Posted on: August 9th, 2009 Curate Camp & “Postmodernism”
I am encouraged by what I experienced this last Thursday and Friday at our monthly diocesan gathering of curates. One of my new curate friends was telling me that I should read some contemporary author on politics and natural rights theory, and while doing this I could tell that he had a very negative view of “postmodernism.” As I heard him talk, I asked if he was influenced by Francis Schaeffer, and sure enough, he is a big fan.
This is the same basic conversation I have been having for almost 15 years now, so I thought I would just state what I mean by “postmodernism.”
What I mean by it is simply antifoundationalism. It is basically the admission that the modern followers of Neitzche, including Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard, have successfully put forth a genealogical critique of modern (and therefore, secular) ethics, showing it to be grounded not in some ontological reality but rather in various versions of a will-to-power. This move is known as a hermeneutic of suspicion.
Now, “good postmodernists” both agree with these post-Neitzcheans, and disagree with them. They agree that there is value in genealogy as a way to see where so many of the conditions of our time which seem to us as “self-evident truths” actually came from, but they disagree that this history is just a chain of arbitrary transitions. Rather history is a story of “constant, contingent shifts either toward or away from … the true human telos.” (Theology and Social Theory 279)
The good postmodernists agree in the validity of an ontology of difference, but this difference is not necessarily violent, not “equivocal at variance,” but rather rooted, ultimately, in the difference within the Trinity and therefore within humanity (as image of God). This difference, then, is, at its truest level, a harmonious difference.
These two presuppositions of secular postmodernism (genealogical historicism and an ontology of difference), therefore are embraced and modified by us “good postmodernists.” The third premise of secular postmodernism, which flows from the other two, and is utterly rejected by Christian theology, is ethical nihilism. This premise is more complicated, since almost none of the contemporary or recent neo-Nietzcheans actually embrace this nihilism. Actually, they sneak in, through the back door, an ahistorical Kantian self whose freedom must then be protected by someone … someone, that is, with power. Thus, for these neo-Nietzcheans, “the protection of the equality of freedom … collapses into the promotion of an inequality of power.” (Theology and Social Theory, 279)
By the way, there are planty of foundationalists in the Episcopal Church, but there are a whole, whole lot more in the PCA.
One Response to “Curate Camp & “Postmodernism””
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John Says:
January 31st, 2010 at 11:01 pmHi, I am from Australia.
Please find a completely different Understanding of both modernism and postmodernism via the references to be found via this site:
http://www.adidaupclose.org/FAQs/postmodernism2.html
Plus the authors radical critique of both scientism and what is usually called religion via this site: