“No one comprehended the stark contrast between belief and unbelief like Nietzsche, and therefore none of the secular prophets depicted the implications of atheism as clearly as he did. Nietzsche brought the tradition of the secular prophets to its conceptual end by proclaiming that atheism was extremely costly. After Nietzsche, easy belief and easy unbelief proved impossible. As the culminating voice of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche foreshadowed the postmodern tradition that effectually eradicated the easy confidence in human nature and in rationality that was trumpeted by his Enlightenment predecessors.”
~ Richard Lints, “The Age of Intellectual Iconoclasm: Revolt Against Theism,” in Revolutions in Worldview, ed. W. Andrew Hoffecker (Phillipsburg, NJ; P & R Publishing, 2007), 301.
Categories: Atheism · History · Ideas · Postmodernism · Secularism
“The ordinary lie was but the omission or the contradiction of a truth, which still subsisted elsewhere and still judged us. But the diabolical lie denies the judge. It proceeds only from itself and proliferates autarchically, like a cancerous cell, introducing into the universe that sophism of pure anguish: the lie of no truth.”
~ Denis De Rougemont, The Devil’s Share (New York, NY: Meridian Books, 1956), 41.
Categories: Postmodernism · Sin · Truth
“We must . . . counter the postmodern despair of language with Christian delight, and the main reason we can delight in language is that we believe language is God-given (and hence reliable), and that we believe there is something beyond language to which our poems, our propositions and our prayers all point: the reality of the Creator and the created order.”
~ Kevin J. Vanhoozer, First Theology (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 33.
Categories: Language · Meaning · Postmodernism
