Abstract
How can one achieve the critical tension between contextual relevance in a post-modem world and "responsibility before history"? What is the justification for theological method as critical reflection within a tradition? What is the relation between ground texts that have historical authority (Scripture), the infonning tradition of interpretation of these texts (Church History), and the interpretive communities that read them (context)? Raising these questions, the article argues that for all its useful insights, postmodemism fundamentally challenges theological (and historical) reflection. Theology has always contextualised itself ever since its origins. What is different in this encounter is that we are dealing with an intractable ideology that not only undercuts the fundamentals but disallows the "long view" (the infonning and continually renewing tradition) and the communicativeness of theology (proclamation).
Highlights
How can one achieve the critical tension between contextual relevance in a post-modem world and "responsibility before history"? What is the justification for theological method as critical reflection within a tradition? What is the relation between ground texts that have historical authority (Scripture), the infonning tradition of interpretation of these texts (Church History), and the interpretive communities that read them? Raising these questions, the article argues that for all its useful insights, postmodemism fundamentally challenges theological reflection
What is different in this encounter is that we are dealing with an intractable ideology that undercuts the fundamentals but disallows the "long view" and the communicativeness of theology
Leslie Fielder, for example, describes the popular culture of our times as a "celebration of the immediacy of pleasure" that is opposed to the elitism of the hierarchical, ISSN 0257-8891 = SKRIF EN KERK Jrg 20(2) 1999 authoritarian and contemplative modem world[3] The opposition between modernism and postmodernism, says Ihab Hassen, is the opposition between authority and anarchy with the latter admitting an indeterminancy into every sphere of human "discourse in the west"[4]
Summary
Toynbee[1] was probably among the first to use the term "postmodern" which has since passed into common currency to describe what has been termed by some a new "paradigm" in intellectual and cultural history. Postmodernity describes a general disenchantment with "modernism", the predominant western intellectual tradition since the Enlightenment which scholars have referred to as "the enlightenment project" - the intellectual and cultural movement that revolutionized western life and society sweeping aside the medieval and its concomitant cosmology and way of life It was inaugurated by the new science and philosophy that followed in the wake of rationalism and empiricism which marginalized arbitrary ecclesiastical and secular powers in the process. Leslie Fielder, for example, describes the popular culture of our times as a "celebration of the immediacy of pleasure" that is opposed to the elitism of the hierarchical, ISSN 0257-8891 = SKRIF EN KERK Jrg 20(2) 1999 authoritarian and contemplative modem world3 The opposition between modernism and postmodernism, says Ihab Hassen, is the opposition between authority and anarchy with the latter admitting an indeterminancy into every sphere of human "discourse in the west"[4] This ubiquitous indeterminancy implies for Hassen "deconstruction, fragmentation and revolt to everything anti-systematic". The meaning of object is already embedded in language, a differential network, and there is "no transcendental signified, no origin, no centre because the process of signification is infinite" 15
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