The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Philosophy Uncategorized: Postmodernism rightly understood

In his Postmodernism Rightly Understood: The Return to Realism in American Thought, Peter Augustine Lawler says that “Postmodern thought rightly understood is human reflection on the failure of the modern project to eradicate human mystery and misery and to bring history to an end.  One form of postmodern thinking is found in the writing of anticommunist dissidents Vaclav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  The fall of communism, Havel said, should be understood as a lesson about the resistance of being and human being to manipulation.  And Solzhenitsyn, of course, told Americans at Harvard that if human beings were born only to be happy, they would not be born to die.  Postmodern thought begins with the news, perhaps both good and bad, about the intractable limits to any pragmatic project to make human existence predictable, tranquil, secure, and carefree.”  He strikingly include Tocqueville among the postmoderns.

Postmodernism is thus a kind of realism:

It “rejects the illusion of self-creation in favor of the reality of conscientious responsibility.”  We are rational in that we seek to “understand and to come to terms with” reality, not to transform it: “There is some correspondence between human thought and the way things really are.  Postmodernism is the return to realism.”

Lawler admits that this is not how postmodernism is usually understood.  Postmodernism rightly understood is not “antifoundationalism,” which Lawler characterizes as “the assertion of the groundlessness of human existence.”  Antifoundationalism is instead “hypermodernism.”

Lawler is right on target in his description of postmodernism as reflection on the limits of human knowledge and power, the chastening of hubris.  Yet, two qualifications: First, what Lawler describes as “antifoundationalism” is not what typically goes by that name among philosophers and theologians.  I affirm that human existence is grounded, in God; but that ground is not universally acknowledged and uncontested, as foundationalism requires.  Second, things aren’t simply as they are.  Like it or not, we do transform reality.  That man is, in a strong sense, a maker – poetic – is one of the affirmations of modernity that we ought to maintain.  As Milbank stresses, what we deny is that poiesis is by definition secular.