Modern and Postmodern Thought: Relativism, Secularism, Identity, Expressive Individualism, and Power how the modern self was made, why relativism cannot survive its own test, what postmodernism gets right and wrong, and how the gospel speaks to a skeptical age

1. Modern and postmodern thought fairly introduced

Before anyone hears an argument, they hear it through a set of assumptions about what is plausible, what is offensive, and what is simply “obvious.” Those assumptions are not neutral; they are the deposit of centuries of thought, and they shape why the gospel sounds either compelling or absurd to a given hearer. To engage our neighbours faithfully, then, we must understand the deep currents that have formed the modern mind. Two great movements dominate, and it helps to grasp them as a story in two acts.

Modernity is the world born of the Enlightenment (roughly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward): the conviction that autonomous human reason — reason cut loose from revelation and tradition — could discover truth, master nature, and guide humanity to progress. It enthroned the individual knowing mind (Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”), prized science as the model of all real knowledge, and increasingly treated God as unnecessary — first marginal, then absent. Its mood was confident, optimistic, and progressive: we are coming of age, throwing off superstition, building a better world by reason alone.

Postmodernity is the disillusioned aftermath (roughly the later twentieth century onward), the suspicion that modernity’s confidence was naive and even dangerous. The bloodbaths of the twentieth century — carried out by “rational,” “progressive” ideologies — shook faith in reason and progress. Postmodern thinkers turned skepticism on the modern project itself: there is no neutral, objective reason (all thinking is situated and biased); there is no single true story of the world (Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives”); truth claims are often masks for power (Foucault); language does not transparently mirror reality (Derrida). The mood is ironic, suspicious, and deconstructive: every grand claim is to be unmasked.

Most people today are not pure moderns or pure postmoderns but live in a confused blend — trusting science like a modern while doubting truth like a postmodern, demanding tolerance while making absolute moral pronouncements. This course aims to make that blend intelligible, to credit what each movement gets right, to expose where each collapses (especially relativism), and to show how the gospel meets the genuine longings and exposes the genuine idols of the age.

2. Why this matters in apologetics

Apologetics is never done in a vacuum; it is done with real people shaped by a particular culture, and the shape of that culture decides which arguments even get a hearing. A generation ago, the live question was often “is Christianity true?” Today, for many, the prior questions are “is there any such thing as truth?” and “isn’t any exclusive claim just a power grab?” and “why should I betray my authentic self for an old institution?” Unless we understand these prior assumptions, our carefully reasoned cases will glance off, because they answer questions no one is asking.

This course matters for several reasons. First, it explains the plausibility structures of the age — why the gospel sounds implausible to many before they have weighed a single argument, and how to address the assumptions, not just the surface objections. Second, it equips discernment. Christians are formed by the culture too; without understanding it, we absorb its idols unawares — remaking grace into the therapeutic, holiness into authenticity, the church into a brand. Third, it tunes our charity. Understanding why a person finds Christianity oppressive or implausible lets us answer the real heart, not a caricature. Fourth, it sharpens the gospel’s edge. Precisely by understanding the age, we can show that the gospel is not the tired old story the culture assumes but the radical, liberating news it has never really heard — the answer to longings the age feels but cannot satisfy.

The goal is not to become fashionable, nor to retreat in fear, but to do what the men of Issachar did — to “understand the times” and know what God’s people should do (1 Chron 12:32) — so that we may commend Christ to this generation in its own language, exposing its idols and answering its hopes.

3. Modernity: the Enlightenment and autonomous reason

The defining move of modernity was the declaration of intellectual independence: human reason would now judge all things for itself, owing nothing to revelation or tradition. Kant captured the spirit in his motto for the Enlightenment: Sapere aude — “Dare to know!” — the summons to throw off “self-imposed immaturity” and think for oneself. Descartes had already sought a foundation for knowledge in the solitary thinking self (“I think, therefore I am”), building outward from the individual mind rather than from God or community. Reason, not the Bible or the church, would be the final court of appeal.

