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"Postmodernism" names not a single doctrine but a mood, a sensibility, and a cluster of arguments that took shape in French thought in the 1970s and spread across the humanities. Its common thread is a suspicion of the large, confident claims that the modern West inherited from the Enlightenment: that reason is universal and neutral, that history is the story of progress, that beneath the flux of appearances there is a stable truth waiting to be discovered and stated. For religion the challenge is double-edged. On one side, postmodernism dismantles the secular confidence — scientific, rationalist, "objective" — that was used to dismiss faith, and so can look like an ally. On the other, it turns the same corrosive suspicion on theology's own grand claims: the Christian story of creation, fall and redemption is itself a "metanarrative," and the realist conviction that God exists independently of human minds is exactly the kind of foundational certainty postmodernism distrusts. This lesson sets out the central postmodern thinkers — Lyotard on metanarratives, Derrida on deconstruction and différance, Foucault on power and knowledge — and then the most important religious response in Britain, Don Cupitt's non-realism, alongside narrative theology and the "death of God" movement. The evaluative spine throughout is the distinction between realism and anti-realism (or non-realism) about God: whether religious language describes a reality that exists whether or not anyone believes in it, or instead expresses and shapes a wholly human form of life.
To grasp postmodernism one must first grasp the "modernity" it claims to come after. The modern project, born of the Enlightenment, rested on a handful of confident assumptions: that there is a single rational method (ideally that of the sciences) which can in principle settle any question; that this reason is universal, the same for all people in all cultures, and therefore neutral between traditions; and that the proper use of reason would deliver steady progress in knowledge, morality and society. Postmodernism is the loss of faith in those assumptions. Its thinkers argue that "reason" is never the view from nowhere it pretends to be: it is always located, shaped by language, history, culture and power. There is no neutral standpoint above the competing traditions from which to judge them — only further perspectives, each with its own commitments.
Key term: Anti-foundationalism — the rejection of the idea that knowledge rests on secure, self-evident foundations (indubitable truths, neutral data, universal reason) from which everything else can be derived; for the postmodernist, all enquiry begins inside some tradition, language or "form of life."
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Incredulity toward metanarratives | Lyotard's defining phrase: a refusal to accept any single overarching story — religious, scientific or political — as the definitive account of reality and history |
| Anti-foundationalism | There are no secure, presuppositionless foundations for knowledge; every starting point is itself situated and contestable |
| The instability of meaning | Language does not transparently mirror a fixed reality; meaning is produced within systems of signs and is never finally pinned down (Derrida's différance) |
| Power and knowledge | What counts as "truth" and "knowledge" is bound up with relations of power (Foucault); claims to objective truth can mask the interests they serve |
| Plurality and difference | There is no single correct interpretation, only multiple perspectives shaped by culture, language and history |
Key term: Postmodernism — a late-twentieth-century intellectual movement marked by scepticism toward grand narratives, objective truth claims and foundational certainties, emphasising plurality, the role of language in constructing reality, and the entanglement of knowledge with power.
Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998), in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), gave the movement its most quoted definition. "Simplifying to the extreme," he wrote, "I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives." A metanarrative (or grand récit) is a large, overarching story that a culture tells to legitimate its knowledge and practices — to explain where we have come from, where we are going, and why our way of organising the world is justified. The Enlightenment narrative of the progressive emancipation of humanity through reason, the Marxist narrative of history advancing toward a classless society, the Christian narrative of creation, fall and redemption: all are metanarratives, stories that claim to give the meaning of the whole and to underwrite the smaller stories ("little narratives," petits récits) we live by.
Key term: Metanarrative (grand narrative) — a totalising story that claims to explain and legitimate a whole body of knowledge or the course of history as such (e.g. progress, emancipation, salvation); Lyotard holds that the postmodern condition is precisely the collapse of belief in these.
Lyotard's claim is not merely that the old metanarratives have been refuted but that, in the contemporary world, they have lost their credibility — we can no longer believe them in the wholehearted way that earlier ages did. What remains is a plurality of local, provisional language games, none of which can claim to legislate for all the others. The implication for religion is direct and uncomfortable. The Christian "story of everything" is, on Lyotard's analysis, a metanarrative of just the kind that the postmodern condition has rendered incredible: a single account, claiming universal validity, that purports to give the meaning of all history from creation to last judgement. To proclaim it as the truth for all humanity is to do exactly what postmodernism distrusts.
There are, however, two replies a theologian can make, and the sharper candidate will hold them in view. First, one can simply accept the demotion: George Lindbeck and the "postliberal" theologians (below) treat Christianity not as a universal metanarrative imposed on outsiders but as the internal "grammar" of a particular community — a little narrative the church inhabits, not a grand récit it forces on the world. Second, one can press the self-reference objection: Lyotard's own claim — that all metanarratives have collapsed and that incredulity is the proper stance — looks suspiciously like a metanarrative about the end of metanarratives, a grand story about the impossibility of grand stories. If it is, it refutes itself; if it is not, it is merely one more local opinion with no special authority to bind the believer. This tu quoque ("you too") move recurs against every postmodern thinker and is the single most important critical tool in the topic.
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), the French-Algerian philosopher, developed deconstruction — not a method of demolition but a way of reading that exposes the unstable assumptions, hidden hierarchies and self-undermining tensions within a text. Western thought, Derrida argued, is structured by oppositions in which one term is silently privileged over the other: speech over writing, presence over absence, soul over body, God over creation. Deconstruction works by showing that the favoured term secretly depends on the one it excludes — that "presence," for instance, is only ever intelligible against a background of absence — so that the hierarchy cannot be held as cleanly as the text supposes.
At the heart of this is différance, a term Derrida coined by altering the French différence in a way audible only in writing (the substituted "a" cannot be heard when the word is spoken — itself a deconstructive joke about the priority of speech). The word fuses two senses of the French verb différer: to differ and to defer. Meaning, Derrida argues, arises only from differences within a system of signs — a word means what it does by not being the other words — and it is endlessly deferred, because each sign refers us only to further signs, never arriving at a final, self-present meaning outside language. There is, in his notorious phrase, "no outside-text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte): we never reach a bedrock of pure meaning unmediated by the play of signs.
Key term: Différance — Derrida's coinage for the way meaning is generated by difference between signs and perpetually deferred along a chain of signs, so that no sign ever delivers a final, fixed, self-present meaning.
Derrida's thought cuts two ways for religion, which is why theologians have both feared and embraced it.
Key term: Deconstruction — Derrida's mode of close reading that uncovers the hidden hierarchies, exclusions and internal contradictions of a text, showing that its central oppositions cannot finally be sustained; applied to theology, it implies that no concept of God is ever fully adequate or closed.
The standard criticism is that deconstruction, pressed consistently, devours its own ground. If no text has a determinate meaning, what determinate meaning can Derrida's texts have? And a faith with no stable propositional content — no claim that God is gracious, that Christ was raised — seems to have surrendered everything that made it worth holding, leaving an elegant religiosity with nothing to confess.
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) supplies the third great postmodern theme: the entanglement of knowledge with power. Foucault rejected the comforting picture in which knowledge grows as power retreats — in which truth is what we reach once we have set interests and coercion aside. On the contrary, he argued, "power and knowledge directly imply one another"; there is no knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute power relations, and no exercise of power that does not produce knowledge. What a society counts as "true," "normal," "sane" or "natural" is not simply discovered but produced within institutions — clinics, prisons, confessionals, schools — that classify and discipline human beings.
Key term: Power/knowledge — Foucault's thesis that what counts as knowledge and truth in a society is inseparable from its relations of power; "truth" is produced by institutions and discourses, not delivered from a neutral standpoint above them.
For the philosophy of religion the application is critical rather than constructive. A Foucauldian reading treats the church's claims to truth — its definitions of sin, orthodoxy, the normal and the deviant — as instruments through which power has historically been organised over bodies and souls (Foucault's study of the practice of confession as a technique for producing "the truth of the self" is the most direct example). This is less an argument that God does not exist than a suspicion that religious "truth" cannot be cleanly separated from the will to control. The obvious reply is twofold. First, the genetic point cuts both ways: showing that a belief has served power does not show it is false (to think otherwise is the genetic fallacy). Second, Foucault's own unmasking claims to tell us how things really are with power and truth — and so quietly relies on the very notion of objective truth it appears to dissolve. As with Lyotard and Derrida, the radical critique struggles to exempt itself from its own acid.
The most influential religious appropriation of these ideas in Britain is the non-realism of Don Cupitt (1934–2025), an Anglican priest and Cambridge philosopher of religion. In Taking Leave of God (1980) Cupitt argued that the honest response to modern critical thought — Kant on the limits of knowledge, Wittgenstein on language, Darwin and Freud on the human animal — is to stop believing in God as an objective, metaphysical being existing "out there" independently of human minds. God, for the mature Cupitt, is not a fact about the universe but a human creation: a unifying spiritual ideal, the personification of our highest values and the goal of the religious life. He famously reconceived God as a "guiding ideal" of the spiritual life rather than an external person who must first be shown to exist.
Key term: Theological non-realism — the view (Cupitt) that God does not exist as a mind-independent being but is a human construct — a symbol, ideal or focus of value internal to religious language and practice; religious statements express and shape a form of life rather than describing an external reality.
Crucially, Cupitt does not conclude that religion is therefore worthless and to be abandoned — that would be ordinary atheism. He concludes the opposite: freed from an incredible metaphysics, religion can be embraced as the most profound of human practices, a discipline of the self through which we are shaped by the highest ideals we can conceive. To "take leave of God" the cosmic object is, paradoxically, to take religion more seriously, as something we do rather than something we believe to be factually so.
Cupitt founded the Sea of Faith Network — its name taken from Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach," which hears the "Sea of Faith" once "at the full" now withdrawing with a "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar." The network gathers Christians, clergy and others who continue in religious practice while holding non-realist views of God. For its members, worship, prayer, liturgy and ethical commitment remain meaningful and valuable as human spiritual activities, even without belief in an objectively existing deity to whom they are addressed.
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