RunRunRun . . .

Cultural relativists are in reality absolutely inconsistent in positing the fundamental principle of absolute equality, an apriori judgment based on an absolute value from their own culture. 

Cultural relativism is an ethnocentric fruit of the modern western view
that a thing is good if it is functional or efficient.

 

Nietzsche, the source of PoMo ideology?:

Quotables on Po'Mos:

The Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree
of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history. H. Blamires.

". . . a contemporary commitment to hermeneutical pluralism if not anarchy is demanded by postmodern experience, with a primary casualty being God’s Scriptural witness to his unified, redemptive and knowable presence in the world. Ironically this postmodern demand, itself totalitarian in its a priori debunking of all prior interpretive strategies, seeks sympathy by posing as the victim of totalitarian excess." Robert W. Yarbrough, "Variations on a Theme: History’s nth Great Hermeneutical Crisis," JETS 39/3 (September 1996): p. 447.

"Only a person who holds to biblical authority can truly practice cultural relativity." S. Grunlan, "Biblical Authority and Cultural Relativity," p. 57.

"Postmodernism is a challenge to the gospel because it grows out of the philosophy of the death of God. It is a form of literary atheism that cannot accept that the author’s intention is recoverable! The death of the author means of course the death of both the divine and human authors." Graeme Goldsworthy, Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture, p. 68.

"The Postmodern Critique: Motive as Power: postmodernism follows Nietzsche in seeing the most basic human most basic human motivation as the will to power. The dynamics of human power are the major force controlling the construction of language. Postmodern cynicism claims that the meanings of the words we use to think and speak with come to us having been shaped over the years by hundreds of power struggles. This of course includes the terms of political discourse, such as justice, freedom and democracy, as well as the words of the Bible, theology, ethics, and the creeds of the church. These words have no objective confirmation of their meanings. Their meanings have come down to us filtered through centuries of accidents, prejudices, squabbles and power plays.
    This uncertainty about meanings leads postmodernism to look with condescension on not only the serious, committed believer in God but also the serious, committed atheist in the same way. Both are naive to think that they can have any certainty about God—his presence or absence. Why? Because the words and ideas they use to think with are a product of such an arbitrary process. The conventional meanings of the words we use offer us no certain grasp of reality. They only reflect the interests of the cultural winners, the dominant groups that managed to gain and maintain power through history—in the rain forest academia, the legislature, the church, or in general culture.
    So, postmodern cynicism has two steps. First the postmodern surgeon has laid bare the fluidity of the meaning of our language itself. Second, he or she has claimed that the major factor that has controlled the shaping of language (and therefore our whole thinking process) is the desire for social power. As a result postmodern jargon is filled with deep cynicism about the meaning of words and texts, and the process of their interpretation and communication.
    We hear that "every text is a pretext," a smokescreen for some hidden agenda. You should read a text not to find out what the author is trying to say but what he or she is trying to hide. If meanings are so flexible, who is to say which interpretation of a given text is more accurate than another? Authority shifts away from a text and its author to the reader, whose reading is as reliable as anyone else’s reading.
    Ideals are deodorants to hide the smell of personal or group ambition. They hide the smell of ambition from the noses of both the oppressed and the oppressor so nobody realizes what is going on—except the postmodern surgeon. A new term has emerged in postmodern discussion: hermeneutic of suspicion. A person’s hermeneutic is his or her idea, principles and practice of how to interpret things. A hermeneutic of suspicion is a way of interpreting the world with suspicion as the primary lens through which an individual sees all that there is.
    Belief in God. How does specifically postmodern cynicism affect belief in God? Many who believe in God are grateful for the way postmodernism has pressed them to think more carefully about the shaping power of culture on language, and of language and its interpretation on all that we think and do. Postmodernism, at least in theory, is not as hostile to theists, those who believe in God, as the modernist enlighteners were. After all everyone has a cultural background, a community of discourse, personal beliefs and interpretations. There is room at the table for everybody, including believers in God—as long as they remember the conditions of their welcome.
    What are the conditions of welcome? I can believe in God, but I must be aware that my faith is only my private way of interpreting my experience, my culture, and the world." Dick Keyes, Seeing Through CYNICISM: a Reconsideration of the Power of Suspicion, IVP Books, 2006, pp. 60-61.

"WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM? Jean-Francois Lyotard (1907-1998), professor of philosophy, defined postmodernism as 'incredulity toward metanarratives.' Lyotard was suspicious of any story or account of the world that claimed to be absolute or all-encompassing—a metanarrative. Postmodernists are suspicious not only because of the limits of reason but also because such perspectives have been oppressive. Therefore, Lyotard, a deconstructionist, said we must take apart all metanarratives.
    David Lehman, in Signs of the Times (a brilliant and playful look at deconstructionisn), suggested that we could eliminate the letters c-o-n from this philosophical approach and call it by its real name: destructionisn. Lyotard and others of his ilk believe in the destruction of any objective knowledge of reality, morality literature or anything else. Or, Lehman suggested, we could also place the accent on the syllable "con" and say that any attempt to affirm knowledge is a con.
    More seriously, various postmodernists affirm the following:
· There is no objective view of reality. We are shaped by our culture. We can have "objectivity" by our cultural standards but no trans-cultural or supracultural objectivity
· Because we are so culturally determined, we cannot judge another culture.
· There are no facts, only interpretations. (Nietzsche)
· History is fiction. History is written from the perspective of the culture, race or gender of the writer. What is "historic" is totally subjective. It depends on the bias of the writer. (Poucault)
· Knowledge is power. We ought to be suspicious of any who claim to give us truth. They are out to further their own (and their group’s) vested interests. (Foucault)
· Ethica1 claims are mere sentiment. There are, for instance, no neutral grounds to condemn the Holocaust. (Rorty)
· Deconstruction is justice. We ought to explore and find the contradictions in every piece of literature so that we can uphold justice and avoid injustice. (Derrida)
· Whoever "spins" best wins. Since there is no objective truth, all we have is rhetoric. Whoever plays the game best wins. Make sure it is you. (Fish)"
Art Lindsley, TRUE TRUTH: Defending absolute truth in a relativistic world, InterVarsity Press, 2004, pp. 60-61.

"I am inclined to think that post-modernity is actually bringing forth a variant of modernity rather than a radical break from it. Post-modernity is really just modernity stripped of the false hopes that were once supported by the straw pillars of Enlightenment ideology, the illusions that once rendered modernity at least tolerable for many people. Their faith in the idea of progress proved to be the last Western superstition, and now it has died. But the essential impulses that brought modernity into being still remain. Post-modernity is proving to be the unfolding of the final stages of modernity." David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman's Publishing Company, 1994, p. 216 . See ibid., pp. 214ff.

"The children who have grown up or are growing up in the post-modern world bear its mark. They are cut loose from everything, hollowed out, eclectic, patched together from scraps of personality picked up here and there, leery of commitments, empty of all passions except that of sex, devoid of the capacity for commitment, fixated on image rather than substance, operating on the seductive elixir of unrestricted personal preference, and informed only by personal intuition. They are sophisticates haunted by ominous superstitions, brittle rationalists living in the grip of outrageous myths, shifting, aching beings who gaze on the world as voyeurs and whose vision of salvation has dwindled to nothing more than a fleeting sense of personal well-being. When these children shape a faith after their own habits, as they are doing in some evangelical churches, it does not much resemble the classic contours of historic Christianity." Wells, God in the Wasteland , pp. 224-225.

"I want the church to be an alternative to post-modern culture, not a mere echo of it. I want a church that is bold to be different and unafraid to be faithful, a church that is interested in something better than using slick marketing techniques to swell the numbers of warm bodies occupying sanctuaries, a church that reflects an integral and undiminished confidence in the power of God’s Word, a church that can find in our present cultural breakdown the opportunity to be God’s people in a world that has abandoned God." Wells, God in the Wasteland, p. 216 . See ibid., pp. 214ff.

"Recent proposals for church reform have rarely amounted to anything more than diversions. They tend, in fact, to lead the church away from what it needs most to confront. They suggest that its weakness lies in the fact that its routines are too old, its music too dull, its programs too few, its parking lots too small, its sermons too sermonic. They suggest that the problems are all administrative or organizational, matters of style or comfort. That is precisely what one would expect to surface in an age that is deeply pragmatic and fixated on image rather than substance. Real reform will have to look beneath the surface to see the poverty of spirit in the evangelical world, its lack of seriousness, its tendency to engage in superficial rather than penetrating analyses, its childish inability to withstand the diversions of flash, fun, and glamour." Wells, God in the Wasteland, p. 223. 

