The Petrine admonition to "give a reason for the hope that lies within you" is the biblical anchor for the interrogation and exploration of the data of revelation that constitutes "theological inquiry." This process of intellectual inquiry is the enduring task of communities of faith, aptly captured in the revered axiom of St. Anselm, "fides quaerens intellectum" (faith seeking understanding). The ordering of faithful, gospel life with life in the world always occurs in the context of specific settings of time and space. Responding to new challenges and demands is a dynamic process of engagement with diverse and oftentimes, "conflictual" construals of life and its ultimate meaning. Whether it is the gathering of the apostles in Jerusalem at the first ecclesial council (Acts 15), or the contentious Christological debates that characterized the councils of Nicea, Chalcedon, and Ephesus, or the missionary outreach of the Christian community that now reaches into every part of globe, these challenges have required the willingness to engage forthrightly and critically, patterns of thought that both converge with and diverge from the ongoing, lived experience of the Christian community.
As Cardinal Newman, the leading Anglican/Catholic theologian of the nineteenth century observed, "in heaven it is otherwise, but here below, to live is to change, and to live well, is to have changed often." For Newman, "change" did not imply wholesale departure from the substance of the Christian deposit of faith, but rather a willingness to plumb its depths, to perceive new lines of development that tap into the vibrant power of faith and action. Theological reflection, then, is a critical task, a task at once holding fast to the accrued wisdom of the church, but is also willing to risk the promise of an encounter with the "stranger" who may come in the guise of diverse races, cultures, and genders, and intellectual traditions. Such engagement, then, is nothing new, and the fact that we continue this process in our own time, with new questions, perhaps, that have arisen from the emergence of both "modern" and "postmodern" assessments should not alarm us. As with every encounter with the "other" there is both danger and opportunity. "Postmodernity," I suggest, presents both of these realities, much like the twinned masks of comedy and tragedy that symbolize the stage and theatrical drama.
My task in this paper is to suggest how theological schools might engage critically with the cultural and intellectual challenges that come under the rubric of "postmodernity." The very term "postmodern" is subject to intense debate about its meaning, and I do not intend to enter into an exhaustive discussion or critique of this literature. However, I do want to make clear my operating understanding of the term "postmodernity" in order to situate my remarks about its implications for us as theological educators for the task of accrediting schools of theology.
In one of her sonnets, the American poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, writes: (1)
"...Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Falls from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts... they lie unquestioned, uncombined.Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric..."
This absence of "loom to weave it into fabric" highlights a characteristic of a postmodern ethos, namely the perception that there is no controlling meta-narrative or grand conceptual scheme to order the complexity of reality. In the apt phrase of the evangelical theologian, Stanley Grenz, the hallmark of postmodernity is "centerless pluralism," or, as the Irish poet William Butler Yeats has remarked in his powerful poem, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," the perception that "the center does not hold." The twentieth century's witness to two global conflicts, genocides and other forms of mass murder, certainly gives one pause about the Enlightenment confidence in the power of reason to conquer, alone, the forces of darkness. To a large extent, postmodernity is a reaction to modernity, hence the emphasis on "post" modern. The "modern" world, for my purposes, and according to my interpretation of the literature, is code language for the Enlightenment project of the 18th century to accentuate the capacity of human intellectual capacity, "reason," to order and improve the world.
According to postmodern critics, the success of Enlightenment reason in science, industry, politics, economics and social relations has often privileged the pragmatic, utilitarian and technical uses of knowledge leading to forms of discourse that are powerful tools for preserving the particular interests of stakeholders in a given power structure. The unmasking of such "totalizing" interests by intellectual, economic and political elites in society has lead postmodern "masters of suspicion" to a strategy of resistance by affirming the irreducibility of the "other." The central commitment to the "face of the other" constitutes for the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who was deeply affected by the Holocaust of the Second World War, the fundamental moral imperative for ethical analysis.
For my purposes, the term "postmodernity," does not speak to a single but many expressions of intellectual, moral and spiritual concerns. Accordingly, I find quite useful the appraisal given to these concerns by the American philosopher of religion at Fuller Seminary in California, Nancey Murphy.(2) Relying on the resources of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Murphy reviews three critical issues that have an impact on philosophy, and I will contend, also have an impact on theological education.
The first issue surrounds the philosophy of language. Critical philosophical work has shifted the understanding of language from an "expressivist-referential" model to a different conception of language as "use" and as an action situated and driven by social conventions. The "expressivist-referential" model reflects a perspective that sees language as "picturing" or representing a state of affairs. The image of language as a "mirror" exactly portraying or corresponding to states of affairs in the world was actually quite restrictive in its range of application. In this conception, discourse that did not fit into a narrow "picture-theory" such as ethical analysis or religious understandings, was marginalized and dismissed as lacking meaning.
By drawing a sharp and impermeable distinction between "facts" and "values," logical positivists asserted that ethical reflections could not be objectively assessed and assigned them to the realm of private feeling or subjectivity. Thus characterized as "emotivist" preferences of the individual, ethical discourse was effectively removed from any publicly defensible warrants for justification of its truth claims. To the contrary, the work of Wittgenstein and his followers has unmasked this flawed understanding by highlighting the multiple purposes served by language schemes, and it has demonstrated the need for language users to cultivate the skills necessary for communication in a variety of contexts, including ethics and religious discourse. According to Murphy, this critical re-conceptualization about language opens up new possibilities for ethical and religious understandings as participants in the larger public conversation about life, its purpose, and ultimate meaning.
The second impact of contemporary Anglo-American postmodernity,
deals with the philosophy of knowledge, epistemology. The reigning
model of knowledge in the West, inherited from Rene Descartes,
is a picture of knowledge as resting upon indisputable building
blocks, or "foundations." According to Descartes, only
these foundations can secure knowledge from the corrosive effects
of skepticism and relativism. However, the critical weakness with
"foundationalism" is that the purported foundations
are not immune from the inherent historicity, context and particular
settings from which they emerge. The alternative to foundationalism
is not necessarily utter relativism or perpetual skepticism. Rather,
knowledge is better approached not as series of impervious building
blocks, but as a web or network of interactive strands of meaning
that influence one another and provide self-correcting strategies
that respect, on the one hand, well-established traditions, and,
on the other hand, blend an openness to new insights and conceptualizations.
In other words, the postmodern turn from the solitary epistemology
of modernity and its Cartesian, mathematical certitude about reality,
to the social epistemology of knowledge as a skillful "dance"
with many players does not entail a collapse into relativism,
but rather a humble awareness that all of our knowing is a "partial"
purchase on the complexity of reality.
Related to these two features of Anglo-American postmodernity, is Murphy's third observation that the philosophy of science has shifted in a similar vein. Because reality itself is complex, it must be interrogated not with a singular, empirical lens, but with multiple research paradigms that are better attuned to grasping the complexity of the scientific enterprise. Atomistic thinking, that is, the view that reality is composed of irreducible bits of matter, has collapsed as we have begun to understand the systemic impact of organizational structures when individual elements of matter are gathered into complex "wholes" such as organisms or organ systems. According to Murphy, philosophy of science has begun to see the integration of such multiple systems as evidence not only of "bottom up" knowledge, the traditional perspective of the individual experimental disciplines of chemistry, biology, physics and so on, but also the "top down" influence of larger conceptual matrices that interact with and alter the causal links among the individual elements of the system.
According to Murphy, different metaphors emerge from a critical engagement with postmodern thought. The common thread in these new metaphors is that they help overcome some of the "reductionism" in the Enlightenment project of modernity. Language is not a picture but an action rooted in social conventions and appropriate rules for knowing how to go on, akin to Wittgenstein's metaphor of language as a form of rule-governed activity like a game, e.g., chess or cricket; knowledge is not so much a construction site of building blocks or foundations, but a web or network of convictions, beliefs and concepts that are historically conditioned by traditions of intellectual inquiry; and reality is multi-faceted, characterized by "top-down" organization, as well as by "bottom-up" structures of organization. The interplay between individual organs in the human body and the functioning of the body as a whole exemplify these interrelated patterns of organization. Murphy's appraisal of these postmodern moves avoids the corrosive relativism to be found in certain strands of postmodernity, for example, the textual relativism of Derrida.
Derrida shares with his philosophical contemporaries a concern to resist the reduction of the "other" to the unifying abstractions of the modern philosophical tradition. "Alterity," Otherness, has primordial status, and texts can imprison and obfuscate as well as liberate and enlighten. "Logocentrism," or the tyranny of imposed meaning and tradition, is to be continually subverted by a process of "double-reading." Simon Critchley refers to this Derridian strategy as "clotural" reading, a word trading on the French term that implies not only an enclosed space like a convent or cloister, but also a boundary that suggests or intimates a surplus of meaning that is hidden from view.(3) Murphy astutely notes, in my view, that these tactics of Derrida only make sense provided that he presumes an understanding of the text that is not subject to his "free play" strategy of endless critique.
To summarize, postmodernity captures a bewildering array of responses and reactions to the modern project of the Enlightenment to ground knowledge or "reason" as a timeless, universal construct, immune from the corrosive forces of history, the contingent, the particular, or the individual human subject. This enduring dream of modernity, however, should not be minimized or dismissed out of hand, and it has realized many achievements such as a concern for universal human rights, a concern for justice and equality, that deserve commendation and praise. The postmodern turn with its resistance to "totalizing" universal schemes, its affirmation of "differ(a)nce" and its commitment to the singular, particular, contextual nature of reality, can be seen as a complementary and necessary "correction" to the weaknesses of modernity. These weaknesses, as argued persuasively in my view by Nancey Murphy, are distorted, minimalistic notions of language, "foundationalism" in epistemology, and univocal understandings of scientific research.
What, then, are some implications of this admittedly selective assessment of postmodernity for the enterprise of theological education? According to Evangelical theologian, Stanley Grenz, a critical assessment of the limitations and assets of postmodernity poses some opportunities for re-shaping theological education, a perspective that is also shared by Catholic theologian, Thomas Guarino. Allow me to reprise some of these perspectives and then I will conclude with some implications of these reflections for those of us involved in the activity of accrediting theological education.
For Grenz, there are many "posts" in postmodern philosophical assessments that bear consideration by theologians, and that are promising for re-conceiving the theological task in response to the challenge of postmodernity.(4) Grenz is quite clear that Christian theology must stand firm against the postmodern rejection, tout court, of any "universal" or unifying center to reality. In other words, wholesale rejection of "metanarratives" or "universals" is not possible if Christian witness is to maintain its identity and credibility. Nonetheless, Grenz finds sympathy for the postmodern critiques of Enlightenment epistemology, especially its rejection of Enlightenment optimism about the capacity of human reason to deliver timeless and objective truth. In postmodern critiques, reason is capable of error, a theme that is coherent with Reformation doctrines concerning the prevalence of sin in human judgments. Moreover, Grenz finds a warrant for Christian endorsement of the critique of Enlightenment objectivity in the Augustinian tradition with its emphasis upon personal convictions and historical location as crucial components of our ability to know truth. This conviction equally provides a warrant for suspecting the Enlightenment assumption about the goodness of knowledge, given our experience of splitting the atom and the prospect of the abuse of genetic science in our own times.
Grenz argues that a "post-individualistic" gospel can emerge from the postmodern critique of absolute autonomy. In particular, the emphasis on communitarian forms of discourse and action actually enhances the Christian conviction about the importance of the Church and its Trinitarian structure as a communion of saints in fellowship with the Trinity. A second positive outcome from postmodernity is the emergence of a "post-rationalistic" gospel, that is a gospel that is not "anti-intellectual" but rather a gospel that is open to "mystery" and a humble awareness of the inadequacy of human propositions, no matter how well-crafted, to capture the fullness of God's life and action in the world. Propositions or doctrines, then, are "second-order" discourse that depend upon the revealed, lived experience of God's ways with us. Catholic theologian, Cardinal Avery Dulles S.J., echoes a similar thought in his book, The Survival of Dogma, in which he points out that dogmas are "entry-points" into the mysteries of faith and are not exhaustive descriptions of the fullness of their meaning.(5) For Grenz, postmodern critique can be helpful in achieving a "post-dualistic" gospel, that is, one in which artificial dichotomies such as that between "body" and "soul" can be overcome with a deeper sense of holistic salvation that is inclusive and relational, that holds together not only the "intellectual-rational" features of our humanity, but also the "emotional-affective" aspects as well. Finally, Grenz favors a "post-noeticentric" gospel, committed to the pursuit of "wisdom" that integrates faith with intellectual insight rather than the Enlightenment ideal of reason alone as the means to achieving a just and equitable society.
From an Evangelical perspective, therefore, Grenz is critical of some aspects of the postmodern turn, but also finds within its critiques positive resources for re-casting and re-shaping the mission of the church to spread the gospel. Thomas Guarino, a Catholic theologian, has written insightfully in the same vein.(6) According to Guarino, while Catholic theology has learned a great deal from postmodernity, he shares with Grenz a need to depart from some of its more radical claims. To cite but one example from Guarino's richly and finely honed essay, postmodern concerns about the irreducibility of the "Other" are indeed valuable reminders that theological language can never encapsulate or fully capture divine mystery. The long apophatic tradition of theological discourse that emphasizes the "via negativa" is reflected in the work of the Cappadocian Fathers, especially Gregory Nazianzen, and in Aquinas. For Guarino, theologians who have embraced postmodern critique, for example Jean Luc-Marion in God Beyond Being, have underestimated the depth to which the classical tradition was aware of the limitations of language to speak of the Ultimate Other, God. Against the postmodern suspicion of any enduring textual meaning, Guarino maintains that theological language must have some degree of intelligibility to "refer" to God in order to preserve identity and continuity in the tradition. In other words, a modest appropriation of postmodern insights can be of great assistance in maintaining a critical sense of the theological task, but wholesale rejection of the tradition is not a necessary conclusion flowing from postmodern critiques of the limitations of language and epistemology.
Given these appraisals of postmodernity, what are some implications for those of us involved in the process of assessment of theological education and accreditation of theological schools? In thinking about this question, I reviewed the process of redevelopment of the standards of accreditation in the ATS, and detected several implications for theological education. A critical assessment and retrieval of some postmodern themes can provide some interesting support for the following objectives of theological education that are woven into the redeveloped standards adopted by the ATS at its Biennium in 1996: (1) The cultivation of critical thinking skills captured in the concept of the "habitus" of theological reflection; (2) Integral learning, that is, holistic education that integrates intellectual mastery of the tradition with pastoral competence, and personal, spiritual capacities of the candidate, and (3) A public, dialogical set of capacities to engage the pluralistic, diverse, global context of theological education and ministry.
When the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada determined that the existing accrediting standards which had remained virtually unchanged for more than thirty years required updating and development, it wisely embarked on an association wide project to re-imagine and "re-vision" the standards. The "Quality of Theological Education" project began with a series of intentional conversations to explore the expectations of the Churches and seminaries with respect to the fundamental purposes of theological education. This undertaking was greatly assisted by timely monographs by thoughtful theologians who had been grappling with precisely the kinds of questions that I have previously outlined. Among this research, the books by David Kelsey, Between Athens and Berlin: The Theological Education Debate and Edward Farley's, Theologia, The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education, are particularly distinguished for their insight into the contemporary postmodern landscape and for their diagnosis and prognosis about the challenges facing theological education.(7) Kelsey's book highlighted the historical setting of theological education in the West, particularly the "Berlin" model of theology as "Wissenschaft" or scientfic knowledge. This shift of theology from its traditional anchor in the Church to the academy as represented by "Berlin" has become increasingly problematic and Kelsey argues that formation for ministry continues to be an essential context for understanding and "doing" theology. Farley's volume addresses the fragmentation in theological scholarship, and argues for a return to the classical Athenian ideal of wisdom or "paideia" as an integrating component of particular theological disciplines.
From these conversations and this research, the standards were re-written completely. Indeed, there are some interesting "postmodern" concerns reflected in the standards. There is clearly a recognition of enduring, but adaptive, normative patterns that are essential and non-negotiable, for example, theological scholarship understood as embracing teaching and learning as well as individual, faculty research, commitment to quality improvement by ongoing and demonstrated practices of evaluation. Essential resources such as faculty, information technologies, financial capacity, appropriate governance mechanisms, continue to be normative and are reflected by the use of the word "shall" to indicate that compliance is required. On the other hand, there is flexibility in recognizing that the standards can accommodate a complex and diverse constituency of schools, including Orthodox schools, Evangelical traditions, and Roman Catholics in addition to the founding institutions of ATS, the mainline Protestant seminaries and university-related divinity schools.
The standard on governance, for example, is intentionally capacious in its expectations, to accommodate a wide variety of patterns in ATS schools, including those schools who have strong confessional commitments, such as the community of Southern Baptist seminaries and the Roman Catholic schools, whose "nesting" within the larger governance structures of their respective churches, does not, therefore, entail an inability to fulfill their mission and purpose, as well as to secure appropriate academic freedom for their faculty members.
Furthermore, the standards are imbued with an ethos of quality improvement of theological education, and use aspirational language, captured by the word "should" to invite this ongoing reflection and assessment. There is a "web" like use of key themes that permeate the standards. These themes are planning and evaluation, freedom of inquiry, diversity, and globalization. That is, these attributes are "woven" throughout each of the degree standards so that they permeate the ethos of the standard, rather than being confined to a separate standard. The emphasis on diversity in terms of race and ethnicity, as well as globalization (itself a term subject to multiple interpretations), is not a nod to passing fads in postmodern culture, but stem from a theological conviction that respect for the "other,"for the "stranger" in our midst, is a value embedded in the gospel and not merely a product of postmodern philosophy. The standards are normative, and they also encompass a recognition that there are many valid ways of meeting the criteria for fulfilling the requirements for accreditation. The heightened awareness of diversity is a recognition, flowing from the "Quality in Accreditation" Project that tilled the soil for the newly re-developed standards, that the "modernity" stemming from the Enlightenment, is also the product of a particular, social, political, economic and intellectual location. For that reason, the intrinsic character and irreducible value of non-European cultures and religious traditions cannot be subsumed or interpreted exclusively through an Enlightenment, Euro-centric filter. Each culture and religious tradition has its distinctive character and integrity and must be viewed in its own particularity. Certainly, critical conversation and interaction with other perspectives, including the contributions of Enlightenment philosophy, are part of the mix, but a positive appropriation of the postmodern resistance to "totalizing" or "reductionistic" schemes, is a contribution that has found its way into the standards.
Reflected in the standards is an appreciation of the complexity of preparing ministerial candidates for the service of the church. Theological education includes, certainly, a commitment to providing students with a critical and deep immersion into the patterns of theological thinking captured in the "classics" of the tradition. But, this intellectual mastery also requires the development and acquisition of formational capacities of personal maturity, character, and pastoral wisdom, to meet the demands of ministry. Assessing this complex panoply of skills and capacities is the challenge facing all of us in theological education today. For this reason, the reinvigorated conversation about theological reflection as a "habitus" or lifelong skill of integrating theology rigorously into one's affective and relational ministerial skills, seeks to overcome the "fragmentation" of modernity as identified by Edward Farley.
In my view, postmodern thinkers who insist on resisting "totalizing" intellectual strategies that assume "universal" consensus remind us of the importance of keeping the conversation going, rather than stopping the "flux" of thinking. Heidegger's emphasis that Dasein, "Being," manifests itself by way of disclosing in time and history a dialectic of both "presence" and "absence," as well as Derrida's maddening word-plays, that he calls "clotural" readings of texts that "de-construct" our "closed" understandings of textual meaning, show us the complexity of reality and the difficulty of reaching "absolute" certainty, or certainty of any kind at all.
While I accept the admonition to epistemological humility, I do not think that complexity precludes our capacity to identify commonality and similarities in perspectives, including cross-cultural learning, nor as a Catholic moral theologian, do I despair of the possibility of arriving at "universalizable" ethical standards. It occurs to me that the postmodern resistance to any universal set of principles, or even the possibility of a metanarrative, is, paradoxically, a universal claim in its own right, dare I say, a postmodern metanarrative? I trust that I am not remiss in suggesting that being true to the postmodern spirit of critique indicates that this denial of universals or metanarratives deserves to be critiqued as well. The virtue of the tradition of "natural law" in Catholic moral theology has been its commitment to shared understandings of the moral life and the moral good that can be recognized by human beings "trans-culturally." The critique, of course, is that this desideratum has often been too optimistically conceived without recognizing the distortions that come from human limitations as well as human sinfulness. Like the Enlightenment ideal of reason, natural law philosophy has been subjected to the same postmodern critique, namely that in seeking a "birds-eye" view of reality, or as Thomas Nagel aptly states, "The View from Nowhere," both pure reason and natural law forget the particular locations from which they emerge, and the fact that every notion is, in my words, a "View from Somewhere."(8) It is interesting that those who are suspicious of natural law, nonetheless find other ways in which to address the real capacity of human beings to speak across particular locations and to arrive at moral consensus. Good illustrations of this process can be seen in the development of "narrative theology" and the emphasis on character and virtue as categories that name qualities that contribute identity and continuity to the moral enterprise. Otherwise, there is no possibility for any form of mutual understanding to occur.