From this root grew the familiar features of the modern world: confidence in science as the paradigm of real knowledge; the idea of inevitable progress; the autonomous individual as the basic unit of society; and the steady relocation of God to the edges — first as a distant deistic clockmaker, then as an unnecessary hypothesis, then as a projection to be explained away (Feuerbach, Freud, Marx). Modernity did not always deny God outright; it simply built a world that ran without him, an account of knowledge, nature, and morality that no longer needed to mention him.

The Christian assessment must be discerning, not reflexively hostile. Modernity carried real, God-given goods, often borrowed from the Christian soil it grew in: a high view of the order and intelligibility of the world (which, as Course 11 argued, fits a created cosmos), genuine scientific and medical advance, and a proper dignity of the individual. But its fatal flaw was autonomy — the claim that the human mind is its own ultimate authority, accountable to nothing above it. This is, at bottom, the original temptation: “you will be like God, knowing” (Gen 3:5), the creature seizing the Creator’s prerogative to define truth and good. And it could not deliver what it promised. Autonomous reason proved unable to ground morality (whose reason? which values?), unable to satisfy the soul, and unable to prevent the rational barbarisms of the twentieth century. Modernity’s confidence was a borrowed capital, spent down — and its exhaustion set the stage for postmodernity’s revolt.

4. Secularization and the immanent frame

The most visible fruit of modernity is secularization. The old “secularization thesis” predicted that as societies modernized, religion would simply wither away — and in much of the West, public life has indeed been emptied of God in a way unimaginable five centuries ago. But the philosopher Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, gave a deeper and more accurate account. Secularism, he argued, is not mainly the decline of belief but a change in its conditions: a shift from a world in which belief in God was the unquestioned default to one in which it is one option among many, and a contested one.

Taylor describes modern Westerners as living within an immanent frame — a mental and social world that feels naturally complete in itself, closed off from the transcendent, in which the “natural” order seems to need no “supernatural” beyond it. The medieval self was “porous,” open and vulnerable to spirits, God, and powers beyond it; the modern self is “buffered,” sealed within its own mind, insulated from the transcendent, the master of its own meaning. Within this frame, God is not so much disproven as made optional, even unreal-seeming — not because of any argument but because of the whole shape of how life is now imagined and lived. This is why bare arguments often fail to move people: the issue is not a missing premise but an entire imaginative world in which God has become hard to feel.

Yet Taylor also notes the “cross-pressures” of the secular age: the immanent frame is haunted. Even sealed within it, modern people feel the pull of transcendence — in beauty, in love, in death, in the sense that there must be “more,” in a persistent dissatisfaction that exclusive humanism cannot fully quiet. Nietzsche saw the cost most clearly: if “God is dead” — if Western culture has killed off the God who grounded meaning, value, and truth — then we have unmoored ourselves from the very things we still want to keep (objective morality, human dignity, meaning), and most people have not begun to reckon with the abyss. The apologetic opportunity is precisely here: to name the haunting, to show that the immanent frame cannot contain the human heart, and to point to the transcendent God who has come near.

5. Postmodernity: the suspicion of metanarratives

If modernity was confident, postmodernity is suspicious. It arose as a loss of faith in the modern project — in neutral reason, objective progress, and the grand stories (Enlightenment progress, Marxist utopia, scientific salvation) that had promised to explain and improve everything but had, in the twentieth century, delivered world wars, gulags, and the Holocaust, all in the name of reason and progress. Jean-François Lyotard famously defined the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives” — a deep distrust of any single, total story claiming to make sense of everything.

Several thinkers gave the movement its tools. Michel Foucault argued that what a society calls “truth” and “knowledge” is bound up with power: those in control define the categories, and claims to objective truth often mask the interests of the powerful. Jacques Derrida, through “deconstruction,” questioned whether language ever transparently delivers stable meaning, arguing that texts undermine their own apparent claims. Richard Rorty dismissed the idea that our beliefs “mirror” an objective reality, treating truth as merely what our community finds useful to say. The common thread is a turn from confident assertion to relentless suspicion: behind every claim to truth, look for the bias, the construction, the will to power.

