The concept of Objectivity is a false product of Liberalism

If by “objectivity” you mean a final language that transcends the contingency of practice—some sort of pristine way to get a one-on-one correspondence to “the way things are” (“the final commensurating vocabulary for all possible rational discourse” —then yes, I deny “objectivity.”

James KA Smith makes the case against liberal ideas of "objectivity" in his book, Who's Afraid of Relativism, the following are some notes I took from that :

We make our way in the world by means of a know-how for which we are indebted to—and dependent upon—a community of meaning making. It is our social dependency as “knowers” (know-howers) that is ignored by representationalist theories of knowledge. We need an appreciation for the contingent, social conditions of our knowledge.

The very picture of an objective knower denies of our creaturehood—namely, our contingency, dependency, and sociality. The picture is fundamentally individualist and atomistic: the lone knower, however “limited,” confronted by—and mirroring , however opaquely—the “external” world, god like in so far as he doesn’t seem to depend on anyone.

And this is the account of "reason" as metanarrative - universal, transcendent , ahistorical, free from narrative or myth, that postmodernity calls into question.

On Lyotard’s account,  for example, Homer’s Odyssey —though telling a grand story and making universal claims about human nature—is not a metanarrative because it does not claim to legitimate itself by an appeal to a supposed universal, scientific reason; rather, it is a matter of proclamation, or kerygma, which demands the response of faith. On the other hand, the scientific stories told by modern rationalism (Kant), scientific naturalism, or sociobiology are metanarratives insofar as they claim to be demonstrable by reason alone.

At the heart of the postmodern critique of modernity is an unveiling of the way that science—which is so critical of the “fables” of narrative—is itself grounded in a narrative. What modernity did not recognize about itself was the way in which narrative infiltrated science.

The problem with metanarratives is that they do not own up to their own mythic ground. Postmodernism is not incredulity toward narrative or myth; on the contrary, it unveils that all knowledge is grounded in such.

Reason is just one myth among others, which is itself rooted in a narrative.

This universal penchant for ahistoricality resulted in the colonial imposition of one particular set of practices as rational and universal, when in fact they were the fruit of a very determinate history and geography. In this respect modernity represented a revival of traditional Platonism, which held that ideas—and it is ideas that modernity really cared about—trafficked in the eternal, unchanging, atemporal realm of the Forms.

In other words, to grasp an idea was to transcend time, and the ideas that really mattered were not conditioned by time or change.

If postmodernity is incredulity toward metanarratives, then does postmodernism signal a rejection of Christian faith insofar as it is based on the grand story of the Scriptures? The answer is clearly negative, since the biblical narrative and Christian faith claim to be legitimated not by an appeal to a universal, autonomous reason but rather by an appeal to a specific narrative.

We can properly confess that we know God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, but such knowledge rests on the gift of (particular,  special) revelation, is not universally objective or demonstrable, and remains a matter of interpretation and perspective (with a significant appreciation for the role of the Spirit’s regeneration and illumination as a condition for knowledge).

We confess knowledge without certainty, truth without objectivity.

The church is most faithful, Stanley Hauerwas argues, when we “are content to live ‘out of control.’ For to be out of control means Christians can risk trusting in gifts, so they have no reason to deny the contingent character of our existence.”“ In other words, to know God isGod (and we are not) is to own up to the tenuous fragility of our existence. This is to recognize that everything depends not just our life and breath, but also truth and knowledge, even our epistemology and metaphysics. But all too often we construct accounts of knowledge and truth that effectively deny our dependence, that efface our vulnerability and try to “secure” us from the relativity of being a (rational, knowing) creature.

Hauerwas points out, because it means that the Christian understanding of contingency is itself dependent. "The liberal nihilists are, of course, right that our lives are contingent," he says, "but their account of contingency is unintelligible. Contingent to what? If everything is contingent, then to say we are contingent is simply not interesting.

