r personal experience and our interpretation of that experience. Since each person's experience is all that can be known, it cannot be concluded that man can know anything in any absolute sense. All one has is his own finite, limited experience. Logic, science, history, and ethics are human disciplines that must, and do, reflect human insufficiency and subjectivity.
Another reason the postmodernists draw these conclusions comes from the fact that the existentialists, with their rejection of rationalism and empiricism, focused philosophy on the human experience, especially as it is communicated through language. Language is the way man expresses these experiences of the world, therefore to understand the world, as best we can, we must look to what is said about reality. But subjectivism is all we can have since the best we can do is experience and interpret what others have experienced and interpreted reality to be, and so the spiral continues downward. Thus, for the postmodernists, any assertion of absolute knowledge is seriously questioned and ultimately rejected. Therefore history is seen as a series of metaphors rather than an account of events as they actually happened. After all, the one recording the events was writing and recording the events as he saw them . Someone else may have seen it differently had they been there. In issues of morality no one particular view is seen as foundational. Rather, each culture's, and ultimately each individual's, view on ethics is just as valid as the next. This view is the basis for the assumptions of "Multiculturalism," and the "Political Correctness" movement in today's society. Rather than affirming any one morality as absolute, every person's moral persuasion is to be respected no matter what it is, and language must be revised so as to not favor any one outlook and thus offend another.
Irving Kristol, a fellow at the American Enterprize Institute, describes the current time as "a shaking of the foundations of the modern world."
Allen says: A massive intellectual revolution is taking place that is perhaps as great as that which marked off the modern world from the Middle Ages. . . The principles forged during the Enlightenment ... which formed the foundations of the modernmentality, are crumbling.
The collapse of Enlightenment Humanism is imminent, and the attacks on it are from all angles. From religious conservatives to scientific liberals, the desire to overhaul the presuppositions of modernity is a shared goal, although the motives differ greatly. Christians welcome the opportunity for credible public discourse concerning their faith, and many scientists are eager to see a shift in scientific outlook that will account for the anomalies that modern science has avoided. These are exciting times, times when the church should be alert. p> In a postmodern world Christianity is intellectually relevant. With the demise of the absoluteness of human reason and science, the super-natural, that which is not empirical, is once again open to consideration. The marketplace of ideas is wide open, and opportunities abound. It is important that the church understand these important times in which it finds itself. But in addition to opening the door once again to the Christian faith, postmodernism, with its critical apparatus, has a few lessons for the church to learn.
What is interesting is that postmodernism strikes at the very same thing God did: language. Without language, logic and science are meaningless; they have no application. As we have seen, its each man for himself in his own private world. The arrogant, pseudo-unity that man had claimed to find was now just one of the many ways of looking at things. Logic and science were now relative to cultural interpretation. Like the people at the Tower of Babel, modern man has been fragmented and scattered. There is no center of discourse any longer. p> In this light perhaps the most significant contribution of postmodernism is that it reminds us of our finitude. It reminds us that God is creator and we are his creation. It tells us that he must be the beginning of all of our thinking, that apart from him we could know nothing. p> For our personal life, postmodernism shows us the futility of autonomy. It forces those of us who know Christ back to the basics of depending on Christ for everything, whether it is salvation or standards. That in him we have meaning and purpose for our lives; he is the vine, we are the branches, and apart from him we can do nothing.
To sum it up, postmodernism need not be seen as a mortal enemy. In many ways it drives us back to complete and total dependence on God. It reminds us that he is the foundation for every area of ​​life, whether it is logic or law. It shows us that there exist no neutral, impartial domains that we can lean on in addition to him. Postmoderni...
