Covenant Worldwide -- Apologetics & Outreach

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Apologetics & Outreach

Instructor: Professor Jerram Barrs

Audio Transcription for Lesson 5: Postmodernism & Authority

Let us begin with prayer.

Heavenly Father, we pray that You will enable us to think in new ways, Father, where you need to challenge and to constrain our minds to think Your thoughts after You in ways that are pleasing to You. We pray, Father, that You will do that with us. Father, where we face ideas that are very challenging; help us to take Your Word very seriously when it tells us that unless we acknowledge You we are blind and will not be able to see. So teach us, we pray, Father, for Jesus' sake. Amen.

I hope one of the things you are seeing as we go along through this is how you are touched by postmodernism. It is not simply the problem of somebody out there, somebody who is not a Christian. It shapes the way all of us think and relate to one another, and we need to be aware of that as we go through this. It helps us to be more understanding of the people around us not only in terms of how to communicate the Gospel, but also in terms of how we are touched by these things.

Now at the end of the last lesson we talked about pluralism, the challenge of living in a pluralistic society, and how everyone has the right to their own views. This, after all, is American democracy. Everyone is free to think precisely what they want. The most widely held belief on anything in the United States is that I have the right to control my own destiny, to think what I want to think. That is a conviction held by 98% of us. It does not really take into account anything about the authority and sovereignty of God. We are creatures. We are not the ones who decide the way things are nor do we have control over our own lives. Jesus said we cannot add just a tiny little bit to our stature or a moment to our lives. Never mind being in control of ourselves. It is an absurdity to think about it. The combination of our finiteness, our creatureliness, and also our sinfulness makes so much of what we think so clearly wrong and so thoroughly prejudiced in all sorts of areas. It is an absurdity to think that I am really in control of my own life and destiny. But that is the most widely held conviction of 98% of Americans today, and that probably includes many of us in seminary.

In American society there has been, for more than the past century, a very deep strain of pragmatism -- the idea that truth is what will work for me. Instead of thinking of truth as something objective, truth is what works out for me. This is one of the things you can see as you look at the New Age movement. People will change their convictions and their ideas about spirituality at any moment because they see something that will work better for them, something that makes them feel more spiritual. It is one of the reasons why, even within the church, people are constantly hopping from one church to another. We have very little regard for doctrine (or truth) in the church today. We are much more concerned with all sorts of practical questions -- what will make me happy, what will make my children happy, who has the best programs -- than what somebody is teaching. Truth is very low on the level of people's priorities, both outside the church and within it. For many people in our culture, truth is equivalent to authenticity. In other words, my honest personal opinion or what feels authentic to me is considered to be truth. Again, this reinforces the notion that truth is simply the honest opinion of the individual. It will not help us when we stand before God to say, "Well, I sincerely held this position." C. S. Lewis has a very powerful passage challenging this in his book, The Great Divorce. He imagines people in hell complaining about their sincerely held convictions and why they are facing judgment for them. So, pragmatism is a third area that reinforces this loss of truth.

This leaves us with is a generation of skeptics. For most young people in this culture there is no sense that there is ultimate truth and therefore that there is ultimate meaning to the human condition. Everything becomes doubtful to us. This has been true in western Europe for almost two generations. When I went to a university in England in the early 1960s everybody was completely skeptical, and it was not just the younger generation. Almost all my professors at the university were too. There is a very deep skepticism in the culture. As I said the other day, as I think of my three sons' friends in high school and college in the United States, I do not think it entered their minds to ever imagine that there might be truth. They take it for granted that skepticism is the right position. Many popular American shows are fundamentally expressing skepticism at the deepest possible level. Everything is held up to doubt; nothing and no one is trustworthy. There is a kind of humor in British comedies. Almost all of them are deeply cynical and skeptical. You need to understand how easily such movies and shows can shape the way you view everything. We can become deeply cynical. I would suggest that one of the problems that many of you are faced with (and deal with at a personal level) is a deeply cynical attitude about all sorts of things. We make the mistake, and our culture makes the mistake, of thinking that if I see clearly the folly of something, the sin of something, or the problems of something, then cynicism is the right response. God sees our follies, weaknesses, and sins with absolute clarity, but He never becomes cynical about us. For those of you who love to laugh at cynical jokes and comedies, I am not going to tell you not to watch them or to listen to such jokes, but you really need to think very carefully about what is happening to your own mind. In our culture, cynicism is very, very deep, causing us to doubt everything.

