It is written in our Scriptures: “The wicked in his proud countenance does not seek; God is not in any of his thoughts” (Psalm 10:4). Indeed the willful denial of reality is an affront to heaven, contempt shown for the gift of life, and sacrilege of all that is worthy (Psalm 14). It is sheer folly to regard life apart from the fear of the LORD, for that is reishit chokhmah – “the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10).
The existence of God is the First Principle of all sound reasoning regarding reality. The so-called “postmodern world” is notorious for failing to explain anything of substantive meaning. Everything is left unexplained; no “narrative” is permitted (except the dogmatic narrative that there is no narrative, of course); no logical connections to a “real world” are sound; there is no “story” to our lives, and therefore postmodernism entirely misses the essential point of everything.
King David asked, “Who shall abide before the Presence of the LORD?” and the Spirit replied: “the one who walks blamelessly and does what is right and speaks truth in his heart” (Psalm 15:2). It is the one who is honest – “the one who speaks truth within his heart” (דבֵר אֱמֶת בִּלְבָבוֹ) that dwells in the “tent of the LORD,” for God is called the God of Truth (אֵל אֱמֶת), the Faithful God (אֵל אֱמוּנָה).
In heaven there is only the language of truth, and truth is the language of heaven. The “pure in heart” – that is, those who accept the truth of their inner condition, who acknowledge their lost condition, mourning over their lives, and who humbly find themselves starving for God’s deliverance – these are the ones who shall behold God (Matt. 5:2-6).
In this connection Blaise Pascal wrote: “I can feel nothing but compassion for those who sincerely lament their doubt, who regard it as the ultimate misfortune, and who, sparing no effort to escape from it, make their search their principal and most serious business. But as for those who spend their lives without a thought for this final end, I view differently. This negligence in the matter where they themselves, their eternity, their all are at stake, fills me more with irritation than pity: yea, it astounds and appalls me…” (Pascal: Pensees).
Postmodern Christianity is a phenomena of despair. By “despair,” however, I do not mean “gloom” or “dejection,” but rather an absurdist anti-intellectualism that derived from the loss of hope regarding obtaining real knowledge about the world. In popular culture, we see that this despair arose just after WWI (in the USA, earlier in Europe), though its roots trace back to the epistemological skepticism of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1784-1804), who posited “limits” to the mind’s ability to know reality by defining a chasm between apparent reality (phenomena) and hidden reality (noumena). The realm of phenomena was open to inspection using the methods of reason, science, etc., whereas the realm of the “numinous” was only supposed and “managed” by positing transcendental “categories” to help lend order to the unknown. Kant’s doctrine opened the door to various forms of irrationalism, since all the meaningful aspects of life (human love, semantic meaning, hope in afterlife, freedom, the existence of God, etc.) were relegated to the murky world of the unknown, leaving us with only a world of “managed appearances” to traffic in as human beings in the world.
GW Hegel (1770-1831) took the next step and speculated wildly above Kant’s uncrossable line. The phenomenal world (Zeitgeist) was “really” a manifestation of Absolute Spirit working its way out through “dialectic” in the space-time world. Later Karl Marx (1818-1883) rejected the idea of Spirit and substituted material forces (i.e., economics) as the engine that drove historical processes. Nietzsche and his odious spawn, Adolf Hitler soon became “true believers” of such irrationalism… Derrida, Foucault and other “postmodernists” gloried in the loss of intelligibility as a political opportunity to ”reconstruct” reality as subjective preference.
The division of rational and irrational modes of encountering reality opened the door for absurdist encounters with the spirit realm. Hence we see the rise of neo-paganism, witchcraft, various forms of the occult (including pop-Kabbalah), new-age thinking, and various extreme forms of “charismatic” Christianity. Since (it is claimed) God cannot be understood using reason, He is known only through the experience of mystery. Faith is therefore expressed by rejecting rationality and embracing the ludicrous, and appeals to logic and clear thinking are rejected. Epistemological nihilism is symptomatic of the despair of the “postmodern” age.
“The Nuremberg trial of the German war criminals was tacitly based on the recognition of the principle: criminal actions cannot be excused if committed on government orders; conscience supersedes the authority of the law of the state.” – Albert Einstein
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