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notions of personal knowledge become much more attractive, as do post/modern holistic and

participatory epistemologies.

Third, a neo-pragmatic theology would embrace Rorty`s non-foundationalism as depicting

starkly the contingencies and fallibilism of the human interpretive condition (thesis 3). Conditioned as

we are by our historical situatedness and fallenness, we see through a glass dimly the light of divine self-

revelation which will be fully illuminated only in the eschaton. The neo-pragmatic non-foundationalist

conviction suggests that any starting point--whether, for example, any of the stools of the Wesleyan

quadrilateral of Scripture, tradition, reason and experience--turned into the ultimate theological

foundation results in idolatrous compromise--again, to follow the example, of fundamentalism,

traditionalism, liberalism, etc., respectively. We should thus acknowledge we proceed from within the

hermeneutical circle rather than presume to do theology from any allegedly neutral, universal, or

ahistorical vantage point. As such, life in the Spirit requires that theological method continuously

negotiate the tensions between Scripture, tradition, community, the demands of reason, etc., rather than

establish any one as more foundational than the others. This accurately describes our increasing

awareness of the new era which has arisen in theology. Rorty`s arguments against method can be

understood as reflecting intuitions that the old ways of philosophizing have broken down. So also does

the contemporary concern with theological method reflect our own attempts to legitimate the ways we do

and should theologize in our postfoundationalist (and post/modern) times.

assessment in Deconstructive Therapy, The Reformed Journal 36:1 (1986): 15-20 one of the few engagements
by evangelicals of (the early) Rorty is on the mark, even if it is more a cultural than substantively theological
analysis.

Here the emergence of feminist and environmental theologies as well as developments in the science and

theology dialogue signal the turn toward holism. See also William A. Dyrness, Let the Earth Rejoice! A Biblical
Theology of Holistic Mission (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1983).

The proliferation of books on method in a postfoundationalist world is staggering. I interact with the

literature and defend a moderate Peircean kind of foundationalism which I call shifting foundationalism in my
Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective, New Critical Thinking in Biblical
Studies and Theology (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002). Also important especially in Protestant
theology is the attempt to rethink the doctrine of Scripture within a postfoundationalist framework; see, e.g., William
J. Abraham, Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998), and Telford Work, Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2001).