Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

its intended nature. Adherents of modernity and traditionalists alike have characterized
the postmodern discourse as arbitrary, superficial, cynical, pointless, and hostile to
history. Postmodernism does not fully abandon modernism, but is highly critical of it.
Although the ideas of modernity still have a
strong residual hold at the level of
acknowledged assumptions, for an
increasing number of people there is no
longer any confidence in the alleged ‘eternal
truths of reason’ of which Lessing spoke
(Newbigin, 1996:77).
J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig describe postmodernism as “a loose coalition
of diverse thinkers from several different academic disciplines” (Craig, 2003:144). It is,
by nature, the rejection of truth, objective rationality and “authorial meaning in texts
along with the existence of stable verbal meanings and universally valid logic definitions”
(ibid. 145). It is an “historical, chronological notion and a philosophical ideology”
(ibid.). Further, postmoderns “reject the idea that there are universal, transcultural
standards, such as the laws of logic or principles of inductive inference, for determining
whether a belief is true or false, rational or irrational, good or bad” (ibid. 146). The ethos,
or driving force, of postmodernity, is a ‘gnawing pessimism’ (Grenz, 1996:7). Muqtedar
Khan suggests that postmodernism, and liberalism generally, are emaciating the human
spirit, not emancipating it (Khan, 2000).
‘PoMod’ or ‘PoMo’ as it is often called, is deeply distrustful of modernity and reason;
a cultural movement in the West that is intentionally pluralistic and subjective, where the
call for ‘tolerance’ and ‘political correctness’ are pushed to extremes. “Postmodernists
fret mightily about arrogance and dogmatism, but to avoid them they typically rebound
into the equal and opposite errors of cheap tolerance and relativism” (Groothuis,
2000:12). Those who hold modernist convictions are thoroughly criticized as dinosaurs
from an obsolete and intolerant age. They claim the universe is not ‘mechanistic’ and
‘dualistic,’ but “historical, relational, and personal” (Grenz, 1996:7). Indeed, “at the heart
of postmodern philosophy is a sustained attack on the premises and presuppositions of
modernism” (Grenz, 1996:123). Jacques Derrida defines postmodernism as a revolt
against the western metaphysical notion of a being, or logos, that grounds knowledge,
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa