Picking up my thread on postmodern culture and Christianity, here are some brief thoughts to stretch the grey matter. In an effort to keep my posts manageably short (for reader and writer) I'm offering a very short summary of the key attributes of a postmodern stance in order to then consider what the implications of these may be for the Bible, our ideas, our world etc...
1. PM is antifoundational - it denies any privileged unassailable starting point for the establishment of truth.
2. PM is antitotalising - it is critical of theories that seek to explain the totality of reality.
3. PM is demystifying - it strives to show that ideals are characteristically grounded in ideology, economics, or political self-interest.
4. PM does not attempt to overcome modernity (which would be a distinctly modern aim - linear progress). Rather, PM offers the opportunity to live and think in non-modern ways within the continuing cultural dominion of modernity.
As someone who self-consciously advocates a postmodern posture, I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts and discussing how such attributes might transform us.
I'm very interested in understanding more about the PM stance, but I'm struggling a bit to translate what you've written into something concrete that i can understand. Could you give some examples for each point, or show what it means 'in the real world' (or even just simplify it a bit more).
ReplyDeleteIf you could suggest a bit more about what the attributes translate into in everyday thinking / doing, that would be really helpful to then start the process of working through how it impacts on us.
Hi anonymous, welcome to the discussion!
ReplyDeleteLet me see if I can give you some tangible examples of what Nathan means since that will help me to check whether I've understood it properly!
Firstly, "PM is antifoundational"
The way I think of this is like a primary school class and their teacher. In this setting, the children, albeit unconsciously, give the teacher a "privileged unassailable starting point." That is, they are willing to accept what they're taught without questioning the source. They see the teacher as an unquestionable source of truth.
Whilst as adults, we are much better equiped to question truth, in some cases we just don't because we believe the source to be unquestionable. An example of where we do this might be scientific discovery or for some it could also be the writings of The Guardian or the teachings of the church.
Second: "PM is antitotalising"
Again, let's think of a school setting, say a GCSE class learning about atoms. My experience of this was that the simple model of protons, neutrons and electrons was presented to us as a complete theory with no suggestion that this was a massive over-simplification. It was only when I then did a-level physics that I learned how much more complex atoms really are and no doubt even then I was only given a fraction of the story. An antitotalising stance seeks to expose and question any idea that claims or appears to claim to have the full story.
So that'll do for now. They're jus silly analogies, but I hope they might be helpful. Maybe Nathan can correct any misrepresentation!
Clearly we still need to think about what the implications of this are for us in our faith.