Abstract
Modernity’s belief that we live in a narratable world (a world with a story) and its confidence in progress (a world with a promise), are terminated by postmodernism’s insights. This is how the American Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson understands the impact of postmodernism. If this is true, it poses great challenges for the Christian faith to be communicated and accepted within this context. This article assesses how Jenson’s theology attempts to address postmodernism’s need for a new story and promise. It concludes that Jenson’s theology, as a Trinitarian theology, forms a coherent answer to these challenges because it is a narrative and eschatological theology. This article indicates, amongst other things the importance of Jenson’s understanding in his theology of the relation between God and time. The significance of Jenson’s approach is that it, firstly, understands the church as a narratable world, with a visible promise, and that it, secondly, follows a characteristically postmodern methodology in addressing these challenges.
Highlights
It is a cliché to say we live in a postmodern world, and “postmodern” has become one of the most used and abused words in “modern” discourse
Modernity has added a new genre ... the absurdist drama that displays precisely an absence of dramatic coherence (Jenson 2010:34). While this was first visible in literature and art, general culture has caught up with postmodernism and many people do not and cannot any longer understand their lives as realistic narratives (Jenson 2010:34)
As to the postmodern critique to such attempts he says we can note the postmodernist critique of metanarratives, and offer a narrative that, because it is about God and us at once, is of a different species altogether (Jenson 2000a:17)
Summary
It is a cliché to say we live in a postmodern world, and “postmodern” has become one of the most used and abused words in “modern” discourse. Since the late twentieth century theologians have been developing a postmodern theology and they have been especially engaged with the philosopher Nietzsche (Ford 1997:11) This is understandable if we consider that Nietzsche radically questioned the whole concept of truth.. For Jenson, postmodernism is the phenomenon of modernity’s self-destruction and according to him modernity’s belief that we live in a narratable world and its confidence in progress are terminated by postmodernism’s insights. His theology can be described as an attempt to address postmodernism’s need for a “new story and promise”. Some aspects of Jenson’s theology may be criticized, this article concludes that Jenson’s theology as a whole is helpful for broadening one’s perspective of how faith can be kept in a postmodern society.
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