By Stanley Grenz
Eerdmans. £8.99. 204 pages
ISBN 0 8028 0864 6
This book has been around for a couple of years, but the turn of the millennium invites a review as Stanley Grenz, a professor at Regent College, Vancouver, introduces us to post-modernism, which it seems is to be the mindset of the future.
He begins by likening the transition from modernism to post-modernism to the difference between Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Whereas Captain Kirk's crew stand in awe of the cold logic of Mr Spock, Jean-Luc Picard's new breed of explorers rely heavily on Counsellor Troi, a gifted woman with intuitive ability to read the hidden feelings of others. The secular scientific vision has failed to satisfy the human soul and something new is required. Thus Grenz launches into a whirlwind tour first of the post-modern ethos as reflected in cutting-edge culture from architecture to cinema, before spelling out in more detail what he describes as post-modernism's 'non-worldview', which questions everything about the Enlightenment outlook but refuses to replace it with anything it would claim of universal validity (except, of course, the universal truth that nothing is universally valid!).
