Have you ever been in a corn maze?  The reason they work is because you can only see right in front of you.  If you had a live drone feed, you could easily orient yourself and find the way out.  This is the benefit of history.  We live in a postmodern culture, but it’s hard to see or understand what that means since we’re surrounded with it.  In this exceptional presentation, Kegan Chandler guides us through the history of premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism so that we can orient ourselves to how many people in our world think and approach life.  Not only will this give you a drones-eye perspective of our current situation, but it also will help you understand how to better share your faith with postmodern people.
—— Notes ——
Metanarratives and Postmodernism (Kegan Chandler)

What is postmodernism?
How in the world did we get here?
Where do we go from here?

Postmodernism is a worldview based on French philosophers, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard w/ these four characteristics:

no objective truth (Derrida)
only interpretations (Derrida)
no meta-narrative (Lyotard)
interpretation in society results from power not truth (Foulcault)

meta-narrative: overarching account that provides a pattern or structure for ppls beliefs and experiences
postmodernist mission: deconstruction

identify social constructs in the world and break them down

if everything is deconstructed, what do we fill it with?

our experiences
community

First Star Wars w/ Luke vs. last star wars w/ Luke, deconstructs everything
premodernism

belief in objective truth
problem: priestly class determines truth
problem: superstition
authority structure suffocated learning and creativity
Renaissance was a way to recover art and classics that the church had suppressed

premodernism crumbles

Reformation
Galileo defeats Aristotle (dropping 2 lead balls from leaning tower of Piza)
this challenges authority of Aristotle
heliocentricity also challenges church’s imprimatur of Ptolemaic geocentricity

modernism

rejection of authority
time and numbers don’t guarantee truth
reason alone can find truth
naïve optimism (holocaust, communism, eugenics)
epistemological revolution, exalting empiricism, which reduced miraculous to superstition
we can save the world if we just apply reason and science

postmodernism

glad that modernism rejected authority
reject the idea that human institutions and states can save us
only the individual can be free
get rid of objective truth to build our own realities
rejection of meta-narratives
distrust that reason can bring enlightenment or satisfaction

pomo is good for Christianity b/c

it defeat naïve secular utopian dreams
defeats empiricisms
accepts supernatural, transcendent
ennobles the individual’s journey of discovery

problems w/ postmodernism

the statement “there is no objective truth” is self-defeating
you can always disagree, saying “that’s just your interpretation”
I can just say “pomo is wrong” and no one can disagree b/c then they would have to appeal to objective reality
just b/c everyone has their own interpretation doesn’t mean that there isn’t one correct one on any given subject

a post-postmodernism worldview

belief in objective truth
belief in the right authoritative sources of truth (scripture)
value

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