There is a wonderful passage in C. S. Lewis's children's book, The Last Battle, that some of you will be familiar with. If you have not read the Narnia stories, I hope you will when you have little children. You can then have the excuse of reading them for yourself because you can read the stories to them. But you ought to be familiar with them because they are a classic expression of the Christian faith as well as being absolutely wonderful children's stories that communicate across any kind of cultural divide. In The Last Battle there is a scene where there is a group of dwarfs. These dwarfs are characterized by skepticism and cynicism. Even when the world is renewed and they are surrounded by the glory of the new earth, they are (at least they think they are) still sitting in a stable in the darkness smelling manure. They simply cannot lift up their eyes and see the glory of what is around them. It is a very powerful portrayal of skepticism. C. S. Lewis comments that they were so afraid of being taken in, so skeptical of anybody's claim to truth or anything else, that they could not be taken out any longer. That is the danger of cynicism. This is a generation of skeptics.

When someone is characterized by skepticism and cynicism, he or she is going to be deeply pessimistic as well about the human condition. One of the primary characteristics of postmodernism is its passionate rejection of the optimism of modernism. They are right to reject the optimism of modernism because modernism, with its confidence in the human person, its assumption that people are basically good, and its confidence in human reason, has no foundation whatsoever for optimism about the future. Postmodernism is deeply pessimistic about the human condition. It is so pessimistic that it is very hard to communicate any notion of genuine hopefulness to young people -- hope in the biblical sense of the word. The conviction of faith is the conviction of what is hoped for, of what we are certain about, because of what God is going to do. But there is a very deep pessimism in our culture. It is assumed by most young people that there are no answers at all to the basic longings of the human heart and to the human condition. One of my friend's daughters said one day, "I think that our generation is the most hopeless generation that there has ever been." I think that is accurate. We are living in a culture of deep hopelessness. Again, if you listen to the music of young people -- whether it is punk rock, rap, alternative music, or any kind of contemporary music -- it is deeply pessimistic about the human condition. Or you can look at the films of someone like Tarantino, Woody Allen, or whoever. Their movies are deeply pessimistic about the human condition. That is where our culture is in a very deep way. Someone has called postmodernism "Nihilism with a smile," but it does not always have a smile. It is often very deeply tragic, and sometimes there is an extraordinary forced gayety over the pessimism. A friend and colleague of mine in L'Abri wrote a wonderful essay on Madonna as an icon of postmodernism. He talks about her dancing over the edge of the abyss. That is where so much of our culture is. It is dancing on the edge of the abyss, trying to smile, pretending that things are okay, but the smile is rather forced. One of the most interesting things to me is that if you look at movies being made today, or at many of the music videos, they are extraordinarily similar to what was being produced in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the beginning of the rise of the Third Reich. When Hitler came to power, it was in the context of a very deep skepticism and pessimism in German culture because these things we are thinking about were already extraordinarily, powerfully operative in Germany by the middle 1920s. If you watch movies from that period you will see some extraordinary similarities to what is taking place in our culture right now, which should be very shocking to you when you think about what happened in Germany. So there is a deep pessimism about the human condition, which is very difficult to bring people out of. Hope is very tough to communicate to people who feel that life is ultimately absurd.

That brings us to the rejection of authority. The rejection of authority follows the point that there is no truth, but we are talking about the consequences here. If there is no truth then there is nothing and no one that can command respect or deserve submission. Again, this is one of the characteristics of the culture in which we live -- a deep suspicion of authority. You can look at any kind of social indicator, whether it is respect for political officials (from the president down to the local ones) or respect for the church and for ministers. There is a deep erosion of respect for authority. There are many British movies in which ministers of the Gospel are presented as complete fools. Some of them, of course, are very funny.

