I am continuing through the unfortunate book A New Kind of Christian, and a thought occurred to me about the very name postmodern. This came to me because the spiritual mentor in this book (a man named Neo) is primrose pathing the other guy, and one of the first things he does is draw out a timeline of history. There was prehistory, see, and then the ancient world, and then the medieval world, and then the modern world. The point of the setup is to get the inductee to see that there was a new period, a postmodernism that had just arrived. A new era had to be accommodated. Even granting that secular modernity has had it (which I do), it is kind of presumptuous to write the history of the next epoch based on what a couple unintelligible Frenchmen had to say. But that is not the point I want to make here. Postmodernism is nothing if not presumptuous.
The problem is that darn timeline, and the word postmodern. Post is a time indicator, a word that assumes the intelligibility of history. But is history intelligible? If so, on what basis? Is this timeline a postmodern timeline, or a modern one? Maybe it is a distinctively Trinitarian timeline. How do we know enough about history to call ourselves post-anything? Is there an objective correlation between our word Waterloo and the actual battle? How can we know? Between our use of the word postmodern and the actual relation of our era to the era that came before it? And will a postmodernist say there is an objective correlation? If so, then isn’t he really a modernist or something? And if not, then why does he call himself a postmodernist?
I don’t want to belabor this, or spend too much refutational capital on postmodernism. As I recently wrote in an article for an upcoming Credenda, postmodernism could be refuted by three toddlers with kazoos. But at the same time, a lot of people who should know better are giving it the time of day, and even people who are not persuaded by it are nodding as though some important contribution were being offered by these guys.