We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. (2 Peter 1:16, NIV)

In my last post, I described how truth itself has come under fire. When truth is attacked, the Bible is attacked. One major front in the battle for truth is being fought in a theater known as postmodernism.

Now, it’s important to acknowledge that postmodern thought has a place for truth — so long as it’s confined to a tiny little slice of reality. That slice has a name in postmodern jargon: they call it a story, or narrative.

But to be tolerated in the postmodern world, truth can only exist in a comfortably narrow slice that only involves a few closely-knit people who basically agree on everything — a “community,” to use a prominent entry from the postmodern lexicon — or even just one person. When you think of reality solely in terms of how it relates to “your story,” there’s a word for that: relativism.

In the Stand to Reason podcast of April 23, 2006, Greg Koukl offered this apt illustration:

We just saw a movie about a grand story that’s very beloved to Christians… Narnia. Two years ago, we saw some other movies about another story that’s beloved to Christians… The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, and Middle Earth. So now we have Narnia and Middle Earth, two separate stories.

Given those two stories, is it true in Narnia that Aslan is the king? Is it true? Well, yeah, of course it’s true — in the story. So — in the story, Aslan is the king, he’s the only king, there is no other king.

Now, is Aslan the king in Middle Earth? No — he’s not in that story. Someone else is king in Middle Earth… Aragorn. Aragorn is the king there, and that’s true for them.

Now, can you see that you can’t say that something about Narnia is true… in a way that makes anything about Middle Earth false? You can’t say… Aslan is king here; therefore, Aragorn can’t be king [there], right? Doesn’t work, does it? Because they’re separate stories. They are not in conflict with each other. The story may be true to itself — if it’s well written, all the pieces fit together, it coheres — but after all, it’s just a story, it isn’t about the way the world really is.

The biggest problem in all of this postmodern storytelling is that it ignores the only story that counts — God’s story. In the end, that’s the “story we find ourselves in,” to quote one postmodern author. This idea of “One Story To Rule Them All” (with apologies to Tolkien), a single, unifying story, is often referred to as a metanarrative, and postmodernism rejects that such a thing exists.

Also note the phrase I rendered in bold: “that’s true for them.” As Eric said on December 22, 2004, the words, “for me,” are “two little words that destroy the Christian message.” Applying that phrase to biblical truth ends up denying the historical facts that form the core of the Gospel.

All of this brings us back to the reason we go to the intent of the author when reading the Bible. If we allow ourselves to fall into the postmodern — even Satanic — trap of declaring what the biblical text means “for us,” then we make ourselves enemies of God and his Word.

In my next post, I will demonstrate why postmodernism is not just absurd — it’s blasphemous.