004. I hate to "pick on" Postmodern Jon, but in his letter he takes a turn that is a little, shall we say, disingenuous. He says he only wants to "clarify my position," but if this is the clear position, I would hate to see the opaque one!

Among the bits of wisdom in his letter, we find

You can be a lot of other things like "American" or "Republican" and still follow Jesus. But you can’t be just anything and still follow Jesus. For example, a Leninist-Stalinist kind of communist wouldn’t make such a great Christian, especially since a Leninist-Stalinist holds to false opinions that can’t be reconciled with the Christian faith.

Now I’m not saying that self-proclaimed postmodernists are just like Leninist-Stalinists, but they do have their problems. Those problems revolve around, among other things, their misunderstandings of truth.

Postmodern Jon refers to a list of scriptural passages cited by Jack Cottrell and says

Here is where Postmodern Jon - and his kin - become either very slippery or a little muddle-headed. It is the case that one meaning of "absolute" is "standing alone." But that is not the only meaning of the word, as Jon would find should he consult his unabridged dictionary. Especially in the context of truth, "absolute" means "not relative." And I say this not just to quibble with postmodern types, but to make an important point.

Jon and his postmodern kin are overly fond of insisting that truth cannot be separated from relationships. They seem to think that one great payoff of this view is that it allows them to talk about Jesus as "the truth." For example, in this same issue of the Christian Standard another self-styled postmodernist, one Lee Eddy, told us

While this all sounds terribly pious, high, and mighty, it masks some important misunderstandings.

Within the historic Christian faith, truth is NOT a "Him" only. Christians should think about that very carefully. The Biblical idea that Jesus is the truth does not rule out propositional truth, or truth as a quality of certain statements.

The quality of a statement that makes a statement true is the quality of describing reality accurately. Without this definition in the background, Biblical statements - including those about Jesus - would have no value for anyone.

Something implied by this definition is that the truth of a statement does not depend upon the perspective of any particular observer. Given the definitions of words in a particular language and the rules of construction in that language, a statement either describes reality accurately, or it does not. It is in this sense that truth, especially in regard to the Christian faith, can rightly be said to be "absolute." It is not relative.

So while Christians ought to live in harmony with the moral truth revealed in the Christian faith, that truth would be just as true even if everyone ignored it. In fact, there is an important sense in which Christian truth is prior to Christian experience. The former defines the latter. The latter depends upon the former.

These so-called postmodern Christians (as if the term "Christian" needs this kind of modifier!) insist on ignoring key points of real postmodernism. Postmodernists typically reject what they call "metanarratives" - which we might call worldviews or systems of thought. I hate to tell Postmodern Lee, but if he doesn’t want "to throw out all doctrinal and ethical systems" then he really isn’t a postmodernist. He is more of a postmodernist wanna-be.

Finally, in his original article, Postmodern Jon spilled a lot of words on his nonsensical view of the importance of doubt. Since he is so keenly interested in doubt, I must say that I very seriously doubt Postmodern Jon when he says, "My only concern is to join hands . . . in joining (not separating) faithful experience and the words of Scripture."

If that is all that concerned Postmodern Jon, he could simply say, "We need to live out what we say is true." I would be right there with him on that.

But that is clearly not all that Postmodern Jon and his kin want to say. They hold a different view of truth from that of the historic Christian faith, and it is a potentially dangerous view of truth. The reality of truth as logically prior to the experience of truth is a key point of the Christian faith. Without it, the Christian faith is just a bunch of mindless people stumbling around a lot of meaningless words.

And that’s the truth!