I recognise this may not be a very critically thought out statement or question but at the moment I am struggling to identify the difference between post modern approaches to issues and critical thinking. PM talks about questioning many basic assumptions, truth, our ability to assume or project answers to issues due to cultural formation issues, reader response and interpretation etc, but surely there is little difference between this and good critical thinking. I was always very skeptical of people asking if post modernity was real, but I am wondering if we more accurate in thinking in the shift as critical or (hyper or an extension of) modernity as wouldn’t critical thinking have it roots and be shaped by the science movement like modernity?
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Hi Richard,
I think that you are somehow touching on the modernisation of postmodernism!
In my mind (and this is just my take on it):
Modernism is the belief that critical thinking is central and that we can know everything by critical thinking. It is an innate trust in ourselves and our ability to understand.
Postmodernism is the understanding that we, as humans, have a limited perspective on truth and that there is a limit to what we can know. That the truth is bigger than us and cannot be understood by critical thinking.
We then try to put postmodernism into our modern bag! We somehow think that we can capture postmodernism and analyse it in a modern fashion and come up with answers in a modern style. We try to put it in our modern bag, but it doesn’t fit! 🙂 Postmodernism is a superset of modernism – modernism fits into postmodernism (and is limited by postmodernism), not vice versa.
The postmodern Christian approach is therefore that spiritual truth transcends human knowledge (modernism) and cannot be understood properly except by the spirit.
1 Cor 2:
11For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. 13This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. 14The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. 15The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment:
16″For who has known the mind of the Lord
that he may instruct him?”[d] But we have the mind of Christ.