The cultural fruit is all around us: the assumption that “your truth” and “my truth” can differ; the reflex to ask not “is this true?” but “whose interest does this serve?”; the suspicion of all institutions, authorities, and grand claims; the prizing of personal narrative and lived experience over objective argument; and, in its harder forms, the reduction of all human relations to power. Postmodernism is rarely held consistently — few really live as if nothing is true — but its mood saturates the culture, and the Christian must learn both to appreciate its genuine insights and to expose its fatal incoherence.

6. What postmodernism gets right

Christian engagement must be honest enough to credit what is true, and postmodernism scores some real points — often against idols the church should never have served. Discernment means receiving these as God’s common-grace correctives, even from unlikely sources.

It is right that human reason is not neutral. The Enlightenment’s dream of a view from nowhere — pure, unbiased, autonomous reason — was always a myth, and Scripture said so first. Everyone reasons from prior commitments; the unbeliever “suppresses the truth” (Rom 1:18); the natural person cannot, on his own, receive the things of the Spirit (1 Cor 2:14). Postmodernism’s exposure of the pretended neutrality of secular reason is something Christians can welcome, for it punctures modernity’s idol of autonomous objectivity.

It is right that claims to truth can mask power and self-interest. Foucault’s suspicion, overstated as a total theory, names something real and biblical: the human heart is deceitful (Jer 17:9), and we constantly dress up self-interest as principle. The prophets unmasked the powerful who called evil good (Isa 5:20); Jesus exposed the religious establishment’s use of piety to devour the vulnerable. Christians, of all people, should not be naive about the corruptions of power, including in the church.

It is right that grand human stories have often been oppressive. The metanarratives of secular progress and revolutionary utopia did bring the horrors Lyotard distrusted. The Christian agrees that human attempts to seize the whole story and impose it by force end in tyranny — which is exactly what a doctrine of sin would predict. And it is right to honour particular voices and lived experience, since every person bears God’s image and no abstraction should erase the individual.

But here is the crucial move: each of these insights, valid in measure, becomes self-destructive when absolutized into a total denial of truth. The reason is not neutral — but that does not mean there is no truth, only that we need help to see it. Power corrupts claims — but “all truth claims are merely power” is itself a truth claim seeking power. Grand stories can oppress — but the answer is not no story but the true story, given by God rather than seized by us. Postmodernism is most useful as a scalpel against idols and most ruinous as a worldview; the next section shows why.

7. Relativism and its self-defeat

The beating heart of popular postmodernism is relativism — the claim that there is no objective truth (cognitive relativism) or no objective morality (moral relativism), only what is “true for you” or “right for your culture.” It presents itself as humble and tolerant. But it cannot survive a moment’s scrutiny, because it cannot be stated without contradicting itself — the single most important thing to see in this whole course.

This is not a debating trick but the exposure of a real incoherence. “There is no objective truth” is offered as an objective truth; “you shouldn’t impose your morality” is itself a moral imposition; “all cultures are equally valid” is a universal value-judgment that not all cultures share. The relativist cannot even state the position without standing on the very ground he denies. And no one actually lives by it: the same person who says “there’s no objective truth” expects the bank to honour the objective truth of his balance, and the person who says “don’t impose your morality” is outraged by real injustice as if it were really, objectively wrong — not merely “wrong for them.”

Moral relativism in particular cannot bear the weight people put on it. The culture that proclaims “who’s to say what’s right?” also insists, with absolute conviction, that racism, oppression, and cruelty are really wrong — not just unfashionable. But that conviction requires an objective moral standard above all cultures, which relativism denies. You cannot consistently say both “all morality is relative” and “injustice is truly evil.” The moral outrage of our age is borrowed capital, drawn on a Christian account it officially refuses — for objective good and evil require a moral lawgiver above us all.

