Jean-François Lyotard was one of the first to attempt a “definition” of postmodernity as “incredulity toward metanarratives [grand reçits, big stories].” Of course Christianity claims to be the metanarrative par excellence. This being the case, it is often asked, “How can postmodernity and Christianity possibly be harmonized?” According to James K.A. Smith in his provocative book, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church, a harmonization is possibile, but first we must understand what Lyotard means by “metanarrative.” The incredulity that postmoderns exhibit toward “big stories,” does not involve a rejection of narratives, myths, or grand totalizing claims about the nature of reality. Rather, the problem with distinctively modern “metanarratives” as explicated by Lyotard in his work, The Postmodern Condition, is that they fail to acknowledge their own narrative nature. “Lyotard very specifically defines metanarratives as universal discourses of legitimation that mask their own particularity; that is, metanarratives deny their narrative ground even as they proceed on it as a basis. […] The problem with [modern] metanarratives is that they do not own up to their own mythic ground” (Smith, p. 69). In other words, the postmodern critique involves the proclamation that all knowledge is a narrative or myth of some sort. Given this understanding of a distinctively modern metanarrative, Smith suggests that Christians ought to embrace Lyotard’s critique. As Smith explains, the reason that this harmonization is essentially consonant rather than dissonant is that the Christian faith (particularly the Dutch Reformed Tradition—but one might also cite Radical Orthodoxy here) does not claim to be legitimated by an appeal to “a universal, autonomous reason, but rather by an appeal to faith (or, to translate, myth or narrative),” postmodernism does not indicate a rejection of the Christian metanarrative but instead “represents a retrieval of a fundamentally Augustinian epistemology that is attentive to the structural necessity of faith preceding reason” (Smith, pp. 68, 72).
What do I have to add—Молодец! Я сосласна! I highly recommend Smith’s book—he does an excellent job of “demythologizing” the common (evangelical) misunderstandings of postmodernism and in more or less “conversational” language.
[The title of this post is dedicated to James G. : )].