Grentz's Primer is singled out by the articles in Reclaiming the Center because it is an important contribution to formulating a coherent view of postmodern thought; however, the direction that Grentz suggests in his conclusion is well-intentioned but misguided. A survey of recent intellectual thought within the Christian church shows the Grentz is within the missionary tradition of the church: he embraces certain aspects of postmodernism in order to reach postmoderns. The same desire gave rise to liberalism at the beginning of the last century: to reach adherents of enlightenment rationalism the gospel needed to accommodate itself to an intellectual world in which rational man was the center. Toward the middle of the twentieth century, neo-orthodoxy sought to communicate the gospel to existential man through a program of demythologizing the gospel, and form and redaction criticism. Likewise, Grentz seeks to convert postmodern individuals to Christianity by framing the gospel in postmodern terms. Like earlier attempts to convert people through by accommodating the message, there is a reaction. Some will embrace Grentz's program as a means of reaching the unchurched. Others, like the contributors to Reclaiming the Center, will reject Grentz's proposal as an unacceptable accommodation.
The fundamental question is whether postmodernism is compatible with historic Christianity. I do not believe that it is. First, Christianity makes universal truth claims. Jean Francois Leotard, the most famous European postmodern, in The Postmodern Condition defined postmodernism as "incredulity toward meta-narratives" because meta-narratives promise but cannot deliver. Christianity, like all philosophical systems, is a meta-narrative (cf. 1 Cor. 15; John 14:6f., 8:31f., 1:1ff., etc.). The gospel is a target for postmodern deconstruction because these truth claims are total and exclusive. Second, the Bible is a text that purports to be the word of God. Jesus said, "Thy word is truth" (John 17:17). For postmoderns, the authorial intent is impossible to assertain (contra E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation). And if intent could be assertained, it should be deconstructed because it is necessarily oppressive. Furthermore, if "every scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the person dedicated to God may be capable and equipped for every good work" (2 Tim. 3:16f.), then the subtext of scripture is oppressive. Postmoderns feel the need to deconstruct these oppressive elements to become liberators of a radical (Nietzschean) kind. Third, from its inception to the present, Christianity is fundamentally a belief system that can be expressed propositionally. The scriptures contain propositions or statements that can readily be transformed into truth claims. The historic doctrines and creeds for Christendom are expressed propositionally. Postmodernism rejects the validity of such claims. They are the social products of communities rather than discovered or disclosed truth. Grentz's evangelistic zeal leads him to seek accommodation with a school of thought that is antagonistic with what he holds most dear.
Those looking for a sustained engagement with postmodernism will be quite disappointed with this book. Essentially all it is is a collection of papers that attempt to refute the work done by Stanley Grenz. How it is that his work is so important to be singled out in this way is unclear to me. Most of the papers simply claim that postconservative evangelicals are ignorantly falling into a marass of relativism. However, despite inflamed rhetoric and passionate desires to preserve the status quo, there is very little substanial engagment with postmodernism in general or postconservative evangelicalism in particular.
Also somewhat annoying are the ways in which certain contributors tend to idolize Kevin Vanhoozer over Grenz (see Wellum's essay). Suffice it to say that they seriously misread both his work in general and his approach to postmodernism in particular. Vanhoozer has explicitly identified himself as a postconservative and a nonfoundationalist about which the contributors to this volume are either ignornant or simply choose to ignore.
What is particularly unsettling about this volume is how out of touch most of the contributors are with the current culture. There are many good critiques to be launched against postmodern thought (For some of these see the works of Kevin Vanhoozer, N.T. Wright and James K.A. Smith), but these authors don't even try to go there. Rather, we get this sort of head-in-the-sand approach which denies that postmodernity is a serious cultural and philosophical force that Christians must engage in a significant way. Millard Erickson and Jim Parker in particular are simply out to lunch when they try to claim that postmodernism is basically passe and everyone is returning to some kind of neoconservativism. Parker's term 'transmodern' is a good one, but he fails to understand the thinkers he puts in that camp (Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre) and those he terms postmodern. It is this kind of simplistic reductionism that really detracts from the book throughout. This railing in the dark may make western, white, male evangelicals feel more secure, but it simply fails to reckon with the profound cultural situation that the church is facing today.
Contrary to what these auithors so fancifully wish for, there can be no return to naive realism, commonsense empiricism or modernism as a whole. The best response that Christians can offer to postmodernism is to reaffirm their own narrative and attempt to extricate it from the cultural ghetto of both modernity and postmodernity (N.T. Wright, Lesslie Newbigin, Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton have been particularly good at pointing us int his direction). Postmodernism is indeed a precarious situation that must be engaged critically, but this book is simply a collection of shoody, reactionary and ultimately fear-driven sholarship. I would highly recommend that the discerning reader look elswhere.
