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Being a postmodern has very little to do with sporting tattoos, wearing grungy clothes, or adopting an easy going nature.  Literally, the postmodern is someone who has dispensed with the modern.  In philisophical terms, modern describes a two-hundred year period of intellectual history, called the Enlightenment, in which human reason was held to be the only arbiter of truth.  That period was bookened by two symbolic "falls" one in 1789 and the other in 1989.

On July 14, 1789, the Bastille Prison in Paris fell, representing the demise of the combined despotic authority of the Crown and the church.  Though this dreaded place of confinment actually only contained seven prisoners, its fall was mere symbolic "political theater,"  since the incident served to launch the French Revolution.  Talk about "political theater"!  On November 19: 1793, revolutionaries place a bust of the goddess of Reason on the high altar in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris.  This rationalist movment was the first great apostasy from Christianity in the modern era.  One of the fathers of the French Revolution, Voltaire, gave to the Revolution the famous phrase: "Crush the horrid thing."  The "horrid thing" was the superstition of Christianity.

From then on, skepticism of all things spiritual was considered a sign of true intellegence, reason being the sole measure of reality and the basis for human progress.  Modernism even entered the church, denying the supernatural, the miracles, and the divinity of Christ.  The success of modernism led many Western thinkers in the 19th and 20th centuries to expect that the 21st centru would see the full flowering of secularism and the disapperence of irrational religion.  They were wrong.  Beleive it or not, scholars now speak of the postsecular age.  Postsecularism "does not accept that reason must rule out religion."

The "fall" that brought a close to the modern period was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, symbolizing the collapse of materialism and of atheistic, secular Marxism.  What brought down the great edifice of reational Enlightenment and modernist culture?  It was postmodernism, which, though it rejects the truth claims of Christianity, also undermines "all absolutist explanations of reality, including Marxism."  The postmodern laser gun was aimed not only at Christianity but also the ideology of secularism, in a "rage against humanism and the Enligthement legacy."

Before we move on:

  1. What beliefs characterize modernism?  How can these beliefs be see in the unfolding of the French Revolution, starting with the fall of the Bastille?
  2. How did modernism affect the church? Why is this abandonment of Christian orthodoxy a natural consequence of embracing modernism?
  3. What beliefs characterize postmodernism?  What ideologies does it oppose?
  4. How was the fall of the Berlin Wall a symbolic deathblow to modernism?