::James Beverley ::May/June 2002 Postmodernism is frequently used to explain contemporary culture-but what exactly does it mean? Christian witness in our world demands that we get up to speed with postmodernism. Whether we like it or not, postmodernism is one of the most powerful forces in philosophy and culture. Postmodern ideas and motifs dominate the intellectual landscape and shape public opinion. Matt Donnelly argued in a Christianity Today article that neglect of postmodernism is the "missing link" in Christian apologetics. He lamented that Christian web sites devoted to defending the gospel virtually ignore the presence and power of postmodern views. Understanding postmodernism requires that one have some sense of the major changes in religion and philosophy over the last 500 years. Here is one way to capture the revolutions that have shaped the West since the end of the Middle Ages. First, think of the period 1500-1600 as the time when the power of Roman Catholicism was broken by Luther, Calvin, and other Reformers. By the end of the sixteenth century one could no longer think of "one Church." There were Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, and Anabaptists, and this was just the start. Second, the loss of unity in Christendom led in the next century to a radical crisis in philosophy and religious certainty. Paradoxically, the Reformers started a train of thought that had a dark side: if Luther can question the Pope, and Calvin can question Luther, and Henry VIII can doubt all of them, and the Anabaptists can doubt everyone from the Pope to Henry, then why not doubt religion altogether? When René Descartes wrote his famous line: "I think, therefore I am," he was trying to work his way out of the skeptical fog bank of his time. Third, in the next century rationalism became everything to philosophers. God no longer judged human reason; God was judged by reason itself. This period (1700-1800) is known as the Enlightenment. Such philosophers as Immanuel Kant, David Hume and Voltaire believed that reason must be used to question all views and ideas, especially crucial Christian themes that framed Western philosophy for centuries. The light in Englightenment was "reason" and not "Jesus." Though Christian faith has remained under attack since the Englightenment, in the nineteenth century it became increasingly difficult for philosophers and other intellectuals to agree on what constituted reason or on how useful rationalism was as a philosophy. If the Enlightenment represents the modern trust of reason, the last two centuries have witnessed the rise of the postmodern distrust of reason. Postmodernism is a term of recent vintage, but the seeds of postmodernism hark back to thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Martin Heidegger who raised radical questions about the intellectual, cultural, and political ideologies of their day. Though none of these thinkers was a postmodernist per se, each saw that powerful elites use "reason" and "logic" and "truth" to hold humans in captivity in some form. Their deep critique of social, philosophical, and psychological norms led to the profound questioning of rationalism that has characterized the leading postmodernist thinkers such as Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994), Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Jacques Derrida (b. 1930). Though Foucault, Derrida and company are notoriously difficult to understand, the basic thrust of postmodernism can be captured quite readily in 10 principles (see sidebar: Postmodernist Viewpoint). Christian scholars are divided over how to react to postmodernism. Some (e.g. Stanley Grenz, Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton) are deeply concerned about certain aspects of the postmodern mind, but they celebrate other aspects of postmodernity. They believe that Foucault and company rightly expose the danger of trusting in reason as an ultimate guide. Other Christian scholars give virtually no credibility to postmodernism. They believe that it is a godless relativism that is a cancer against the gospel. Doug Groothuis argues in Truth Decay that postmodernism represents a dead end intellectually and morally. At last fall's annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Colorado, Doug Geivett, a Christian philosopher, gave a public lecture against Stan Grenz for the latter's openness to key themes in postmodernism. Of course, even if one follows Grenz and others in seeing some good in postmodernism, all Christian scholars have noted that ultimately postmodernism is an anti-Christian perspective. That means, in the end, that Christians in this postmodern world must seek to present Christ in such a way that postmodernists will recognize in Him the path to truth, the way to meaning, the cause of beauty, the answer to oppression, and the solution to despair. If Christ is all that and more, who would want to stick with postmodernism? For further reading: The Church on the Other Side: Doing Ministry in the Postmodern Matrix by Brian D. McLaren, Zondervan Publishers James A. Beverley is professor of theology and ethics at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto. His web site is http://www.religionwatch.ca Relevant Web Sites: For a comprehensive bibliography on postmodernism: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jeffreyhearn/bibpm~1.htm University of Colorado Philosophy Site: http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/postmodern.html Informationon Derrida: http://www.mii.kurume-.ac.jp/~leuers/AllDerridaLinks.htm Philosophy in Cyberspace (a general guide to philosophy): http://www-personal.monash.edu.au/~dey/phil/ On the work of some scientists against postmodernism: http://members.tripod.com/~ScienceWars/ For a great site on Christian Apologetics and Philosophy: http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ157.HTM Postmodernism Under Fire If you want postmodernism handled with a bit of spice, I suggest three routes. First, you will want to get Frederick Crews's work The Postmodern Pooh (North Point Press, 2001). Crews, a distinguished English professor, uses the famous bear as the focus for a satirical stab at postmodernism and other follies. Second, you can ask your computer to pull up a postmodernist essay from "The Postmodernism Generator" web site. Andrew C. Bulwak created a computer program that generates meaningless essays using postmodernist lingo. Go to http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern Most important, check out the hoax that physicist Alan Sokal pulled off on the editors of Social Text, a premier literary and cultural journal. Sokal, a professor at New York University, wrote a parody of postmodernist jargon under the title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." He put in sloppy scientific data, used careless reasoning, and even argued that the external world is not real. When the essay was published in1996 Sokal announced in another journal that it was all a joke, albeit a serious one. This led to a huge academic firestorm that led to major newspaper coverage, debate in journals and at international conferences, and a host of books including Sokal's own Fashionable Nonsense (New York: St. Martin's, 1998), co-authored with Jean Bricmont. James Robert Brown, a philosopher at the University of Toronto, has just covered the whole debate in Who Rules in Science? (Harvard University Press, 2001). For Sokal's own site, with a vast array of links, go to http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/#papers Postmodernist Viewpoint There is no single world view that captures reality, no master story (or meta-narrative) that underlies humanity. Reason is to be distrusted because there is no way to know which person's reason is reliable. There is no such thing as objectivity. There is no "truth" to appeal to for understanding history and culture. There are no moral absolutes. The West, with its colonialist heritage, deserves ridicule. Texts, whether religious or philosophical or literary, do not have intrinsic meaning. Ideas are cultural creations. Everything is relative. We need to be deeply suspicious of all ideas given the way that ideas are used as tools to oppress and confine humans.
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