Abstract

Postmodern philosophers are developing models in ontology and epistemology to replace the old modernist models born of the Enlightenment and critical philosophy. They rely on the foundations laid by such thinkers as Polanyi, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty in their developing philosophies. Philosophers of religion have an important role in this effort, for modernist epistemology is denoted by the relegation of transcendence to the domain of the unknowable. The recovery of transcendence is therefore a major concern for postmodern philosophers of religion. Furthermore, postmodern evangelicals have not adequately addressed the need for a complete philosophical system as a response to postmodern revisionist theologies. ;Working within the evangelical Christian tradition, Jerry H. Gill offers an ambitious effort toward this goal. His postmodern philosophy of religion begins with the epistemology of a natural theology and extends into every category of philosophy. His fundamental claim is that reality exists not in realms, as the premodernists and the modernists held, but in dimensions. All knowledge is mediated through the particulars of this multidimensional reality. ;In order to appraise Gill's claims and the model that he develops from them, his works are examined in detail with the works of his contemporaries being used for reflective evaluation. The first chapter reviews the rise of postmodernism, placing Gill in his appropriate philosophical context. Chapter two examines his methodology, evaluating his basic presuppositions as compared to those of his contemporaries. Chapter three examines his ontology and epistemology. Gill makes particularly commendable use of Polanyi's ideas on the division between tacit and explicit knowing. The latter three chapters demonstrate and evaluate Gill's application of his model to the philosophical categories of language and hermeneutics, aesthetics and art, and christology and world religions. ;Although Gill provides a formidable system within the Christian tradition for postmodern thinkers, his model is not adequate for an evangelical approach. Evangelicals agree that knowledge of the Transcendent is mediated, but in his desire to completely eliminate all dichotomies from his philosophy, Gill discards the essential biblical notion of a Creator/creation distinction. This is an unnecessary adjustment for evangelicals seeking to respond to postmodern revisionist paradigms