Other influentials have embraced postmodernity to such a passionate extent that nothing less than a wholesale reengineering of Christianity is implied. The traditionalists accuse such Christians enamored of postmodern thought of being addicted to novelty. Postmodernism is portrayed as nothing more than a fad of the intelligentsia. They argue that a church redesigned along postmodern lines will find itself irrelevant when postmodernity is inevitably eclipsed by the next philosophical rage. The revisionists counter that the traditionalists are hopelessly trapped in the grip of a modern church, with an outdated and unfounded trust in the ability of man s mind to apprehend and communicate the One who transcends man s finite categories and inadequate linguistic symbol systems.
Demonization occurs when the other s motives are negatively construed.
This narrowing of the other person results from several factors. One is the need to create a paradigm to handle controversy. In the short run, it is more simple and convenient to cast as adversary those with whom we disagree. The original precipitating conflict is sometimes shown to be hopelessly simplistic in its two-dimensionality. Resolving the conflict is now revealed to require the much harder work of addressing all the concerns represented in each disputant s presuppositions.