Postmodern Apologetics?

      Modernity is often labeled as the Age of Science, or as the Age of Reason, but I would like to add one more moniker: Modernity is also the Age of Apologetics. In modernity, traditional forms of authority (viz. Church and State) are rejected and human reason is re-imagined as universal and objective so that it can fill the authority vacuum. In other words, it is to Reason (as universal and objective) that one must look in modernity for the authority and legitimacy of one’s beliefs and actions (and one must do it for oneself!). What is more, moderns understand the “universal” and “objective” dimensions of human reason in terms of the modern ideals of secularism (religious neutrality), democracy (rule by the majority), science (empirical), and disinterestedness (unbiased opinion). Science, understood (roughly) as the free and disinterested attempt to unify the various dimensions of human sense-experience under a common theory, became the paradigm of rational inquiry—for philosophy as well as natural science. Subsequently, modernism challenges the very source and basis of Christian belief—for Christianity could hitherto claim very little by way of these modern ideals. It is little wonder, then, that Christians found it necessary to take up the arms of modern rationality and defend themselves. In short, in response to the attacks on Christian belief from modern philosophy, modern evangelical Christians developed a “scientific” apologetic, modeled after the philosophical method and rigor of modern analytic philosophy, which attempted to establish the universal rationality of Christian belief using the same “objective” and “presuppositionless” premises required by modern empirical science.

      My suggestion is that, in light of postmodern critiques of modernity, evangelicals should adopt form of apologetic that is kerygmatic in nature, rather than a modern “scientific” apologetic. Perhaps the model for the Christian thinker can be someone other than an analytic philosopher.

      But what sort of model should we have for apologetics—“the rational defense of the faith”—other than the analytic philosopher, with her emphasis on demonstrating or proving the propositions of Christianity are both universally and objectively true? Make no mistake: I greatly value the insights of analytic philosophy and admire its rigor, but perhaps we should consider the New Testament apostle (or Old Testament prophet) as an alternate model for our apologetic efforts.¹ Paul never tires of pointing out that apostles and prophets, unlike modern philosophers, do not predicate their authority on clever arguments, logical coherence, rhetorical brilliance, or anything like the modern conception of human reason, but on the divine source of their message. It is not so much that the apostle cannot or even will not engage in rhetorical brilliance or philosophical and logical argumentation—as St. Paul is certainly capable and often does; it is rather that the apostle does not base the authority of his or her message on his or her own intellectual resources. The apostle’s primary mode of address is, then, kerygma, proclamation or preaching, and any argumentation is a secondary discourse designed to facilitate the primary one.

      There are a number of reasons why we might want to consider the apostle as the exemplar for a new kind of apologetics. To begin with, the modern paradigm of empirical science does not accord well with the biblical portrayal of Christianity. Modern science—to be distinguished from the premodern paradigm of natural science—models the universe as brute and irrational and sees its task as directing the powers of human reason (conceived in the terms described above) toward the mastery of its object, having begged no questions with regard to its theoretical status. Søren Kierkegaard is the first modern thinker to perceive the deep-seated disparity between the modern scientific paradigm and biblical Christianity, and he subsequently argues vigorously that Christianity cannot be assimilated to modern science and philosophy as modern apologists wish.

      From the Christian point of view, the truth about Christianity cannot be found in modern-styled objectivity.² Not only does the essence of Christianity concern the desperate need of humans and God’s gracious (and personal) response to our need, but it also starts with the assumption that human being (including human reason) is unable to save itself. Christian truth presumes to master us, rather than to be mastered by us. In this case, whenever I try to establish the fundamental reasonability of Christianity in modern terms I remove its fundamental “offense” to reason and transform Christianity into something domestic, with nothing other than a cognitive claim on my life. Christianity, however, is a way of being, or what Kierkegaard calls an “actuality”—a way of living with and before God—and not just a cognitive event involving intellectual assent to a set of propositions. It involves the acts of God Himself in response to our condition as sinful persons and requires our being saved from this condition of brokenness and sinfulness through a total response that can only be described in theological categories like sin, repentance, and salvation the necessarily relate to the subjectivity of human being. These personal categories cannot be assimilated into the objective discourse of modern science and point to subjective realities that are more appropriately dealt with in sermons.