This has been happening in western Europe for a very long time. I was a pastor in England for 17 or 18 years. One could never assume that as a pastor you would get any respect. In fact, it is precisely the opposite. The fact I was a pastor made me assume that I would not get respect. So I would never tell people that I was a pastor, not because I was ashamed of being a pastor but because I wanted people to meet me and respect me as a person before I revealed to them that I was a pastor. Otherwise I would be lost. It was almost impossible to regain the ground because there was an assumption in much of western Europe -- and it is a growing assumption here -- that being a pastor is a position that no longer deserves respect at all. There are sections of the community where this is not so strongly the case, but it is growing everywhere. Do not assume that because a particular part of the American community has respected pastors in the past that it is going to continue to respect them. Many people outside the church and inside the church have very little respect simply because the culture teaches us at a very deep level to question or to be suspicious of authority. Every time there is another article in the press about a priest abusing children sexually, a pastor committing adultery, or a pastor burning his church down and fiddling with the church's finances, the skepticism and questions about the trustworthiness of somebody in church authority grows.

When I was in the hospital in England, I was having some very serious arthritic problems. This was about 17 years ago, and I could hardly walk at all for months. I was taken to the hospital at one point for three weeks. I was in the rheumatology ward, and I was in there with a group of another five or six guys. I did not tell them that I was a pastor, and we got along really well. We had lots of wonderful discussions about the Gospel and many, many other things. Then one day my session came into the hospital and we had a session meeting around my bed. We, of course, prayed together, and we were discussing all sorts of things that these guys could overhear. After the session had gone, the guys came to me one by one and asked, "What do you do?" Then I told them I was a pastor. I was not ashamed of being a pastor, but by that time I had won sufficient respect and confidence that it did not matter that they knew.

Do not ever assume in this culture any longer that simply because you hold this position that it is going to mean you have respect. When I moved here 12 years ago, I remember all sorts of comments as I tried to establish credit. It is very difficult when you come from another culture to try to establish credit when you have no credit history. Even if you have cash, people are kind of dubious about you. And moving here from another country made it extremely difficult. I remember going to a couple of stores around here and people in the stores saying things to me. When they discovered that I was a minister who was going to be teaching at the seminary -- some of them were rude and others were envious -- they said, "Well, that is a great business to be in because that is a place where you can make lots of money." (They meant by being dishonest.) Some said, "That is a good job." Others would tell me stories about how pastors in their neighborhood had been discovered committing adultery or addicted to pornography or whatever. This is not a problem just in some other part of the world. This is a problem right here. There is a deep lack of respect for authority. This is true for the church as an institution, it is true for pastors and anybody else in authority, it is true for political figures, and it is true for any book, like the Bible, that claims to have authority. The notion of authority is one that is deeply questioned in a postmodern culture.

We have seen the change even here among our seminary students. You are much more postmodern in this area than you might think. We had a discussion in a faculty meeting a couple of years ago over the growing lack of respect for authority -- the authority of the professors in our classes -- and the increasing questioning of the right of a professor to assign a grade to a student. We had a long discussion about it in a faculty meeting. What was so interesting is that the next week our president came back to the faculty meeting and he said, "I was just talking to the president of another seminary and he said that they had a discussion last week in their faculty meeting about how increasingly postmodern our students are in terms of their questioning of authority." The same discussion was taking place in another seminary at exactly the same time we were having it -- all the same week. This is a problem. It means you, personally, need to be very careful how you speak about political figures, for example. Are you just contributing to the cynicism about authority in the culture? Many Christians do. Many Christians who pride themselves on being extraordinarily conservative and very anti-postmodern and who ridicule postmodernism are contributing every day of their lives to the deep skepticism and suspicion of authority in this culture by the way they talk about people in authority in their society.

