I’m continuing to pull ideas from Paul Hiebert’s Transforming Worldviews; why come up with my own thoughts while I can use someone’s like Hiebert’s?

Hiebert has a thorough discussion of modernity and it’s impact on the church. This is a topic near and dear to my heart. I have to chuckle a bit as so many church leaders pull their hair out over the effects of postmodernism, while they seem blind to what modernity has done to the church. Hiebert says it well:

It is as true, or more so, of conservative Christians, who are often unaware of modernity’s influences. It represents both a great opportunity and a great threat to the church. As Guinness reminds us, “The Christian church contributed to the rise of the modern world; the modern world, in turn, has undermined the Christian church. Thus, to the degree that the church enters, engages and employs the modern world uncritically, the church becomes her own gravedigger” (1994b, 324).

Modernity undercut the authority of Scripture, placed God in a box marked “irrelevant,” and forced the Western church into rigid structures of rules and regulations. Modernity placed logic above God; it placed logic above just about everything. Modernity brought us the dualism which I’ve looked at in the last few chapters.

Even as we struggle to deal with postmodernism’s relativism, maybe we should welcome its necessary critiques of modernity and it’s shortcomings.