Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

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referentially incoherent. That is to say, if it is true, then it is false. Thus, one need not say
a word or raise an objection to refute it; it is quite literally self-refuting” (Craig, in
Cowan, 2000:182). Postmodernism is an “attempt to cut the feet from under one’s
opponents without having to engage one’s opponents’ arguments, a strategy that is
ultimately self-refuting” (ibid. 183). Craig is convinced that postmodernism is incoherent
and faddish. Simply put, postmodernism commits epistemological suicide.
Ironically, Foucault, Derrida, and other French postmodernist thinkers have been passé
in France for a good while, substituted by a generation of younger scholars called ‘neoconservative.’
Moreover, if one takes the postmodern idea of the hermeneutics of
suspicion seriously, then there is every reason to believe that their entire academic
exercise is simply a thinly veiled disguise to get political power over anyone who holds a
view different from their own. When postmodernists give up the idea of objective truth
there is no reason whatsoever to take what they say as true -- particularly since they have
conceded up front that nothing is genuinely true (Erickson, 2004:308).
University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa