It was a sunny spring day, my friends and I were camping in the Red River Gorge in eastern Kentucky, one of the most beautiful places I know. To pass the time we were hiking along a cliff and after about an hour the trail ended. There in front of us was a tree growing out of the side of the rock face. Well, being the danger seekers we were we decided it better to climb up and jump over to the cliff above, it was only about 4 feet across and 200 feet down. So we climbed, my friend first. Bruce easily jumped across the gap. When I got set to leap the branch he had just used gave way. There I was, part in the tree, part in the air and part on the cliff, scared. Quickly my friend found a sturdy root and slid down to rescue me. Using all the strength we both had we managed to pull my trembling body to safety. I faced death if my friend had not been there. Yet, it was my own foolishness that landed me in this situation. Later that night I could not calm down. As I lay there under the stars in the crisp spring air I realized that fear had ignited emotions in me I didn’t know were there. Now as I think back on that dangerous day I realize that fear had changed me. Many years later and a life lived trying to control fear I am once again faced with a jump to a nearby cliff.

As I sit and write this story I think about what FDR said, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" I have no idea what that means. Yet , I know it was the war cry of modernity. We had so controlled and mastered the world we call home that we had nothing to fear. We were so mighty and so smart that nothing could get in our way. We went to war with no fear only the arrogance that we could not loss. Modernity was about controlling our fear. Fear of losing a war, fear of nature harming us, fear of hunger, fear of failure. Fear became the enemy and we won. The modern world constructed so many ways to control our fear that we forgot what fear was. Then came Vietnam and once again we understood fear.

We had spent billions of dollars creating weapons that could destroy our world in an instant. But we couldn’t defeat a little band of communists. In all our security we lost our ability to fear. Our culture became one that hated fear, we were not allowed to let anyone know our fears, that was a sign of weakness. Weakness was not something we wanted any part of. Within this culture of fear-destruction the church succumb. In the 20th century the church bought the goods the culture was selling. We fought battles to prove that Christianity was the one true religion.  We fought battles to prove to ourselves that our God was stronger and better than any other. And in the midst of that fight we lost our way.

After licking our wounds from Vietnam and letting the world see that we had lost our ability to fear our culture began to come apart. Sex, drugs and rock and roll took over. The days of our fear-less lives had been destroyed. Out there in the real world people had seen this coming and begun to discuss and postulate answers. The result of that early exploration was Postmodernity. After spending so much energy trying to be fear-less suddenly we realized it was okay to be scared. Yet, something held us back from truly embracing a fear-filled life. We fought the truth that was out there with all we had. But the harder we resisted the bigger the wave got. Eventually it reached tsunami proportion and overwhelmed us all.

Then once we had all prepared ourselves for the shift to a postmodern world the unthinkable happened. In a single act of terror we instantly became modern people again. Our need to control and conquer an enemy overwhelmed us. We put our might into action and began to bomb Afghanistan and once victorious there turned toward Iraq. Once again we had become warriors and we were winning. Yet, deep down inside each of us a fear was stirring.  A fear that tells us this enemy can not be defeated with might and weapons.  A fear that is there to help us see God and his desire to help us.  If we fear nothing we have no need for God. 

Maybe the "war on terrorism" is the first postmodern war, it won’t be the last. Our need to once again control and dominate our fear has driven us to do things we never thought we would. In many ways we have regressed to a modern world view in our understanding of this new world. Postmodernity is faltering in its ability to give us a credible answer to our new source of fear. We argue whether the war is just or justified. We can never conquer the evil that is integral to our world, we can’t even control it, it is here to stay. Our answer is not in a new philosophy, our answer is letting the fear that we were created to have inform and inspire us to create a greater way of living.  Postmodernity was touted as the next great age, the answer to our modern woes.

Yet, after a few decades of deconstruction   Postmodernity is not the panacea we all thought. The constant state of tearing down has created an uncontrolled fear. We have gone from fearing nothing to fearing everything.  Overwhelmed with a world that is open and free, anything goes. To conquer our fear we have made everything relative. There is no truth, no standards, no fear?  You see if everything is relative and thus equal there is nothing to fear. Once again we have succeeded in creating a fear-less world.

You see if we allow Postmodernity to become the leviathan that modernity was we will once again make the same mistakes of our predecessors. The ways we make them will be different but in the end they will come to the same conclusion. Fifty to one hundred years from now the next post-age will come along and deconstruct our carefully built structures of relativism. There has to something more out there. Some way to let God back into our lives in a way that allows us to be the people we were created to be. If we marginalize everything through our deconstruction then Neitzsche’s words will ring true and we will have once again killed our God. 

We need to see Postmodernity as a gateway or bridge to our next great age. An age where we once again embrace the part of the trinity we fear the most. The Spirit is to be our guide. Our guide to embracing and using our fear to once again create a world where we can share our fears with each other. And in that sharing of ourselves release a power that will sweep over us and show who our God really is. We will see God the way we were created to see, with fear. So lets make that jump over this post-gap and with the help of our friends as the great philosopher Jim Morrison said. "break on through to the other side."

The desire to drive out fear is not the result of being Modern, it is the result of being human. Perhaps the error of Modernism was in trying to eliminate fear without replacing fear with some other nobler feeling...like love.
Paul said that perfect love drives out fear, and conversely fear drives out love. The two cannot coexist in a single heart. Scripture in many places tells us not to be afraid, so i don't think it makes sense to say that God created us with fear or that fear is an innately good thing.
Still, i thought this was a very insightful article coming from the perspective it does, regardless of whether that perspective was entirely Biblical.
--Jared ( tractarian72 at hotmail dot com ) on 4/14/2005; 5:17:03 PM

We also need to remember that as christians we are not post modern in the truest sense of the term. Post modernism at it's core denies that there is any ultimate truth. Yet Jesus declared "I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life..."

Somehow we need to hold on to this fact. There is Truth with a captal T. That truth is Jesus.

My home country of NZ has a staggeringly high rate of teen suicide. I beleive that, in part, the post modern tidal wave is to blame. If there is no Truth, and everyones point of view is valid and people have no way of expressing their doubt, sconcerns, angers about life and the world in any meaningful way...despair is a natural consequence.

We need to challenge people today to seek the truth no matter what the cost. It reminds me of a line from "A Few Good Men" 'you want the truth! You can't handle the truth!'

Grace,

Matt
--Matt Mansell ( eloieli at truthmail dot com ) on 2/25/2004; 11:19:53 AM