Epistemology III - Post-Modernism

Post-modernism's epistemology and its effects are in many ways less clear than those of modernism to the average person in Western society. There are probably multiple reasons, among them:

• It is a more recent development,


• It encompasses developments in several areas ("post" simply means "after"), and


• Its epistemology is grounded largely in a recent (and relatively opaque) linguistic theory...not the sort of thing kids read about in middle school (unlike the scientific method).

At the risk of fatal oversimplification, I'll define post-modernism (as an epistemology) as follows:

The understanding that

• knowledge is ultimately shaped by and grounded in language,


• language both reflects and reinforces existing power structures, and


• the key task of the knower is to deconstruct the existing assumptions and power structures seen in a text.

Note that the task of the knower is largely de-structive (vs. the con-structive activity engaged by the modern knower), though via a specified process.

This has various implications:

• All knowledge is subjective, relative, narrative, and specific to a time, place, and individual knower,


• All language and knowledge claims are best seen as attempts to exert power,


• All claims to objective universal knowledge are attempts to oppress others.

Although this summary is may be closer to parody than reality (or maybe it's closer to a deconstructed post-modernism), I think it's a reasonable summary for purposes of thinking about its influence on epistemology.

In the area of general revelation, even the hardest of modern science is seen by some as socially constructed, and therefore relative (not objective). In the popular arena, this critique finds a sympathetic hearing among those who see technology (being grounded in math, physics, and chemistry) as inherently oppressive. More broadly, claims to universally knowable objective knowledge of any type, much less about the metaphysical and God, are dismissed.

In the area of special revelation, the Bible is seen as just another text whose traditional reading and understanding simply reflects another place and time. Therefore, traditional understandings should be, a priori, rejected as attempts to impose the perspectives and values (a relatively new term) of another place and time on a current place and time. Traditional liberal Protestantism rejected miracles; postmodern Protestantism rejects doctrines (assertions of universal Truth) and is generally suspicious of any text that does not align with an amorphous definition of "tolerance." Regardless, it seems that modern and postmodern approaches to Christianity are reaching roughly the same conclusions about required/desired individual and corporate behavior.

If modernism is sometimes encourages in the broader culture an "easy believism" (17,400 hits in Google), post-modernism would seem to encourage what might be called "easy skepticism" (352 hits in Google). Most of us have been indoctrinated about such dangers as appeals to authority and the limits of reason. On the other hand, most of us have thought little (if any) about the dangers of acting on uninformed emotion since "everyone knows that knowledge is subjective and relative"(and is therefore not worth pursuing).

Since the culture we live in is mostly post-modern, it would seem that the primary danger Christians face from it is a tendency to either (a) not pursue a knowledge of the Bible's text, or (b) to apply a sophisticated linguistic theory that distorts the plain meaning of the text (e.g., by emphasizing what is different between a current context and the context of the original text, instead of discerning the meaning conveyed by the text that is universal across all contexts).