      I also want briefly to mention one other important problem with using modern (objective and universal) apologetic arguments to defend Christianity, though there are others as well. Modern objectivity refuses to acknowledge the ethical dimensions of arguments, and treats them abstractly and a-contextually, and ignores the personal and social dimension of reason. The trouble, of course, is that arguments always are situated and made by persons, and as such are ethical entities. Adopting a modern paradigm predisposes apologists to ignore that, first, arguments, like words, are more than just formal operations that yield true conclusions. Arguments never mean anything until they are used by persons in a social context to do something, and one may use a perfectly valid argument with all true premises to do something unethical (like, for example, belittle or domineer someone). A modern, objective approach to apologetic arguments also inclines Christian apologists to overlook the fact that their arguments may be used to support an oppressive and socially unjust form of Christianity, and therefore to that degree fail to justify actual Christianity.

      But what if we modeled our apologetic heroes after apostles and not analytic philosophers? What if we made love, and not modern rationality, the hallmark of our defense of Christianity, and took kerygma, not logic, as the form of our apologetic discourse?

      The sort of kerygmatic apologetics I mean to endorse is one that takes lightly neither issues of truth nor the rationality of Christian belief. Biblically, the basis for and motivation of kerygma is love, and this means that at the core of a kerygmatic apologetic will be a love-centered rationality. The irony of Christian love is that it is characterized by self-donation; it gives itself up to find itself. A love-centered rationality will have as its character an appropriate humility, a personal and social situatedness that takes human embodiment seriously (i.e., it is not a disembodied rationality) within an over-arching Gospel narrative and, above all, is characterized by an interest in the welfare and perspective of others. Postmodern evangelicals, however, do not thereby relinquish the pursuit of the Good, the True and the Beautiful, nor do they require that their interlocutors (i.e., their neighbors) to either. On my construal of postmodernity it calls us into even more serious and patient rational dialogue with those whom we disagree about the most important things than modernity, for it calls us to the dialectical task of recognizing alternate points of view and carefully establishing our Christian convictions in dialogue with them. There is, if you will, what we might call after Kierkegaard a “logic of insanity”³ that argues for the Socratic affirmation of “the superiority of heaven-sent madness over man-made sanity.”⁴ 

      The type of postmodern kerygmatic apologetic I envision will have several identifiable aspects. First, it will be occasional, not systematic or “universal.” The communication of God’s truth is not something the apostle presents as a scientific theory that is able to answer a set of theoretical questions. A kerygmatic apologetic will subsequently involve a particular person addressing a specific audience that has a concrete set of concerns about life, God and the world. It will not deal in hypothetical questions or answers that do not arise from the context of the audience’s lives and does not propose to offer answers that have not been personally won in the circumstances of the Christian’s own life.

      Second, a kerygmatic apologetic will be confessional. Its primary mode of discourse will be in the category of witness. An apostle does not present her message in the form of objective and universal truths but as a confession of or witness to a personal word they have received from God. A witness, then, is someone who confesses her convictions within the wider context of her life and therefore displays an existentially embodied argument. (And in the wider context of the Church, the Christian witness becomes a socially embodied argument.) The act of confession or witness subverts the modern subject-object split and provides the starting point for genuine dialogue and effective apologetic argument by honestly confessing one’s convictions and offering a starting point for dialogue. Witness is, in other words, what Stan Hauerwas calls, “the condition necessary to begin argument.”⁵ Witness doesn’t end arguments, but it determines the kind and shape that our arguments and apologetic dialogues will take. Witness creates the conditions for the intelligibility of the Gospel insofar as it demonstrates a way of being in which its claims make sense.

