Votin' or Fishin'? Summer 1996

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Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Ag by J. Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh (InterVarsity, 1995), 250 pages, $14.99.

TOTO, I DON'T THINK WE'RE IN Kansas anymore." Dorothy's immortal words in The Wizard of Oz epitomize the confusion of many caught up in the cultural, literary, and artistic cornado called postmodernism. Postmodernism plunges us into a world where the plain certainties of Kansas dissolve into the mists of an Emerald City founded on smoke, mirrors, and machinations. In the end, it turns out that there was no transcendent Wizard after all—just our own efforts at heroism and a white male desperately trying to keep the whole ruse going.

If the tornado of postmodernism has not yet reached your part of the world, it will, and if you are looking for help in surviving the whirlwind you will be hard pressed to find better guides than J. Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh of Toronto's Institute for Christian Studies. In laying out a comprehensive picture of postmodernism, Middleton and Walsh embrace much of the postmodern program as eminently biblical, and yet they also vigorously critique its relativism and nihilism. Indeed, biblical faith, on their reading, is uniquely able to incorporate the challenges of postmodern thinking into a positive, coherent vision for life. Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be does not let us stay in Kansas, but neither does it get lost in the whirlwind.

The structure of the book is chiastic. In the first section, Middleton and Walsh lay out the key themes of postmodernism, using the diagnostic questions from their earlier book on worldview, A Transforming Vision: (1) Where are we? (2) Who are we? (3) What's wrong? and (4) What's the remedy? In the second ...

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