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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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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.
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I would explain to my students that the world is real, and that we experience the world that God created through our senses. However, there are truths that cannot be experienced this way; truths that can only be experienced through faith and a relationship with Jesus.
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I believe that drawing students back to an understanding of truth as objective rather than subjective and relative is vital. Hence, I do lessons demonstrating that T/truth, while having subjective aspects, is ultimately objective and demonstratable.