Quote by D.A. Carson

“Of the many distinctions that have been attempted between modernism and postmodernism, perhaps this is the most common: modernism still believed in the objectivity of knowledge, and that the human mind can uncover such knowledge. In its most optimistic form, modernism held that ultimately knowledge would revolutionize the world, squeeze God to the periphery or perhaps abandon him to his own devices, and build an edifice of glorious knowledge to the great God Science. But this stance has largely been abandoned in the postmodernism that characterizes most Western universities. Deconstructionists have been most vociferous in denouncing the modernist vision. They hold that language and meaning are socially constructed, which is tantamount to saying arbitrarily constructed. Its meaning is grounded neither in “reality” nor in texts per se. Texts will invariably be interpreted against the backdrop of the interpreter’s social “home” and the historical conditioning of the language itself. Granted this interpretive independence from the text, it is entirely appropriate and right for the interpreter to take bits and pieces of the text out of the frameworks in which they are apparently embedded (“deconstruct” the text), and refit them into the framework (“locatedness”) of the interpreter, thereby generating fresh insight, not least that which relativizes and criticizes the text itself.”