But this way of preaching fails to do justice to the rather imperialistic claims of Scripture. The modern world must be made to understand that it is nothing more than that-just a world. I mean the modern world is an ideological construct, an intellectual fabrication, a way of construing reality that has lasted for about two hundred years, mainly in Northern Europe and in some of its colonies. Modernity, which held sway over human imaginations in the industrialized West for about two centuries, is now losing its grip. Unfortunately, too often Christians have treated the modern world as if it were a fact, a reality to which we were obligated to adjust and adapt, rather than a point of view with which we might argue.
Modernity has arrogance built into itself.
Therefore, all other ways of construing the world must converse with modernity on modernity's terms. Fortunately, modern ways of knowing and thinking are gradually losing their privileged status in Western thought. We are realizing that modernity is only one way of describing what is going on in the world. Modernity has been a good ride in many ways. Humanity has received many gifts from modern, scientific, technological ways of thinking.