I hope you found Penner’s book of value. Get ready to begin discussing the intro Monday, @Paul_Allen1! But as you see there has been plenty pre-discussion discussion already.
What a great question!! Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man came immediately to mind. And I began to suspect I misread the meaning in the title.
What if Penner means the end of apologetics as in what is the chief end of apologetics?
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I’m only starting chapter 2 and very much engrossed. I’m using the link you supplied, Kendel, to read it online - cheapskate that I am. But I would very much like to see what he wrote on pages 51-52. Page 50 ends with such promising thoughts - only to teleport the reader over to p. 53! Anybody have pages 51-52 available somewhere online?
I’ll put a link to my photos from my book in Slide 9 with the other resources. Sorry I have pencil mauled my book so much. You get art-work and commentary as well as text.
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That’s like the presumable play on words in Tim Keller’s title The Reason for God. A reader will be disappointed if they think it means the reason for God’s existence.
This is my favorite summary of post modernism:
Postmodernism
A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one’s own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.
Postmodernism is “post” because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called “modern” mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism “cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself.”
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Thanks, Mark! This is outstanding. I’ll add it to the resource list on Slide 9.
How did you get to this?
Good old Google. Here is a very short talk by a seminarian about post modernism and the challenge to Christianity (and everything else we might want to hold on faith).
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Well … all these Christian apologists (and everybody else so acclimated to reacting to them from every which side) had better fasten their seatbelts! Because (at least around here), we’re about to discuss a “new” player in town! Well - okay, Penner published his book in 2013 and it really discusses Kierkegaard’s ideas from a couple centuries ago. But still … these ideas haven’t permeated through much of our culture yet, if Christian school culture in my neck of the woods is any indicator.
So the upcoming discussion should be a pretty fresh look at ideas that seem long overdue for examination.
Beginning with our popular culture level assumptions about “modernism” and “postmodernism”. Get ready to have your ideas about both of those categories shaken up. At least that’s what it looks like to me already, only a couple chapters in.
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Yep. While the Quakers look for a way back to a pre modern world and most of us today I believe are still running Enlightenment 1.0, some of us will look for a way to get comfy in a new normal, post modern world. Really I think we’ll be looking to see what we can take with us. I’d say those on your team who have been making your peace with faith which you hold without converting it to certainty on the strength of your own rational machinations will have the advantage. I hope to have gained some of that advantage by virtue of recognizing what among my own beliefs are necessarily sustained by faith and can’t be argued as being true for everyone in any sense I should be able to convince everyone of.
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According to this explanation, I would be 50% post-modern because I think this accurately describes the subjective aspect of reality. But there is also an objective aspect to reality which is NOT just interpretation. As for explanations, people require different things from them – sometimes rather subjective things. But scientific explanations are different. They are demonstrable and thus the same for everyone according to written procedures which give the same result no matter what you believe or interpret. But science is not metaphysics – that much is true. Telling us what is the ultimate reality is not the business of science but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t inform our understanding of reality. It cannot confine our understanding, but it is foolish to ignore it also.
Indeed. This will end in the skepticism of skepticism itself, and accepting the role of subjective participation in living your life means that you have to make choices in faith. Faith because you want to live even though certainty is discarded as chasing after an illusion. You just choose in the process of deciding who you are, which is not something anyone or anything is going to be able to tell you.
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Me too. No one should want to lose the clear view of what is going on around us that science provides. I doubt post modernism will qualify anything about that aside from when discerning when to tap into the one or the other in deciding what we want to do. Mostly I see it as a check against the intrusion of rational thought into every pursuit.
Last one … honest. Decided to look for a video on Kierkegaard’s ideas to give a better idea of how he factors in. This one is about 19 minutes long and was easy to take in. I definitely have a better handle on what he is about than the other couple things looked into. Wonder if @vulcanlogician has any experience with Kierkegaard? Apparently he is considered the father of Existentialism, which may appeal to @mitchellmckain
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As I remember it, from him is part of where I got this whole divide between the subjective and objective.
