Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

higher ruling order in relation to a lower order,
to a ‘below’ that is the origin of the antithesis
‘good’ and ‘bad’ (Nietzsche, 1887:2).
Postmoderns equate those who dare to judge the moral and ethical practices of others
in society as intolerants and fanatics. Really, the criticisms they bring against the church
are not wholly unwarranted. Christians have at times been guilty of arrogance and
intolerance. Richard John Neuhaus said, “few things have contributed so powerfully to
the unbelief of the modern and postmodern world as the pretension of Christians to know
more than we do... If Christians exhibited more intellectual patience, modesty, curiosity,
and sense of adventure, there would be few atheists in the world, both of the rationalist
and postmodern varieties” (Neuhaus, in Groothius, 2000:12).
Postmoderns are quick to eclectically embrace whatever suits them, and/or promotes
their own relativistic agendas. This is especially true when ‘ammunition’ is needed to
deconstruct, undermine, or outright attack the so-called rigid, stale thinking of the past.
Whatever the subject, whatever the focus, the postmodernist creates an argument, but
does not usually construct it rationally as the modernist would. “While modernity
decentred God and in its place crowned reason as the sovereign authority that alone
determined the legitimacy of truth claims, postmodernity has chosen to dethrone not only
reason but the very notion of authority and the very idea of truth” (Khan, 2000).
The differences between postmodernity and modernity are, in some ways, ‘in-house’
arguments among relatives. The postmoderns understand the limitations of modernity,
especially challenging them at the point of ‘certainty.’ Modernists have done much the
same to others, especially to Christianity, for years. The modernists continue to rail
against the faith communities because of their so-called improvable tenets; yet, the
postmoderns do much the same to the modernists. Indeed, the modernists have spent
considerable energy in recent decades, defending themselves from their postmodern
critics, and even other critics from outside the West. David Bosch comments:
It was not only the monsters created and then
let loose by science that have helped
Enlightenment science to come to its senses.
Spokespersons from the Third World also
began to challenge the neutrality of science by
asking whose interests it was serving. They
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa