PREACHING TO POSTMODERNS: Changing Worldviews

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PREACHING TO POSTMODERNSChanging Worldviews
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WORLDVIEWS

• Pre-Modern
• Modern
• Post-Modern

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PRE-MODERN WORLD

• Truth is Objective
• Generally, Platonic or Neo-platonic
• A parallel for Christian pre-moderns
• A referential understanding of language

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PLATO VS. ARISTOTLE
Aristotle
Plato
Ideal
Ideal
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PRE-MODERN WORLD

• Correspondence Theory of Truth
• Straight-forward hermeneutic
• Reality was teleological
• A Pattern in History

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THE MEANING OF MODERN

• It is clear, however, that the idea of modernity
  could be conceived only within the framework of a
  specific time awareness, namely, that of
  historical time, linear and irreversible, flowing
  irresistibly onwards.
• . . . the idea of modernity was born during the
  Christian middle ages.
• Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 13.

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THE MEANING OF MODERN

• It was during the middle ages that the word
  modernus, an adjective and noun, was coined from
  the adverb modo (meaning recently, just now), in
  the same fashion as hodiernus had been derived
  from hodie (today).
• Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 13.

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THE MEANING OF MODERN

• It has been convincingly demonstrated that the
  division of western history into three
  erasantiquity, Middle Ages, and modernitydates
  from the early Renaissance.
• Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 20.

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MODERN WORLD

• The Objectivity of Truth
• Cartesian Rationalism
• From the objectively, externally true, to
• The thinking subject
• This created a subject-object dualism
• Creation was Orderly
• Certainty of knowledge
• Man the measure of all things

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MODERN WORLD

• The way thinkers built up their knowledge and
  ordered it was commonly foundationalist i.e., it
  was presupposed that one must adopt certain
  foundations for ones knowledge. The foundations
  might be self-evident truths or incontestable
  sense-data, but only on the basis of such
  foundations can one certainly infer entire
  superstructures of thought that are then added to
  the foundations. Carson, The Gagging of God, 61

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MODERN WORLD

• Naturalism (materialism) became the primary mode
  of explanation, from Humes skepticism to
  Darwins evolutionism
• The Scientific Method becomes the dominant model
  for ascertaining truth
• Beginning with the scientific revolution in the
  sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe,
  right up to the present day, science has laid the
  foundation of modern progress.
• Walsh and Middleton, Truth is Stranger Than It
  Used to Be, 16

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MODERN WORLD

• Deism is a betrayal of classical theism and an
  accommodation to naturalism
• After the seventeenth century, the age of
  scientific revolution, came the eighteenth
  century, the age of enlightenment, when we
  began, says the myth, to reap the fruits of
  scientific rationality and emerge from the
  darkness of superstition.
• Walsh and Middleton, Truth is Stranger Than It
  Used to Be, 17

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MODERN WORLD

• Individualism, and the personal discovery of
  truth, replaces the classical focus on the
  objectivity of truth
• . . . beginning in the eighteenth century and
  continuing to the present day, we have the
  invention of complex machines- steam engines,
  internal combustion engines, jet engines, fusion
  drives, and computersin ever increasing
  complexity and efficiency.
• Walsh and Middleton, Truth is Stranger Than It
  Used to Be, 17

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MODERN WORLD

• Individualism, and the personal discovery of
  truth, replaces the classical focus on the
  objectivity of truth
• As John Dewey noted in his characterization of
  modernity, the modern eschatological vision of
  human betterment and progress is to be achieved
  solely by human beings (independent of divine
  help), as they attempt individually and
  collectively to understand and control nature.
• Walsh and Middleton, Truth is Stranger Than It
  Used to Be, 21

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MODERN WORLD

• Modernity depends on meta-narratives
  (universal narratives or accounts of reality,
  of the way things are) . . . . These
  meta-narratives include Marxism, Hegels theory
  of universal spirit, the post-Enlightenment view
  of progress, and in theology, the view that we
  should accept as rational in the field of
  theology only what is judged rational by any
  reasonable and intelligent person. Carson, GOG,
  63

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MODERN WORLD

• The modern myth of progress, in other words, is
  rooted not simply in a faith, but what must be
  judged from a biblical standpoint as a false,
  idolatrous faith. . . . In place of valuing
  science, technology, and economic growth as the
  positive, though limited and relative dimensions
  of Gods good created world . . . modern Western
  people have historically absolutized these
  dimensions of life and elevated them into a triad
  of false gods, to which they have committed
  themselves for guidance and salvation.
• Walsh and Middleton, Truth is Stranger Than It
  Used to Be, 21

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MODERN WORLD Time Line

• Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, 1637
  Cogito ergo sum
• John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
  1690 mindtabula rasa
• Immanuel Kant, 1787 Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd
  ed.
• G.W.F Hegel, 1770-1831 Synthesis!
• F. Nietzsche, 1844-1900 if God is dead, radical
  perspectivism

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WORLDVIEWS
Premodern
Plato
(Truth Objective)
Modern
Descartes
(Truth? Subjective)
Aristotle
Truth
Postmodern
Truth
Truth
Truths?
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PREACHING TO POSTMODERNSChanging Worldviews