Crossroads: Where Faith and Inquiry Meet

(Note: If you haven't read the first three parts of this series it will give you the necessary background fro this post. You can find the links here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3)

Here are several vignettes to illustrate my point of the 18-35 year olds (Postmoderns) different thinking from thos of us over 40.
In my church, in an intergenerational Sunday School class, there was a nice young man whom I would say was in his late 20's or early 30's. I shared with the class about the need to retain the kernel of the gospel of substitutionary atonement, the cross and what really happened there. The class agreed and he was very enthusiastic in his agreement. Then I continued to lament that IMO many emergents were changing this gospel. He replied, "You know I read a book and I'm wondering if that is a book by one of those emergent people you are talking about. He named the book and its author and told me it was the most meaningful book he has read in his life. Having read the book, I know the author (IMO) does not have a solid belief in what we know as historic orthodox Christianity and the substituionary atonement. In my modernist work-think these two things do not match. That is, that book and what I said about what the gospel should contain don't match. This seems typical of this generation. They see black and white and tell us there really isn't that much difference. Or, another version would be fusion or synthesis. In other words, combine some black and some white and get gray. This generation often doesn't seem to see any probems with that approach. And that IMO is the kernel of the challenge to the church. Typical is something like this coming from their mouths:
"After all, the HIndus have some truth, and the muslims have some truth so we should learn from them."
This type of thing is being said by Christians--not unbelievers. And that is the challenge in front of us. It isn't a fad at all. It's a whole different philosophical way of thinking.

Here is another example. A book I would heartedly recommend is Dear Church: Lettters from a Disillusioned Generation by Sarah Cunningham. When she wrote this book, last year, she was a 21-year old seminary student working toward her masters of theology. Most of the people she talks about in the book are young evangelicals, which makes it very potent. Much of what I have written in these four parts are reflected when listening to the young people she talks with in her book.

And here is my last example. I know a 25-year old young married Christian woman I would call a very strong Christian who attended a Christian college. She read the first three parts of this series and sent me an email to express her thoughts. I'm going to reproduce it here with her permisison. I think it speaks for itself and I will end with that. Next and last post of this series will be our response to all of this and how future churches might look.
"I read the three posts you had on postmodernism and it actually answered a lot of questions for me so I wanted to thank you for sending me the links. I could see examples of what you talked about throughout my entire life. In the Christian school, when I was young, that’s all we did was memorize and recite scripture. We were like little robots who never questioned what the verses meant or how they applied to us – we could just recite them over and over again. Many of those verses I still know 20+ years later.
When I went to public school, it was an entirely different situation and, the further in grade school I got, the further I got away from clearly defined right & wrong, truth & non-truth as it was taught in the school (I was still taught these things at home or by my grandparents). Because the teachers needed to include ‘everything’, they would teach you everything and encourage you to make your own decisions about things. In fact, those who could not or would not intellectually challenge what was taught them were often viewed as somehow being scholastically or otherwise impaired. The older and further you got, the more you were expected to respect but challenge the things they taught you and the teachers doted or smiled on those that did. Those students that were open for a debate were most often viewed as the ones most likely to succeed in life or at least graduate with honors. One of my favorite classes in high school was Brit Lit (British Literature) because the teacher was a very outspoken atheist who daily encouraged me to challenge his beliefs with my own because he claimed that neither of us could ever proof the other correct and viewed my beliefs to be just as valid as his own. He would often pick British writings to be analyzed in a classroom discussion. He would refer to me by my last name and say “What does your God say about this?” By the end of the year, I was spending much of my free time & lunch breaks discussing different things with him. Despite being an atheist, he was by far my favorite teacher in high school and one I won’t quickly forget.
College, even though it was a Christian university, was just an advanced version of high school. I learned all about the different types of philosophy and studied all the people you mentioned but we moved through them in such a way that the underlying mindset or point always seemed to be that no man was ever more right or wrong than the other. Of-course, you had students w ho would argue that there was a clearly defined line between right & wrong but the professor loved those situations the most because he would use binary type situations to get a strong discussion out of it. Most of the exams in both high school and college had a certain element of how much you could argue or discuss your own side of the question or scenario (some tests left more room in this area than others). Even on multiple choice tests, more points were often awarded if the student adequately defended their answer, regardless of whether their answer was one of the choices or not, and space was provided to write.
The affect that this had on me and others my age was more astounding than ever once I realized where it had all come from. For non-Christians in my age range, just by being friends and hanging out with them, I can see and understand why they are not in a rush to come to Christ. Since they have a poor concept of what truth is, they can’t understand the truth when they see it. Even if, for some reason, they are convinced that they need to be in church or that they need to seek Christ, they struggle and fight with themselves over the idea that there could be just one right way or one right truth. If they do begin to accept the fact that there may only be one right way, they panic about which one is right because everybody says they’re right. What ends up happening is that they create their own methods of doing things and their ways to live, call it whatever they want, and feel safe because it is the only thing that makes sense to them.
For myself, although I don’t struggle with the supremacy of God, I do often struggle with the concept of right & wrong and with the binaries you mentioned. Binaries are most often what teachers would use to begin a debate or discussion by using a method similar to “Yes, _____ is wrong but is it wrong when ______?” It is most often the “but what ifs” that have made me struggle with right & wrong. For instance, the law says that stealing is wrong but is it wrong to the homeless guy sitting out in the cold & rain and who sees an opportunity to get a coat? Or, the law says that speeding is wrong, but is it wrong to the man whose dying wife was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance and he is following behind? Once you start considering all the ‘buts’ to the situation, you open up a can of worms where it is difficult to define anything as absolutely being right or wrong. I think that’s where a lot of crime begins to happen because people who do not know or who struggle with right and wrong simply justify their actions and do whatever it is they want to do.
I can talk for hours on this subject but I think the whole post-modern movement, although it certainly has its advantages and good points, has been twisted around by satan to give him a foothold in society. As Christians, we have to understand what these types of thinkers are going through and how to best approach them. For young Christians like me, we have to really keep our minds in check and not let the thoughts or things that have been so engrained in us fog the truth that God has for us."