Contemporary Theology II: ST507 From Theology of Hope to ... · As Groothuis shows us in his book Unmasking the New Age, ... consciousness, a global understanding of political reality.”

Contemporary Theology II:

Transcript - ST507 Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

1 of 15

LESSON 21 of 24ST507

Postmodernism: Introduction and Modernity

Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism

At the end of our last lecture we were coming to the end of our thinking on New Age theology, and I want to wrap up our thinking on that particular theology and then move fairly shortly into a discussion of postmodernism. But before we do that let’s begin with a word of prayer.

Father, we thank you for the privilege of study. As we reflect upon these theologies of our day we realize that there is a hunger and a thirst for really yourself although modern men have a hard time placing a clear indication of what they’re looking for. But, Lord, as we study these theologies, we pray that you would help us to gain a clearer insight into the modern mindset and to be better prepared to minister to people with whom we come in contact. We ask all these things in Christ’s name. Amen.

At the end of our last lecture, we were talking about New Age influences and connections, and we had noted some of the relationship of the New Age movement to science, and then at the very end I had begun to talk about the connection between New Age thinking and politics. And you remember we had said that with a theology of personal transformation as a result of transformed consciousness, it’s natural to assume that such a theology would lead in the direction of a politics of transformation, and indeed that’s what the connection is between New Age thinking and politics. If in fact the New Age thinking calls for a whole new worldview, we posed a question at the end of the last lecture, How did we get to this point? Why are people thinking this? As Groothuis shows us in his book Unmasking the New Age, the counterculture had its leftist politics in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the time the Vietnam War ended, there was not the same opponent that was being faced as there had been during that war. However, the psychological struggle for peace and wholeness had not ended at all, and as Groothuis explains, and I quote him here from page 113, he says, “For many, the countercultural protest has developed into the New Age hope for the total transformation

John S. Feinberg, PhD University of Chicago, MA and PhD

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, ThMTalbot Theological Seminary, MDiv

University of California, BA

Transcript - ST507 Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


2 of 15

Lesson 21 of 24

of self and society. While many liberal political elements remain, the leftism of the sixties has been transcended by a spiritual politics not content with secular materialism. Mark Satin claims that we are more than simply economic beings and our liberation must include a spiritual as well as an economic recovery. In short, the New Age political message is, ‘Our consciousness is unlimited and our responsibility is total. As gods come of age, we must transform the planet.’”

As to the specific New Age political agenda, Groothuis then goes on to say on pages 114 through 115, “The root idea of the New Age is oneness, unity, and wholeness, the One for all. The controlling metaphor for the old paradigm was the machine. The earth, the state, and humanity were seen as assemblages of individual parts (atoms, as it were) isolated and insulated from each other. New Age politics seeks to replace this atomism with a holism that sees the planet as an interrelated system, an organism rather than a machine. The narrowness of vision must succumb to a planetary consciousness, a global understanding of political reality.”

This is the basic idea, but specifically what is on the agenda of New Age politics? Let me list a series of items that are of great concern to those who want to apply New Age concerns to the area of politics. For one thing, there are ecological issues of conservation and pollution control that are very significant. Second, the traditional polarities between masculine and feminine we are told must be transcended. Patriarchy must be replaced with an awareness of male/female equality or even in some cases an awareness of female superiority. Some in the neo-pagan movement would be espousing this particular point of view.

But then third, there is a concern for a sense of interconnection with the entire universe, and that sense of interconnection is said to be an impetus to stop us from violating others by forcing them to give birth. This is a rather interesting connection. If you are really at one with other people, then you should realize that you don’t like to be told what to do, you don’t like to be forced to do things against your will, so you shouldn’t force other people to do things that they don’t want to, and the way that’s being applied in this case is to say that this pantheistic monism is used to justify abortion. If somebody else wants to have an abortion, who are we to tell them not to? And given our connectedness with them, we should understand how frustrating it is to have people tell us that we can’t do things, so we should be careful not to force other people to do things against their will.



