Philippines is easily penetrated by a postmodern culture. Furthermore, post-modernism seeks to dismantle Christianity by overturning traditional standards and binary oppositions.
It is designed to construct values and meaning by not setting off two opposite statements against one another but through a semiotic analysis. While postmodernism proposes harmony and community, it is done at the expense of deconstructing established texts, structures, arts and systems.
It does not propose permanence of principles because it affirms relativity to any given place, person and time. The task to differentiate subjectivity from objectivity is futile since crossing the boundary of each property implies conflict and the eventual domination of one over the other.
While it seeks inter-relatedness and interdependence of all things the end result is uncertainty. There is no objective moral standard by which we can base absolute judgment and establish demarcations to truths and fallacies.
The fates of the Laws of God are simple suggestions, or just another way of looking at reality and could not be used as a fundamental base to enforce judgment. The principle of relativity is now expressed in arts, architectures, philosophy, economics, politics, language, literatures, and texts which eventually produce a postmodern youth culture. Postmodernism with all forms of subtlety has successfully produced disloyalty and attacks to authority.
In order that evangelical Christian respond pro-actively to postmodernism two questions can be asked: 1 What will Evangelical Christianity look like in the future? May our search for a more comprehensive understanding of postmodernity would lead us to a meaningful and colorful tapestry of life even as we create theology and enhance worship that fits well with the Filipino culture. They colonized many parts of the world and dominated much of the rest, both politically and economically.
Modernism This faith in progress, which characterized the entire modern period, lasted about two centuries. One scholar, Thomas Oden, asserts that it lasted exactly years, from the fall of the Bastille in Paris in to the fall of the Berlin Wall in The French Revolution razed the past and on its rubble erected a new social order.
With the enthronement of the goddess of Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral, a new age of liberty, equality and fraternity was ushered in.
But it ended in Communism and other totalitarian systems that enslaved millions, ruling the proletariat with an iron fist and setting brother against brother and children against their parents. Actually, the bubble of modernism began to burst in the early part of the20th century. The First World War, which broke out in , threw a huge monkey wrench into the belief that man was basically good and on his way to perfection. By the late 20th century it became clear that science had not answered all questions or solved all problems.
Instead, it had given us environmental pollution and nuclear bombs. Not only did the promised utopias--whether of socialism, communism or the Great Society--fail to materialize, but also social problems were increasing rather than decreasing. No one, of course, would argue that modernism has been a total failure. Science and technology have given us a standard of living beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors.
Still, modernism, despite its huge successes, has left many people unhappy and unfulfilled. In other words, the goddess of Reason has failed her devotees. It was this disillusionment with the failure of modernism that led to what is now known as post-modernism. Postmodernism Postmodernism first came to expression in art.
The invention of photography in the early 19th century had a dramatic effect on the world of art and eventually on the way people viewed reality. Prior to photography, visual representations of the world were produced through painting, sculpture and woodcut engraving. Artists would strive for realism in their work. They tried to faithfully reproduce what they could see with their eyes.
But if a photograph can represent the same scene as a painting with equal or even greater clarity, why bother with the older method? Increasingly, they began to express their own psychological experience of perceiving an object rather than trying to reproduce it. Their random splashes and dribbles of paint on a canvas reflected their mood rather than their model.
As time went on, however, the term was applied to describe changes in many other areas of human endeavour. The basic, underlying principle of post-modernism is its denial of reality and objective truth. Reality, according to postmodernists, is a kind of lens that cultures construct and through which they view the world, including religion and morality. Every culture accepts its particular reality without question until it is exposed to other cultures.
Today, many people in the West are confused because of the challenges from competing cultures. But not only that. We are also under relentless pressure to accept as a fact that all these 'realities' are of equal value. Postmodernists claim that each culture has its own metanarrative by which its members live and guide their lives.
A metanarrative is a kind of story or myth that assumes universal acceptance and explains the meaning of the world and life in it.
Metanarratives are global worldviews, overarching explanations of reality based on central organizing truths. They resemble stories in that they speak of a beginning and an end of history and deal with heroes and common people, with victories and defeats, with conflicts and the resolution of conflicts, in the same way as common stories do cf.
Oosterhoff, Postmodernism, A Christian Appraisal, p. These various metanarratives, postmodernists say, serve to legitimize or justify the belief systems of their societies.
People act in a certain way and teach and believe certain things because it is in accordance with their metanarrative, or master story. These belief systems are not true in any absolute sense, postmodernists claim, but they are simply cultural constructs used for the purpose of consolidating and protecting the values and interests of a particular group. Any group that claims that its belief system is based on absolute truth must realize that such a claim has validity only for that group.
The modern era sought to emancipate humanity from existence in a God-centred universe. The rise of the natural sciences not only promises to set humanity free from the prison of a predetermined universe, it also promises man untold freedom to determine his own destiny. As evangelical theologian Carl Henry puts it,. The twentieth century — the century of scientific progress — brought with it, among other debacles, World War I, World War II, Marxist totalitarianism, Auschwitz, the increasing poisoning of the planet, and bare escape from nuclear destruction.
Despite boundless expectations from science, modernity with its militarism and rape of nature is seen by postmodernity as a threat to planetary life and survival. Seen broadly, postmodernism is a movement that tries to break away from the determinism of the modern worldview.