The gentle questionThe most useful response to relativism is not a lecture but a question, asked kindly: “Is that true — really, objectively true, for everyone — or just true for you?” The relativist must either abandon the position or admit it has no claim on anyone. Then the real conversation can begin: not “is there truth?” (there must be) but “what is the truth, and have we met it?”

8. Expressive individualism and the modern self

Perhaps the deepest shift of the modern age is not in what people think about truth but in what they assume about the self. Carl Trueman, building on Charles Taylor, Philip Rieff, and others, has traced the rise of what is called expressive individualism: the conviction that the self is defined by its inner feelings and desires, that authenticity means expressing those feelings outwardly, and that the highest good and deepest duty is to “be true to yourself.” On this view, the inner self is sovereign; to suppress or deny one’s felt desires — or to have them judged by any external authority — is the great betrayal, even a kind of violence.

This is a historical achievement, not a timeless given. For most of human history, the self was understood from the outside in: a person found identity in their place within a given order — created by God, bound by duty, situated in family, community, and tradition, accountable to a reality larger than the self. The modern self is understood from the inside out: identity is discovered (or created) by looking within, consulting one’s feelings, and expressing them against any constraint. “Follow your heart,” “you do you,” “live your truth,” “the most important thing is to be authentic” — these are the catechism of expressive individualism, and they are now simply the air we breathe.

The Christian response must again be discerning. There is a genuine good being grasped at: persons really are not mere cogs in a collective; inner integrity matters; hypocrisy is a real evil; God does care about the heart. But the modern self rests on two errors. First, it absolutizes feeling. It treats spontaneous inner desire as the deepest truth about a person and the final authority — precisely what Scripture warns against: “The heart is deceitful above all things” (Jer 17:9); “there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Prov 14:12). “Follow your heart” is terrible advice if the heart is unreliable. Second, it makes the self its own creator and judge — the autonomy of modernity now turned inward, the self defining its own identity and good with no reference to the God who made it. This is freedom as self-creation, and it is finally exhausting and lonely: a self with no given nature, no fixed meaning, no rest, condemned to construct and defend an identity that no one else is obliged to recognize.

9. The therapeutic turn and identity

Hand in hand with expressive individualism comes what Philip Rieff called the triumph of the therapeutic: the reorganization of culture around psychological well-being as the highest good. Where older cultures asked “what is my duty?” or “what is true?”, the therapeutic culture asks “what makes me feel whole, affirmed, and happy?” The goal of life becomes self-fulfillment; the great sin becomes whatever makes one feel bad about oneself; and the great virtue becomes affirmation — not telling people uncomfortable truths but validating their feelings and choices.

This reshapes everything, including how the gospel is heard. In a therapeutic culture, sin sounds like an insult to self-esteem, repentance like self-hatred, and the call to deny oneself like psychological harm. Conversely, the gospel is constantly tempted to remake itself in therapeutic terms — God as a cosmic affirmer of my best life, grace as self-acceptance, salvation as feeling good about myself. Sociologists have even named the actual operative religion of much of the West “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”: be nice, be happy, God exists to help me feel good and solve my problems, and good people go to heaven. It is Christianity hollowed out and refilled with the therapeutic self.

This is also the soil of the modern obsession with identity. When the self is defined by inner feeling and validated by therapy, identity becomes both supremely important and dangerously fragile — something one must construct, announce, and have recognized by others, with no stable ground beneath it. The result is the anxious, exhausting, ever-shifting quest for a secure self that the age both demands and cannot supply. Here the gospel speaks with stunning relevance — not by affirming the project but by offering what it cannot: a given, secure, unshakeable identity, not constructed by us and not dependent on the recognition of others, but conferred by God in Christ. “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). The Christian does not have to build and defend a self; he receives one, beloved and secure, as a gift.