In contrast, Christians know their contingency is a correlative to their status as creatures. To be contingent is to recognize that our lives are intelligible only to the extent that we discover we are characters in a narrative we did not create."' And that very discovery, I would add, depends upon our being "in Christ."

That's why the Triune God doesn't just send us an "objective" Word; he sends his Son who, upon his ascension, imparts the Spirit who gives birth to a community of practice to enable us to read his world.

He doesn't just send us a message;he enfolds us into his body. And that body is the community of practice in which we learn to mean the world—the context in which we learn what the world is for.

Our seeing the world as a gift to be used is relative to our immersion in the Story in which that makes sense. The church is the language-game in which we learn to read the world aright.

The church is that"conventional"community in which the Spirit trains us to know the real world.

Atomistic independent knowers don’t exist. We bear witness to HUMAN knowers, contingent social creatures whose knowledge depends on the gifts of communities of practice that make the world intelligible. For human knowers, there is no knowledge outside of community. Accordingly, there is no knowledge of God in Christ apart from the communal practices of his body, which is home to his word.

Embracing contingency does not entail embracing ‘liberalism’: in fact, to the contrary, it is when we deny our contingency that we are thereby licensed to deny our dependence and hence assume the position where we are arbitrators of truth. When we spur our dependence on tradition and assume a stance of ‘objective’ knowledge whereby we can dismiss aspects of Scripture and Christian orthodoxy as benighted and unenlightened. In short, it is the denial of dependence that undergirds a progressive agenda. The picture of knowledge bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment is a forthright denial of our dependence, and it yields a God-like picture of human reason. It is ‘objectivity’ that is ‘liberal’.”

Conversely, the "atomistic" epistemology that is hound up with representationalist realism is actually liberal and subjectivist. It posits a picture of the lone, self-sufficient knower able to "mirror" the world without help, independently. Thus Charles Taylor notes that the Cartesian turn unleashes a subjectivism that has ripple effects across culture. "Now [after Descartes] certainty is some-thing the mind has to generate for itself. It requires a reflexive turn, where instead of simply trusting the opinions you have acquired through your upbringing, you examine their foundation, which is ultimately to he found in your own mind."' I, the subject, am put in the place of arbitrator and judge, throwing off the taint of external influences.This is why “absolute” truth is liberal: it denies of knowers to dependence and denies any indebtedness to tradition.

If knowledge is a social accomplishment, and justification is a social effect, then we need to appreciate that "intelligibility comes from skill, not theory, and credibility comes from good performance, not adherence to independently formulated criteria" . So "the reasonableness of a religion is largely a function of its assimilative powers, of its ability to provide an intelligible in-terpretation in its own terms of the varied situations and realities adherents [and nonadherents] encounter" approach "is not to be equated with irrationalism. The issue is not whether there are universal norms of reasonableness, but whether these can he formulated in some neutral, framework-independent language" .

Appreciation of the contingent, communal conditions of knowledge does not undercut the ability to make universal claims, nor does it preclude the possibility of asserting universal norms. It only means that it is impossible to see or grasp such norms from "nowhere" or from an "absolute" standpoint. The contingent conditions of a particular community of practice are the gifts that enable us to see and understand these "universal" features of the cosmos. But this means that the condition for their being "intelligible" is a degree of competence in the discursive practices of the community (or communities) that see them as such.

We receive revelation from God - noncontingent and absolute, who we confess is "God the Father Almighty" And yet one needs to "learn" to receive it as such, and the Spirit has elected to effect such "training" (in a Wittgensteinian sense) through the community of practice that is the body of Christ." Everything we know and confess as Christians is relative to this (contingent, historical) revelation, and our reception of this as revelation is dependent upon our inculcation in the community of social practice that is the church. There is now no revelation outside the church because there is no meaning that is not "use." Far from undercutting Christian orthodoxy, this simply brings us back to what we learned from Augustine…to see creation as creation, to receive the world as sacramentum mundi, depends upon (is relative to) a story about the world that is revealed to us by God and passed on to us in the community of the Spirit that is the church."