Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

maximum voluntary community agreement, rather than some tolerated disagreement
(Rorty, 1991:38-39). Rorty’s concept of truth has become nearly pervasive throughout
Western societies, where solidarity without truth, is more important than truth attained
through argument and objections.
The Judeo-Christian, or biblical worldview, by contrast, is built upon the
presupposition that there is right and wrong, true and false. Francis Schaeffer discussed
often how postmodern [relativist] epistemology was undermining both the Christian faith
and epistemology in general. Absolutes require antithesis, the existence of the contrast of
opposites. Antithetical thought ultimately argues that God exists in contrast to His not
existing. It relies further on the reality of God’s creation of what exists, in contrast to
what does not exist -- and then to His creating people to live, observe and think in the
reality (Schaeffer, 1990:228).
Contrary to this, Georg Hegel’s dialectic model advocates compromise, rather than
absolutes and antithesis. Beginning with the traditional dichotomy between thesis and
antithesis, Hegel works toward a synthesis, or compromise of the two extremes. Rather
than the polar opposites of right and wrong, true and false, holy and unholy, there are now
just relativistic compromises: the synthesis of thesis and antithesis. For about a century
this has been practiced in the West, though limited to the moral, not scientific realm.
“Getting along” without controversy, especially in the moral realm has become more
important that truths and absolutes. Philosopher William Lane Craig says:
To assert that ‘the truth is that there is no truth’
is both self-refuting and arbitrary. For if this
statement is true, it is not true, since there is no
truth. So-called deconstructionism thus cannot
be halted from deconstructing itself.
Moreover, there is also no reason for adopting
the postmodern perspective rather than, say,
the outlooks of Western capitalism, male
chauvinism, white racism, and so forth, since
post-modernism has no more truth to it then
these perspectives. Caught in this selfdefeating
trap, some postmodernists have been
forced to the same recourse as Buddhist
mystics: denying that postmodernism is really
a view or position at all. But then, once again,
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa