The four ways (pre-critical, historical, theological and postmodern readings) correspond very broadly to three movements within the history of Western culture in the last few centuries. The first belongs to the period before the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century; the second, to the major emphasis of the Enlightenment, sometimes known as ‘modernism’ or ‘modernity’; the third, to a corrective on the second, still from within the Enlightenment worldview; and the fourth to the recent period, in which the Enlightenment worldview has begun to break up under questioning from many sides, and
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