{"id":200,"date":"2005-07-08T19:08:00","date_gmt":"2005-07-08T19:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/jesuscreed\/2005\/07\/postmodernism-theses.html"},"modified":"2005-07-08T19:08:00","modified_gmt":"2005-07-08T19:08:00","slug":"postmodernism-theses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2005\/07\/postmodernism-theses.html","title":{"rendered":"“Post”modernism theses"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In a book dreamed up and edited by Myron Penner, called Christianity and the Postmodern Turn<\/a>, Kevin Vanhoozer, a friend from my TEDS days and a scholar whose writings I always cherish, has proposed ten theses about postmodernism. (Incidentally, Penner’s focus on postmodernism as a linguistic turn is most helpful.)<\/p>\n

I shall summarize Kevin’s theses about postmodernity (=pomo):<\/p>\n

1. Pomo is the condition of being fully aware of one’s situatedness, and hence of one’s contingency and deconstructibility.<\/p>\n

2. Christians can learn the “criticism of isms” from pomo.<\/p>\n

3. Christians must not “correlate” with pomo but only with Christ and canon, which determine one’s credenda and agenda.<\/p>\n

4. Christian thought is faith seeking understanding — biblical and trinitarian.<\/p>\n

5. Pomo has not discovered anything that was not already available.<\/p>\n

6. Christian thinking means thinking “out of a mythopoetic framework of scripture (e.g., in terms of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation).”<\/p>\n

7. Christian faith is realist but insists that some truths can adequately be grasped only by a plurality of vocabularies or conceptual schemes oriented to different levels or aspects of reality.<\/p>\n

8. Long sentences here: The aim of Christian thinking … is wisdom; the norm is the wisdom of God in the face of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

9. Christian thinking is holistic, holy, catholic, and apostolic.<\/p>\n

10. Modernity and pomo are digressions from Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

Comments.<\/p>\n

As always, Kevin’s on the mark and has said things well. There are abundance of things to quote, but I wish to offer subtle, and not substantial, demurrals on a point or three.<\/p>\n

1. Pomo is more than “thinking” and “epistemology.” The “pomo turn” in the emergent movement concerns “knowledge that emerges from performance” as much as from “reflection.”<\/p>\n

2. To the degree that #1 is right, #10 must be modified. If we have learned from pomo, then it is not totally a digression — even if the subject is Jesus Christ. The issue is our “knowledge” of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

3. #5 is in tension with #1 as well. Unless Kevin is thinking exclusively of Solomon’s thread-bare words that there is nothing new under the sun, then there is something profoundly informative about a growing consciousness of the linguistic turn. I don’t think Bible or tradition deals with language as a power game, a rhetoric used to empower and disempower. Not at least as a linguistic device, consciously that is.<\/p>\n

The article by Kevin is worth the price of the book.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a book dreamed up and edited by Myron Penner, called Christianity and the Postmodern Turn, Kevin Vanhoozer, a friend from my TEDS days and a scholar whose writings I always cherish, has proposed ten theses about postmodernism. (Incidentally, Penner’s focus on postmodernism as a linguistic turn is most helpful.) 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