What Is Postmodernism and How Does It Affect Our Culture Today? | Dr. Jamie Dew

Postmodernism is a word that often gets thrown around in our culture, but what does it mean and is it even relevant anymore? In this video, President of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, Dr. Jamie Dew, gives a crash course on postmodernism and how it's being adopted in our world today.

Learn more about New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary: https://www.nobts.edu/
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The entire video is above, and the transcript is below.
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Now postmoderns certainly have ideas of truth, but they don't believe about truth the same thing you and I believe.

So for example, here's a statement we all think to be true: I'm wearing a gray suit. You think that's true because the statement itself corresponds to the way things really are. That's called a correspondence theory of truth. That had been the premodern and the modern assumption. Postmoderns reject that. Truth now is simply what works for us. Or truth is simply which is consistent with other things. 

And so they have ways of defining truth, but there is no longer anything like Truth with a big T. No what we'd call metanarrative, that is meta meaning overarching, narrative meaning story. There are no overarching explanations of reality. There's no truths. So you shouldn't pretend to have one. I shouldn't pretend to have one. That's at least what they say, but notice in our culture these people that dub themselves as postmodern. What they're really after and what they're really against is our truth. They want to substitute it with a different truth, with their own morality, and things like that.

So one example of where you're gonna see postmodern ideals flesh out in our culture is really what you're seeing happening in this sort of culmination of the sexual revolution and the movement into transgenderism and other things like that. We're now in a place where people will say things like, "I know I'm in a boy's body, but I'm not a boy. I'm something else underneath that." And we're left to define, not just truth out there anyway we want to, we're now able to define ourselves in any particular way we want to. 

And there's this getting rid of these classical, traditional ideas that go well back before Christianity. They would go back to the classical period of the philosophers. This would be Plato and Aristotle. It would come up through the Christian tradition. It would come up through the medieval traditions. It would come up all the way through modernity. It would even come up pretty far into the 20 and 21st century, but now you're seeing it come to full fruition where we're gonna redefine or get rid of definitions of what it means to be a human, what it means to be a male, what it means to be a female, and we're free now to just define that any way we want to. 

This is very much a good example of the way postmodern thought has infected our culture and shaped the way we think about very, very important things.

So in short, that's a crash course on postmodernism. It is still very much alive in our culture and we do need to know what it is.

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