10. The hermeneutics of power

The newest and now-dominant turn takes Foucault’s suspicion to its conclusion: the assumption that power is the hidden key to everything. On this view — flowing from critical theory and its descendants — society is best understood as a web of power relations between oppressor groups and oppressed groups; claims to objective truth, reason, and morality are really tools by which the powerful maintain dominance; and the path to liberation is to unmask these power structures and overturn them. Knowledge is reframed as “standpoint”: what you can know depends on your social position, and the perspective of the oppressed has special access to truth that the privileged are blind to.

As with postmodernism generally, the Christian must both credit the insight and expose the overreach. The insight is real and biblical: power does corrupt; the strong do oppress the weak and call it justice; ideologies do mask self-interest; and Scripture is fierce about it — the prophets thunder against those who “trample on the poor” (Amos 5:11), and God’s special concern for the vulnerable runs through the whole Bible. Christians should be the last to be naive about the abuse of power, including their own. But the overreach is ruinous. When everything is reduced to power, several things collapse at once. Truth disappears (if all claims are just power, so is this one — the self-refutation again). Reason becomes impossible (we can no longer argue, only struggle). Persons are dissolved into group identities, reducing individuals to instances of oppressor or oppressed. And grace is excluded: a world of pure power has no category for forgiveness, reconciliation, or love across the lines of group — only permanent struggle and the inversion of hierarchies.

The deepest Christian response is that the hermeneutics of power has identified a real disease but mislocated it and lost the cure. The fundamental human problem is indeed a corruption of power — but it runs not merely between groups but through every human heart, including the oppressed’s; the line between oppressor and oppressed runs down the middle of each of us (Solzhenitsyn’s famous insight, deeply biblical). And the answer is not the endless inversion of power but its redemption: a King who exercised power by laying it down, who “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45), who reconciles enemies into one body, and who breaks the cycle of struggle with forgiveness and grace. The gospel both takes oppression more seriously than critical theory (sin is real, and judgment is coming) and offers what it cannot — not merely a reshuffling of power but the death of the old self and reconciliation through the cross.

11. The gospel as a true and humble story

Postmodernism distrusts metanarratives — grand, total stories that explain everything — and not without reason, given how human metanarratives have been used to oppress. So does the gospel, then, simply stand condemned as one more oppressive grand story? No — and seeing why is central to engaging the age.

First, the gospel is a metanarrative: it tells the one true story of the whole of reality — creation, fall, redemption, consummation. It will not pretend to be merely one private “truth for me”; it claims to be the account of how things actually are, for everyone. To trim it into a personal preference is to deny it. But the gospel is a metanarrative of a unique kind, and it answers the postmodern suspicion in three ways.

It is not a human story but a given one. The fatal flaw of human metanarratives — the reason they oppress — is that they are seized by some group and imposed by force for its own interests. But the gospel is not constructed by the powerful to justify themselves; it is revealed by God, and its central act is God himself coming down, not to dominate but to die. A story whose climax is the Author crucified by the powerful, for the sake of the weak, cannot be a tool of the strong.

It is a humbling story, not a self-serving one. Every human metanarrative casts its tellers as the heroes. The gospel casts all of us as sinners — the powerful and the powerless alike — and God alone as the hero and Saviour. It does not flatter any group; it indicts and then redeems all. A metanarrative that tells its own adherents they are sinners saved only by grace is the opposite of a self-justifying ideology.

It grounds the very things postmodernism wants but cannot supply. Postmodernism rightly cherishes the dignity of persons, the evil of oppression, and the demand for justice — but relativism gives it no ground to stand on. The gospel grounds all three: persons have inviolable dignity because they bear God’s image; oppression is truly evil because there is a holy God who hates it; justice is real and certain because God will judge the world in righteousness. The age’s noblest instincts are homeless until they find their home in the Christian story — the only metanarrative that is both true and humble, that diagnoses the disease of power and provides the cure of grace.