A good example of the kind of tensions involved in a critical appropriation of postmodern insights can be seen in the work of Stanley Fish, dean of the school of liberal arts and sciences at the University of Chicago, Illinois. His op-ed piece about the 9/11 tragedy that appeared in the New York Times, "Condemnation Without Absolutes," while deeply sympathetic to postmodern suspicions of "universal" ethical constructs, nonetheless finds that there can be condemnation of horrors such as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States without necessarily becoming mired in the quest for false absolutes. It is hard to imagine a set of circumstances in which the 9/11 tragedy could not be condemned. Whatever merit Dr. Fish may find in being able to "walk in the shoes" of the terrorists in order to better understand their motives, I do not share his reluctance concerning the possibility of real and authentic consensus on moral matters even to the extent of agreement that there are principles, such as the killing of the innocent, that are capable of being judged to be "virtually exceptionless" in their scope and range of meaning. That it may be difficult to arrive at such norms I readily grant. However, the difficulty of the task does not mean that it is impossible, postmodern dogma to this effect notwithstanding.
I have come to the conclusion that postmodern thinkers have not brought an end to philosophy or theology for that matter. The image that comes to mind is familiar to those of us who travel by air. At the airport, we are accustomed to rigorous screening of our luggage. Postmodern thinkers serve as critical reviewers of our intellectual "luggage," including our theological traditions. In that capacity, they serve a useful function of detecting possible distortions or difficulties in the conceptual apparatus of our traditions, but their particular screens or filters are themselves subject to critical assessment. To the extent that good, critical questions identify "problems" in the luggage, they are helpful. But, good screening doesn't eliminate the luggage, nor does it prevent the luggage from reaching its destination. Embedded within these critiques or screens is the drive for totality, completion and wholeness that is never an achieved, once for all artifact, but rather an ongoing process of discovery.
As I read this literature, postmodern thinkers, far from dismantling the legacy of the philosophical tradition, are, for the most part, engaged in the normal activity of philosophy as a therapeutic exercise of exposing weaknesses and distortions in our understanding. Wittgenstein's examination of conundrums in the philosophy of language, including mind/body interactions, is an exercise in this kind of therapeutic appraisal designed to deliver us from "bewitchments to our intelligence" stemming from previous philosophical formulations. Theological education can derive some desirable insights from this kind of searching examination without, I think, losing its own soul in the process.
Theological education that equips students to think critically,
to embrace diversity from within a stance that values the irreducible
particularity and genius of the Christian tradition, to form ministers
holistically with integrated skills of intellect, heart, and pastoral
competence, and to engage the public square with a distinctive
voice, is the crucial challenge facing us as accreditors of theological
schools. To the extent that engagement with postmodern currents
galvanizes and energizes our capacity to meet the needs of the
church as it faces dialogue with the great world religions and
the enormous challenges of a planet that is becoming more and
not less connected, globally and across cultures, then it continues
to provide a useful tool for theological education. I have indicated
a few ways in which the standards of the ATS reflect some of these
trends. However, the distinctive identity and mission of theological
schools and the task of theological education are not threatened
by the challenge of critical voices that emerge in every age,
including our perceived "postmodern" age. Christians
are ever subject to the admonition "to give a reason for
the hope that lies within you." I intend that my remarks
provide some assistance in providing resources for meeting the
postmodern challenge today. At the very least, we certainly can
stand our ground with postmodernity as we meet, perhaps, on a
common footing, namely in the commitment so dear to postmodern
thinkers, that we "stay in the flux" and "keep
the conversation going."
Endnotes
1. Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Sonnet," in her collected
poems, Huntsman, What Quarry? (New York: Harper Brothers,
c. 1933): 92.
2.Nancey Murphy, Anglo-American Postmodernity: Philosophical
Perspectives on Science, Religion and Ethics, (Boulder, Colorado:
Westview Press, 1997).
3.Simon Critchley, Ethics of Deconstruction, Derrida and Levinas,
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
4.Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: William B.Eerdmans Publishing, 1996): 161-174.
5.Avery Dulles, Survival of Dogma: Faith, Authority and Dogma
in a changing world, (New York: Crossroads, 1982).
6.Thomas Guarino, "Postmodernity and five fundamental theological
issues," Theological Studies 57 (December, 1996, Issue
4): 654ff.
7.David H. Kelsey, Between Athens and Berlin: The Theological
Education Debate (Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans, 1993).
Also by the same author, To Understand God Truly: What's Theological
about a Theological School, (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John
Knox Press, 1992). Edward Farley, Theologia: The Fragmentation
and Unity of Theological Education, (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1983).
8.Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986).