3 of 15

Lesson 21 of 24

Another political agenda item for New Age thinkers is population control and nuclear disarmament. Then of course also on the agenda is a new world political order that is consonant with the cosmic order. You remember that New Age thinkers tell us that cosmic consciousness knows that everything is one, but then if that’s the case this should be reflected in our political organization of things. Hence, the idea of strict national boundaries and divisions between nations and peoples must be transcended by the realization of unity and interdependence of all mankind.

Nationalism and patriotism then are seen as resulting from the view of separation and exclusiveness. Modern transportation and telecommunications have made us instead a global civilization, and we need to become the same kind of people politically. Let me share with you the way that Groothuis puts this point. I’m going to read to you from page 117 of Unmasking the New Age. He says, “New Age politics, then, emphasizes the need for political order consonant with the cosmic order. While most speak of the need for cultural uniqueness, New Age political thinkers point toward a new world order where the nations are united politically and economically. Since the enjoyment of wealth, prosperity, and peace is now unevenly distributed, a new economic order is requited to redress the balance. Likewise, strategies of nuclear disarmament must be implemented if the new global society is to live as one and in peace. Satin speaks [this is Mark Satin] vaguely of a ‘planetary guidance system’ that would labor to avoid the rigidities of a world government without abandoning international political sanctions. This would regulate world culture but not organize it. One of many solutions Satin offers is a system of planetary taxation on resource use which would be part of an economic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations. Although the planet must be unified economically, politically, and socially, Satin and many New Age political thinkers such as Marilyn Ferguson strongly support the decentralization of civil government. Government must be made manageable and reduced to a more ‘human scale.’ Here, Groothuis says, much of the New Age follows economist E. F. Schumacher’s idea that small is beautiful.”

Having mentioned all of these things on the New Age agenda, Groothuis then shows some of the influences of these views on various groups that are attempting to impact society with New Age political themes, and then he sums up the impact of all of this in a paragraph that we find on page 121 of Unmasking the New Age. Now let me share that with you. He says, “New Age political



4 of 15

Lesson 21 of 24

unity is not so much organizational as it is ideological. Ferguson notes that the collusion in New Age politics is in its assumptions. This collusion of assumptions is maintained, strengthened, and implemented through networking. Rather than relying on a formal organization, the New Age seeks to find connections through a web of informational networks which Ferguson believes will generate power enough to remake society. The strategy is to link groups and individuals through conferences, phone calls, air travel, books, phantom organizations, papers, pamphleteering, photocopying, lectures, workshops, parties, grapevines, mutual friends, summit meetings, coalitions, tapes, and newsletters in a web of influence which is at once expansive, powerful, decentralized, and intimate. A glance through the New Consciousness Source Book, the New Age Directory or other such books will show how broad the movement is.”

As to this idea of one world order and no national boundaries and all the rest, I would simply draw your attention to what biblical prophecy says about the politics of the end time. If you look at passages, for example, like the seventh chapter of the book of Daniel, the thirteenth chapter of the book of Revelation, and so on, you will find that ultimately at the very end time, during the time of great tribulation, the world will move in the direction of one political leader, one world government who will also demand that everyone worship him, and if you do not comply, there will be, Revelation 13 shows, “economic discrimination; there will be death that is meted out to you.”

Now please do not misunderstand. I am not suggesting that we now know that we’re presently in the end times because New Age theology is on the scene and it espouses this kind of one world order and one world government, but rather my point here is simply to note the similarities between the New Age political agenda and the agenda, if you will, of the political leaders of the end times according to Scripture. Indeed if God decided to wrap up His program with the world at this point in time, we can say that the stage is already set for Him to do so. With this kind of political thinking that we find in the New Age movement, it is not at all hard to see how someone who would come along preaching world unity/world order could gain control over many nations and many peoples.

