Peter

I think your prognostications about the rise and rise of post modernism are too gloomy. It is a term which in my opinion obscures far more than it illuminates and which in any event only has currency among a certain sector of academe.

People when they are not engaging in such speculation would never doubt whether something can be proved correct or incorrect, whether it is verifiable or not verifiable .

Our ordinary lives are full of judgments about what is correct or incorrect, probable and improbable and we never think of questioning their applicability. The law courts, construction, manufacturing, engineering, computer science, theoretical science, history etc etc take the use of these concepts for granted.

The only sense I can find in post modernism lies at the point where it overlaps with the Wittgensteinian concept of language game. According to Wittgenstein the rules and categories that apply in one language game or form of life may not apply in another and so the justification for a truth claim in one may be quite different from that in another eg the standards of proof that apply in legal processes are not the same as those in physics. Another example is in ethics where modernist notions of objectivity in truth are misleading ( so that, for example, one person cannot delegate to another the task of determining what she should do on an ethical issue in the same way she can on a technical issue).

You and I are at one in thinking that questions of truth and error apply to history. Where we have disagreed is on the role of history in understanding Christianity. I think the historical record is meagre and you do not; you think it is critical that we are able to say that eg the resurrection is well founded historically and I do not.

There are several kinds of ‘why’ questions we can ask about the resurrection. One is why we believe. The answer to that, in my view, is that we believe in the resurrection because of its integrity with Christ’s life and with the broader story of God’s dealings with mankind. The question of the historical evidence poses a second kind of ‘why’? It asks whether it really happened- whether it is intellectually respectable to believe such a thing. If the evidence is meagre (which, in my opinion it is, given how extraordinary an event it was) are we then to say that, in believing it, we have failed in our intellectual duty. Was that what troubled doubting Thomas?

What we (or at least I) need to understand better is where to draw the lines between intellectual rigour, faith and superstition.

 Paul