12. Truth, freedom, and the self in Christ

The modern age tells two great lies that the gospel directly answers: that freedom means autonomy — the absence of any authority over the self — and that the self is found by looking within. Against both, Jesus says something startling: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32). Here truth and freedom are joined — and both are found not within the self but in him.

On freedom: the modern self imagines that freedom is the removal of all external constraint, so that the unconstrained, self-defining will is most free. But Jesus locates true bondage not outside but inside: “everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34). The autonomous self, “free” from God, is not free at all but enslaved — to its own disordered desires, to the relentless and exhausting project of self-creation, to the judgment of others whose recognition it craves. Real freedom is not the absence of all authority but submission to the right one — the truth, embodied in Christ, that frees us from the tyranny of sin and self. A fish is most free in water, not on the bank; the human self is most free in glad dependence on its Maker, not in the lonely sovereignty it was never built to bear.

On the self: the modern project of looking within to discover or construct an identity is, in the end, unbearable — a self with no given nature, endlessly building and defending a fragile identity that depends on the applause of others. The gospel offers the opposite and the rest the heart craves: an identity that is given, not achieved; secure, not fragile; grounded in God’s love, not the recognition of the crowd. The believer does not have to manufacture a self; he is told who he is — a beloved child of God, in Christ, “a new creation” (2 Cor 5:17), with a life “hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). This is why the gospel’s call to “deny yourself” (Mark 8:34) is not the violence the therapeutic age imagines but the doorway to life: “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt 16:25). The self is not found by being expressed; it is found by being given to Christ, and received back, healed, secure, and free.

13. Apologetic case studies

Six conversations, each combining clarity with love. The aim is never to win and wound, but to remove an obstacle and commend Christ.

Case 1 — “There’s no such thing as objective truth.”

Answer with a gentle question, not a lecture: “Is that statement objectively true — for everyone — or just true for you? If it’s objectively true, then there’s at least one objective truth, and the claim defeats itself. If it’s only true for you, then I’m free to disagree, and it has no hold on me.” Said kindly, this opens the door to the real question: not whether there is truth, but what it is, and whether we’ve met it.

Case 2 — “You can’t impose your morality on others.”

“That sounds right — but notice it’s itself a moral rule you’re imposing on me: ‘you ought not impose morality.’ Everyone has a morality they think others should live by — you do too, or you wouldn’t object to cruelty or injustice. The question isn’t whether to have a morality (we all do) but which one is true — and where a real, objective right and wrong could even come from.”

Case 3 — “You just believe that because of your upbringing / your privilege / your bias.”

“Maybe my background shaped me — but so did yours, and that’s true of every belief anyone holds, including yours. Where a belief comes from doesn’t tell us whether it’s true; that’s a separate question. If we dismiss every view by tracing its origins, we’d have to dismiss yours too. So can we set aside who’s biased and just look at whether it’s actually true?”

Case 4 — “Just be true to yourself / follow your heart.”

“I love that you want to live with integrity — that’s a real good. But can I ask: is your heart always trustworthy? Mine isn’t. Sometimes my deepest feelings have pointed me toward what would have wrecked me. ‘Follow your heart’ only works if the heart is a reliable guide — and honestly, isn’t that the one thing experience teaches us it isn’t? What if real freedom isn’t expressing whatever I feel, but becoming the person I was actually made to be?”

Case 5 — “Religion is just a power structure to control people.”

“You’re right that religion has been used for power and control — tragically, including by people who claimed to follow Jesus, and he’d be the first to condemn them. But look at the actual founder: a man with no army, no wealth, no office, who washed his followers’ feet and died forgiving his executioners. If you wanted to invent a religion to seize power, you would never invent that. The gospel’s whole logic is power laid down, not grasped.”

Case 6 — “The church is on the wrong side of history.”