      Third, such an apologetic will also have an eschatological character that acknowledges its conclusions as finite, fallible and penultimate. The arguments and propositions of the apologetic witness will anticipate the new order inaugurated by the return of Jesus Christ and the full presence of God in which the truth is fully and finally revealed. As a result, the sort of reasoning of the apostle is from within a kind of mega-narrative that is a particular community’s story of the world (with global implications), as opposed to the meta-narrative of modernity, which purports to tell everyone’s presuppositionless story of the world.⁶

      Fourth, and finally, a postmodern kerygmatic apologetic is one that addresses the whole person; that is, it is holistic. Logical argumentation is one dimension of defending Christian faith, but insofar as it is Gospel, Christianity addresses the whole person and is concerned with issues of social justice as well as propositional or logical correctness. The goal, furthermore, is not one of rational domination but of “winning” the person over. Kierkegaard summarizes the situation nicely:

Long, long before the enemy thinks of seeking agreement, the loving one is already in agreement with him; and not only that, no, he has gone over to the enemy’s side, is fighting for his cause…See, this can be called a battle of love or a battle in love! To fight with the help of the good against the enemy—that is laudable and noble; but to fight for the enemy—and against whom? Against oneself, if you will—this, yes, this is loving, or this is the conciliatory spirit in love.⁷

¹ Here I am following Merold Westphal very closely in both the form and content of my suggestion. See his wonderful essay, “Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy of Religion That Will Be Able to Come Forth as Prophecy,” in Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982),1-18.

² Westphal, “Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy of Religion,” 10.

³ Once again, the phrase is Westphal’s. See Merold Westphal, “Kierkegaard and the Logic of Insanity,” in Kierkegaard’s Critique, 85-104.

⁴ Quoted in Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique, 87.

⁵ Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), 207.

⁶ Merold Westphal makes the distinction between mega- and meta-narratives in Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham U. Press, 2001), p. xiii.

⁷ Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), 335.

 Trying to define postmodern evangelicalism is undoubtedly a fool’s errand. Bruce Benson notes in his blog that there is no such thing as postmodernism, so it is an audacious act, indeed, to attempt to articulate how an evangelical Christian could also be “postmodern.” And there’s no telling what an evangelical is these days either. The appellation may mean anything from, “I believe in the divine, infallible, inerrant interpretation of Scripture”—as a freshman theology student of mine once wrote (mistakenly, I hope) in a theology paper—to, “I vote Republican,” or “I only listen to CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) and took a vow to remain a virgin until marriage.” In fact, during the run-up to the 2004 US presidential election, Jerry Falwell declared on National Public Radio (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3354001) that Jim Wallis, a founding editor of Sojourners magazine, was “as much an evangelical as an oak tree” simply because Wallis pointed out that the Republican Party does not have a monopoly on public morality in the USA (viz. gay marriage) and that some of the platforms of the Democratic Party, such as overcoming poverty and protecting the environment, are values issues as well.

  I can appreciate the irony in attempting to write about ministry to postmodern people in the midst of a culture in which “how to’s” are viewed to be as reliable as the wind. Of course there is no one prototype or model for the emerging church. The look of the church which ministers to postmoderns is as varied as the people it serves. However, I believe we can explore a posture of the heart through which the imagining of possibilities can flow.

The Bible, Theology and Postmodernism
However else evangelicals have identified themselves in North America, the doctrine of Scripture lies at the core of our identity and self-understanding. Over and against modern liberal theologians who accepted the dictates of higher criticism in regards to the Christian scriptures, evangelicals stood in the gap, refused to bend to modern attacks on the Bible, and developed an elaborate apologetic bibliology that asserted the full authority of Scripture and its propositional inerrancy. Couple this with the fact that many (most?) evangelicals perceive postmodernism as seriously compromising the ability of the biblical (or any other) text to say anything meaningful at all, it is understandable why a large contingent of evangelicals react to the encroachment of postmodernism on Christian thought with something comparable to an akinetic fit. Those of us who identify with evangelicalism but are also compelled by aspects of the postmodern turn need to be mindful of the historical value of the evangelical response to theological liberalism and how much our ability to be (self)critical of evangelicalism in a postmodern way owes to those early evangelicals. Nonetheless, it is my firm conviction that the traditional evangelical doctrine of Scripture1 needs to be retooled in the light of postmodern critiques of the modern philosophical framework in which evangelicals have situated their view of the Bible. I want to offer several brief insights as to what such a “retooling” might look like.

      Evangelicals also find ourselves in a world that has changed dramatically. Many ideas which we once believed to be “given” are now called into question. Increasingly, we have found that we have lost our voice in a world of pluralistic _expression. 

For many, evangelical faith and postmodernism make strange bedfellows. Some evangelicals, in fact, see in the postmodern culture of pluralism “the ugly face” of “the most dangerous threat to the gospel since the rise of the gnostic heresy in the second century.”[1] And yet, with its mutation from a largely Western phenomenon to a global phenomenon, evangelical faith needs to contend with postmodernism in a more perceptive way, for the new evangelicals are likely to see the postmodern “intense distrust of all universal or ‘totalizing’ discourses”[2] as a much needed emancipation from “the ‘monotony’ of universal modernism’s vision of the world.”[3]The question we must ask ourselves is: How is evangelical faith (in its Western expression) going to deal with its other non-Western expressions that are admittedly postmodern?

A few years ago, I engaged in an online dialogue with a well-known
evangelical who had declared "postmodernism is dead" in light of
September 11, 2001.  He had defined postmodernism just as Bruce Benson
says we shouldn't, and I was trying (less effectively than Bruce has
done) to correct his misconception.  In so doing, I tried to offer a
bit of social history to augment the intellectual history.  I've
paraphrased here what I wrote in my reply a couple years ago, not to
contradict what Bruce has written (because I fully agree with him),
but to supplement it:

In the late 20th century, many thoughtful people of a postmodern
attitude looked back at regimes like Stalin's and Hitler's. (One must
never forget how the postmodern attitude developed in the aftermath of
the Holocaust and colonialism, as deeply ethical European
intellectuals like Michael Polanyi reflected on the atrocities their
peers had perpetuated or acquiesced to.)  They realized that these
megalomaniacs used grand systems of belief to justify their
atrocities. Those totalitarian systems of belief – which these people
sometimes called "metanarratives," but which also could have been
called "world views" or "ideologies" – were so powerful they could
transform good European intellectuals into killers or accomplices.
They thought back over European history and realized (as C. S. Lewis
did) that those who have passionate commitment to a system of belief
will be most willing, not only to die for it, but to kill for it. 

Spiritual Formation is a new term for many – it’s already a buzz-word in some circles.  It has a long and noble history among Roman Catholics, but has in recent years grown in popularity among both conservative and traditional (or mainline) Protestants.  In many ways, it provides an alternative to or advancement beyond the terms Christian Education, Discipleship, and Follow-Up.  These three terms have a special rootedness in the late modernity of the post-war period.

Christian Education meant an approach to Christian training that generally mirrored modern public school education.  It was age-graded, teacher-focused, classroom-situated, and curriculum based.  It was equally valued in both traditional and conservative Protestant churches, and was often equivalent to “Sunday School for adults.”

Discipleship was more modeled on self-study correspondence courses than public school classrooms.  It generally involved fill-in-the-blanks booklets which one would complete on one’s own by reading Bible verses (generally disconnected from any narrative context) and answering questions.  The result was that one would gradually absorb a systematic theology.  But discipleship usually added an important new dimension:  mentoring. 

Postmodern Apologetics?

      Modernity is often labeled as the Age of Science, or as the Age of Reason, but I would like to add one more moniker: Modernity is also the Age of Apologetics. In modernity, traditional forms of authority (viz. Church and State) are rejected and human reason is re-imagined as universal and objective so that it can fill the authority vacuum. In other words, it is to Reason (as universal and objective) that one must look in modernity for the authority and legitimacy of one’s beliefs and actions (and one must do it for oneself!). What is more, moderns understand the “universal” and “objective” dimensions of human reason in terms of the modern ideals of secularism (religious neutrality), democracy (rule by the majority), science (empirical), and disinterestedness (unbiased opinion). Science, understood (roughly) as the free and disinterested attempt to unify the various dimensions of human sense-experience under a common theory, became the paradigm of rational inquiry—for philosophy as well as natural science. Subsequently, modernism challenges the very source and basis of Christian belief—for Christianity could hitherto claim very little by way of these modern ideals. It is little wonder, then, that Christians found it necessary to take up the arms of modern rationality and defend themselves. In short, in response to the attacks on Christian belief from modern philosophy, modern evangelical Christians developed a “scientific” apologetic, modeled after the philosophical method and rigor of modern analytic philosophy, which attempted to establish the universal rationality of Christian belief using the same “objective” and “presuppositionless” premises required by modern empirical science.

