Donald T. Williams, PhD
P. O. Box # 800807
Toccoa Falls, GA. 30598
THE GREAT DIVIDE:
The Church and the Post-Modernist Challenge
The Church of Jesus Christ today faces a challenge far greater than the
Renaissance, more potentially divisive than the Reformation, more insidious in its
inroads into the life of the Church itself than the secularist rationalism of the
Endarkenment.
If my words sound alarmist, well, I am alarmed. As one who is both a college
professor and a pastor, I have had the opportunity to watch this new threat growing in
the Academy, and I now see it becoming planted firmly in the lives of Christian young
people who subjectively love Jesus, go to Bible studies, and sing all the right choruses.
But their minds are increasingly structured and controlled by paradigms which are in
deadly conflict with the Christian worldview and the Christian tradition as any of us--
Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, Reformed, Dispensationalist, or Arminian--have ever
understood it. And they are blithely unaware of the contradiction. Indeed, pointing
out that it is a contradiction is likely to have little meaning to them.
What is at stake is not just Christian truth but whether any assertion can be
described as true; in other words, not just the Christian message but the very
framework of shared experience and categories that makes possible any communication
at all between the Church and its members or the Church and the world it was sent to
reach. And so, let me describe this new way of thinking, inimical not only to the
Christian faith but to anything we have ever recognized as rational thought in the West.
Since the Academy is still the primary place from which it flows, I shall describe it as I
have encountered it there. For it is important, not simply that we reject and condemn it,
but that first we understand it, so we can reject it, and minister to those bamboozled by
it, with understanding.
The Christian professor's life is full of challenges. Many of our students come to
us like Robert Frost's farmer-neighbor in "Mending Wall." They will not go behind their