In decrying the modernist goal of a unified science, postmodernism rejects all forms of meta-discourses or meta-narratives that try to explain the nature and meaning of the universe. Thus, all grand-narratives, from unified field theory to Marxism to the Christian Gospel are declared modern, and therefore dead.
So comprehensive is its critique of the modern that Lyotard could declare that postmodernism has altered the game rules for science, literature, the arts as well as religion. Although it is notoriously difficult to define postmodernism, it is possible to identify its key characteristics. Firstly, postmodern philosophers maintain that knowledge is always conditioned by particularities and by the situation of the knower.
There is therefore no objective knowledge, and since knowledge is always bound up with the context, there is no neutral discovery of knowledge. This leads philosophers to conclude that knowledge is uncertain. This is the second characteristic of postmodernism. The view that knowledge can be erected on some indubitable foundation foundationalism is denied. Thirdly, since what we have are but particular constructs there can never be an over-arching system of explanations as the moderns claim.
These over-arching systems, what we have called meta-discourses or meta-narratives, must therefore be abandoned. Fourthly, postmodernism rejects the modern vision and rhetoric of progress. According to its philosophers, the tumultuous history of the twentieth century has comprehensively and decisively demolished such ideals of progress.
Fifthly, postmodernism rejects modern individualism, which sees the individual knower as the ideal. Thus, while postmodernism champions the community over the individual, communities are at the same time isolated from one another.
There is very little prospect for genuine dialogue. Finally, postmodernism rejects the idea that the scientific method is omnicompetent. It recognises intuition, for example, as a legitimate source of knowledge. There are of course various shades of postmodernism. Some philosophers have talked about a soft postmodernism, which seeks only to challenge the presuppositions and conclusions of a dogmatic form of modernism. Thus, soft postmodernism rejects the naturalism and antisupranaturalism of modernity.
It is important to point out that Christians should have no problems with these objections. Indeed, theologians like Stanley Grenz have argued, correctly, that these critiques forwarded by soft postmodernism resonate with the Christian critique of modernity as well. But, as they say, the devil is in the details! In addition, we have to see what postmodernism has to offer by way of constructive correctives to the perceived excesses of modernism.
Philosophers also speak of hard postmodernism. Hard postmodernism agrees with all the criticisms forwarded by soft postmodernism against modernity but pushes for the most extreme conclusions. It deconstructs everything that modernism proposes. It does not only argue against objective truth in the sense that all truth-claims are influenced culturally and contextually. Hard postmodernism also rejects objective knowledge and claims that our knowledge and our language do not have any objective referent.
Such postmodernisms embrace pluralism as a necessary cultural and philosophical phenomenon. The first characteristic of postmodernism is the loss of objectivity and the eclipse of truth. Although there are different proposals for this deconstruction, they are all undergirded by the view that there is no relationship between truth and reality. Postmodern epistemology rejects the correspondence theory of truth.
Truths have to do rather with perspectives, associated with different individuals and communities and expressed through language. In other words, truths are social constructs that are specific to the communities that hold them and have no reference outside of those communities.
This view of truth in effect rejects the idea that truth-claims are objective and thus universally accessible. There is no metanarrative, no rational account of the grand scheme of things that is there for all to evaluate. Truth is dissolved into communities, ethnic and gender groups, and other contingent factors.
With this view of truth, postmodernism not only embraces pluralism but celebrates it. Because truths are tied to the communities that propose them, they are as diverse as these communities.
Os Guiness has provided a succinct description of the postmodern condition in his book, Fit Bodies, Fat Minds :. There is no truth; only truths. There is no grand reason; only reasons. There is no privileged civilisation or culture, or belief, norm and style ; only a multiplicity of cultures, beliefs, norms and styles.
There is no universal justice; only interests and competition among interest groups. The postmodern rejection of objective truth and its embrace of pluralism mean that it sees relativism as a necessary phenomenon that must be welcomed. There is no need for the different truth-claims to jostle for supremacy, for there is room for all of them.
No one has the monopoly of truth, and therefore no institution or group has the right to pontificate its beliefs on others. In this climate of pluralism and relativism, tolerance is often hailed as the noblest of virtues. In the end, it is tolerance that matters, not right or wrong, truth and falsehood. Some postmoderns maintain that truth has to do not with theoretical correctness as such but with its usefulness. This concept of truth is forwarded by postmodern thinkers like Richard Rorty, who undoubtedly is one of the most influential proponents of postmodern pragmatism.
Pragmatists focus on action rather than contemplation, [9] and they ask questions about what is useful rather than what is right. This understanding has elevated science to a privileged position among the human cultural enterprises, when in fact, according to Rorty, science is merely one vocabulary among many. The postmodern attitude towards objective truth has at least two important implications for Christian ministry.
The first has to do with the place of doctrine and theology in the Christian Faith. In the past 30 years, a number of theologians have criticised the lack of doctrinal emphasis in the Church and the dismal state of theological literacy among Christians. In his book, No Place for Truth , theologian David Wells traces the decline in theological astuteness in evangelical churches in America. According to Wells, while in the s, s and s American evangelicals were firmly grounded in the Bible and the fundamentals of the Christian Faith, from the s onward there seem to be a decline in interest in such matters.
According to Wells American evangelicals. It is simply enough for them simply to know that Christ somehow died for people.
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