Now Scripture is very challenging to us. In the New Testament, Scripture teaches us to fear God. Peter says in 1 Peter 2 to honor the emperor and to give respect to everyone in authority. Peter was not writing about some pillar of virtue. He was writing about the emperor Nero who was going to put him to death in the most brutal manner in a year or two. Paul writes something very similar in Romans 13 about having respect for authorities. That does not mean we cannot question or challenge authority to do what is right. That is another issue. It is appropriate to remove a president from office for being dishonest or to try to impeach a president for abusing his power. It is appropriate because historically this society (holding a biblical understanding at this level) recognizes that power corrupts people because people are sinful by nature and therefore there needs to be restraints on those who are in office or in authority at every level. Scripture teaches that everywhere. It teaches us that those in power are not the law and that there is a law that stands above them. As a great Jewess put it, "Be he never so high the law is above him." There is an enormous difference between holding a president, a governor, a senator, a congressperson, or a judge to a set of standards and then calling for them to account by those standards and maybe removing them from office if they seriously offend against those standards. There is a huge difference between that and just communicating deep suspicion of the value of any authority. Christians are doing this all the time, and what we are doing is just simply helping our culture become more postmodern and making it even more difficult to communicate Christian truth to people. That is what you are actually doing if you are telling jokes about the president or being completely dismissive of his authority. Your particular political affiliation is beside the point. Scripture is very clear about this. It tells us in the Old Testament that to dishonor or curse the king, the ruler, is like blasphemy. It is an offense in the Old Testament law and it is punishable by death. And Scripture tells us not even to curse a ruler in our hearts, never mind openly. It is not a question of doing it because of fear of punishment -- that is not the biblical principle. It is a question of respect for authority. When we lose respect for authority it becomes very difficult to communicate anything.

This loss of respect for authority is true at every level. It is true in the institution of marriage. People, including Christians, make vows that they break all the time. They promise before God and His people to love this person "until death separates us, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, for better or worse." And the levels of divorce in the evangelical church are almost the same as in the society as a whole. That is a lack of respect for authority at a very deep level; it is a disrespect for the authority of the institution of marriage given by God. Now, of course, God forgives us. I am sure some of you are divorced. God is very merciful and gracious. But there is a huge difference between recognizing that and taking God's gift of forgiveness to heart because of what it cost Him in giving His Son to bear the judgment for our sins. There is a huge difference between delighting in that forgiveness and disregarding the issue of authority, whether it is the authority of the institution of marriage, of a family, of one's parents, of the institutions of the state or of the church, or of any other. I am not teaching some view like Bill Gothard, who teaches that there is, in a sense, a chain of command, and the Christian virtue is just simply obeying the person above you. That is not what Scripture teaches. Scripture does not teach us that human authority is ever absolute. It is always subordinate to God's authority. Only God's authority is absolute. Whenever there is a conflict between authorities, we are called to obey God rather than human beings. Scripture is absolutely plain about that. But the issue of disregard for authority, disregard for the institutions, and disregard for the Word of God are the deepest problems in the church. It comes back to this issue of feeling like I have the right to govern my own life. Well, I do not. God does. I am not the captain of my soul, God is. He is the one who teaches me what to do.

We discussed the issue of suspicion of authority in our culture, and now I have several sub-points. This is going to mean trust in myself. The point I have already been making is that I am my only authority. Think of all the books out there. If you go to any bookstore and look at the all of the books on self-esteem or self-reliance, they will reinforce this idea that I am the only person in the end who is worth trusting. I am the only one who can be my own authority.

Second, there is the privatization of religious experience. What do I mean? It is in the area of religious truth. I have become my own authority. My private experience is all that matters. We can see this in the New Age movement. People just drift around from one New Age group to another, mixing and swapping ideas, beliefs, and practices as they like them. It is what makes me feel good or what makes me feel spiritual that matters. All of you have seen articles in magazines, newspapers, and programs on television where they will ask the question, "Who is God?" Then they will give you the views of 50 celebrities, and they all have their different views of God. Well, who cares what they think? What difference does it make? Their private opinions about who God is do not tell us anything about who God is. God decides who He is. That is how He revealed Himself to Moses: "I am who I am has sent me to you. This is who you are to say that I am. I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who is faithful to His promises, the God who is holy and righteous and just." We cannot decide who God is. It would have been absurd through most of the history of this nation to have an opinion pole or to ask celebrities who they thought God was -- not because the nation was Christian, that is not my point. It is not a sensible thing to do to ask a series of actors, actresses, musicians, novelists, and politicians to tell us who they think God is. "Who is your God?" That is how the question is put, as if we have God in our pocket and can decide who He is. But that is the culture in which we live, and it can become that way in the church very easily as well -- that my religious experience has more authority than anything else. So, the privatization of religious experience is the second sub-point.

