Truth Decay and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more

Buy New

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
or
Amazon Prime Free Trial required. Sign up when you check out. Learn More
Buy Used
Used - Very Good See details
$3.99 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
   
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism
 
 
Start reading Truth Decay on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism [Paperback]

Douglas Groothuis (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)

List Price: $16.00
Price: $10.93 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $5.07 (32%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
Want it delivered Monday, February 13? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition $9.60  
Paperback $10.93  

Book Description

May 1, 2000
A 2001 Christianity Today Award of Merit winner! The concept of truth as absolute, objective and universal has undergone serious deterioration in recent years. No longer is it a goal for all to pursue. Rather postmodernism sees truth as inseparable from culture, psychology, race and gender. Ultimately, truth is what we make it to be. What factors have accelarated this decay of truth? Why are people willing to embrace such a devalued concept? How does this new view compare and contrast with a Christian understanding? While postmodernism contains some truthful insights (despite its attempt to dethrone truth), Douglas Groothuis sees its basic tenets as intellectually flawed and hostile to Christian views. In this spirited presentation of a solid, biblical and logical perspective, Groothuis unveils how truth has come under attack and how it can be defended in the vital areas of theology, apologetics, ethics and the arts.

Frequently Bought Together

Customers buy this book with Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith $26.34

Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism + Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith
  • This item: Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details



Editorial Reviews

Review

Groothuis offers a fascinating and intellectually rigorous work on truth and its implications in postmodern society and personal life. -- CBA Marketplace, June 2000

About the Author

Douglas Groothuis (Ph.D., University of Oregon) is associate professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary. He is also the author of The Soul in Cyberspace and Unmasking the New Age.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 303 pages
  • Publisher: IVP Books (May 1, 2000)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0830822283
  • ISBN-13: 978-0830822287
  • Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #453,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am a philosopher who serves as Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary and as an Affiliate Faculty at Metropolitan State College of Denver. I have authored two dozen academic papers published in journals such as Religious Studies, Inquiry, Sophia, Philosophia Christi, Think, and Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. I have also published dozens of articles in magazines such as Christianity Today, Books and Culture, The Christian Research Journal, and many others.

I am the author of eleven books:

1. Unmasking the New Age (InterVarsity Press, 1986)
2. Confronting the New Age (InterVarsity Press, 1988)
3. Revealing the New Age Jesus (InterVarsity Press, 1990)
4. Christianity That Counts (Baker Books, 1994)
5. Deceived by the Light (Harvest House, 1995)
6. Jesus in an Age of Controversy (Harvest House, 1996)
7. The Soul in Cyberspace (Baker Books, 1997)
8. Truth Decay (InterVarsity Press, 2000)
9. On Jesus (Wadsworth, 2003)
10. On Pascal (Wadsworth, 2003)
11. Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith (InterVarsity Press, 2011)

I also co-edited the volume, In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-Humean Assessment (InterVarsity Press, 2005) with James Sennett.

 

Customer Reviews

11 Reviews
5 star:
 (7)
4 star:
 (1)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:
 (2)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (11 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars For the Most Part, Excellent, December 21, 2001
This review is from: Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism (Paperback)
Groothuis has done a good job in this book of profiling postmodernism and discrediting it in light of its devastating theories on truth and living. In the process, he does a good job of affirming the reality of universal truth and showing how Christianity's worldview best honors absolute truth in comparison to other worldviews, most notably postmodernism.

This book is an attempt to touch on various aspects of the postmodernist issue. Groothuis spends a good deal of time deconstructing the postmodernist objection to universal truth and its embrace of 'cultural truths', along with the worldview's inability to provide any basis for the many presuppositions it makes. He also analyzes the massive internal inconsistencies prevalent throughout postmodern thought and eloquently demonstrates that many adherents to postmodernism tend to be first in line to fail the litmus tests of their own worldview. He also analyzes the issue of whether language can express truths beyond itself, which is a common assertion among prominent postmodernists. Groothuis also spends a chapter looking at the dangerous apologetics that some prominent Christians have developed which resemble postmodernist thinking. In many of these areas, Groothuis's analysis is thorough and excellent, with an emphasis on heavy quotation from those he is critiquing.