For other critiques of the New Age political agenda let me just refer you to Groothuis’s discussion on pages 125 to 130 of his Unmasking the New Age. This completes what I would like to



5 of 15

Lesson 21 of 24

share with you in terms of New Age theology. As with any of these theologies that we have studied in this course and in the preceding, we’re able to give you a taste, we could always go into more detail, but I trust that this will give you the flavor of New Age thinking.

I would now like to turn for the rest of this lecture and the remainder of the course to a discussion of postmodernism. Let me begin with some introductory matters, and then we’ll go from there. Perhaps you’ve heard the label postmodern or postmodernism, and perhaps you’ve heard certain definitions of it and perhaps you are pretty sure you know what it means. I would like to suggest that this is a label, postmodernism, that is actually used to refer to a number of different views in a number of different disciplines or fields of inquiry. For example, there are philosophical viewpoints especially in the area of epistemology that are postmodern. There are on the other hand views within the domain of politics that we can say are postmodern. There are theological views, social views, ecological views, for example, that all can be related to this label of postmodernism, and once you realize that you recognize that it is very easy to be reductionistic in your understanding of postmodernism. That is, it’s easy to think that postmodernism only means one or two things when in fact it’s an idea, a mindset that refers to a number of different things.

In spite of the variety of views and issues that fall under this label, generally I think we can say that postmodern positions are a reaction to what is known as the modern mindset and the modern worldview, and so it seems to me that the best way to proceed in what follows is to first of all sketch the basic understanding of the world that characterizes modernity or the modern mindset. Then, after I have pointed out the sorts of views within modernity postmodernists are reacting to, I will give you a general characterization of the postmodern mindset, and then finally I want to turn specifically to varieties of postmodern theologies.

In all of this I’m relying heavily, although not exclusively, on a book that is authored by David Griffin, William Beardslee, and Joe Holland. It’s entitled Varieties of Postmodern Theology [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989], and what they show us is that there are different varieties of postmodern theology but in one way or another these different kinds of theologies are reacting against something that typifies the modern mindset.



6 of 15

Lesson 21 of 24

If postmodernism is a reaction to modernism, what is modernity? Let me, if I may, initially give you a general characterization, and then I want to go more specifically and talk about what the modern mindset is philosophically and then what it is socially and culturally. And then we want to talk about modernity theologically, and once we’ve done that we’ll then be ready to turn to look at the postmodern responses to the modern mindset.

First of all then a general characterization of modernity. As we find in the book by Griffin and Beardslee and Holland, they note for us that in a broader sense the modern age refers to the period begun by Galileo and Descartes and Newton, that is, a period that continued into the nineteenth century, rationalism and scientism, that are still influential even to this very day. In a narrower sense though the modern period was a period of artistic and cultural activity that was here early in the twentieth century. Now the modern mentality at least in the broader sense of it was characterized by a deterministic model of reality; in particular we’re thinking here of Newtonian science, and that deterministic model of reality was used to interpret phenomena ranging from physics to sociology to psychology and religion.

That gives you a general idea of what we mean by modernity, but let me point more specifically at things that go along with the modern mindset. There is on the one hand a certain philosophical backdrop that is part of the modern mindset. In the modern mindset it is possible, or according to modern thinkers, it is possible to have a rational objective approach to reality. This approach to reality sought to get at reality specifically through the natural and the social sciences, and modern theologies worked against the backdrop of this modern worldview, the idea that we can know what is the case about the world and we can do so through the natural and social sciences. As to the epistemology of the modern mindset, that is, its theory of knowledge, the basic epistemological doctrine of the modern world as Griffin and the others show us is what’s known as “sensate empiricism,” according to which knowledge of the world beyond ourselves comes exclusively through sense perception. In other words, it is possible to know the world outside of the mind, and the way it is possible to do that is through our sense organs and using them for sense perception.

