. . . What, exactly, is shifting in this paradigm ?

A venture into any of these overlapping developments (science and religion, social systems revolutions, definition of "human being,"  and  the nature of healing) will soon bring us to issues at a deeper level, underlying them all. 

Two intertwined, but not always identical, philosophical problems, truth and authority, require the sustained philosophical attention that many scholars are giving them. They are not new questions, of course, and they are indeed questions for every age. Ours presents its own new twists, quite interesting in their own right. In any case, it is not possible to make a defensible case for a Christian worldview without dealing directly and competently with them.

An agape is celebrated in the early Church led by the deaconess Phoebe, a co-worker of St. Paul.
Dina Cormick "Phoebe of Cenchrae"   from Heroic Women Series, Durban, South Africa  http://www.stanthonyshrine.org/art_exhibits/Hospitality_art.html

THE PROBLEM 
OF TRUTH & PLURALISM

This issue, at the heart of postmodernism, has to do with certain assumptions which must be dismantled in order to advocate a Christian worldview.

Just as astronomers long ago discovered there is no celestial fixed point, so now philosophers find no terra firma from which to argue. If in a post-positivist, post-deconstructionist, post-postmodern world there is no longer any shared "roof", no universal conventions that it is more or less safe to take for granted, no universal cosmology of any sort on the basis of which truth claims can be adjudicated, from which moral criteria can be derived and debated, then on what basis do human beings function in community beyond their particular field specialization, cultural identity, language game, household or ideological enclave?

There is a sense 
 –sometimes frightened, sometimes exhilarated, sometimes cynical– 
                                       that we are escapees from Authority.

Once you can ask:  ‘To what extent, under what conditions, does anything that has authority, have that authority?’, no source of authority is the same.

Once it becomes possible to question authority, it becomes necessary, and inevitable, to do so without exemption.

The questioning exposes much that is faulty in past ascriptions of authority. The human race has had some very costly lessons in dangers of failing to examine the legitimacy of an authority before yielding to it. But the moral and epistemological need to question authority has produced other extremes. One result of postmodernism is a surrender, sometimes naughtily gleeful, to radical relativism.

A surprising amount of sloppy thinking has frequently managed to prevail in this atmosphere of latter-day relativism.  One manifestation of it is an assumption, ubiquitously encountered, usually tacit and unexamined, persisting sometimes even where various forms of relativism are critiqued.

THE ERRONEOUS ASSUMPTION IS THIS:

Allegiance to a particular point of view
(especially a Christian one)
and open-minded critical thinking are mutually exclusive.

These are uncongenial times for truth claims, which, it is assumed, can only be made dogmatically....

...So therefore (according to this assumption, typically unexamined), to make a truth claim, at least a Christian one, is to practice intolerance.

Varieties of postmodern relativism are undergoing robust critiques, many of which come from Christian theologians and logicians.

In order to make a case for a viable Christian paradigm --one which is nimble and receptive, which values loyal opposition from within and welcomes critical questions from without, which is an open but anchored system– it becomes necessary to make a case for the legitimacy of such allegiances and truth claims, including their compatibility with a free exchange of ideas. The Alethia Foundation is dedicated to this task.

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