“‘The wrong side of history’ assumes history has a moral direction — that things are heading somewhere good, and we can be measured against it. That’s actually a borrowed Christian idea; a purely secular, relativist universe has no ‘right side’ for history to have. So the very phrase smuggles in a moral standard that needs God to make sense. The real question isn’t which way the cultural wind is blowing — winds shift — but what is actually true and good.”

14. A practical conversation method

A repeatable shape for engaging the assumptions of the age — not a script but a posture, moving from understanding to gospel.

Listen for the assumption beneath the words — is this relativism, expressive individualism, the suspicion of power? Most people are not quoting Foucault; they are repeating the cultural air, often with a real longing underneath. Name the assumption gently, so the unspoken becomes visible and discussable. Affirm the insight — find the genuine good the person is reaching for (the hatred of hypocrisy, the concern for the oppressed, the desire for authenticity) and honour it sincerely; this is not flattery but truth, and it earns a hearing. Expose the flaw — with a light touch and often a question, show where the assumption defeats itself or cannot deliver what it promises (relativism’s self-refutation, the unreliable heart, the homelessness of justice without God). Offer the better story — show that the gospel provides what the person actually wants: real truth, secure identity, true freedom, grounded justice. Point to Christ — move from the abstract to the person of Jesus, in whom the longings of the age are finally met.

Throughout, remember Paul at Athens (Acts 17): he understood the culture, quoted its poets, affirmed its religious longing, exposed its idols, and pointed to the risen Christ. He neither absorbed the culture nor despised it; he engaged it, in love, toward the gospel. So must we.

15. Reflection exercises

Work these through; they turn understanding into usable conviction. Try each before checking the key.

16. Common mistakes Christians make

• Captivity to the culture. Quietly absorbing relativism as “tolerance,” expressive individualism as “authenticity,” or the therapeutic as “grace,” until the gospel is remade in the culture’s image (Col 2:8). Discern the idols you’ve breathed in.
• Contempt for the culture. Dismissing the whole modern world as decadence, refusing to understand it. You cannot answer what you will not understand, or love whom you only despise.
• Refusing to credit any insight. Treating postmodernism as wholly false misses its real, common-grace critiques of arrogant reason and hidden power — and forfeits points of contact.
• Crediting too much. The opposite error: embracing the critiques without exposing the self-refuting denial of truth, ending in a Christianity with no firm ground to stand on.
• Arguing the surface, missing the assumption. Answering the stated objection while ignoring the unspoken plausibility structure beneath it — so the argument never connects.
• Defending the church’s sins. When the “power” critique lands on real Christian abuses of power, defensiveness is fatal. Own what is true, repent where needed, and point past the church’s failures to its Lord.
• Winning the argument, losing the person. Treating people as positions to be defeated rather than image-bearers to be loved, often carrying real wounds beneath their words.

17. Greek and Hebrew notes

A few words from Scripture speak directly to truth, the heart, the mind, and the self that this course concerns.

ἀλήθεια — alētheia — “truth”

The word Pilate threw away — “What is truth?” (John 18:38) — standing before the one who had just said, “everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice” (18:37), and who is “the truth” (John 14:6). In the New Testament truth is not merely a property of statements but is personal and reliable, grounded in God; the postmodern dissolution of truth founders on the One who embodies it.

μεταμορφόομαι / ἀνακαίνωσις — metamorphoomai / anakainōsis — “be transformed / renewal”

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom 12:2). The verb gives us “metamorphosis.” The Christian is neither captive to the age’s mind (“conformed”) nor contemptuous of it, but inwardly transformed — given a renewed mind able to discern (dokimazein) the will of God amid the spirit of the times.

ὀχύρωμα — ochyrōma — “stronghold, fortress”

“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor 10:4–5). The “strongholds” are fortified ideologies — the plausibility structures of an age — and the Christian’s weapons are spiritual, not worldly, demolishing the false and bringing every thought into Christ’s service. This is the very task of this course.

לֵב — leb — “heart”

In Hebrew the “heart” is the whole inner person — mind, will, and affections together — and Scripture’s verdict on it is sobering: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9). This is the direct answer to “follow your heart”: the heart is not a trustworthy oracle but itself in need of healing and a new birth (Ezek 36:26).

