ABSTRACT

In his introduction to Theology at the End of the Century, Robert P. Scharlemann points out “several distinguishing features of the postmodern in its significance for theological thinking.”2 Here Scharlemann sets out the questioning of the transparency of the self, the Nietzschean declaration of the death of God, the Hegelian transformation of the speculative Good Friday into world history, and the loss of first principles, as characteristics of postmodernity. Here I am primarily concerned with the first of these features, the questioning of the transparency of the self. Scharlemann suggests that the “full transparency of the self to itself in thinking” is a Cartesian notion, but it also applies to “the Kantian notion of the apperception of the transcendental ego.”3