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„Postmodern theology“ is an ambivalent term. On the one hand the adjectiv „postmodern“ is used by German theologians if they wish to mark a thought as irrational, arbitrary or in an inadequate way popular. On the other hand the word serves as a collecting term for an examination of certain thinkers, who – quite diffuse – were listed under the headline “postmodern”. These are authors like Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Gianni Vattimo, Wolfgang Welsch, Zygmunt Bauman, Frederic Jameson, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek and even Emmanuel Lévinas and Robert Spaemann. The wide range of concepts behind the names in this enumeration, can not be summarised in a single term. And from the beginning “postmodernity” was a substitute for a missing adequate expression, which also shows its form as Not- or After-Modernity. Furthermore the word was used only by few to name their own concepts. The philosophical inauguration was made by the success of Jean-François Lyotard’s book The postmodern condition and in Germany it was Wolfgang Welsch, who made the term and his philosopher popular. But Lyotard stands against a notion of “postmodernity” in the sense of colourful nihilism und for a “respectable postmodernity” (Lyotard, Jean-François, Der Widerstreit. München 1987, 12.). Foucault for example never called himself “postmodern”. The only common characterisation might be the one Matthias Schnell points out:
“However one stands towards the term of postmodernity – if one regards it as enlightening for the present or as superfluous and nonsensical -, one thing is consensual: that in contrast to the early Neuzeit of enlightment and the optimistical ideologies of 18th and 19th century, based on progress and hope, the intellectual atmosphere as well as the social and cultural situation in the Western world changed fundamentally.” (Schnell, Die Herausforderung der Postmoderne-Diskussion für die Theologie der Gegenwart, 154.)
More conrete postmodernity could be regarded as an response to certain crises of modernity, f.e. the crisis of representation, the crisis of historiography, the crisis of ethics (vgl. Ward, Graham, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory. Houndmills-Basingstoke-Hampshire-London: Macmillan Press (1996) 22000.) and last but not least the crisis of the subject. These „contemporary critical theories“ are within the trajectory of the „dialectics of enlightment“, although the thesis of instrumental reason has given way to other topics. If one wants to speak of a common ground of „postmodern“ philosophies, it is their critical attitude towards certain developments of modernity.