Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

meaning and language. The postmodern project is not a constructive; it is a deconstructive
criticism of, and challenge to, the presuppositions upon which the
Enlightenment has long rested.
Postmodernism is at once violently opposed to the absolutes of institutionalized
religion and welcoming of an individual [non-traditional] spirituality long disallowed by
traditional Western religion. Orthodox, traditional religious adherents are highly
distrusted by postmoderns. To be Evangelical, for example, is wrong-headed, because
postmoderns believe that to be orthodox and zealous means adherence to absolutes that
might offend someone else, or infringe upon their personal freedoms. Irrational
postmodernism goes beyond the rationally oriented attacks of modernity. “Modernism is
a revolt against revealed religion. It is a revolt against the truth. Postmodernism is a
further revolt, fundamentally against modernism and secondarily against Christianity and
the truth as well” (Mark Dever, in Carson, 2000:142).
Where religion is concerned, postmoderns often follow Friedrich Nietzsche who said:
“Where has God gone I shall tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. We are all his
murderers... God is dead. That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has
yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. There has never been a greater deed”
(Nietzsche, 1882:125). To Nietzsche Christianity was nothing more than an ethos that
glorified weakness. He believed mankind was in the transitional stage from animality to
the superman (ubermensch, German) of the future. He believed man must propel himself
into the future by abolishing the archaic notions of God, or divine rule, to create a new
value foundation upon which to build a new world.
The source of the concept ‘good’ has been
sought and established in the wrong place: the
judgment ‘good’ did not originate with those
to whom ‘goodness’ was shown! Rather it
was ‘the good’ themselves, that is to say, the
noble, powerful, high-stationed and highminded,
who felt and established themselves
and their actions as good... It was out of this
pathos of distance that they first seized the
right to create values and to coin names for
values... the protracted and domineering
fundamental total feeling on the part of a
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa