Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? (The Church and Postmodern Culture): Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church

cultural phenomena, for Schaeffer, are symptoms of philosophical shifts, not vice versa.

I will argue that the postmodern church could do nothing better than be ancient, that the most powerful way to reach a postmodern world is by recovering tradition, and that the most effective means of discipleship is found in liturgy.

“The first and chief defense of the gospel, the first ‘letter of commendation’ not only for Paul but for Jesus, is not an argument but the life of the church conformed to Christ by the Spirit in service and

apologetic; it is an apologetic.

What I describe

As such, Christianity becomes intellectualized rather than incarnate, commodified rather than the site of genuine community.

And recognizing such a continuity may require that we jettison some of our own modern presuppositions. Our Christian faith—and correlatively, our account of apologetics—is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reas

my strategy is “Schaefferian” in the sense that my primary audience is not just philosophers but practitioners—more specifically, Christians engaged in ministry in a postmodern world, as well as searching inhabitants of this postmodern world. As such, these essays are not an academic project per se.

The most significant continuity is that both deny grace; in other words, both modernity and postmodernity are characterized by an idolatrous notion of self-sufficiency and a deep