By D.A. Carson
Apollos/IVP. £14.99. 640 pages
ISBN 0 85111 767 8
At the Enlightenment Western intellectuals rejected God and his revelation as the source of truth and frame of reference for understanding life. The 'modern' approach which emerged believed that pure reason and scientific method were all that was needed. But this has proved fallacious.
To our observations and logic we bring the baggage of our personal and cultural conditioning which skews our every perception. Hand in hand with this realisation, out of the discipline of literary criticism has also arisen the phenomenon of 'deconstructionism'. This claims that language functions by making distinctions, but is never precise enough to make our distinctions hold under the closest scrutiny and so the logic of any discourse can always be undermined. Without the rock of God's truth we find ourselves all at sea in the post-modern world where all is relative, all is only in the eye of the beholder.
