Page 12 - Empowering Missional Artists - Jim Mills.pdf

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Middle English, Anglo-French and originates from the late Latin word subversion, which means

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“a systematic attempt to overthrow or undermine.” The goal of this movement is not to re-
introduce modernism as the hope of civilization nor the over-throw of post-modernism, rather as

Eugene Peterson suggests, the subversive work of God’s people is to undermine the kingdom of

self and establish the Kingdom of God. (Peterson 1989, 27) A prerequisite to successfully fulfill

that quest is that we come to know and understand the predominate culture climate we all live in.

A CLOSER LOOK AT POSTMODERNISM:

“When the foundations are being destroyed what can the righteous do?” Ps 11:3

Since as early as the 1960s, every first world western society across the globe - from the

USA to Australia to Western Europe - has undergone, according to Diogenes Allen of

Princeton, “a massive intellectual revolution that is perhaps as great as that which marked off

the modern world form the Middle Ages.” (Veith 1994, 27) The illusive ideology behind this

revolution is known as postmodernism, the ideological soil from which concepts such as

deconstruction have sprung. Allen is not the only voice declaring this radical ideological

change. Actually, historian Sir Arnold Toynbee was the first scholar who used the term

postmodern as early as 1940. He wrote, that the postmodern age is one, which is,

. . . dominated by anxiety, irrationalism and helplessness. In such a world
consciousness is a drift, unable to anchor it-self to any universal ground of justice,
truth, or reason on which the ideals of modernity had been founded in the past.
Consciousness itself is thus ‘decentered’ no longer an agent of action in the world, but
a function through which impersonal forces pass and intersect. Art becomes not so
much an expression of the human spirit, but another commodity . . .there can only be
disruption from within: micro-politics, language games, parodic skirmishes, irony,
fragmentation. (Ibid, 45)

This shift according to Ravi Zacharias was philosophically perpetuated by the “brilliant yet

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tragic figures” (Zacharias 2000, 21) of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche of the 19
th
century and the French 20 century Michel Foucault. Nietzsche, whose “influence remains
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substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism,” was