Third, there is a deconstruction of everything sacred. I talked about this a little bit in an earlier lesson when we were discussing the issue of style, but this is true on the level of the arts. We talked about how things that were held to be precious, significant, beautiful, and wonderful examples of human achievement are just treated as if they were jokes or games or something to advertise -- beer or cigarettes or deodorants or cars or anything under the sun. But it is true with things that are regarded as sacred in the sense of religious things. Think of Madonna and the name she chose. Why do you think she chose that name? Think of many of the things that she has done, calling into question the authority and value of any kind of religious symbolism or religious content. I do not want to attack Madonna here. I am not saying that you should not listen to Madonna's music. You just need to understand what is happening.

I get a letter from time to time from a man who claims to be an apologist and evangelist to Muslims. His idea of being an apologist and evangelist to Muslims means to go to a university campus and denounce Allah, say all kinds of nasty things about him, and blaspheme him from the perspective of the Muslims. Then there is usually a riot on the university campus, and he has to be escorted off the campus by the university police to keep his life safe. And he regards this as a great triumph for the Gospel. But when you look at Acts 19, you see the riot that took place in the city of Ephesus over the falling off of the sales of the little images of the temple of Diana. These people in Ephesus are shouting for two hours, "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" The city clerk is able to quiet the crowd by saying, "These men have not robbed our temples nor did they blaspheme our goddess." Again, if we ridicule what other people believe, we are actually undermining ourselves and the glory of the Gospel. We are becoming postmodern too. We are just taking part in another little culture war where we attack and ridicule other people. We do not like to be treated that way ourselves. One of the most basic commandments in Scripture is to do to others what we would like to be done to us -- to speak of others as we would like them to speak about us. When you hear somebody blaspheming Christ or blaspheming Christianity or ridiculing it on the television, you get really angry. Treat other people with the same respect. That does not mean you have to say what they think is true. That is not the point. But you are called by Scripture to treat people and their opinions and convictions with respect. We will look at this very carefully later. So, the third point is the deconstruction of everything sacred. That is one of the characteristics of the culture in which we live.

The fourth sub-point, and we will not go into this in detail, is that no style or art is better than any other. We already talked about this so I will not say any more about that right here except simply to say this: some of you may have wondered when we were discussing art and architecture earlier where the notion that there are no standards by which to judge art came from. It is coming from, of course, a complete rejection of the notice of authority. We have no standards by which we can say, "This is a great work of art. This is a wonderful piece of music, and this is a poor one." There are no standards at all because there is only personal opinion.

The fifth sub-point, as I have already said, is that there is a very playful element to this, and we recognize that. Sometimes it is kind of fun, but there is also something serious underneath it.

This brings us to the issue of moral relativism. Once you have lost the notion that there is truth, once you have lost the notion of authority, then there are no longer any transcendent commandments or moral standards -- that is, there is no law above us at all. There is nobody in heaven saying, "You shall do this, and you shall not do that." There is nobody in heaven defining for us what it means to be human. Scripture defines that for us. We are created to be in the image of God. Our calling is to love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. That is a nice definition of what it means to be human. That is what we are created for. However, if God no longer exists or if God is silent and there is nothing else or no one else inhabiting the heavens and there is no absolute set of moral standards to govern us, then we are in a position where we have no way of knowing what is ultimately right or wrong. That means, at a very practical level, one of the following four things.

