The Description of Modernity

…depicted in the first two chapters of No Place for Truth.
 

somewhere between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century lies a great historical divide. The period before that could be called the Age of the West; the new period he calls simply Our Time. On the other side of that line, Europe was the center of the world, politically and economically; now America is. In the earlier period, there was a sense in which Judeo-Christian values were at the center of culture, even if they were not believed in personally. Now, however, there is no such set of values. Rather, they have been displaced and replaced by a loose set of psychological attitudes, which are now referred to as modernity.' This new period, Our Time, is not restricted by geography. It is not the civilization of any one group of people, in any one place. It is not political in nature. The soil from which it springs is that which capitalism and democracy produce, and it especially depends on technology and urbanization. But it may be found virtually anywhere that the requisite conditions are present.

The Enlightenment world that has characterized much of modernity was an optimistic one. It was based on a strong confidence in human reason and its ability to solve humanity's problems unaided. This confidence, in turn, was based on an illusion, however, according to Wells-an illusion that an impersonal force was at work in the world promoting only the ends that the Enlightenment envisioned. This has not proven to be the case, however. For the fruits of this Enlightenment have been far from positive in many cases. Violence is present in our society in many forms. The powerful run roughshod over the weak. Many of the unborn never have an opportunity to live. Industry pollutes the earth. The elderly are encouraged to die and make room for those coming after them.
 
What shapes the modern world is not powerful minds but powerful forces, not philosophy but urbanization, capitalism, and technology. As the older quest for truth has collapsed, intellectual life has increasingly become little more than a gloss on the processes of modernization. Intellectuals merely serve as mirrors, reflecting what is taking place within society. They are post-modern in the sense that they are often disillusioned with the emptiness of the old Enlightenment ideals, but they are entirely modern in that they reflect the values of the impersonal processes of modernization. 

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Ten Features of Modernism

Modernism can actually be clustered into two general types, a more moderate form and a more extreme form, which I term soft modernism and hard modernism, respectively.
 
Soft modernism shares with its forerunner, premodernism, belief in the rationality of the universe and in human ability to know and understand the truth. Both believe that inclusive explanations of reality, or in other words, integrative metaphysical schemes or worldviews, can be constructed.
 
Hard modernism goes beyond its soft counterpart, however, by excluding anything other than this. On the terms of hard modernism, reality is limited to what can be experienced, thus excluding supernaturalism of any kind. Knowledge is restricted to what can be known through reason and experience, excluding any sort of intuition. What is not logical is not considered real.
 
Several salient features of modernism should be noted.
 
1. Naturalism. Reality is believed to be restricted to the observable system of nature. Its immanent laws are the cause of all that occurs.
 
2. Humanism. The human is the highest reality and value, the end for which all of reality exists rather than the means to the service of some higher being.
 
3. The scientific method. Knowledge is good and can be attained by humans. The method best suited for this enterprise is the scientific method, which came to fruition during this period. Observation and experimentation are the sources from which our knowledge of truth is built up.
 
4. Reductionism. From being considered the best means for gaining knowledge, the scientific method came increasingly to be considered the only method, so that various disciplines sought to attain the objectivity and precision of the natural sciences. Humans in some cases were regarded as nothing but highly developed animals.
 
5. Progress. Because knowledge is good, humanly attainable, and growing, we are progressively overcoming the problems that have beset the human race.
 
6. Nature. Rather than being fixed and static, nature came to be thought of as dynamic, growing, and developing. Thus it was able to produce the changes in life forms through immanent processes of evolution, rather than requiring explanation in terms of a creator and designer.
 
7. Certainty. Because knowledge was seen as objective, it could attain certainty. This required foundationalism, the belief that it is possible to base knowledge on some sort of absolute first principles. One early model of this was found in the rationalism of Rene Descartes, who found one indubitable belief, namely, that he was doubting, and then proceeded to draw deductions from that. An alternative was empiricism, the belief that there are purely objective sensory data from which knowledge can be formulated.
 
8. Determinism. There was a belief that what happened in the universe followed from fixed causes. Thus, the scientific method could discover these laws of regularity that controlled the universe. Not only physical occurrences but human behavior were believed to be under this etiological control.
 
9. Individualism. The ideal of the knower was the solitary individual, carefully protecting his or her objectivity by weighing all options. Truth being objective, individuals can discover it by their own efforts. They can free themselves from the conditioning particularities of their own time and place and know reality as it is in itself.
 
