Ideas Have Consequences
How Postmodernism Changes the Rules - Part 2 of 2
By John Stonestreet

While there are significant disagreements among the various expressions of postmodernism, there is a key belief that characterizes all of them: an acute awareness of our "situatedness" as humans.

As I described in last month’s article (“Ideas Have Histories: Where Postmodernism Came From”), postmoderns deny that there is any overarching story, or metanarrative, to the world. Therefore, we all come from a perspective, or bias, that is shaped by the culture, or the “little stories,” we inhabit. As Kevin Vanhoozer states in a segment of Christianity and the Postmodern Turn, “Postmoderns are so preoccupied with the situated self that they cannot get beyond it.”  Because of this “situatedness,” no one can claim objectivity for his or her views.

This is the clearest difference between postmodernism and most other worldviews. Whereas the central concern of other worldviews is what the real world actually is, the focus of postmodernism is on how we perceive and how we describe what the world is.