Oh yeah… watching the video makes this pretty clear, doesn’t it?
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Mark, this was really helpful (and disquieting). Thanks for sharing it. I’ve added it to Slide 9.
Hello Group,
I will not have much access ro a computer, and therefore this discussion, for the next while. I look forward to reading the discussion, when I do have access. It might be a while until I have time to contribute much myself.
I have been putting recommended resources into Slide 9 and will continue to, when I can, but there will be lags until I have normal computer access again.
Thanks for a great discussion so far.
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Thank you for reading it, by the way.
Recently I came across this quote and I’m going to be weighing it against what Penner actually says. I’m suspect that it wrongly characterizes his words, but I’m also hopeful the two views can be reconciled.
“The Evangelical philosophers James K. A. Smith, Myron B. Penner, and Carl A. Raschke claim that most forms of natural theology are dependent on modern conceptions of reason, truth, and language… According to these authors, notions like objectivity, neutrality, and rationality are various forms of idolatry, and any philosophical dependence on knowledge informed by these values will be a kind of idolatry.”
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This book looks like a rebuttal to Penner’s thesis which we’re about to start discussing tomorrow. Just reading the blurb about Shepardson’s book here - it appears to have been written almost directly with Penner (or other authors like him) in mind. So it might be an interesting exercise after we’ve discussed Penner’s thesis to then look at a book like this one to see if the “modernists” give a successful or satisfactory reply.
I do note that our anticipated discussions here are all happening within the very modernist paradigm that Penner is questioning. I.e. - we are all about to use the very tools which Penner (and apparently Kierkegaard long before) claims to have already shown to be faulty instruments with regard to the most important questions of life. So by approaching Penner’s book with analysis, and potential arguments and rebuttals in mind, we are already “falling into his trap” that he has foreseen.
But that said, as intrigued (and even sympathetic) as I am with Penner’s thesis, I think it remains to be seen if Penner’s challenge to modernity is, in fact, successful. So … one book at a time! We’ll let Penner speak for himself (and Kierkegaard) and see how that goes. It may well be that we ourselves anticipate much of the response that Moreland and the current modernest army of apologists will give.
Added edit: I shouldn’t refer to Penner’s thesis as “a trap” as if he was crafting some new argument. In fact, arguments and “reasoning our way through all this” is precisely what he is trying to back away from himself. So perhaps I should say it this way … we’re all pulling our chairs up to the very table whose legs Penner alleges are faulty and/or inadequate. I’ll be eagerly waiting to see if Penner succeeds with getting us to consider all these things on ostensibly “non-modernist” grounds.
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Merv, I’m going to push back on this a bit. I understand why you’re saying this, and I’ve been to this point many times with work like Penner’s. His point is subtle, and it is not as broad (at least in the case of this book) as some postmodern critics. Penner is NOT saying that reasoned critical analysis is always inappropriate or impossible, but that it is inappropriate or impossible in the case of apologetics or any discussion of ultimate truths.
So our discussion of the book, is not quite the same as actually applying those Enlightenment critical tools to the actual defense of the faith. In one case we are talking about apologetics, and in the other we are trying to “apologize”. Penner is showing us that the tools for one are not appropriate for both.
Other critics would say that even the discussion we are attempting is impossible — yet they continued to write and write and write, using similar tools, even in verbal acts of subversion…… We can’t help ourselves, can we?
I agree. Please, one book at a time. I do hope that for those who are interested though, this book leads to further study and consideration of the things Christianity and Postmodernism have to say to each other. I’m frustrated, doing side-research or following up on titles that Penner and others mention, to find out that while for decades I’ve been sitting on the deeply challenging and valuable critical theory I worked with, there have been Christian thinkers really working with these ideas, not merely mischaracterising them, and arguing against them. My little follow up was unsurprisingly of the second category. I could be at a very different place right now, if I had known others were working well with it at the same time.