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Postmodernism presents a challenge to the Christian view of epistemology. What are some practical ways you, as a Christian educator, can respond to this challenge?
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The challenge is that things can’t exist if they aren’t directly pointed to. Faith, knowing something without clear evidence, challenges this idea. Personally, I call attention to the idea of intuition. Intuition is not tangible in any way, but sometimes we get a sense of what to do or what not to do, how someone will react, how to make choices to keep ourselves safe, etc. Not all things, including faith, are tangible, but it doesn’t mean that they are not real. It sounds like folks might us the example of if something is TANGIBLE … not everything is tangible!
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If our foundation is scripture and we believe it to be 66 books written by over 40 authors and we read and believe the whole book as the inerrant Word of God, then that sets the framework for our existence and our ways of knowing. The experience that we live in is framed by the Lord for our growth and learning processes is predicated on an understanding that there is an absolute truth and that is God, and we are separated from absolute truth by sin. This is counterintuitive to postmodernism which is predicated on emotionality, relativism, and humanism. Naturalism is also infused into that tincture to explain away universal laws set in motion by God. Without God, we don’t necessarily know what is good for us and a sin nature does not lead to thinking or doing what is right for others. Living with a social contract as posited by Rousseau doesn’t suffice because it is founded on nothing. Accountability, integrity, humility, and honour come only through more complete scriptural teaching/understanding. Postmodernism is the opposite, you move the goal posts to wherever one feels they need to be for the individual and there is not one that is righteous.
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By coming back to the Word regularly and pointing out that we experience the creation through the senses that God crafted for us. There are absolutes such as hot and cold. Just because someone says boiling water is cold, doesn’t make it so (which is what the postmodern movement is endorsing). We can then move on to the discussion of faith and how somethings cannot be experienced through our senses explicitly but that does not make them less real.
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I think one of the ways I address this issue is directly and explicitly. I tell my students that there are many in the world who think that there is no such thing as objective truth. We will discuss the difference between objective truth and subjective truth. Then we will discuss examples of objective truth. A single example of objective truth is sufficient to establish that there is such a thing as objective truth. Having convinced students that there are objective truths, pointing out the objective nature of the truth claims of the Christian worldview becomes a more plausible proposal.
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I think that turning to the Bible and looking at things that are unseen gives the students examples that confirm that Christ is above us. That our senses are not the only thing that cause us to know something. We can experience and know something without them.