The first is that the only way we can think about moral issues is the matter of individual choice. Right and wrong are what I think they are. It ought to be no surprise to us that if we think about the issue of abortion, those who are in favor of abortion call themselves the pro-choice movement. They talk about a woman's right to choose. That is regarded as the sacred thing in our culture -- that each of us has the right to choose for ourselves what we are going to do. We can choose whether to allow this child to live or to have this child die because it is going to be handicapped, because I do not like the sex, because I cannot afford to have a child right now, because it is not convenient for my career, etc, etc. That is one of the deepest currents shaping the culture in which we live. I have the right to choose for myself what I think will be right and what will be wrong. It is very easy for us to fall into this trap. I talked earlier about the decay of moral standards in the church regarding marriage, but it is true of every other social indicator. The church is becoming morally weaker and weaker in the culture because this is such a pervasive idea. This is the greatest idol of the culture in which we live -- that I am free to choose what I want to do with my life, with my sexuality, and with everything else about myself.

I had a debate a couple of years back, a public debate with a gay professor from the University of Chicago Divinity School. It was a debate on the issue of whether or not the state should recognize same sex marriages. His fundamental argument, of course, was that such issues are entirely a matter for the individual to decide for himself. These are matters of private, personal morality, and he argued very passionately that no state should ever interfere with matters of private, personal morality. He said that it is absolutely up to the individual. There are all sorts of practical answers that you can make to this. All states, of course, have to have laws about matters of personal and private morality. There is no state in the world that does not have laws about pedophilia -- having sex with children -- though in every western country laws about the age of consent are going down all the time to a younger and younger age. I did not raise that issue because in that context it would have been particularly offensive. I just asked this question of everybody present: "Would you like to have laws upholding polygamy or polyandry -- having several wives or several husbands -- as Utah did at one point because this was part of Mormon teaching?" Everybody present was horrified by the idea because they saw all the practical problems that it creates. They saw it as being subversive of order in this society. Of course societies have to make laws about moral questions, but it is assumed in our culture that it is not appropriate to have such laws. Even as Christians, we can be shaped by this and not just in the level that our own moral standards start declining. There are enormous numbers of Christians who will say, "Personally, I think abortion is wrong. I think it is killing an unborn child, but who am I to say that this is what other people should think? We do not need laws about it. It is purely a matter of personal choice." If it is true that a fetus in the womb is indeed a human person, a developing human person, then of course it is wrong for anybody to do this. The truth is that in our culture people acknowledge that the fetus in the womb is a developing human person. Obviously it is. We know more about that than any previous generation has ever known, but we do not allow that to have any moral weight. We simply say this is just a matter for the individual.

I have been asked a question about the loss of standards in music. The person who asked said that in his Christian college there was somewhat of a relativism in the music department in terms of whether there are any standards. That was partly a reaction against a kind of view from the past that only classical music was good and every other form of music would really have very little value in comparison. It is a very interesting question because it seems to me we have two problems here. One is the problem of modernism. Modernism is what postmodernism is reacting against. Modernism, with its confidence in human reason and in the human person, had a very strong view that there is a canon of music and a canon of literature. So the whole notion of the hundred best books, for example, is really a modernist notion. Alan Bloom is a modernist and passionately anti-postmodern. He talks about the value of the great books. He lists some of them and he includes the Bible, although he certainly does not believe it but thinks it is great literature. There was a problem with the modernist approach to the canon because it was very restricted. It was very dominated by one particular culture -- the white male European culture. Christians need to be prepared to recognize this. We talked about this in an earlier lesson. The Christian, above all others, ought to be the first person to say that every culture has its own glory. The book of Revelation ends with all the cultures bringing their glory into the kingdom of Christ. We ought to delight in great cultural artifacts, whatever culture, whatever part of the world, or whatever part of history they come from rather than just simply saying that our white European male culture is the pinnacle of all human civilization. We do not need to say that. We need to recognize what is good and beautiful no matter where it comes from rather than making our own particular music or our own particular art or our own tastes in these things an absolute standard for everybody else. There has been a proper reaction against that.

