If Dewey trained culture to live without fixed truth, Michel Foucault trained it to distrust the very idea that truth ever existed.
With Foucault, the progression reaches its logical conclusion. Truth is no longer something to be discovered, reinterpreted, or applied — it is something to be suspected. Claims of truth are not evaluated for accuracy, but interrogated for motive.
Knowledge as Power
Foucault argued that what societies call “truth” is inseparable from power. Knowledge does not stand above institutions, language, or culture — it is produced by them. Every claim to truth serves someone’s interests.
In this framework, truth does not liberate. It controls.
The task, then, is not to believe, but to unmask. Not to understand, but to deconstruct. Suspicion becomes a virtue, and certainty becomes a threat.
Language Dissolves Meaning
Foucault placed enormous weight on language. Words do not convey stable meaning; they shape and constrain thought. To control language is to control reality.
Once this assumption takes hold, communication itself becomes adversarial. Statements are no longer heard — they are analyzed. Intent matters more than content. Authority is always guilty until proven innocent.
Why Foucault Still Rules
Foucault rules from the grave whenever disagreement is framed as harm, conviction as violence, and clarity as domination. He rules wherever institutions are assumed corrupt by definition and moral claims are treated as masks for power.
You don’t have to read Foucault to think this way. His influence lives in cultural instincts — in the reflex to critique rather than understand.
Scripture Under Suspicion
The Bible cannot survive in a Foucauldian framework as Scripture. Its claims to truth and authority immediately place it under suspicion. It is no longer read to be understood, but examined to be exposed.
When Scripture speaks clearly, it is accused of oppression. When it refuses revision, it is labeled dangerous. The problem is not the text — but the framework brought to it.
The End of the Drift
At this point in the progression, nothing remains solid. Truth is power. Meaning is unstable. Authority is suspect. What began as reinterpretation ends in dissolution.
And yet, this was not planned.
These men did not work together. They lived in different times, different cultures, and addressed different questions. Still, their ideas form a coherent drift — not because of coordination, but because they shared a direction.
When revelation is set aside, something else must take its place. And what replaces it will inevitably reflect human authority, not divine truth.
A Final Word
This series has not been about demonizing thinkers or denying complexity. It has been about recognizing frameworks.
When the Bible refuses to cooperate with these frameworks, it is often blamed — footnoted into doubt, softened into suggestion, or dismissed as a relic. But Scripture does not exist to be managed. It exists to speak.
“For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword…” — Hebrews 4:12
The question, in the end, is not whether these men still rule from the grave.
It is whether we will allow Scripture to rule the living.
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