Modern, postmodern — day after day, century after century, men prove that there truly is nothing new under the sun. David Wells writes of the overthrow of truth, and the causes and motives behind it.

Truth is hot today. Hotly disputed, that is. . . . Doubts about truth are aired in rarified intellectual circles and heard in movies. It is a question in law journals as in the wider popular culture. Everywhere we are hearing the same uncertainties about the very possibility of truth.
   In the church it is tempting to exploit these uncertainties, and many are falling prey to this temptation. The temptation is that sounding diffident about truth, about whether we can know the truth, does have its attractions today. It establishes an immediate bond with those in our postmodern culture. Postmoderns have become very leery about truth and about those who think they know it.
   This apparent gain by way of connection however, is more than matched by a loss. What makes for a bond with culture makes for a rupture, I will argue, with the ways of God.*

Why is it that truth has so fallen out of fashion in the world? And why is it that the church is rejecting absolute truth claims as well? The answer begins with one basic fact:

. . . American Christians rate themselves high on relationships and low on Bible knowledge. The Bible, after all, is the source of truth God gave us. Of the seven characteristics [George] Barna selected for measuring spirituality in 2005, Bible knowledge came out the lowest.
   This is part of our picture today. We are spiritual. We want relationships, but we do not want to be religious. Bible knowledge is increasingly considered part of religion in this growing and damaging separation of spirituality from religion. This explains why so many of our churches, especially the most prominent marketing mega churches, give the impression that Christianity is about many things, but truth is not one of them. . . .

   My conclusion is that absolute truth and morality are fast receding in society because their grounding in God as objective, as outside of our self, as our transcendent point of reference, is disappearing. There is nothing outside the individual that stands over against the individual, that remains as the measure for the individual’s actions, the standard for what is right or wrong, or as the test of what is true and what is not.
. . . I am talking about what is called the “autonomous self.” It does have a connection with the earlier individualism that was so much a part of the American story. However, it is not simply individualism. It is what has happened to individualism in our highly modernized society. It is how individualism looks in its postmodern dress.†

Postmoderns, of course, reject individualism. Individualism was a part of modernism, with which they vehemently deny any connection. Postoderns are all about community — and it is evident that they do long for community. However,

. . . postmoderns are deceiving themselves if they think the autonomous self died with modernity. It did not. This is one of the threads that weaves its way, unbroken, from old Enlightenment days into our newer, postmodern disposition and explains an awful lot about the way truth is being understood.
   Then it was that Enlightenment thinkers demanded to be freed from all external authority in order to make up their own minds. They demanded to be freed from God, religious authority, and the past. . . . This attitude has come down to our own time in the form of secular humanism.
   It is true, of course, that postmoderns, in and out of the church, despise this older rationalism. . . . There is much to be said for this rejection of Enlightenment rationalism . . . However, the breach here with the past is not nearly as complete as postmoderns imagine. There is actually a thread of continuity that ties that age to ours, and this thread is quite unbroken.
   This thread is our understanding about the self. Then, as now, it has been loosed from every external constraint, be it God, the past, or religious authority. We demand to be free. We today, postmodern that we may be, are more unconstrained, more emancipated from everything except our own selves than were the proponents of the enlightenment.‡

In the few millennia since Adam, little has changed. Self and its demands for autonomy are still the ultimate motivation of every sin.