In light of this assumption of sensate empiricism, it stands to reason that there can be no knowledge of values when you and I open our eyes and our ears and all the rest of our senses and we



7 of 15

Lesson 21 of 24

interact with the world, we see objects, we see states of affairs in the world, but we do not through our sensory organs perceive the value or the lack thereof of those states of affairs and those things that we find in the world. Our evaluations of what’s happening are things that we place upon the world, so all moral and aesthetic values then must be considered not as something that we can actually perceive in the world, but they are preferences, they are judgments that we place upon the world, and some would say we even arbitrarily place these preferences upon the things we find in the world.

Likewise, there can be no genuine religious experience in the sense of a direct sensory experience of God. Belief in God then is entirely groundless or at best it is rooted in an inference from our sensory knowledge of the world to something that goes beyond the senses. You can see that with this sensate empiricism this in effect pretty much blocks God out of the world and out of being an object of knowledge if the only thing that we can know is what we know through the senses.

According to this epistemology it is possible through empiricism, through our interaction with the empirical world, to know what is true about the world. That is, as long as you’re discussing things that are really in the world: objects, states of affairs, actions, events that can be seen. Human perceptual and rationale abilities are capable of functioning objectively so as to be able to determine what is true or false of the world, and as a result of this, according to the modern epistemology, it was possible to talk about truth as a correspondence between our language and the way the world is, and it is possible to determine through the use of human reason and human perceptual abilities what is true of the world, so in the modern mindset there is such a thing as truth, perhaps we might even say absolute truth, and in many cases we are in a position to know what it is and to know it accurately . . . .

From this epistemology stems the modern or what oftentimes is known as the Enlightenment concept of what it means to be rational, the modern period roughly coinciding with what we’re talking about, the Enlightenment, at least the beginnings of the modern period and the Enlightenment period of history and culture and all the rest overlapping quite heavily.

All right, what is the enlightenment or modern concept of what it means to be rational? I want to state that in just a moment, but let me add further that along with this Enlightenment or modern



8 of 15

Lesson 21 of 24

concept of rationality is typically a commitment to some form of epistemological foundationalism. That may be a term that you’re not familiar with. I’ll explain it in just a moment.

What is the enlightenment concept of rationality? Some have referred to this as the evidentialist principle. This concept of rationality says it is only rational to maintain a belief if one does so on the basis of sufficient evidence, arguments, or reasons for the belief, so if you hold the belief whether it be about God or anything else and you have not supported it by argument and evidence or maybe you have by some argument and evidence but it’s not sufficient to demonstrate that your belief is true, you do not have a right to go on believing that and if you continue to believe anyway, then you are not acting rationally.

Someone says, If it’s only rational to continue believing if you do so on the basis of sufficient evidence and argument and reason, what counts as sufficient evidence? One very popular view on this comes from a view known as classic foundationalism. Now foundationalism is a theory of knowledge, and it says that our beliefs are justified on the basis of other beliefs that we hold, and ultimately those beliefs go deeper into our knowing structure, referred to as our noetic structure, and eventually we can trace our beliefs back to other beliefs that are totally foundational; they don’t rest on other types of beliefs that we hold, but they are truly basic, they are truly foundational.

Here’s what classic foundationalists say as to what counts as sufficient evidence to hold on to a belief. They tell us that a belief has a sufficient support if it is supported by evidences which themselves are supported or inferred ultimately from beliefs that are properly basic. That sounds good, but what’s a properly basic belief? According to classic foundationalism, a properly basic belief is a belief that is either self-evident, we hear the idea and we immediately (we might even say intuitively) know that it’s true. It’s a belief that is either self-evident, evident to the senses, or incorrigible; it wouldn’t make any sense to doubt it.

Now I must say that not everyone who has held to the Enlightenment conception of rationality has been a foundationalist, but it has surely been one of the more popular approaches to knowledge, and you can see with this modern mindset there is definitely a belief that truth is out there, it is accessible, and unless you have sufficient evidence and arguments for your belief, you don’t have a right to hold on to that belief because something else is more



9 of 15

Lesson 21 of 24

likely to be true, and of course all of us are in a position to know what is true if we just properly use our sensory perception and our reasoning capacities.

