Living with Postmodernity: The Challenge and Opportunity

To read Kameel Majdali’s article, “Living with Postmodernity: The Challenge and Opportunity”, download the PDF here. 

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For our purposes, postmodernism can be defined as a cultural, intellectual, and spiritual movement which partially replaces the grand narrative of ideology/religion (e.g. Marxism, Christianity) and the certainties of scientific rationalism with a subjective,  intuitive, wholistic viewpoint that leads to a plurality of worldviews—all which are considered valid. It represents a radical form of relativism.

For the Church, which represented temporal power in the Middle Ages, restructured in the Reformation, and sidelined in The Enlightenment, it is not even on the playing field today. Instead of calling western civilization as “Christian, we are returning full circle to the time when the Church was born in the first century: the tolerant, testy, multicultural, and pagan Roman Empire, where the world was not the Church’s domain but its mission field.

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Major pillars of postmodernism include the “death of truth.” The Bible says that Jesus Christ is the truth (John 14:6)—the absolute truth and only way to the Father–and we learn this by revelation. Modernism, with its emphasis on science and reason, rejects revelation as a means of identifying absolute truth. Postmodernism, on the other hand, says that truth as a universal, fixed, absolute, and objective entity does not exist. Instead, there are many “truths” and all are equally valid. This repudiation of absolute truth means that Biblical moral standards against lying, stealing, and sex outside of marriage, are challenged as the only standard of living. Richard Rorty says that truth is made, not found. All various societal groups construct their own “truth” to help lift up profile and bolster power. In the absence of universal and public truth, everyone becomes entitled to their own “private truth,” no matter how preposterous it is.

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