"Should we expect people to think long-term and make self-sacrificing, truly intergenerational decisions when in both the moral and philosophical realms there is very little consensus left in Western countries over the proper foundation for moral behaviour, moral authority, our theory of knowledge, and, ultimately, one's purpose for even existing? We live in a culture that has the audacity to tell us that truth does not even exist (despite the self-refuting nature of that statement), and that if truth did exist we could never know it anyway. Some refer to this as postmodernism. It is important to point out that although the nature of truth has been debated throughout the centuries, postmodernism has turned this debate on its head. While most arguments throughout history have focused on rival claims to truth, postmodernism rejects the very notion of truth as fixed, universal, objective, or absolute. As a result, we find ourselves in the midst of a culture without moral authority, or as legal scholar Stephen Carter calls it, a "culture of disbelief."
    "But as many astute thinkers and observers of history have pointed out, a culture that does not and cannot make moral judgements, and has jettisoned both its willingness to discern truth and its agreed answer to the question of the purpose of life, is surely living under the shadow of nihilism. There is no ultimate meaning, and ultimate reality (i.e. moral standards) is nothing more than what individuals determine it to be!"Jonathan M. Wellum, "Managing beyond our time," Comment, October 12, 2006.

"Looking intently we can see that behind these ubiquitous and seemingly innocent experiments of rejecting ‘antiquated’ tradition there lies a deep-seated hostility toward any spirituality. This relentless cult of novelty, with its assertion that art need not be good or pure, just so long as it is new, newer, and newer still conceals an unyielding and long-sustained attempt to undermine, ridicule, and uproot all moral precepts. There is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative, ‘the world is text,’ a text any post modernist is willing to compose. How clamorous it all is, but also--how helpless." Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the empty claims of post-modernism at the receiving of the National Arts Club medal of honor, 1993.

"The new model [of megashift theology] reflects a number of postmodernist tenets: downplay of absolutes; distrust of transcendence; preference for "dynamic change" over "static truth"; desire for religious pluralism so that people of other cultures and religions are saved; the downplay of God’s authority over us; the tone of tolerance, warm sentiments, and pop psychology. For all of its nice thoughts, however megashift theology strikes at the very foundation of any faith that can call itself evangelical—the good news that Jesus Christ died on the cross to atone for our sins and to offer us the free gift of salvation. At stake is the gospel itself." Gene Veith, Jr. Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture, Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1994, pp. 214-215.

    Postmodernists also dislike "fundamentalism," but not for the reasons modernists did. Postmodernists dislike fundamentalists not for believing in the supernatural holding to irrational notions, believing in things they don’t understand, or living in the past. Postmodernists are against fundamentalism for ‘believing in only one truth?’ Thus, postmodernists oflen accuse modernists of being "fundamentalists?
    Here is the great irony: Many of today's evangelical theologians, the heirs of the fundamentalists, are now embracing postmodernism Why? Because they think this new ideology will free them from the challenge of modernism. Not realizing that particular war is over, many evangelical theologians are enlisting postmodernism as an ally. In doing so, of course, they also have to reject, though for a different reason, the fundamentals of orthodox Christianity.
    The desire for God to be "open," the insistence that Scripture is indeterminate and open to infinite interpretation, the teaching that no one is damned, that there are multiple paths to God, that followers of other religions can be saved, are all manifestations of postmodernism in contemporary evangelical theology. So are evangelical feminism, calls to tone down biblical morality, "the emerging church:’ and the notion that our positive thoughts can create a new reality.
    The most common assertion of postmodernist evangelicalism is that "postmodern persons [they can’t say ‘man’ anymore] are unable to accept ready-made religious doctrines." The emphasis on believing objective Christian doctrines is too "modernist’ Rather, Christians are to be encouraged to cultivate their own subjective spirituality based on their personal experiences of the "mysteries’ of faith.
    In capitulating to postmodernism, these church people are ending up in the same place as those who capitulated to modernism. They preach an eviscerated Christianity that is incapable of changing lives or saving the lost. Trying to be relevant, they make themselves irrelevent. Trying to get people to come to church, they only succeed in giving them reasons to stay at home." Gene E. Veith, "Truth and consequences: Confounding the Postmodern Mind," Tabletalk, March 2006, pp. 62-63.

“The first sacrifice of pluralism is rationality, the second is intellectual integrity, the third is genuine tolerance, for in my experience no group is more intolerant than the committed pluralists.”
Letters Along the Way, D.A.Carson and J. Woodbridge, p. 181.