      My suggestion is that, in light of postmodern critiques of modernity, evangelicals should adopt form of apologetic that is kerygmatic in nature, rather than a modern “scientific” apologetic. Perhaps the model for the Christian thinker can be someone other than an analytic philosopher.

      But what sort of model should we have for apologetics—“the rational defense of the faith”—other than the analytic philosopher, with her emphasis on demonstrating or proving the propositions of Christianity are both universally and objectively true? Make no mistake: I greatly value the insights of analytic philosophy and admire its rigor, but perhaps we should consider the New Testament apostle (or Old Testament prophet) as an alternate model for our apologetic efforts.¹ Paul never tires of pointing out that apostles and prophets, unlike modern philosophers, do not predicate their authority on clever arguments, logical coherence, rhetorical brilliance, or anything like the modern conception of human reason, but on the divine source of their message. It is not so much that the apostle cannot or even will not engage in rhetorical brilliance or philosophical and logical argumentation—as St. Paul is certainly capable and often does; it is rather that the apostle does base the authority of his or her message on his or her own intellectual resources. The apostle’s primary mode of address is, then, kerygma, proclamation or preaching, and any argumentation is a secondary discourse designed to facilitate the primary one.

      There are a number of reasons why we might want to consider the apostle as the exemplar for a new kind of apologetics. To begin with, the modern paradigm of empirical science does not accord well with the biblical portrayal of Christianity. Modern science—to be distinguished from the premodern paradigm of natural science—models the universe as brute and irrational and sees its task as directing the powers of human reason (conceived in the terms described above) toward the mastery of its object, having begged no questions with regard to its theoretical status. Søren Kierkegaard is the first modern thinker to perceive the deep-seated disparity between the modern scientific paradigm and biblical Christianity, and he subsequently argues vigorously that Christianity cannot be assimilated to modern science and philosophy as modern apologists wish.

      From the Christian point of view, the truth about Christianity cannot be found in modern-styled objectivity.² Not only does the essence of Christianity concern the desperate need of humans and God’s gracious (and personal) response to our need, but it also starts with the assumption that human being (including human reason) is unable to save itself. Christian truth presumes to master us, rather than to be mastered by us. In this case, whenever I try to establish the fundamental reasonability of Christianity in modern terms I remove its fundamental “offense” to reason and transform Christianity into something domestic, with nothing other than a cognitive claim on my life. Christianity, however, is a way of being, or what Kierkegaard calls an “actuality”—a way of living with and before God—and not just a cognitive event involving intellectual assent to a set of propositions. It involves the acts of God Himself in response to our condition as sinful persons and requires our being saved from this condition of brokenness and sinfulness through a total response that can only be described in theological categories like sin, repentance, and salvation the necessarily relate to the subjectivity of human being. These personal categories cannot be assimilated into the objective discourse of modern science and point to subjective realities that are more appropriately dealt with in sermons.

      I also want briefly to mention one other important problem with using modern (objective and universal) apologetic arguments to defend Christianity, though there are others as well. Modern objectivity refuses to acknowledge the ethical dimensions of arguments, and treats them abstractly and a-contextually, and ignores the personal and social dimension of reason. The trouble, of course, is that arguments always are situated and made by persons, and as such are ethical entities. Adopting a modern paradigm predisposes apologists to ignore that, first, arguments, like words, are more than just formal operations that yield true conclusions. Arguments never mean anything until they are used by persons in a social context to do something, and one may use a perfectly valid argument with all true premises to do something unethical (like, for example, belittle or domineer someone). A modern, objective approach to apologetic arguments also inclines Christian apologists to overlook the fact that their arguments may be used to support an oppressive and socially unjust form of Christianity, and therefore to that degree fail to justify actual Christianity.

      But what if we modeled our apologetic heroes after apostles and not analytic philosophers? What if we made love, and not modern rationality, the hallmark of our defense of Christianity, and took kerygma, not logic, as the form of our apologetic discourse?

