Indeed, I really mean most of us in Western culture, and so I will be making cultural generalizations about us on a grand scale. We are modern people, in the process of becoming post-modern people. I will develop this generalization in two stages. I begin with modernity. We are modern people.
Modernity has two central characteristics that are most important for our purposes.
First, modernity is marked by scientific ways of knowing. Indeed, it was the development of the scientific method and science that marked the birth of modernity. And secondly, modernity is marked by a material understanding of reality. That understanding has already been superceded in theoretical physics, which I will also return to briefly, but that image of reality is still dominant at the level of cultural consciousness. Though I am a critic of modernity, and will soon make two important criticisms of modernity, I am not one of those theologians who trashes modernity, as some of my colleagues do.