NP? What believers have in common with postmoderns

[Doug Millison]

"[...] What believers have in common with postmoderns
is a distrust of modern claims to knowledge. To be a
believer, however, is to be subject to an attack that
postmoderns, holding truthlessness to themselves like
a lover, never have to face. The history of modernity
in the West is in many ways nothing more than the
effort to destroy medieval faith. It is a
three-hundred-year attempt to demolish medieval
(especially Catholic) claims to authority, and to
substitute a structure of science and ethics based
solely on human rationality. But with the failure to
discover any such rational structure-seen by the
postmoderns-the only portion of the modern project
still available to a modern is the destruction of
faith. It should not surprise us that, in very recent
times, attacks on what little is left of medieval
belief have become more outrageous: resurgent
anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic broadsides, vicious
mockery of evangelical preaching, desecrations of the
Host in Catholic masses. For modern men and women,
nothing else remains of the high moral project of
modernity: these attacks are the only good thing left
to do. The attackers are convinced of the morality of
their attack not by the certainty of their aims-who's
to say what's right or wrong?-but by opposition from
believers.

Three hundred years of this attack have created in
believers an attitude both deeply defensive and deeply
conservative. But the defensiveness springs from the
attempt by believers to defend their belief against a
"progressive" philosophy that is already rejected
intellectually by nearly all cultural commentators,
and, I suspect, despised intuitively by nearly all
young people in America. Believers should not become
entangled in the defense of modern times. This is the
key-the postmodern attack on modernity is right:
without God, essences are the will to power. Without
God, every attempt to call something true or beautiful
or good is actually an attempt to compel other people
to agree. [...] "

from:
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9402/bottum.html
Christians and Postmoderns
J. Bottum
Copyright (c) 1994 First Things 40 (February 1994):
28-32. 

You're right, Otto, it's worth reading.
And, I don't wonder that you don't agree with the author.

=====
<www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com>

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