Page 3 of 7 | Original Research
We would do this not to exclude others or prove that our way is the only true way, but to give witness of how and why – rooted and grounded in our vision of God as a God of Love – we see things the way we do, how we conceive of justice, how we practise mercy. Along those lines and in that way, we invite others in turn to share their deepest beliefs and convictions for mutual learning and benefit. For the big question for all of us as world-citizens, whether Christian, Buddhist, Moslem, Marxist, Humanist, Hindu, Atheist, whatever, is how to sort out good worldviews – justice serving, mercy-effused, difference-embracing, life-affirming visions – from worldviews that do not serve justice, that exclude the other and different, that fuel discontent and feed greed. The sustainability of our planet, with its flora, fauna and peoples depends on such inter-faith negotiation. I say negotiation, because, for the stakes involved, conversation is far too mild a word.
That slow, often tedious, back and forth process of coming to
know and respect each other which belongs to an economy of love, does not, as we only know too well, eliminate the risk
of violence. The risk factor is inherent in the dynamic of love. However, an economy of love – risky and precarious as it is – provides the only alternative for meeting in the middle, for non-violent connections. Thus, although in our broken world it is difficult and risky to walk humbly and justly with those who are different and strange, it is not and need not be, in God’s grace, impossible.
The entire fragile process, fraught with apprehension and
anxiety, facing prodigious odds, the ‘rainbow nation’ of
South Africa, with its multitude of ethnic groupings and
eleven official languages knows only too well. When I visited
South Africa for six weeks in 1980, I never dreamt that in 15 years apartheid could or would be dismantled without a sea of bloodshed. Yet it happened. And today South Africa is continuing to live out that miracle of forgiveness, truth and reconciliation, however imperfectly, in fragility, with
lapses, on the way. The rest of the world stands in awe of the
courage, dedication and grace that South Africa exhibited.
Indeed, in this communal process of working-out and livingout a biblical worldview that embraces difference with justice
and mercy, the Christian churches and communities in South
Africa deserve to play a very important and distinctive role.
A limit to knowledge
Another positive distinction of Postmodernism is its dethronement of Reason. Reason is put in its place. This is big stuff, because Modernism placed supreme confidence in Reason (and Science) as the Answer to all of life’s problems, the royal road to knowledge, security and happiness. The ethos of Modernism is mastery, control and independence. Modernism asks: ‘What’s the problem?’ And then it says, ‘Let’s solve it! After all, we have the technology and knowhow. Any and every mystery – including the mystery of God – will eventually yield its secrets if we persevere.’
Postmodernism not only considers the claims of Reason
illusions that need to be unmasked, but marks them as
dangerous to people everywhere. In the public arena, Modernism insisted that we bracket, deny, or ignore the very key characteristics which make us unique. We were asked to keep our differences – of gender, race, and faith – at home, personal and private. In brief, Reason neutralised the other, with philosophical thinking in the West ‘in essence’
attempting ‘to domesticate Otherness’ (Gasche 1986:101),
achieve unity and effect closure. Emmanuel Levinas (1969:46)
argues that the modernist credo of mastery and control is ‘totalizing’, resulting in a ‘philosophy of injustice’. The
upshot has been that the ruling elites have passed off their
own agendas as the voice of reason, often with the insidious
consequence that the different and other, the less positioned
and unprivileged, particularly the weak, the marginalised and the poor – those whom the Bible calls the strangers, widows and orphans – are set aside and, if they resist, face
discrimination and retaliation.
Life, says Postmodernism, is more than logic. Not that there
is no place for science and reason; there is, lots of space, and there are many accompanying benefits. But there is a limit
to knowledge and knowledge is never disinterested, neutral,
atemporal, or aspatial. There is no such thing as Universal
Reason. Reason is never impartial. Reason is always in service
of wider and broader interests. In other words, knowledge
only reaches so far. Indeed – in shades of Augustine –
Jacques Derrida (1993:29) ends his Memoirs of the blind with
an emphatic confession: ‘I don’t know. One has to believe.’
Moreover, because human understanding is embedded in the very phenomena we are trying to understand, there are no
independent means of verifying the correct paradigm. There are no knockdown, airtight logical arguments that go all the
way down, proving a certain position as the unvarnished Truth. Grand narratives that claim to explain everything have lost credibility. No theory, no science will ever be able to encompass reality.
I think it is important to note the significance of the
postmodern limitation of knowledge for our advocacy of a biblical worldview. In the period of Modernism that developed in the West after Descartes, worldviews, including Abraham Kuyper’s Calvinist world-and-life view that has been of such tremendous consequence to us, developed under the primacy of intellectual thematisation. Perceptions of the world were identified with, and in the process transformed into, world-conceptions. Worldviews emerged as a framework of conceptualised beliefs, often defined as a set of dogmas. In other words, for the most part, worldview as an idea is still very largely intellectual, conceptual and rational. This perception is in fact so strong that Jamie Smith, a leading young Calvinist philosopher at Calvin College, suggests in his Desiring the kingdom that we replace the concept of worldview with Charles Taylor’s idea of the social imaginary (Smith 2009:63−71).
Indeed, as I read it, it is a major question whether what could be called the worldview ship can be pried loose from its intellectual moorings and retooled to do service in the often uncharted and tempestuous seas of faith and life. My wager
http://www.koersjournal.org.za | doi:10.4102/koers.v77i1.28
