A Summary of Postmodern Philosophy

A Summary of Postmodern Philosophy

QUESTION: A Summary of Postmodern Philosophy
ANSWER:
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity
Evangelical Divinity School, is a shrewd observer of the Postmodern scene
and a somewhat sympathetic critic. In addition, he understands the important
role Nietzsche played in expressing the foundational ideas for
Postmodernism.1 He writes, Nietzsche, the patron saint of postmodernity,
prophesied accurately: if God is dead, then its interpretation all the way
down....[O]ne word only points to another word and never to reality itself. No
one interpretation can ever be regarded as final. As in interpretation, so in life:
everything becomes undecidable.2
Vanhoozer points us to the late C.S. Lewis, who foresaw the shift toward
Postmodernist thinking. Lewis term for this movement is bulverism after its
imaginary inventor Ezekiel Bulver. Vanhoozer explains: Lewis imagines the
moment that bulverism was born, when five-year-old Ezekiel heard his
mother say to his father, Oh, you say that because you are a man. Bulver
intuitively grasped the stunning implication: arguments need not be refuted,
only situated. One rebuts a thought simply by calling attention to the
genealogy or location of its thinker.3 Probably nothing in Postmodernism
today would surprise Lewis.
A Summary of Postmodernism
Vanhoozer offers a concise summary of Postmodern philosophy:
1. The mark of the Postmodern condition of knowledge is a move away from
the authority of universal science toward narratives of local knowledge.4
2. Postmodernists reject the notion of universal rationality; reason is always

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A Summary of Postmodern Philosophy

3.
4.

5.

6.

situated within particular narratives, traditions, institutions, and practices.

Postmodernists reject unifying, totalizing, universal schemes in favor of
new emphases on difference, plurality, fragmentation, and complexity.
Postmodernists reject the notion that the person is an autonomous
individual with a rational consciousness that transcends his or her
particular place in culture, language, history, and gendered body.
Postmodernists agree with Nietzsche that God (that is to say, the
supreme being of classical theism) has become unbelievable, as have
the autonomous self and the meaning of history.
What we know about things is linguistically, culturally, and socially
constructed. Language stands for the socially constructed order within
which we think and move and have our being.5

Notes:
Rendered with permission from the book, Understanding the Times: The
Collision of Todays Competing Worldviews (Rev 2nd ed), David Noebel,
Summit Press, 2006. Compliments of John Stonestreet, David Noebel, and
the Christian Worldview Ministry at Summit Ministries. All rights reserved in
the original.
1

See Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York, NY:
The Free Press, 1997), Will Du rants The Story of Philosophy, and John P.
Koster, The Atheist Syndrome (Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth & Hyatt
Publishers, 1989) for background material on Nietzsche.

Penner, Christianity and the Postmodern Turn: Six Views, 78.

Ibid., 76.

Postmodernists were not the first to offer such a view of knowledge.

Bertrand Russell held a similar viewall truths are particular truths. See
Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion (London, UK: Rutledge Classics,
2002), 127. Midgley offers a classic critique of this position, quoting
Wittgenstein that particular propositions cannot always be prior to general

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A Summary of Postmodern Philosophy

ones. Both are elements in language, which is itself an element in our whole
system of behaviour. In a crucial sense, the whole is always prior to its parts.
And unquestionably this kind of belief in a law-abiding universe... is a
precondition of any possible physical science.
5

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed., Postmodern Theology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press), 1013.

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