Quotes from Heath White

The history of the church has reflected the evolution from premodernism to modernism in many ways. One clear example lies in the changing structure of worship services.

Faith in the power of reason is the central pillar of the modern worldview.

cultural traditions are instructions for living: when we violate them, for instance by not having a Christmas tree or by serving pie at a birthday party, it can feel somehow wrong.

Premoderns placed their trust in authority. Moderns lost their confidence in authority and placed it in human reason instead. Postmoderns kept the modern distrust of authority but lost their trust in reason and have found nothing to replace it. This is the crux of all postmodern thought.

we could say that, since this reaction is a matter of degree, your worldview is modern insofar as experiencing other cultures in your own backyard gives you vertigo.

Every institution is affected by the culture in which it lives and especially the culture in which it was born. That includes my church and denomination as well as yours.

The ways you and I conduct our Christian lives and the churches we attend are culturally influenced,

Twenty-first-century American churches have a history and an institutional culture rooted in the modern or premodern periods—the twentieth, nineteenth, or earlier centuries

here is the nub of the issue between Christianity and postmodernism: what is freedom?

In the eyes of postmoderns, then, modernism has failed, both as a prediction of progress and as a moral framework for culture. As a result, postmoderns take distinctly anti-modern views on the deeper questions of human life: social, political, moral, and spiritual questions.

Postmodernism is not a theory or a creed: it is more like an attitude or a way of looking at things. It didn't drop out of the sky—it showed up at this juncture in history, in Western culture, for specific reasons that have to do with the history of the West.

Because history has the functions it has—supplying practical lessons and moral examples, shaping a culture's identity and even influencing one's view of destiny—it is no surprise that a culture's history of itself will be somewhat self-serving, casting itself in the role of good guy, emphasizing its virtues and minimizing its shortcomings.

sometime around the turn of the seventeenth century there began what is often called the modern period, or modernity.[1] It lasted, roughly, until sometime in the late twentieth century.

The modern period is defined by a distinctive worldview, forged in all its essentials during the Enlightenment, which we'll label "modernism" for lack of anything better.

for instance, a sermon from Romans on the difference between the man under law and the man under grace may not make much impact, but a story illustrating the difference, like Les Miserables, might make an impression.

the church is part of God's plan for every Christian, that Christian selves are a work in progress that cannot be left to the culture at large, that discipleship is not an option for the spiritual elite but God's command for everyone.

For traditional Christians, the refusal to believe in moral absolutes is perhaps the most distressing aspect of postmodernism. The distress lies at the heart of what I called "the moral concern" with postmodernism in the first chapter. How should a Christian respond?

Christians ought to be troubled by the postmodern rejection of moral absolutes. But in responding, the first task is to get our own house in order.

For postmoderns, no knowledge is fully reliable and no concepts are absolutely indispensable.

The general idea of universal moral norms is ancient, widespread, and endorsed by practically every moral authority up until late in the modern period.

We are born in both intellectual and moral darkness. We need the influence of the Holy Spirit—in the life of Jesus Christ, in the Bible, in the historical church, and in our own consciences—to enlighten us. Since modernity rejected all these things, it's no wonder that it abounded in as much evil and discord as it has.

Metanarratives give meaning to individual events, tying them together in the broadest possible fashion. They help structure all of life around a pre-ordained trajectory of history.

postmoderns have lost faith in the idea of objective verification. Instead, they focus on the persuasive power of the stories we tell

Literature, not science or theology, is the master discipline, the paradigm of inquiry, for postmoderns.