ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that a credible theistic ethics can meet the challenge of postmodern deconstruction through an epistemology that is essentially relational, engaged, world-embedded, and founded on the primacy of the self as agent-in-relation. A naive correspondence theory assumes that ideas arise and can be checked for validity in the absence of direct engagement with the world to which ideas presumably correspond. It 'solves' the problem of knowledge solely from within the cognitive act itself. Some have argued that epistemological realism is undermined by the irreducibly metaphorical character of our knowledge. Moderate realism is an epistemological position that situates knowing in a preexisting world of persons, objects and events with which the thinker is practically engaged through interaction. It is contextual in that it acknowledges that all ideas arise in some delimited context of the self-as-agent's practical encounter with the world.
