Current discussion on the nature and substance of covenant theology has centered around biblico-theological as well as systematico-theological questions. While these discussions will have some bearing upon the subject of this paper, I want to focus mainly on the philosophical and apologetical ramifications of the concept of covenant. More narrowly, I want to investigate into the relationship between the concept of the covenant and epistemology. I will argue that the theological concept of the covenant can provide some needed solutions to epistemological impasses in philosophy. If man is in everything everywhere and always “coram deo” and epistemology is at bottom covenantally construed, this will have consequences for our apologetics. The results of the best of Reformed covenant theology, both biblico-theologically and systematico-theologically, will then feed into a uniquely biblical epistemology which will, in turn, ground a powerful apologetic for our times and issue a covenantal call to repentance. (Continue Reading…)

With this eighth installment of our series we begin a general outline of a postmodern concept of truth.

The concept of truth in Postmodernism

At the outset of this series, I mentioned the inherent difficulty of analyzing postmodernism because it is such a many-headed beast. Correspondingly, it is difficult or nearly impossible to define the concept of truth in postmodernism.¹ What I would like to offer in the following is a patchwork of several features of the concept of truth in a postmodern context.² Rather than trying to be comprehensive, I will list several (partly overlapping, partly differing or even opposing) concepts of truth and a list of –isms that are postmodern ways of finding truth, or creating truth, or disposing of truth.

Vanhoozer puts the postmodern canon of truth in memorable apodictic form: “Thou shalt not believe in absolutes.”³ This expresses well the absolute insistence of postmoderns on the abolition of absolutes. Even though postmodernism is life “in the ruins of cast down –isms”⁴, it nevertheless has bred a host of new –isms itself. Some of them are supported by valid concerns, some of them must be rejected off-hand. Several must be mentioned here, with some obvious overlap, and no claim to exhaustiveness:

1. Pluralism/Parochialis

In his book The Gagging of God, D.A. Carson identifies three kinds of pluralism: empirical pluralism (which is neither intrinsically good nor bad), cherished pluralism (i.e., valuing plurality for plurality’s sake), and philosophical or hermeneutical pluralism.⁵ The latter is what we are concerned with here. Carson calls it “by far, the most serious development” in so far that it seeks to do only one thing, through different means: to abolish the belief “that any notion that a particular ideological or religious claim is intrinsically superior to another is necessarily wrong.”⁶ Superiority of one truth over another is a thorn in the postmodern flesh because it brings with it not only an exclusivism, but also a power struggle. But superiority of truth is not all that has been abdicated.

The “postmodern condition” has been defined by one of the early spokesmen of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard, as an “incredulity towards metanarratives.”⁷ These metanarratives were what gave modernity her coherence and the “Enlightenment project” its legitimation. Of course, in so far as Christianity (i.e. the truth of the bible) was not considered to be the metanarrative, there was never just one grand metanarrative. There were always many. But they all generally came with a claim to universal validity. Lyotard saw the abandonment of such metanarratives as the defining factor of postmodernism. However, it would be too quick to say that a dissolution of the notion of truth altogether is a result of this trend. On the contrary, truth may still be found not on a grand, universal scheme, but rather (and much more humbly) on a local level, within a particular community of “believers” in this particular truth. The development was “from the muffled majesty of grand narratives to the splintering autonomy of micronarratives.”⁸ This has lead to a parochialization of truth. What is true for you must not of necessity be true for anyone else. What is true here must not be true elsewhere. What is true today must not be true tomorrow. “Postmodernists reject unifying, totalizing, and universal schemes in favor of new emphases on difference, plurality, fragmentation, and complexity.”⁹ The “unifying theory” of everything which modernism so optimistically sought after is dismantled as a myth.¹⁰

It is only the concept of a universal truth which leads to a claim of superiority of one “truth” over another. Where the idea of a universal (or “true truth”, as Francis Schaeffer called it) is given up, there arises a plurality and eventually a pluralism of “truths” where one truth can coexist peacefully with the other without claim for superiority, even if they might contradict each other.

1. Even my uttering this last sentence can count as a characterization of postmodernism. After all, is not the fact that one finds many concepts of truth in postmodernism, also a distinctive and definitive theory of truth?↩
2. This patchwork fashion actually suits the purpose of this paper rather well, because one will not find anyone today actually holding all of the –isms or subscribing to the views of any of the spokesmen of postmodernism in pure form. Rather, the features I describe are part of the makeup of postmodernism that will influence people living within it and in it to differing degrees.↩
3. Vanhoozer, Postmodern Theology, 15.↩
4. Ibid.↩
5. Donald Carson, The Gagging of God. Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1996), 13-22.↩
6. Ibid., 19.↩
7. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), xxiv.↩
8. Stephen Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 32.↩
9. Vanhoozer, Postmodern Theology, 11.↩
10. Cf. Ibid.↩

This seventh installment of our “Postmodern epistemology series” will quickly summarize the main features the so-called transitional period between modernity and postmodernity.

Summary of Transition Period

In summary, even in the transitional figures we have chosen to survey we can see how highly indebted and concessive they are to Kant’s basic epistemological framework. Either in appropriating it or in trying to overcome it they show themselves to be his disciples, willingly or unwillingly. But in contradistinction to the modern figures we surveyed, we also recognize new developments in the transitional period eventually leading to postmodernism.

For example, there is a renewed interest in Hegelian dialectic and Hegelian historicism seems to have been a commonly shared philosophy of history. According to Hegel (1770-1831), there is no objective way to determine which of many theories and views of truth on any given question is right. What we have is not absolute truth but in any discipline we may find the facts about who has held what “truth” when and why. For Hegel, philosophy is the history of philosophy. This view of truth as historically determined has of course been willingly appropriated by postmodern thinkers. It mainly surfaces in the so-called “New Historicism.”
Kierkegaard’s turn to the subject (subjectivism or existentialism), Nietzsche’s nihilism, aestheticism and relativism (or perspectivism), and Heidegger’s existentialist Dasein (which marked the opposition to abstract being and a renewed antimetaphysical philosophy) are all motifs that we will meet again and again in postmodern thought.