Although somewhat minor, I must also say that I thought the cover of the paperback was outstanding. The cover depicts a barren landscape, almost a wasteland. This illustration is very applicable to the postmodern worldview. After reading this book, I think quite a few readers will rightly conclude that postmodernism is an extremely depressing and hopeless way of thinking about the world and its inhabitants. In many ways, the impression I got from Groothuis's book is that postmodernism is really on a quest to devalue almost everything under the guise that we don't really know anything. Groothuis's quote from Dorothy Sayers about halfway through the book is one of the best quotes I've ever heard about the futility of the postmodernist outlook on life and truth. Utterly devastating.

I debated whether to give the book 4 or 5 stars. I opted for 5, but I will note a couple of regrets I have about the book that do not diminish the overall rating but are regrets nonetheless. First, Groothuis's analysis of postmodernism appears pretty confined to the atheistic/agnostic wing of postmodernism. And while I certainly appreciated his appraisal in this area, I think Groothuis would have really hit a homerun if he had also taken some time to analyze the spiritual postmodernism that is rampant as well. In many ways, the spirituality aspect of postmodernism is more important than the non-spiritual aspect. New Age spirituality draws heavily from postmodernism and this phenomenon is more prevalent than atheistic postmodernism, at least in America. But this is an area that Groothuis does not explore. Lastly, Groothuis's defense of egalitarianism against the charge of postmodernism is highly subjective in a way that the rest of the book is not. Groothuis and his wife are well known advocates of egalitarianism, and this advocacy is clearly prominent in this section. This would have been okay had Groothuis's analysis of this issue been as honest as the rest of the book. But whereas Groothuis quotes extensively from postmodernists throughout the rest of the book, he does not quote at all from the traditionalist school within Christianity while trying to advance the school of egalitarianism. Ultimately, Groothuis does not present a fair depiction of the traditionalist school of thought (he goes so far as to summarize that traditionalism, in his opinion, is based on prejudices that are outdated, which is ad hominem and inaccurate), and this is regretable since such an approach tends to resemble postmodernism in its superficiality.

But given that these two points are minor enough that the book still stands on its own as a solid critique of postmodernism, I give the book 5 stars and recommend it to anyone who is struggling with the meaning of truth, whether truth can be authoritative and universal, and what this means to daily living.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


14 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Best discussion of evangelical uses of postmodernism, June 14, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism (Paperback)
Everyone who is interested in a Christian approach to postmodernism with applications for theology must read this book. Groothuis is the first author to provide a useful overview of postmodernism from a Christian perspective while at the same time dealing substantively with theological issues. What we have here is a nuanced evangelicalism that sees evangelical theology's recognition of the objective and propositional nature of revelatory truth in scripture, not as a sad side effect of an Enlightenment Modernist ethos, but as a traditional, indeed pre-modern viewpoint that has viability in the contemporary context. While Groothuis is not naive about the way much evangelical evidentialism has relied too heavily on Modernist categories, he manages to avoid the broad strokes painted by authors like Grenz and McGrath, who at times seem to think that the very concept of scriptural infallibility itself is an Enlightenment construct, rather than the premodern notion that it is.

This book is the first to reply to Stanley Grenz and Alister McGrath in a way that does not fall prey to naive ultra-foundationalism (rather to more of a "modest foundationalism" like that of Alvin Plantinga) but at the same time does not run tail-tucked from pomo fads that evangelical theologians seem to be more scared of than anyone else (as Alan Jacobs rightly noted in his recent article in Atlantic Monthly). Unlike Grenz and McGrath (and their popular counterpart Chuck Smith, Jr.), Groothuis achieves a balance: he recognizes the importance of understanding the postmodern condition and even learning from it, without selling out to it.

