Tim Keller

Tim Keller fordert eine Erneuerung der christlichen Apologetik:

There is a lot of resistance right now among younger evangelical leaders toward apologetics. We are told we don’t need arguments any more because people aren’t rational. We need loving community instead. But I think this is short-sighted for two reasons. First, Christians in the West will finally be facing what missionaries around the world have faced for years—how to communicate the gospel to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and adherents of various folk religions. All young church leaders should take courses in and read the texts of the other major world religions. They should also study the gospel presentations written by missionaries engaging those religions. Loving community will be extremely important, as it always is, to reach out to neighbors of other faiths, but if they are going to come into the church, they will have many questions that church leaders today need to be able to answer.

Second, there a real vacuum in Western secular thought. When Derrida died I was surprised how many of his former students admitted that High Theory (what evangelicals call ‚post-modernism‘) is seen as a dead end, mainly because it is so relativistic that it provides no basis for political action. And a leading British intellectual like Terry Eagleton in recent lectures at Yale (published as Religion, Faith, and Revolution by Yale Press) savaged the older scientific atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens as equally bankrupt. Eagleton points out that the Enlightenment’s optimism about science and human progress is dead. Serious Western thought is not going back to that, no matter how popular Dawkins‘ books get. But postmodernism cannot produce a basis for human rights or justice either.

Kellers zweite Anmerkung zur »Höheren Theorie« deckt sich mit meinen eigenen Beobachtungen. Im Buch Die Postmoderne habe ich 2006 geschrieben (S. 61):

Während die Postmoderne im Kulturleben und in der Politik westlicher Gesellschaften allgegenwärtig ist, verliert sie im Raum des Denkens allmählich ihren Einfluss. In Frankreich, wo der Dekonstruktivismus seinen Siegeszug begann und Andersdenkende geradezu paralysierte, gibt es bereits brillante Entwürfe gegen die Diktatur des Dialogs.  Seit Jahren sind in den Feuilletons Grabgesänge zu lesen, die erklären, die Postmoderne habe sich in Illusionen verzettelt und sei inzwischen Schnee von gestern .

Hier mehr von Tim Keller zum Thema: theresurgence.com.