From The River of God by Kim Cimio — Part II. Culture, Chapter 4
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)
How the great cultural break of the early twentieth century, the explosion of media, and the rise of postmodernism changed the world, and how Christians can share the gospel in a postmodern age.
What was the great fault line in modern history?
History has borderlands where one era gives way to another, like the fall of Rome or the Renaissance. But the greatest fault line occurred about a century ago. Virginia Woolf declared that “on or about December 1910, human nature changed,” and Mortimer Adler saw a clear break between the twentieth century and the twenty-five centuries before it. Around 1900 everything shifted at once. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) overturned perspective; Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913) replaced harmony with primitive energy; Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) remade literature. C.S. Lewis called it the biggest break in tradition since the Epic of Gilgamesh. Planck and Einstein ended Newtonian physics, cinema was born, and Freud revealed a twisted unconscious beneath our rationality. World War I shattered the illusion of inevitable progress.
Why is fake news unavoidable today, and what does it have to do with postmodernism?
Traditional societies had few channels of information. When I grew up in Korea, television had four channels and half the nation watched the same show. Then came cable, the internet, YouTube, camera phones, and now AI-generated video. With this flood came fake news. Many call for more fact-checking, but who should check? If CNN does it, critics call it fake news checking fake news; if governments do it, they contradict each other, as South Korea and Sweden did on masks. Even simple questions, like whether our phones listen to us, are almost impossible to settle. Jean-François Lyotard began The Postmodern Condition by discussing computers. Postmodernism emerged not from philosophical arguments but from changes in media. When sources were few, they had great authority. Now people believe what they want. We live in a world that is freer and more confusing at the same time.
What do Facebook, Instagram and disappearing “stories” reveal about a generational shift in worldview?
Facebook (2004) embodies the age-old belief that more is better: long posts, albums, files, groups, messaging. Instagram (2010) deliberately limits what you can do, and young people prefer it. The digital world offers so many free options that people suffer decision fatigue, and limits remove the burden of choice. Stories that vanish in 24 hours, adopted after Snapchat, puzzle older people but delight younger ones. Because nothing lasts, they feel free to share spontaneously without overthinking. The irony is striking: humanity worked for millennia to preserve data, carving stone and copying manuscripts, yet in the digital age preservation is the last thing young people want. We truly inhabit a different world with a different worldview.
What was La Belle Époque, and what did Kierkegaard criticize about the Christianity of his time?
The death of Queen Victoria in 1901 symbolized the end of a world. Europe was Christian, confident and optimistic; the nineteenth century was the great century of missions, and Western nations saw themselves as blessed by God. The years before World War I are called La Belle Époque, “The Beautiful Era.” Yet the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard accused Christians of “playing Christianity.” For him, true faith is a personal relationship with God, not external signs like Sunday attendance. A Christian should live “in the audience of one,” echoing the Reformers’ coram deo, life in the presence of God. He also saw that Christianity had become a set of rational theses within the European intellectual system. Against this, he put inward decisiveness and passionate commitment at the core, the “leap of faith” he saw in Abraham’s offering of Isaac.
What did Nietzsche mean by “God is dead,” and what does his life show?
Nietzsche wasn’t arguing that God doesn’t exist. He was describing how the Enlightenment’s reason, science and secularism had made the Christian worldview lose its authority, so that belief in God became “unacceptable.” Europe has two roots, Christian and Greco-Roman. Since the Renaissance, the Greco-Roman one grew stronger until the Enlightenment forced a choice between reason and faith, and most chose reason. But Nietzsche saw that reason’s victory contained its own destruction: if you criticize every authority, why not reason itself? Teach a child to doubt every authority, and eventually they doubt yours. His life shows how hard it is to live without God. A professor at 24, he rejected humility as “slave morality,” titled chapters “Why I Am So Wise” and “Why I Am a Destiny,” and suffered a mental breakdown at 44 from which he never recovered.
What was the counterculture of the baby boomers, and how did it relate to faith?