10. Anti-authoritarianism. The human was considered the final and most complete measure of truth. Any externally imposed authority, whether that of the group or of a supernatural being, must be subjected to scrutiny and criticism by human reason.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

The Tenets of Postmodernism

This modern period has, in turn, given way to the postmodern, and its ideology to postmodernism. This represents the convergence of several movements in different intellectual disciplines.
 
In many ways, the beginning inspiration was from the French school of literary criticism known as deconstruction. In history, there is the new historicism, in which history is not merely the objective discovery of the past, but actually creates it. In philosophy, neo-pragmatism holds that words refer not to objective, extralinguistic entities, but to other words. Certain basic motifs have emerged, countering the modern view. Although these will be described at greater length by several of the thinkers we will examine, they can be briefly summarized here.
 
1. The objectivity of knowledge is denied. Whether the knower is conditioned by the particularities of his or her situation or theories are used oppressively, knowledge is not a neutral means of discovery. 
 
2. Knowledge is uncertain. Foundationalism, the idea that knowledge can be erected on some sort of bedrock of indubitable first principles, has had to be abandoned.
 
3. All-inclusive systems of explanation, whether metaphysical or historical, are impossible, and the attempt to construct them should be abandoned.
 
4. The inherent goodness of knowledge is also questioned. The belief that by means of discovering the truths of nature it could be controlled and evil and ills overcome has been disproved by the destructive ends to which knowledge has been put (in warfare, for instance).
 
5. Thus, progress is rejected. The history of the twentieth century should make this clear.
 
6. The model of the isolated individual knower as the ideal has been replaced by community-based knowledge. Truth is defined by and for the community, and all knowledge occurs within some community.
 
7. The scientific method as the epitomization of the objective method of inquiry is called into question. Truth is not known simply through reason, but through other channels, such as intuition.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

The Rise of Postmodernism

The current dissatisfaction with modernity, intellectually, has appeared in a wide variety of disciplines. One of the first was architecture, where modernism had attempted to develop a homogenized style that broke with the past and its indigenized designs by attempting to universalize, to belong everywhere because it did not belong anywhere in particular. Postmodern architecture broke with this by having many styles, reflecting interests of both the past and the present. It is one expression of our multiculturalism. But because it is not driven by any hard ideology, as was modernism, in its eclecticism it really does not have any definite purpose at all.
 
In the old Enlightenment belief, there was confidence in the possibility of rational, objective scholarship. This has been rejected by postmodernism, intellectually. In the absence of any assent to a body of universal truth, even those conclusions that are presumably objectively discovered by scholars are seen to be only results of these scholars' interests and dispositions. Given the belief in relativism, there is great difficulty in insisting on the universal validity of one's findings. Even science, thought of as the paragon of objectivity and rationality by the modernists, is seen not to be exempt from this relativizing influence. Thomas Kuhn has shown that what scientists observe is very much affected by their anticipation of what they are looking for and what they consider possible. In literature, deconstruction holds that words do not have any meaning in themselves. They mean only what we want them to mean. These same phenomena can also be seen in postmodern theology.
 
Wells asserts, however, that the relationship between the modern and the postmodern is more complex than we sometimes recognize and acknowledge. The very fact that we insist on being postmodern, rather than merely antimodern, indicates a desire to transcend the recent past, which in turn reflects belief in progress. And this in itself is a clearly modern conception. Thus, even postmodernism has not fully freed itself from modernism.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Walking in/by the Spirit

The central role of the Spirit is most clearly spelled out in Galatians 5:13-6:10, where with a series of verbs modified by the phrase pneumati ("in/by the Spirit"), Paul urges the Galatians to "make a completion" (3:3) by means of the same Spirit by whom they had been converted. They are commanded to "walk in the Spirit," and promised that those who so walk "will not fulfdl the desire of the flesh" (v. 16); such people are "led by the Spirit," attested by "the fruit of the Spirit" (w. 22-23), and are not under Torah (w. 18, 23). Since they "live by the Spirit" (= have been brought to life by the life-giving Spirit), they must also "behave in accordance with the Spirit" (v. 25). Finally, only those who "sow to the Spirit" in this way "will reap the eternal life" that is also from the Spirit (6:8).
 
Two things are clear from this passage: that the Spirit is the key to ethical life, and that Paul expects Spirit people to exhibit changed behavior. The first instruction, "walk by the Spirit," is the basic command in Paul's ethics. The verb "to walk" was commonly used in Judaism to refer to a person's whole way of life. Paul adopted it as his most common verb for ethical conduct (17 occurrences in all). All other commands proceed from this one. The primary form that such walking takes is "in love" (Eph 5:2; Gal 5:6), hence love is the first-mentioned "fruit of the Spirit" (Gal 5:22; cf. 5:14; Rom 13:8-10).
 
