David Wells has an insightful book Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World. The book deals with hyperconsumerism and functional nihilism among other things and is well worth the read. In a chapter entitled Miracles of Modern Splendor, Wells sets forth an interesting proposition:

Years ago, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that we are “somewhat embarrassed by the fact that we are the first culture which is in danger of being subordinated to its economy. We have to live as luxuriously as possible in order to keep our productive enterprise from stalling.” Today, we are not embarrassed at all. It is exactly what we want and what, we have come to think, we need. This kind of avid consumerism, Christopher Lasch observes, “promotes an ethic of hedonism… and thus undermines the ‘traditional values’ of thrift and self-denial.” This never-ending transformation of luxuries into necessities, the experience of comfort only fueling the desire for even more comfort, “appeared to give the Anglo-American idea of progress a solid foundation that could not be shaken by subsequent events,” he remarks, “not even by the global wars that broke out in the twentieth century.”¹

In our quest for affluence via increased consumption, we have come to the doorstep of [as Niebuhr put it] “being subordinated to [our] economy.” It appears as though Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” has turned and is now choking us out. The situation likens itself to a distorted version of Pinocchio in which the marionette turns on its maker Geppetto and enslaves him. In Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s futuristic movie based on the short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick, the arch-villain Roy [an artificial human] kills his maker Tyrrell by gouging out his eyes after becoming frustrated with his encoded lifespan [which is only 4 years] and artificial life. It would seem as though our culture is under the grip of our own creation - our market economy.

In his book, Wells discusses how a well-developed christology can combat our postmodern situation. Rather than run from our captor or modify our doctrine to fit it, we must look for answers within the truth of the Word. Through the power of Christ’s message, our culture can be redeemed from its captivity.

1. Wells, David F., Above All Earthly Pow’rs (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 41.↩