From my sermon last Sunday on Daniel 8, where it says that because of the little horn "truth was thrown to the ground" (v. 12).

Throwing truth to the ground is the very definition of the postmodern Zeitgeist. We live in an era when the very concept of truth is brought into question. Truth is relative, something that's merely created by a community. And when one community claims to have absolute truth they inevitably use that as an excuse to oppress and exploit another community, so the thinking goes. Totalizing truth is always totalitarian. It is, as postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault calls it, a 'regime of truth'. In other words, truth will hurt and control people. No one has a right to affirm that their truth is true for someone else. Therefore, truth itself is thrown to the ground.

And I'm afraid this thinking has crept into the church. A growing number find sermons to be passé and modernistic; offensive even. Theology, they claim, is entirely an art and not a science. Many buy into this notion that doctrine is dangerous; that any dogmatic assertions about God, Man, Sin, Christ, Salvation, etc… are arrogant and inhibiting. "We have our communally constructed truths, but they're fluid and adaptable and we would never try to impose them on someone else." It's true – truth has been used to beat people over the head and to make one feel self-righteous. It's true – many have been overly ambitious in their claims to exhaust the depths of God and to put him into nice, neat little categories of thought. But those truths do not negate the existence of truth. God is big, ineffable, infinite, incomprehensible, independent, non-contingent, timeless, possessing aseity… a being sui generis. These are all systematic theology terms that say that God cannot be contained in systematic theology textbooks. There is mystery. "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of [his] law" (Dt. 29:29). There is much we don't know/can't know, but God has revealed certain things to us that correspond to reality as it is in him. They are true and they can and must be put into propositional statements that guide and control our thinking about God and his world. We've got to beware of extreme forms of postmodernism that can seep into the church and turn our faith to mush.