Journal: Trinity Journal
Volume: TRINJ 17:1 (Spring 1996)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

TrinJ 17:1 (Spring 1996) p. 95

Book Reviews

J. Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh. Truth is Stranger Than It Used To Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1995.

Culture is changing at a dizzying pace. We live in what is being called a postmodern age. Breaking sharply from the assumptions of the European Enlightenment that have been the driving force in the West for the past 250 years, our culture is experiencing radical ideological and social transformation. Old sources of authority and social cohesion are breaking down and new ones are taking their place. For the emerging generation, Christianity is “out” and spirituality is “in.” Concepts of family, gender, and ethnicity are being radically reshaped. The fall of communism and the emerging global economy are redefining the meaning of nation. Genetic engineering challenges our sense of humanness and computer based communication reorients our understanding of time and space.

What does all this mean? And how are the people of God to be faithful witnesses for the gospel amidst such change? These questions were the subject of a conference held at Wheaton College in April, 1994. Prominent and less known evangelicals gathered to explore how Christian apologetics can be retooled to speak in postmodern times. One of the three views the conference explored involved accepting some of the key tenets of postmodern ideology and addressing postmodern culture in its own terms. This approach was advanced by J. Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh. Subsequent to the conference, InterVarsity Press published their work in a book titled, Truth is Stranger Than It Used To Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age.

The book is divided into two sections. The first part explains what modernism and postmodernism are, and the concerns to which postmodern culture is sensitive. The second section attempts to frame the biblical message in a way that is meaningful to the postmodern world.

The authors begin by summarizing the modern era and how postmodernism makes a decisive departure from modernism’s core assumptions. Modernism, as Middleton and Walsh see it, is based on the authority of Descartes’ autonomous man—the one who starts from his own thought and builds his world view systematically and from reason alone. Naively, postmodernists charge, modernists assumed that the mind was a “mirror of nature,” meaning that our perceptions of reality actually correspond to the way the world is. From this presumption, modernists built a culture that exalted technological achievement and mastery over the natural order. Expansion-minded capitalism and liberal democracy, outgrowths of modernist autonomous individualism, subjugated the earth to the eurocentric, androcentric paradigm.

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