by Karla Perry

Created on: April 09, 2009   Last Updated: January 10, 2011

My first brush with postmodernism came during my time at a local community college. However, the philosophy I was encountering in varying degrees I did not recognize until I entered a four year university where I was inundated with a continual onslaught of postmodernism. To be fair, my views have changed quiet dramatically since my first encounter.

At the onset, postmodernism was to me a headache of a philosophy which destroyed logic and reason leaving the foundations of truth in a pile of rumble. My professors decried the notion of the existence of truth and if it did exist, they saw it as unable to be known. English professors used postmodern criticism to divorce literary text from the author opening interpretation to the reader alone. History professors suggested history was only written by those with bias and thus no scholarship could really be trusted. The general idea produced by postmodernism was that the truth is there is no truth, while at the same time declaring itself to be a philosophy incapable of being pin pointed by a definition which connotes limitation.

Postmodernism is seen as the worldview that has no worldview; the truth without truth. It is practiced by a literary criticism form known as deconstruction. However, it is not relegated to literature alone for deconstruction is to be used as a method of dissecting anything that is seen as real or solid. The idea is that there are no absolutes and nothing is sacred. All can be deconstructed to find nothing at its base. Language is denoted as only abstract representations of things which hold no true meaning and thus communication fails to be meaningful.

As I said, my opinion of this philosophy has changed. Notwithstanding, the above description, while it cannot do the totality of the philosophy justice, is a part of what it is all about. Still there is something more to postmodern thought. The average non academic postmodern does not necessarily embrace such radical abandonment of logic and reason. Although I have met some who do. The cultural mood of our day is vastly postmodern for the current culture embraces experience over factual knowledge. It desires authenticity and spirituality over tradition and dogma.

Some Christians have attempted to enter this cultural mood to reach out to those spiritual seekers of authentic reality. Those of the Emerging
Church movement have embarked on this quest. Consequently some controversy has abounded concerning their attempts. Just the same, as Christians

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>