We’ve said then that the basic epistemological doctrine of the modern world is this sensate empiricism, but there’s also a basic ontological doctrine of modernity, and when I speak about ontology, I’m talking about the nature and structure of reality. In particular, we’re talking about what there is. The basic ontological doctrine of modernity is known as the mechanistic doctrine of nature. Now according to this mechanistic doctrine of nature, the physical world is composed of inanimate, insentient atoms which interact by deterministic impact. This mechanistic view of nature allows for one of two possible worldviews which as we are told are the two worldviews that typically we find in the modern world, in the modern period.

One of those world views is the dualistic version of modernity, and in this dualistic version the human self or soul is regarded as above nature. It’s something immaterial. It’s not something material, but it is also the only place in which we find the value in the world; in physical things there’s not value, but in the human self or soul we find the locusts or the place of value in the world.

This dualistic modernism tends then in the direction of alienation, anthropocentrism, and intellectual fragmentation in the form of a radical split between the sciences on the one hand, things that talk about the physical world, and the humanities on the other, things that talk about the development of the self, things that deal with more than just the physical world. This dualism is unintelligible as to how that which is not in the world and above it can interact with the physical world; it becomes an unintelligible apart from a certain supernaturalism because the belief here is that a supernatural deity is needed to explain how it is that sentient mind and insentient matter can interact at all.

Throughout the modern period philosophers have wrestled with this difficulty of mind and body, mind and matter interaction, and because of the difficulties inherent in that dualism, dualistic modernity has increasingly collapsed into the other major modern worldview, namely, materialism. This is a view that there is only one thing in the world, not dualism of mind and matter but just a monism of matter alone, and such a materialistic approach entails determinism, reductionism, atheism, and nihilism, according to Griffin and the others; at least that’s what it seems to have led



10 of 15

Lesson 21 of 24

to. If there’s nothing out there but the physical universe, then it seems pretty clearly that things interact by predetermined laws, that we have to reduce all apparently mental phenomena to something totally physical, there can’t be a God, at least not in the Judeo-Christian sense of pure spirit, and surely there’s no value beyond the physical things that are out there so there’s no value, there’s no meaning in the universe.

When you combine this worldview with the sensate empiricism that goes along with it, this worldview entails positivism; that’s the view that the only truth that we can know is that which comes through the natural sciences, and of course we’re able to get truth in the natural sciences because they depend upon sense perception, and sense perception, the theory is, works well enough so that we can know what’s true of the world. On the other hand, disciplines like religion, theology, ethics, metaphysics, the ultimate structure and nature of reality can deliver no additional truths to us at all, according to this particular worldview. We can reasonably believe only the worldview that is provided by the natural sciences, and that is a worldview in which there is no God, no freedom, and no meaning to the distinction between good and evil. What you’re hearing described here should sound somewhat familiar to you if you have studied logical positivism before or if you remember from our first course our discussion of the earlier philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but definitely this is a view that truth is in fact accessible, there is such a thing as truth, and we can know what it is and we do so through sense perception, through the use of reason, and all the rest.

That’s some of the philosophical backdrop of the modern mindset, but let me turn for a little bit and talk about modernity from a social and a cultural perspective. It is said that the modern world as a coherent period of social history began with the sixteenth century. It matured after the eighteenth century, and then in the late twentieth century we find that it’s coming to an end, so it had quite a run we might say, lasted for a good while, but it appears to be breaking down. Now prior to the sixteenth century, a premodern consciousness dominated the Western world. This involved a fatalistic acceptance of nature and history, whatever went on in nature and history, that is, as reflecting God’s immutable ordering of the world. God was in charge of all these things, and what we didn’t understand, what we couldn’t explain through the sciences, we said it’s in God’s hand, He’s in charge of it, and we left it that way. Empire builders defied fate to try to change history, but even they viewed themselves as carriers of fate, and they represented



11 of 15

Lesson 21 of 24

the oppressive fate of those that they control.