One only hopes that Groothuis's next project will be his own book along the lines of Grenz's Renewing the Center, in which Groothuis will offer a more extensive version of the chapter that deals with the approaches of Grenz, McGrath, et al., and show that there is a credible way to be an evangelical in the postmodern era without scrapping the last 250 years of evangelical theological wisdom.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


41 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Sad..., March 16, 2006
This review is from: Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism (Paperback)
Even if one is sympathetic to Groothuis's broad concern, one can't help but be disappointed with this text. This book is a bad regurgitation of other bad and reductive non-readings of `pomo'. Groothuis depends way too highly on secondary (and sometimes tertiary) sources. It escapes me how a former reviewer could call this work `scholarly.' I suppose if one considers Logic 101 tinged with the usual fundamentalist `defender of the Faith' rhetoric and aura (which hovers over every page), then this could be called `scholarly.'

The big problem I found is that even when Groothuis offers defensible criticisms, his alternatives end up being just as problematic as the positions he criticizes. For all his advocacy for a correspondence theory of truth, his tone betrays a penchant for certainty and formal coherence. He falls into the problem of the relation between thought and `reality,' representation to presentation, the role of language, and so forth. No doubt God comes to save the day with all these problems, yet on the very justificatory terms Groothuis advocates for, God escapes the measure of correspondence and becomes its condition of possibility. In other words, God becomes a structural metaphysical function which `saves' Groothuis's truth from the skeptic. The problem, however, is that Groothuis wants truth to be absolute, universal, and accessible to all, yet he is dependent on a moment (i.e. faith) which, by definition, retains a trace of contingency or `objective' undecidability.

Groothuis's more ethical concerns are where I am more sympathetic, but again, here his polemics and non-reading of the people he criticizes drowned out whatever constructive points he offers. Groothuis practices the same type of irresponsible reflection that some of the `pomo' Evangelical's do: uncriticality. Here, philosophy and reflection - whether Modern or postmodern - becomes a means to simply confirm and justify a complacent status quo, rather than challenging and transforming the status quo. The challenge presented in this book is for a nostalgic return to the good old days of Christendom.

Jesus did not come to `save' our metaphysical systems, but to redeem us and this world. That redemption is not contingent upon accurate representations as Groothuis seems to think. It is madness to the Greek (i.e. the logician) and a stumbling block to the Legalist (i.e. moralistic hypocrites). The task is not to make the faith less crazy or more socially repressive. As James tells us, the measure of `true' faith - and here I will grant a type of reference - is that we `attend to the widow and orphan.' Kerygma without service is dead, a worse lie than any humanism. Perhaps if we began `proving' our faith, that is, manifesting its truth in radical service and justice - we could actually demonstrate the truth to which we testify. I guess it is much easier to `defend the faith' with bad arguments which only convince the already convinced, than to `live the faith': serve the people no one gives a hoot about. After all, in the latter case one cannot fancy oneself a hero in quite the same way.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews









Only search this product's reviews



Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
A venerable old Russian proverb claims that "one word of truth outweighs the world." Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
truth decay, correspondence view, postmodernist themes, postmodernist rejection, truth about truth, propositional revelation, postmodernist philosophy, postmodernist art, postmodernist ideas, brown desk, postmodernist view, postmodern times
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Grand Rapids, Downers Grove, Jesus Christ, Douglas Groothuis, Richard Rorty, New Testament, Walter Truett Anderson, Holy Spirit, Rebecca Merrill Groothuis, Alvin Plantinga, Michel Foucault, Francis Schaeffer, New Age, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Carl Henry, Pluralist Society, Stanley Grenz, United States, Arthur Holmes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Berger, Terry Eagleton, Blaise Pascal
New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats
Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:





Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   
Related forums





Look for Similar Items by Category


Look for Similar Items by Subject