James R Cowles "Resident Skeptic -- POSTMODERNISM BORN OUT OF DUE SEASON" PDF

I was raised a fundamentalist Baptist, and eventually migrated to conservative, but non-fundamentalist, Protestantism. One of the laments I quickly became accustomed to hearing from the latter was the complaint that, in the secular culture at large, there were no "objective standards" of meaning and morality. After the conservative-Protestant phase of my spiritual evolution, I converted to the Roman Catholic faith. That tradition emphasizes the official doctrinal position of the Catholic Church, which is considered normative for all Christian traditions, even Protestant churches. I found this emphasis deeply refreshing, because, looking back on my experience as a Protestant, I realized that the sheer multiplicity of often mutually contradictory doctrines and practices was itself -- and ironically -- an instance of the very lack of "objective standards" conservative evangelical churches always complained about. Eventually, I discovered that, in a strange way, the Protestant Reformation that gave rise to these disparate confessional traditions amounted to a kind of adumbration of the postmodernist, especially deconstructionist, sensibility that would arise and come to dominate Western culture 500 years post-Reformation. In fact, I came to believe that the Protestant Reformation was actually postmodernism born out of due season. The Reformers who were the contemporaries and heirs of Luther, Calvin, & Co. were actually the first postmodernists.