Postmodernism 101 Quotes

“here is the nub of the issue between Christianity and postmodernism: what is freedom?”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“as the tides of history rise and fall, worldviews rise and fall with them,”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“Christianity is a religion of great hope. Yet for some reason, I can remember many sermons on faith and many on love, but I can’t remember many on hope.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“Postmodernism involves the loss of any hope that some larger-than-human force—be it God or History or Progress or Science or Reason—is going to come to the aid of humanity and make everything all right in the end. Postmoderns believe that we make our own bed, historically speaking, and we have to lie in it; and that’s all there is to say. Except, maybe, that we’re not such good bed-makers.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“Metanarratives give meaning to individual events, tying them together in the broadest possible fashion. They help structure all of life around a pre-ordained trajectory of history.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“Because history has the functions it has—supplying practical lessons and moral examples, shaping a culture’s identity and even influencing one’s view of destiny—it is no surprise that a culture’s history of itself will be somewhat self-serving, casting itself in the role of good guy, emphasizing its virtues and minimizing its shortcomings.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“we could say that, since this reaction is a matter of degree, your worldview is modern insofar as experiencing other cultures in your own backyard gives you vertigo.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“cultural traditions are instructions for living: when we violate them, for instance by not having a Christmas tree or by serving pie at a birthday party, it can feel somehow wrong.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“Literature, not science or theology, is the master discipline, the paradigm of inquiry, for postmoderns.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“postmoderns have lost faith in the idea of objective verification. Instead, they focus on the persuasive power of the stories we tell”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“Inquiry—by which I mean learning, investigation, education, and the pursuit of knowledge in general—has a history. That is, how people have understood and approached inquiry has changed over time.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“For postmoderns, no knowledge is fully reliable and no concepts are absolutely indispensable.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“for instance, a sermon from Romans on the difference between the man under law and the man under grace may not make much impact, but a story illustrating the difference, like Les Miserables, might make an impression.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“the church is part of God’s plan for every Christian, that Christian selves are a work in progress that cannot be left to the culture at large, that discipleship is not an option for the spiritual elite but God’s command for everyone.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“We are born in both intellectual and moral darkness. We need the influence of the Holy Spirit—in the life of Jesus Christ, in the Bible, in the historical church, and in our own consciences—to enlighten us. Since modernity rejected all these things, it’s no wonder that it abounded in as much evil and discord as it has.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“The general idea of universal moral norms is ancient, widespread, and endorsed by practically every moral authority up until late in the modern period.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“Christians ought to be troubled by the postmodern rejection of moral absolutes. But in responding, the first task is to get our own house in order.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“For traditional Christians, the refusal to believe in moral absolutes is perhaps the most distressing aspect of postmodernism. The distress lies at the heart of what I called “the moral concern” with postmodernism in the first chapter. How should a Christian respond?”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“In the eyes of postmoderns, then, modernism has failed, both as a prediction of progress and as a moral framework for culture. As a result, postmoderns take distinctly anti-modern views on the deeper questions of human life: social, political, moral, and spiritual questions.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“Premoderns placed their trust in authority. Moderns lost their confidence in authority and placed it in human reason instead. Postmoderns kept the modern distrust of authority but lost their trust in reason and have found nothing to replace it. This is the crux of all postmodern thought.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“Faith in the power of reason is the central pillar of the modern worldview.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“The history of the church has reflected the evolution from premodernism to modernism in many ways. One clear example lies in the changing structure of worship services.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“Twenty-first-century American churches have a history and an institutional culture rooted in the modern or premodern periods—the twentieth, nineteenth, or earlier centuries”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“The ways you and I conduct our Christian lives and the churches we attend are culturally influenced,”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“Every institution is affected by the culture in which it lives and especially the culture in which it was born. That includes my church and denomination as well as yours.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“attitudes were increasingly rejected; and now, in the twenty-first century, much of the energy and creative thinking in our culture operates off postmodern assumptions.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“The modern period is defined by a distinctive worldview, forged in all its essentials during the Enlightenment, which we’ll label “modernism” for lack of anything better.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“sometime around the turn of the seventeenth century there began what is often called the modern period, or modernity.[1] It lasted, roughly, until sometime in the late twentieth century.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian

“Postmodernism is not a theory or a creed: it is more like an attitude or a way of looking at things. It didn’t drop out of the sky—it showed up at this juncture in history, in Western culture, for specific reasons that have to do with the history of the West.”
― Heath White, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian