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Evangelical  critics  of of "liberalism"  allege  that allege that its hallmark was-and is-a was—and is—a cognitive relativism."  By By making experience  the  one  and the one and only primal (noetic) source of theology, liberalism condemned theology to be like all other human efforts to know and to understand. It thereby became simply one more part of "the human quest for understanding ,. . . which is one undertaken from within the flux of human experience  employing employing the  tools available tools available to human experimenters"  and and never yielding   "any certainty beyond that of an interim report offered from within the fallabilities infallabilities of the fragile, human psyche." In thus  becoming becoming "relative  and and fallible,"  like  all  other human like all other human knowledge, theology becomes quite different from   "the kind of knowledge given by revelation"  (David Wells:  179179,  174174). 

But this charge of "cognitive relativism"  cannot cannot be sustained. It confuses what may very well be only a  criticalcritical, nondogmatic attitude toward claims to validity (and authority) with a  relativistic relativistic attitude according to which all such claims, being valid for  each each of the individuals or groups who make or imply them, must be accepted as equally valid. Conversely, those who make this charge typically seek to commend their own uncritical, dogmatic attitude toward (at least certain) claims to validity (and authority) by arguing that any other  attitude attitude either is or necessarily devolves into relativism. Significantly, liberals  or or radicals  who who think of themselves as holding an extreme contrary position to that of evangelicals, reason in essentially the same way-inferringway—inferring, as Gordon Kaufman does, for example, that any claim to absolute truth has to be given up if one is  to to maintain a consistently critical, nondogmatic attitude toward claims to validity (and authority). 

My  question question is  whether whether the whole  antianti-foundationalist polemic of many contemporary philosophers doesn't involve something like the same confusion. One is not, or need not be, a  foundationalist foundationalist simply because one insists that our claims to validity (and authority) be critically validated somehow by reason and experience. Or, alternatively, if such an insistence simply as such makes one properly a  foundationalistfoundationalist, then being a foundationalist is nothing to be ashamed of, or apologized for.  Nor Nor can an uncritical, dogmatic anti-traditionalism be foisted off onto the Enlightenment,  as  distinct as distinct from positions that may have been held by thinkers representing themselves, or represented by others, as belonging to the (normative)  Enlightenment  tradition.  Enlightenment Enlightenment means,  normativelynormatively, not anti-traditionalism, but, if one may say so,  anti­uncriticalismanti­uncriticalism,  antianti-dogmatism-including dogmatism—including such expressions  of of an uncritical, dogmatic attitude as may well characterize persons taking non- or even anti­traditionalist  positionspositions. 

20 December 1991