On page 10 of Varieties of Postmodern Theology, we read, “By contrast, the modern spirit promised to liberate humanity from fate. It promised to break the religiously legitimated constraints of classical Catholic tradition and its authoritarian institutions. It promised a new vision centered in secular science seeking freedom and progress for all the world.”

Renaissance humanism, as our authors tell us, was midwife to this view, and the Reformation gave it a religious grounding, but its full birth came in the Enlightenment era which promised to use the light of reason to shatter all residues of superstition and ignorance. Reason then was the foundation of the modern world, and through the use of reason we were going to be able to liberate ourself from superstition, from everything that bound us.

It is safe to say as well here that the development of modern science also was critical to a birthing, giving birth to the modern world. There’s a belief or there has been a belief in the modern mindset that through science mankind could control the world and we could also through science tell what is true or what is false about reality. Science was deemed to be the domain of pristine objectivity. In other areas of study there might be subjectivity that would enter in, but not science. Science just deals with what there is, and it gets it absolutely accurate.

On page 11 we read from Varieties of Postmodern Theology, “The modern world freed technology, politics, economics, and culture from nearly every restraint,” but as our authors show the result of the modern world is an increasingly new, more powerful, and destructive technological fate. The modern world, we are told, is building a scientific death trap for humanity and nature. It didn’t appear to be that way at the outset, but this has become evident in the twentieth century with what we’ve seen in World War I, World War II, and the nuclear age that has followed all of that.

The modern era is also characterized by a rise of scientific totalitarian states. We in the West tend to think of this in terms of communism, in terms of some form of socialism, but there have been totalitarian states that have been socialists like Marxists states and there have also been some that have been capitalistic as well. Another form of the destructiveness that we find in the modern era was the attempted scientific extermination of European Jews and others by the Nazis. A further destructive



12 of 15

Lesson 21 of 24

force, we are told, in the late modern era is the poisoning of the natural ecology of the planet. In addition to the poisoning of the natural ecology of the planet, there is a poisoning of humanity’s social ecology. This is being done by erosion of the family, the neighborhood, community, and their underlying moral values.

Gradually, we have also seen the increasing secularization of society with a gradual shutting out altogether from public life, a shutting out of the awe and the power of the religious. You cannot say it, you cannot do it in some places if it’s religious at all, at least if it’s public. I quote here from page 12, “Thus we see the negative climax of the modern scientific promise of freedom and progress evermore destructive wars, threats of nuclear annihilation, genocide, totalitarianism, ecological poisoning, erosion of community, marginalization of the poor and public suppression of religious mystery. What emerged in the eighteenth century as a bold dream converts itself dialectically in the late twentieth century into a frightening nightmare. This is the cultural end of the modern world.”

In the modern era, as well, our authors note that there has gradually been a privatization and marginalization of religion in order to expand the autonomy of the secular and that of course has been advanced by science and technology. In other words, religion is put off to the boundaries of national life, and if you want to be religious it’s okay if you keep it to yourself, don’t bring that into public domain. Autonomous science and technology then themselves have become in fact the religion of the public realm while individual pietism is the religion of the private realm. And the assumption that always goes along with this is that individual piety is subjective, it is not something that is objective in nature, there are not things that we believe in that we can objectively prove.

On the other hand, there is the public domain that deals with things that are provable through sensate empiricism, and these are the things that are objects of knowledge. We can talk about these in rational ways, and these are the things that we can prove or disprove in terms of academic disciplines. The drive for autonomy of the individual parts, that is, freedom of each individual, has itself led to atomization and isolation of the individual. People feel disjointed, and they feel isolated from one another. This has happened in particular in liberal democratic countries. But the answer is not then to move to a more totalitarian socialist state because in socialist countries governments have just increased



13 of 15

Lesson 21 of 24

in their control of citizens through the exercise of raw power without any religious ideology whatsoever to back them up, and then you feel that yes, you’re all one of the masses, but you don’t have any individual significance.

