Just so you get a feel for the variety of meanings, know that the word originated in the field of architecture. I think modernism in architecture may have had something to do with right angles, and postmodernism in architecture may have said something about the need to make buildings that fit into their environment. Check wikipedia.com to confirm that if you're bored.

The popular misconception of postmodernism suggests that there is no such thing as truth, and this is, of course, a heresy, as well as self-contradictory: "There is no truth (except the truth that there is no truth [except the truth that there is no truth {except the truth that there is no truth . . . }]), etc."

Anyways, properly understood, postmodernism doesn’t say that there is no truth so much as it says that truth is pretty hard to get at. Or hard at which to get. Or maybe there is no truth about grammatical rules, except the truth I make up. Ok, up which I make. Lousy Writing Center.

So . . . what I'm talking about is pretty much philosophical postmodernism. The most important sorts of postmodernism are this one, and the popular misconception described above, and the postmodernism that English teachers like to use. I don’t know much about that last one; you'll have to ask your English teachers; but maybe I'll remember to mention why and how it apparently came about from philosophical postmodernism, which is explained below.

Anyhow, we shall first define what is a narrative. I love dictionary.com like I love wikipedia.com (I started their article on the Christian Worldview, which was later hijacked by some bloke), but dictionary.com's definition is insufficient. We're looking here at The Postmodern Condition, a splendid (green) little book by Jean-Francois Lyotard, who in spite of his funny name wrote a dern good book, from which this essay is more or less drawn. This book is the official definition of postmodernism, or at least it's the closest thing we have to an official definition. Narrative here is defined as the stories and traditions a culture has, the traditions that pass on values from one generation to the next, the stories that show a person in that culture how to live. For the ancient Greeks, one narrative was the Odyssey. Odysseus exemplifies virtues like courage and cleverness, virtues valued by the Greek culture. Greeks are taught to value cleverness and courage by hearing about their culture's traditional hero. We're not entirely separated from this sort of thing today; you watch a movie, and you want to be smooth like Bond (even though Bond’s a total loser), or honorable like Aragorn, strong like Spiderman.

Every culture has (or used to have) their own narratives, their own traditions, their own stories and values. You hear these stories your whole life, and you want to exemplify the virtues exemplified by those stories. That’s a narrative. It legitimizes, for a culture, that culture's way of life. A metanarrative, now, is a story that tries to force itself on all cultures. It tries to legitimize itself for everyone.

Like we said, postmodernism is that which comes after modernism. Modernism has a metanarrative: science. See, modernism with its annoying little science story tended to wreak havoc upon all narratives, but it had to get its own narrative to legitimize itself. So it got a new thing: it was the first metanarrative. The story of modernism is that, through our human reason and our technology, we’ll make things better and better on earth and we'll probably even make a utopia after a while.

So, anyways, postmodernism hates that, for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that modernism is mean. Like girls. At least that's what some of my homies say, but some of my female hommies may disagree. I'll let them fight about it. But modernism just doesn't work, anyways. The human mind cannot contain the universe. That’s why postmodernism typically spends a lot of time thinking about what we can know and what we can't. In postmodernism's most basic form, all that’s required to call yourself 'postmodern' is to have a problem with modernism and think that human reason can’t contain the universe. Which it can’t.

Merold Westphal is a neat chap, who does something or other at Fordham university. Westphal's a major thinker for Christian postmodernism. He says that there’s a difference between Truth–that is, absolute Truth, the way things really are, the way God, for instance, really is–and . . . between truth–that is, truth as we know it, the way we know God, for instance. Now, Truth-with-a-big-T is how God knows himself. Truth-with-a-little-t is what we know about God. God is infinite, so Truth-with-a-big-T is infinite. We are finite, sinful, pathetic little wusses, so the truth-with-a-little-t about God is the way finite beings know the infinite. So Westphal thinks that postmodernism has a lot to offer to Christianity in the way of reminding us our finite capability for knowing things.

The Merold Westphal book from which the previous paragraph is drawn is, by the way, Overcoming onto-theology, a splendid book really.

Now, the postmodernism about which many Christians are worried works, best I can tell, like this: it realizes that not everything can really be logical, but it forgets to actually call modernism wrong in trying to put everything within the jurisdiction of logic. So it starts to say that there can be good things that are within the jurisdiction of logic but are not logical. You know what fits those criteria, right? The illogical, the absurd.

Basically, it's an overreaction to modernism. This sort of postmodernism is an obnoxious but–thank the Lord–unnecessary . . . heresy.

Ok, it looks like I didn't get around to explaining why English teachers have so much power in the postmodern era; maybe I'll update this essay later. Till then, or till the end of time if I don’t get around to it, I really don't think it means anything to repeat the trite "have a nice day" for you one more time, so may the peace of Christ be with you.

–Mark Boone, Fall 2004