The key for Paul lay with the Spirit as a dynamically experienced reality in the life of both believers (Gal 3:2, 4) and community (3:5). Paul's expectation level was high on this matter because for him and his churches the Spirit was not simply believed in but was experienced in tangible, visible ways. If our experience of the Spirit lies at a lower level, we must resist the temptation to remake Paul into our image and thereby find comfort in a Paul that did not exist. Paul's answer was "walk in/by the Spirit," and he assumed that such a walk was available to those who had already "experienced so many things" of the Spirit (Gal 5:4). He does not tell us how to do that because such a dynamic life in the Spirit was presumed by him.
 

- Gordon D. Fee, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God. p106-107.

The Mind of the Spirit

The term φρόνημα has no exact equivalent in English, and even in Greek its semantic range is wide enough that only context will define its sense. Given the semantic range of φρόνημα, the phrases often translated “mind of the Spirit” and “mind of the flesh” can refer to the divergent frames of mind, cognitive dispositions, or cognitive approaches of the Spirit and of the flesh. In today’s terms, one might think partly of how outlooks and character are shaped by the different worldviews, or approaches to reality, of these two spheres. One mind focuses on the matters of God; the other is oriented around only matters involving the self and its desires (Rom. 8:5–6).
 
Philo, who often employs the term φρόνημα, may provide a sample of Diaspora Jewish intellectual usage. He generally uses the term to mean disposition, attitude, or character. As such, it is a settled direction of the personality, not a matter of fleeting thoughts; certainly, this must be true also for Paul, who plainly depicts the corrupted mind of Romans 1:28–31 not as a matter of fleeting thoughts but as a matter of characteristic ones. This disposition may be intelligent, philosophic, untrained and undiscerning, free or slavish, proud or broken, noble, enduring, mature, or brave and courageous. (As one expects from Philo, such aspects of character often correlate with masculinity or with being effeminate.)
 
Because ancient intellectuals often associated such aspects of character with one’s way of thinking, it is not surprising that for Philo the term φρόνημα often has cognitive associations, including in ways associated with the sort of intellectual thought elsewhere addressed by Paul. Thus, for Philo φρόνημα ideally contemplates matters beyond heaven rather than lowly ones. It can be divine, viewing matters from a divine perspective and desiring nothing earthly. It can be subject to or avoid pleasure. Ideally, it should think not only of its own locale but with wise knowledge about the cosmos.
 
Paul certainly includes cognitive associations, because he clearly associates the meaning of this noun with the cognate verb φρονέω, which occurs in Romans 8:5. Yet Paul means even more than exclusively “disposition,” “character,” “attitude,” or “frame of mind,”because he uses the same language in relation to the mind of the Spirit (see 8:27). That is, for Paul, the new way of thinking is empowered by God’s own activity.
 
The mind-frame of the Spirit thus not only contemplates God and shares God’s agendas; it depends on God, recognizing the liberation accomplished in Christ (Rom. 8:2) and the consequent power to live a new way (8:3). This is the perspective that Paul has been communicating in previous chapters: believers are righted by Christ, not themselves (cf. 3:21–5:11), and this righting includes a new life in union with Christ (5:12–6:11). Just as Paul depends on Christ for being righted, he depends on God’s Spirit for being able to appropriate the cognitive moral character consonant with one who is righted. One who behaves by the new identity is thus walking by the Spirit. For Paul, the new frame for thinking is effective because it depends on the reality of Christ and thus of the new identity in him.

- Craig S. Keener, The Mind of the Spirit: Paul's Approach to Transformed Thinking, 2016

The Images of Holy Spirit

Adding to the images of "anointing," "seal," "down payment," and "firstfruits" , one can draw firm conclusions:
 
1. The wide variety of images and figures of speech in itself indicates that no single one will do. The work of Christ, applied by the Spirit in Christian conversion, simply has to many facets to be captured by a single image. In almost every case the choice of images is related to the perspective on the human condition that is addressed in the context. Thus, propitiation responds to our being under God's wrath; redemption to our being enslaved to sin; justification to our guilt before God's law; reconciliation to our being God's enemies; sanctification to our being unholy; washing to our being unclean; and so on.
 
2. The images tend to be used in keeping with the emphasis of the moment, thus the point in context is what is at issue, not the precise timing or relationships in conversion.
 
3. There is no such thing as Christian conversion that does not have the coming of the Spirit into the believer's life as the critical ingredient. However variously expressed, the presence of die Spirit is the one constant.
 

- Gordon D. Fee, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God. p94.