Two world wars exposed the myth of progress and the darkness of the human heart. The boomers, born after World War II, wanted to build a new world without their parents’ models. They were the first to focus on the environment, and they championed racial and gender equality in an era of segregation, when Rosa Parks had to sit at the back of the bus. They were intensely political; the 1968 generation dominated politics in France, Germany and the US for decades. Unlike Enlightenment atheists, they were seekers. Many traveled to India and brought back yoga, meditation and words like karma and guru; the New Age movement blended Eastern religions for the West. Some found their answer in Christ. These “Jesus People” included musicians like Keith Green, and Youth With A Mission was born in this upheaval.
How did YWAM begin, and why could young people suddenly become missionaries?
YWAM was founded in 1960 from Loren Cunningham’s vision of waves of young people reaching the nations, just as youth were claiming society’s leadership through JFK, the Beatles and New Hollywood. In agricultural societies elders led; in industrial society, middle-aged people with knowledge led; in the information age, creativity and charm lead, and young people are best equipped for that. Yet in the 1960s, becoming a missionary still meant college, seminary, mission training and local church work, so you’d be ready in your early thirties. That made sense when William Carey’s journey to India took five months and problems were hard to fix from afar. Commercial flights changed everything. When the field is a day away, short-term missions make sense: train young people for a week and send them for three. That was YWAM’s beginning, and we still try to champion youth.
Who is Generation X, and how did it change the church?
Generation X, roughly those born 1965–1980 and named by Douglas Coupland’s novel, was the first to grow up with computers and video. They saw communism collapse and have no illusions about ideology; they trust no system and are less political than boomers or Gen Z. But they are excellent visual artists, especially filmmakers like David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson. The Matrix (1999) captures their skepticism and anxiety about technology and authenticity. In the church, Gen X values authenticity over intellectual coherence. They lead people to Christ through genuine friendship rather than apologetics, as in Myron Penner’s The End of Apologetics. Older Christians often see this as a problem, but Gen X feels that if you are intellectually consistent but don’t practice Christ’s love and forgiveness, you fail to represent Christ.
How have male and Western perspectives shaped traditional Christianity?
Postmodern Christians argue that traditional Christianity often reflects a male-dominated Western culture rather than Christianity itself. At one YWAM base, the all-male leadership ruled that the shared TV would be used only for news and sports, treating those as public and “objective” and women’s preferred shows as private. What is called objective is often objective only from a male perspective. Western assumptions matter too. The West values clear, direct communication; the East values subtlety, and directness can seem immature. In Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Pilate orders Judas “protected,” and his officer understands this means “kill.” Koreans call this skill nunchi. Buddhism embeds it: in the Flower Sermon, Buddha silently held up a lotus, and only one disciple understood. Zen, a religion without explanation, attracts Westerners tired of direct communication.
How do Eastern and Western worldviews differ on being and emptiness?
In the West, existence is the center of philosophy, pictured like a solid billiard ball. In the East, non-existence matters, and reality is like air: we describe a room by its furniture and ignore the air that fills it and keeps us alive. The Eastern concept of chi is an invisible field that shapes reality, much like the Force in Star Wars. If atomic theory is the ultimate expression of the Western worldview, field theory expresses the Eastern one. European languages speak of human beings; Chinese speaks of the “human between,” because the space between people makes us human. Western paintings are covered in color, while Eastern paintings value “the beauty of white space.” Japanese haiku express this in 17 syllables, as in Basho’s “An old silent pond… / A frog jumps into the pond, / splash! Silence again.”
How can Christians share the gospel in a postmodern world?
In modernism, being a Christian meant intellectual agreement with doctrine. C.S. Lewis called himself “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” because he felt compelled by the arguments; his own “lunatic, liar or Lord” argument follows this model. But today people don’t want to hear arguments. Aquinas’s Five Ways or Kant’s moral argument don’t work if no one listens, and in an age of information overload, spreading information isn’t welcome. We can still share our lives. People who ignore arguments will listen to stories: “You will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8). We can also offer community. In a wired world, city life is lonely, and a loving Christian community is a miracle that points to a loving God: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). Postmodernism is not the end of Christianity but an opportunity to live our faith authentically. Times change, but God’s truth doesn’t.
Source: Kim Cimio, The River of God (Vision & Logic, 2025), chapter 4, “The Medium is The Message.” Answers are condensed from the book in the author’s words.