At the same time, it is not helpful to go in the direction of saying there are no standards at all by which we can judge anything, because some art, some music, some paintings, some literature, and some poetry is better than others. In each particular field there are standards by which you can judge. To say there are no standards and no criteria by which we can judge will lead us to say that the men's urinal by Marcel Duchan or his bicycle wheel that he signed is artistically just as great as Michelangelo's "David." Or it would lead us to say that some kid scribbling dirty jokes on the lavatory wall is literarily just as great as Shakespeare's "Hamlet." That is just nonsense. We have to be aware that there are cultural prejudices, but there are indeed standards of beauty by which we can judge. In the end for the Christian, we would have to say they relate back to the question of God as the great Creator and our calling to imitate Him.

There are all sorts of criteria by which we can judge the arts and though I do not have time to go through them in detail, let me mention several. The fundamental one is whether or not there is truth in them. At the deepest level, all great literature, for example, is going to deal with three great themes: the glory of creation, the tragedy of our experience of the brokenness of this world, and the longing for redemption, for a better world. That is true in all great literature from all over the world. No matter what culture or what period of history it is from, those themes are present. In all great literature, you are going to have this tension between the glory of who we are as human persons, the marvelous things that we can create and produce, and the shame of our brokenness and sinfulness. People do not have to be Christians to know that because this is fundamentally the truth about the human condition, which all human beings are in touch with. That is why, for example, you can read a novel by a non-Christian and it can be far truer than one by a Christian. If the Christian just writes something sentimental and shallow, it is not true. No, the human condition is not a kind of Pollyanna where everything works out lovely. It simply is not. It is dishonest to present it that way. There are many Christian books out there, if you go to Christian bookstores, that are like that. I do not like to use the term "Christian book." There are Christians who write books and some of them are good and some of them are bad because there are some standards by which you can judge them. One of the standards is truth.

The second standard deals with issues of morality. We have to ask the questions about the moral intent and the moral consequence of things that claim to be art. There is literature that has the purpose of depraving, there is no question about it. That is why the lyrics of that band, "2 Live Crew," are being questioned. Is it appropriate to encourage men to brutally and sexually assault women? Art has to be judged at the moral level. It is not a shallow judgment. You cannot simply say that this has nudity, sex, and violence, so it should not be there. You would have to get rid of the Bible. I am serious. It is very foolish the way Christians approach this question. Someone might say, "This film has 50 blasphemous words in it, a scene of nudity, some sex and some violence, so we should not watch it. But take, for example, the rate of death of the Levites' concubine in the book of Judges. That is a horrible scene. The Song of Songs has graphic, very explicit nudity and sexuality. It is very graphic. It is not a book about the love between Christ and the soul or Christ and the church. It is a book about sex. That is simply what it is about, and it is part of the Word of God. Or take the book of Job. It is filled with blasphemous statements by Job's comforters who say false things about God. We as Christians blaspheme all the time far worse than unbelievers when we say to somebody, "Oh I will pray for you" or "God bless you," but we really do not mean it at all. We have no interest in the person whatsoever. That is really blasphemous in a way that somebody who does not believe in God taking His name in vain is not blasphemous to the same power at all. I am not saying we excuse that. We do not understand blasphemy deeply enough. So, second, there is a moral criteria by which we judge things.

Third, there are criteria or objective standards of the artistic merit of something in terms of how carefully and beautifully it is designed. This is true of writing a book, writing a poem, writing music, or painting a picture. There are objective standards of quality by which all art has to be judged. There are questions about the unity of the message of the work and the form in which it is put. This is another criteria by which we consider things. There are questions of integrity. Does this work of art have integrity with the artist or is it something that is, at one level, deeply hypocritical? So, there are all sorts of questions and criteria by which we can indeed judge any work of art, and they are objective. But we cannot fall into the modernist trap and the trap that Christians have sometimes made by saying, "Well, the only good music is this." There is great music in all sorts of different forms, whether it is in jazz, classical, or in whatever, and we have to ask those objective standards about it.

