Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 21:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: Postmodernism
Author: Stewart E. Kelly

Postmodernism

Stewart E. Kelly

Stewart Kelly is professor of philosophy emeritus at Minot State University.

I met Bob Stewart in 2002, and in 2007 he graciously contacted me to work on a book in a series he was editing. For the last 15 years or so we have eaten dinner together on the first night of the annual ETS meeting. It has been a pleasure and a blessing to know him, and I write this with deep gratitude. It goes without saying that I look up to him!

The world is not what it once was.1 In the immortal words of Bob Dylan, “Things Have Changed.” For hundreds of years Western thought was dominated by what has been called Enlightenment Modernism, or Modernism for short. The Enlightenment2 is a broad movement that swept over Europe and the American colonies beginning in the 1600’s, most notably in the work of the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1595–1650). Prior to Descartes, the European worldview was dominated by the authority of the Bible, the importance of the Church, and a view of the universe in which God was at the center of things. The Enlightenment, which commences around 1660,3 and continues all the way to 1914 and the killing fields of western Europe and the senseless slaughter of World War I (the Great War). The Enlightenment challenged a number of beliefs, including the following:

• Belief in God – Under the influence of Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677), the French Philosophes, David Hume 1711-

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1776), and others, belief in God came under fire. Agnosticism4 and Atheism both became viable options, and even those who were theists gradually came to consider Unitarianism5 intellectually respectable.

• Original Sin – Many Enlightenment thinkers, John Locke (1632–1704)6 for example, came to reject Original Sin in favor of a more optimistic view of human nature. Humans were no longer sinners (by birth) before an unhappy God, but moral agents who possessed the ability to meet the demands of morality.7

• The Authority of Scripture – Prior to 1600 both Protestants and Catholics believed in the inerrancy of the Scriptures. The work of Spinoza, Jean LeClerc (1657–1736), and various German rationalists began to undermine confidence in the Scriptures.
• The Subordinate Role of Human Reason – Some thinkers8 began to champion the autonomy ...
  
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