I appreciate what my friend John Armstrong has to say about postmodernism here. The postmodernists have climbed into the car of modernity’s premises, and have driven it into a tree. What the postmodernists do not appear to grasp, however, is that mumbling incoherently to oneself in the wreckage of that old car does not constitute having a new car. Not even if you say vrooom to yourself and imagine that you are toodling down the road, bottle of Jack Daniels still intact and still in hand.
But then along come some evangelical Christians who (for some inscrutable reason, best known to themselves) want to identify themselves with the postmodernists. What they are doing is slowing down their vintage Mercedes of Trinitarian bright red orthodoxy, with not a scratch on it, to do a little rubber necking at the accident. “With a little epistemic humility, there is quite a bit we could probably learn from that learned fellow! And if we crawled in there with him, we could crawl back out again. And then we would be an Emergent Church, emerging (but not too far!) from the Shattered Windshield of Modernity!”
Christians should not overstate our opportunities in this. Postmodernism is only a good development in the same way that the prodigal son envying the pig food was a good development. The point is for him to return to the Father, and not to acquire a taste for the food in the trough.