Then on page 86, our authors make this statement, and I quote, “This worldview fosters the type of modern world described by Cox [as an aside I should say this is Harvey Cox, the Harvard theologian], so this worldview fosters the type of modern world described by Cox. The atomistic mechanistic view of nature in which relations are based on force alone promotes an atomistic mechanistic view of society ruled by bureaucratic rationality. At the international level, this view promotes a system of power politics between nation-states. This worldview also promotes a technology devoted to perfecting instruments of coercion and death and an economic system in which profit is the only standard of excellence.”

Finally, this world view relegates religion to illusion. Of course it can be an illusion that is useful, that is, from the modern perspective it’s useful, insofar as it promotes nationalism, militarism, and economically efficient behavior and/or provides enough solace to individuals to keep them keeping on. But it is still an illusion. That’s according to much of the modern mindset.

I want to turn in just a moment to look at a theological description of the modern era, but let me say if what you’ve been hearing as I’ve described the philosophical, social, and cultural backdrop of the modern era and you can tell these kind of things are going to get blasted by postmodernism, if what you’ve heard sounds somewhat familiar, it should. What we have heard as we’ve studied liberation theology, as we’ve studied feminist theology, as we’ve studied New Age theology, our themes that in one way or another reject the modern mindset so that in one sense a good bet if not all of what we’ve been studying in this second course finds its culmination in postmodernism, and we might even more broadly say that these theologies that we have been studying in this course in one way or another themselves are postmodern and reflect a reaction against the modern mindset. We’ll see that even more fully as we see what postmodern theologies actually say.

Right now, let me go back for a few more minutes to talk about the modern mindset and describe it theologically. Early modern theologies sought to accommodate theology to the modern world by reducing theologies’ content; oftentimes they did so by



14 of 15

Lesson 21 of 24

demythologizing it, by reducing theologies’ content in order to reach a sort of universal theology that represented the essence of all religions, and here an example of this kind of approach of early modern theologies we might find in eighteenth-century deism. When we get late into the modern period, though, late modern theologies returned to particularity rather than striving for views that would be universal or universally applicable or attract large numbers of people.

By returning to particularity, these late modern theologies gave up their claim to provide a basis for public policy in an increasingly pluralistic society. If religion becomes very person-relative, very specific and individualistic, you can hardly use this for public policy. In addition, late modern theology appealed to criteria of validation other than the public criteria used in science and science-based philosophy such as self-consistency and factual adequacy. Instead, late modern theologies appealed to truth as subjectivity. You knew that these things were true not because you could prove it in the way science or history proved one idea or another; you proved it by subjectively somehow or other knowing or you contrasted the perspective, the language game of objective science with that of religion, or you appealed to a revelation to a particular community which allowed them to speak from faith to faith, but in all of these cases they in essence conceded the arena of public discourse to the modern world, and in so doing they excused themself from needing to meet the demands of public verification.

In addition, late modern theology sought to articulate biblical faith in a context in which people’s faith, religion, or piety was generally assumed to be a private matter without relevance to public policy, and I’m sure that many of you have seen that in the modern world. You really see it if you have attended secular universities where you go and you sit in the classroom and religion and personal religious belief are very, very far from the subject of study and whatever the subject of study may be, we are not encouraged at all. We’re not allowed to let our religious convictions at all guide what we think about that discipline of study.

There’s more to the modern theological mindset, and I’m going to pick that up in our next lecture.

Transcript - ST507 Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

15 of 15

Postmodernism: Introduction and ModernityLesson 21 of 24

Then, after we have completed our description of the modern mindset, I want to turn to a description of postmodern themes generally and then begin to look at some specific postmodernism theologies.

Documents

Contemporary Theology II: ST507 From Theology of Hope to ... · As Groothuis shows us in his book Unmasking the New Age, ... consciousness, a global understanding of political reality.”