The prophet Joel spoke of a day when the sun would be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood. This picture--besides giving us a glimpse of that terrible, coming Day of the Lord in judgment--is also a graphic picture of our own times. Even today, in the gathering clouds of our culture, we see darkness at noon.
One of the central realities of this darkness is the dawning of a post-Christian culture. Even beyond that, we will see in this emerging culture the closing of the postmodern mind. Something is happening to the worldview, the mentality, and the consciousness of this age. It is like the closing of a steel door, a solemn, cataclysmic slamming of a door. We have been watching the postmodern mind in its development, and it is now well developed. Not only do we see the themes of postmodernity, but we understand the challenge this pattern of thinking poses to Christian truth and Christian truth-telling. Tolerance is perverted into a radical secularism that is anything but tolerant. There is no openness to truth. Instead, the postmodern mind has a fanatical dedication to moral relativism, and an understanding that truth has no objective or absolute basis whatsoever.
Recently, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida died. Known as the father of deconstructionism, he trumpeted what he called "the death of the author." Derrida's basically nihilistic philosophy suggested that texts mean nothing. In other words, it is the reader who comes to the text with meaning and determines what will be found within the text. The author is dead, Derrida proclaimed, and can no longer dictate by his totalitarian authority what the text means. Even before Derrida's death, new debates about deconstructionism arose in the academy. In reality, however, this nihilistic philosophy has already filtered down into popular culture. Even now, for example, many of our judges are deconstructionists, seeing the law not as what it was or what it was intended to be, but seeing it rather as a tool they can use for their own social engineering. In the elite institutions of American academia, deconstructionism is the order of the day. The text means what the professor says it means, and it means whatever each student would have it to mean.
Unfortunately, deconstructionism has also found its way into many pulpits, sometimes in a hard, ideological form, but more often in a soft and seductive form. In the hard form of undiluted liberalism, it is simply the idea that this text, the Bible, may be a privileged text, but the authors are dead. Thus, it is now up to us to decide what it should mean. We can turn the text on its head, and we can do so in the name of liberation and freedom from oppression. No longer must we be bound by this oppressive truth; on the contrary, we will liberate ourselves by deconstructing the text. After all, all the authors are dead. Of course, it is worth keeping in mind that such a hermeneutic must also assume that The Author is dead.
In its softer, subtler form, we find deconstructionism among some who would never consider themselves liberals, and who would even claim to have what they would characterize as a high view of Scripture. Yet when they encounter the text, they also deconstruct it. Yes, they say, but this has to be understood in terms of our modern understanding. Modern psychology has something to bring to this, something to tell us which Paul missed. Yes, that may be what it said, but now we ourselves can decide what it means.
In both its hard and soft forms, deconstructionism has filtered down to the popular culture, even to those who never heard of Jacques Derrida but have been nonetheless infected with this postmodern mentality and this subtle form of subversive relativism and subjectivism. You can hear Derrida in the discourse of adolescence in the mall. You can hear it in the conversation on the nightly news. This closing of the postmodern mind is the opposite of what postmodernism claimed was its aspiration. Postmodernism claimed that this new postmodern age--with the end of modernity, the demise of scientific objectivity, and the openness to new forms and understandings of truth--would lead to an opening of the mind. But as is always the case, the totalitarian opening of the mind always ends with the radical closing of the mind. There is nothing less tolerant than the modern ethos of tolerance. There is nothing less open than the modern idea of open-mindedness. In the darkening sky and the gathering clouds, we see this.
