The term „Postmodernity“
„Postmodern theology“ is an ambivalent term. On the one hand the adjective „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.
Catholic theology had held on to a critical stance towards modernity for a long time. But “postmodern theology” is not to be attached seamlessly to pre-modernity: the way to postmodernity leads necessarily through modernity, as a revision of modernity (Lyotard, Jean-François, Die Moderne redigieren. In: Welsch, Wolfgang (Hg.), Wege aus der Moderne. Schlüsseltexte der Postmoderne-Diskussion. Weinheim 1988, 204-214.). A defence of the attainment of enlightment is adequately confronting a backward-looking restoration. But this reaction might fail to appreciate those “postmoderns”, that analyse the “dialectics of enlightment”, a purely modern theology will be involved in. After Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, as “prophets of postmodernity”, and the hermeneutics of suspicion in their trajectory, the securities of the past have been shattered. An adequate response of theology to the radical decentralising of reality has to be given.
Only a “respectable postmodernity” deserves a theological awareness, but that as much as possible. This will not lead to a coherent theological concept. Matthias Schnell puts forward a first movement in those theologians, that investigate the question of pluralism in present society, which is classified as “postmodern”. Furthermore he differentiates between a postmodern “Wholism”, that is connected with the names Koslowski, Spaemann and Hübner, and the thinkers of deconstruction. The last movement has become dominant within “postmodern theology”. Graham Ward also distinguishes liberal and conservative postmodern theology (Ward, Postmodern Theology). Whereas the first employs the relativistic, nihilistic and linguistic premises directly on theology and therefore subjects it alien criteria, the last tries to show, which religious and theological problems have been raised by the postmoderns and tries to develop perspectives in the dialog with “postmodern philosophy”. This conservative theology has been argues by Radical Orthodoxy, which Ward has been associated with from its first publication.
A lasting question is the relation of theology and “postmodernity”. As “postmodernity” is not to be treated as a an epoch but as a dialectic characteristic of modernity itself, a mere temporal relationship like “theology in postmodernity” cannot be chosen. Still the compilation “postmodernity in theology” stay to vague and “theology of postmodernity” might be to far-reaching and display a claim that is not demanded, the combination “postmodern-theology” will be used here. This is taken form the web-address “postmoderne-theologie”, in which “postmodern” can be read as an adjective determining theology. But the hyphen can also make visible the dialectic between the two parts of the term, a dialectics that opens a dialog in which theology has the final word. After “postmodernity” stands theology.

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