יָשָׁר — yashar — “right (in one’s own eyes)”

The refrain that closes Judges — “everyone did what was right (yashar) in his own eyes” (Judg 21:25) — is the ancient name for expressive individualism and moral relativism: each person his own authority, with no king. Scripture presents this not as freedom but as the recipe for chaos, the very disorder our age is rediscovering.

צֶלֶם — tselem — “image”

“God created man in his own image (tselem)” (Gen 1:27). Here is the true ground of the dignity and identity the modern self grasps after in vain. The self is not self-created or self-defined; it is given — we are made in God’s image, and remade in the image of his Son (Rom 8:29). Identity is received, not constructed, and that is the deepest good news for an anxious, identity-weary age.

18. The pivot to Christ

The modern and postmodern story is, in the end, a story of exhaustion. Modernity promised that autonomous reason would lead us into the light; it gave us astonishing powers and then, in the twentieth century, the rational machinery of mass death, and could not tell us why anything mattered. Postmodernity, disillusioned, turned suspicion on truth and reason themselves — and left us with no truth to rest in, no story to live by, no self that is not a fragile construction, no justice that is not merely the next group’s power. The age that began by killing God to be free has discovered that it cannot keep the things it most wanted — meaning, dignity, truth, justice, a stable self — without him. The immanent frame is haunted, and the haunting is grace.

Into this exhaustion the gospel speaks, not as one more weary human story but as the word the age has never really heard. To the relativist who cannot find truth, it offers the Truth in person: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). To the self exhausted by the impossible labour of self-creation, it offers a given identity, secure and beloved: “your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). To the seeker of authentic freedom enslaved to his own desires, it offers the only freedom that frees: “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). To the suspicion that all power oppresses, it offers the King who laid power down and died for his enemies, and who will yet set every wrong right. And to the homeless longing for justice, dignity, and meaning, it offers the only ground on which they can stand — a holy God, a real fall, a true redemption, a coming consummation.

This is the one metanarrative that is both true and humble: true, because it is God’s own account of reality, sealed by the resurrection; humble, because it makes all of us sinners and God alone the Saviour, and because its climax is not conquest but a cross. The most relevant thing the church can do in a skeptical, post-truth, identity-weary age is not to chase its moods but to tell it, in love, the old story that turns out to be the only new thing under the sun: that God has come, in Christ, to make all things — and every exhausted self — new.

19. Questions people ask

The questions that come up most often about truth, the self, and the spirit of the age — from skeptics, from seekers, and from believers under pressure. Each is answered in five parts: how you will usually hear it, a short answer, a fuller explanation, the scriptural or doctrinal anchor, and a pastoral note.

20. Further reading

A selection of trustworthy works on modernity, postmodernity, and the modern self, weighted toward the Reformed-evangelical tradition. Inclusion does not imply agreement at every point.

• On the modern self and the secular age
• Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (and the shorter Strange New World) — the essential evangelical account of expressive individualism.
• Charles Taylor, A Secular Age — the landmark study of secularization, the immanent frame, and the buffered self (demanding but rewarding).
• James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular — a readable guide to Taylor for Christians.
• Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic — the classic diagnosis of the therapeutic turn.
• On postmodernism and truth
• James K. A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? — a fair Christian engagement (crediting and critiquing).
• D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God — on pluralism, postmodernism, and truth.
• Os Guinness, Time for Truth — truth and its loss in the modern world.
• On engaging the culture for Christ
• Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society — confident, humble missionary engagement.
• Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God and The Reason for God — the gospel for a skeptical age.
• Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory — reading culture through the biblical story.
• Related pages on this site
• Epistemology (Course 04) and Religious Pluralism (Course 12).
• Christian Apologetics and Modern Apologetics — the dedicated resources.
• Discernment — testing the spirits of the age.

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