Tongues of Judgment, Tongues of Fire
The Judgment of Language in Postmodernity
Genesis 11:1-2
I.
Modernity is like a young boy with his fat fingers full of ill-gotten licorice and lollipops, standing on the kitchen counter yelling out in a shrill voice that his mother is sleeping. Before he can taste of the sweets, his mother rises grumpily from her nap and metes out parental judgment in the old fashioned way. Is this what he wanted from the start?
II.
What has happened is this: we desired to build up, and not out. The Tower was the modern 
goal: to shepherd our common modern language of science into a technological marvel which would bring us to the heights of heaven. Our metanarrative ambition, as David Bentley Hart calls it, drove us upward, to “transcend the conditioned finitude and contingency of stories by discovering the meaning, limits, and motives of all stories.” Rather than fill the earth with many stories, we ground them into mortar and bitumen and layered them up into one tall Enlightenment Tower and expected it to stand there forever. Modernity used the lingua scientifica to erect its own god to replace the One who had faded into rumor. And for some reason, modernity expected the unity of the Tower to stand.