I would be certainly happy to give you my own notes on Christianity and the arts. They go through some of these issues. But there are lots of really excellent books out there. There are some good books by Hans Rademacher who taught art history at the Free University in Amsterdam. There is a fine book by Calvin Seerveld called Rainbows for a Fallen World. But there are many, many books out there that will address some of these questions.

The question has been raised, "All cultures produce great works of art, but should we not expect, or at least hope, that a culture influenced by the Gospel ought to produce really great works of art more consistently?" That is an excellent question, and I think that one would hope that that would be true, and it ought to be true. Look at drama, for example. I do not think there is any question that by objective standards Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist who has written in any language or at any point in history. This is almost universally acknowledged except by a few radical postmodernists. I think there is no question whether Shakespeare personally was a Christian because the Christian ought to have a clearer understanding of what is true and what is good and what is beautiful. They will not necessarily have that, and one of our tragedies right now is that some Christians have a very shallow, or even negative, view of the arts. The same is true for most of our churches for most of the past 80 to 100 years, which has been devastating in its consequences. But, the Reformation had a very high view of the arts, a very high view of what it means to be made in the image of God and of the lordship of Christ over the whole of life. One of the consequences of that was the production of very great art in all sorts of areas.

On the issue of drama, the other three greatest dramatists are Greek. They were not Christian. God has made human beings wonderfully, and people who do not know Him are able to produce wonderful things. In theory, we ought to be able to say that the Christian should be the greatest cook, but that does not necessarily happen. You can look at all sorts of areas, but everybody is sinful. The Christian is too. People fail to use and they misuse and abuse their gifts. That is true for both believers and unbelievers. This is not the area of the arts, but it is probably true that the greatest philosopher who has ever lived, in any culture, is Plato. Most people, including most Christians, would acknowledge that. He was not a believer. Some Christians try to deal with that one by saying Plato was a Christian before Christ because he said so many wonderful things, but that does not help us. We ought to be prepared to acknowledge that the unbeliever is capable of producing wonderful things. I think I used this illustration before. My parents, as unbelievers, had the best marriage I have ever seen. So, while we say that we hope this might be true, in some areas we can point to examples that it is true. Bach is certainly one of the greatest musicians and creators of music ever. Rembrandt is one of the greatest painters. Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist. You know, those three people are all believers. But there are many, many very great artists who are certainly not Christians and who do not come from cultures that are shaped by Christianity. You can look at the great statuary, for example, of the Greeks. Or you can look at the glories of Japanese or Chinese painting or at the marvel of architecture in ancient Egypt or in India, etc. We could go all over the world and look at marvelous examples of human creativity from every nation and every culture on the face of the earth and say, "We have to have a really biblical view of the glory of what it means to be human."

In Psalm 8 David says, "Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens." His glory is higher, greater, and more exalted in the heavens. And then David asks the question, "What is man [what is a human being]?" And his answer is, "You have crowned him with glory." Human beings have a greater glory than the heavens. That is what that psalm teaches us. Proverbs 8 teaches that God's wisdom is made known to the whole human race. Calvin, who certainly had a very deep sense of human depravity, also had a very high view of what it means to be in the image of God and of the goodness of God to all people and to all cultures. My marriage as a believer ought to be better than my neighbor's who is not. But is it, necessarily? In fact, it should be a real challenge to us when we see the wonderful marriages that unbelievers can have -- we need to repent very deeply of our sin. If they are capable of producing this level of love, commitment, and self-sacrifice without the Holy Spirit in their hearts, without the knowledge of the forgiveness of Jesus Christ, then what should I be capable of? This is true in every area of human life whether we are talking about moral victories in glory or whether we are talking about artistic victories in glory. That is where we have to be very careful that we do not fall into the modernist trap of assuming that the products of western culture are superior at every point to the products of every other culture that has ever lived. We must be very careful not to do that because it is not right to do it. It denies the common grace of God at a very deep level. We, as Christians, are commanded by the apostle Paul to recognize and delight in whatever is lovely, noble, true, worthy, and of good report. So, while that question is a great question, I would say that is one we need to think about very carefully rather than assuming that this is what is going to happen.

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