The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity

It is important to know that this author's defining religious experience was in a charismatic context. His primary thesis is that the "foundationalism" of the Enlightenment and modernism has been embedded in evangelicalism (although they are antagonists) and that the epistemology, philosophy of language and metaphysics of modernism has been rejected and superseded by postmodernism. Of course, trying to define postmodernism is like trying to nail jello to the wall. For Raschke, postmodernism is bound up with Heiddiger, Derrida and others of that -- especially French -- ilk. His primary complaint against modernistic Christianity is against the "hellenistic" systematic theology. He also doesn't like the doctrine of inerrancy. He promotes "faith" which is "postpropositional."

It would take a major essay to critique this book adequately. Good things: the survey of Western intellectual history; the summary and discussion of major intellectual figures: Luther, Calvin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Heidigger and others; the emphasis that systematic theology is not the essence of Christian faith. Bad things: the elevation of Derrida's views of language (he was a snake-oil salesman, in my view); he demonizes what his disagrees with; he uses rhetoric to inform the reader what conclusions to have without a rationale for those conclusions; he elevates the neo-charismatic religious experience and spontaneity as normative for Christian experience without providing reasons for the "modernist, foundationalist" evangelical to change his views.

After reading this book, I have a much more articulate understanding of why I reject so much of postmodernist polemic.