      The sort of kerygmatic apologetics I mean to endorse is one that takes lightly neither issues of truth nor the rationality of Christian belief. Biblically, the basis for and motivation of kerygma is love, and this means that at the core of a kerygmatic apologetic will be a love-centered rationality. The irony of Christian love is that it is characterized by self-donation; it gives itself up to find itself. A love-centered rationality will have as its character an appropriate humility, a personal and social situatedness that takes human embodiment seriously (i.e., it is not a disembodied rationality) within an over-arching Gospel narrative and, above all, is characterized by an interest in the welfare and perspective of others. Postmodern evangelicals, however, do not thereby relinquish the pursuit of the Good, the True and the Beautiful, nor do they require that their interlocutors (i.e., their neighbors) to either. On my construal of postmodernity it calls us into even more serious and patient rational dialogue with those whom we disagree about the most important things than modernity, for it calls us to the dialectical task of recognizing alternate points of view and carefully establishing our Christian convictions in dialogue with them. There is, if you will, what we might call after Kierkegaard a “logic of insanity”³ that argues for “the superiority of heaven-sent madness over man-made sanity.”⁴ 

      The type of postmodern kerygmatic apologetic I envision will have several identifiable aspects. First, it will be occasional, not systematic or “universal.” The communication of God’s truth is not something the apostle presents as a scientific theory that is able to answer a set of theoretical questions. A kerygmatic apologetic will subsequently involve a particular person addressing a specific audience that has a concrete set of concerns about life, God and the world. It will not deal in hypothetical questions or answers that do not arise from the context of the audience’s lives and does not propose to offer answers that have not been personally won in the circumstances of the Christian’s own life.

      Second, a kerygmatic apologetic will be confessional. Its primary mode of discourse will be in the category of witness. An apostle does not present her message in the form of objective and universal truths but as a confession of or witness to a personal word they have received from God. A witness, then, is someone who confesses her convictions within the wider context of her life and therefore displays an existentially embodied argument. (And in the wider context of the Church, the Christian witness becomes a socially embodied argument.) The act of confession or witness subverts the modern subject-object split and provides the starting point for genuine dialogue and effective apologetic argument by honestly confessing one’s convictions and offering a starting point for dialogue. Witness is, in other words, what Stan Hauerwas calls, “the condition necessary to begin argument.”⁵ Witness doesn’t end arguments, but it determines the kind and shape that our arguments and apologetic dialogues will take. Witness creates the conditions for the intelligibility of the Gospel insofar as it demonstrates a way of being in which its claims make sense.

      Third, such an apologetic will also have an eschatological character that acknowledges its conclusions as finite, fallible and penultimate. The arguments and propositions of the apologetic witness will anticipate the new order inaugurated by the return of Jesus Christ and the full presence of God in which the truth is fully and finally revealed. As a result, the sort of reasoning of the apostle is from within a kind of mega-narrative that is a particular community’s story of the world (with global implications), as opposed to the meta-narrative of modernity, which purports to tell everyone’s presuppositionless story of the world.⁶

      Fourth, and finally, a postmodern kerygmatic apologetic is one that addresses the whole person; that is, it is holistic. Logical argumentation is one dimension of defending Christian faith, but insofar as it is Gospel, Christianity addresses the whole person and is concerned with issues of social justice as well as propositional or logical correctness. The goal, furthermore, is not one of rational domination but of “winning” the person over. Kierkegaard summarizes the situation nicely:

Long, long before the enemy thinks of seeking agreement, the loving one is already in agreement with him; and not only that, no, he has gone over to the enemy’s side, is fighting for his cause…See, this can be called a battle of love or a battle in love! To fight with the help of the good against the enemy—that is laudable and noble; but to fight for the enemy—and against whom? Against oneself, if you will—this, yes, this is loving, or this is the conciliatory spirit in love.⁷

¹ Here I am following Merold Westphal very closely in both the form and content of my suggestion. See his wonderful essay, “Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy of Religion That Will Be Able to Come Forth as Prophecy,” in Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982),1-18.

² Westphal, “Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy of Religion,” 10.

³ Once again, the phrase is Westphal’s. See Merold Westphal, “Kierkegaard and the Logic of Insanity,” in Kierkegaard’s Critique, 85-104.

⁴ Quoted in Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique, 87.

⁵ Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), 207.

⁶ Merold Westphal makes the distinction between mega- and meta-narratives in Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham U. Press, 2001), p. xiii.

⁷ Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), 335.