Happy New Year!
The blog's gone stale while we were away visiting family and friends for Christmas, but I'm back now and sick (thanks Dave).
While my wife is next door at her parents' house I (both because I feel crummy and in an effort to avoid infecting the rest of the family) am doing a little browsing and blogging after which I will return to my winter break reading. I'm finishing up Merold Westphal's Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism, which has been one of my favorite reads in a while. I've also started Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation by Mirsolav Wolf and will follow it up with The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, edited by Kevin Vanhoozer, who gave the final keynote address (my personal favorite) at ETS/EPS in San Antonio this year.
While I would usually be trying to get a jump-start on my reading for the Spring, but I have too much peripheral reading that I'm trying to squeeze in before the semester starts.
Happy New Year, everybody. Celebrate responsibly!
While my wife is next door at her parents' house I (both because I feel crummy and in an effort to avoid infecting the rest of the family) am doing a little browsing and blogging after which I will return to my winter break reading. I'm finishing up Merold Westphal's Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism, which has been one of my favorite reads in a while. I've also started Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation by Mirsolav Wolf and will follow it up with The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, edited by Kevin Vanhoozer, who gave the final keynote address (my personal favorite) at ETS/EPS in San Antonio this year.
While I would usually be trying to get a jump-start on my reading for the Spring, but I have too much peripheral reading that I'm trying to squeeze in before the semester starts.
Happy New Year, everybody. Celebrate responsibly!
posted by saument @ 8:08 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Say it ain't so! I was thoroughly disappointed with Vanhoozer's talk at this past ETS meeting. (See here and here for other comments I made about the ETS/EPS meeting. I also blogged about Moreland's talk.)
So are you guys really into the evangelical postmodern movement? (Do I see Grenz and Fiddes on your bookshelf? Oh look, I think I see Heidegger and Tillich!) I'm very concerned about this trend in evangelical theology. Of course, I don't think the evangelical pomo trend is entirely false, but I am surprised to see your endorsement. I'd be interested to read your posts about this subject.
Out of curiosity, how popular is this at DTS among students and faculty?
Well don't jump to any conclusions about where in that camp I might fit. I am not a whole hog supporter of all things pomo (I'm actually more of a strange combination of a pre-modern neo-thomist a-la Maritain mixed with a tendency towards a Scheafferian-style presuppositionalism, with a strong affinity for the Radical Orthodoxy project).
(Since this turned out to be such a long response to John's comment I thought I'd post these links here. I pretty much get my position on postmodernism from Westphal.
Blind spots: Christianity and postmodern philosophyPostmodern fallacies: a response to Merold Westphal - FeaturesMerold Westphal replies - Features - response to Douglas Groothuis' response to Westphal's original articleCf. The introduction in Westphal's Overcoming Onto-Theology.)
I think it's possible to be critical of much in postmodernism while still listening to and affirming postmodern critiques of radical foundationalism (as seeking a God's eye view that only God possesses in an effort to master the creation).
I think that most evangelicals I read get postmodernism wrong either by an uncritical embrace (Grenz and Franke) or by a defensive critique that does more to defend modernism than it does the Faith (Groothuis).
From what I can tell so far, Van Hoozer is light-years away from either Grenz or Groothuis.
I do think that there's a lot more modernism in 20th century evangelical theology that we have been able to see in the past, regardless of the fact that we were reacting against the modernism we saw in liberal theology.
I still hold to a correspondence theory of truth, but understand various types of knowledge - propositional, narrative, knowledge by connaturality. A major issue I have with much early-mid 20th century Evangelicalism is an exclusively propositional approach to Scripture. Yes, Scripture contains propositional truth, but it also contains narrative. Narrative knowlege goes beyond propositional knowledge. As Flannery O'Conner pointed out (and Leland Ryken cited) the meaning of a story cannot be boiled down to a propositional statement. The meaning is the story. We can speak truthfully about the story, but there will always be more there than we can say. I can never take my Erickson, Ryrie, Berkhoff, or Grudem Systematic Theology text and dispense with Scripture. And while nobody that I know of ever advocated doing that, there is that sort of spirit in a strictly propositional approach to revelation.
Regarding Moreland's talk. I appreciated it, but his critique doesn't really apply to someone like Westphal who actually would make some of the same criticisms. The problem I had with Moreland's talk was that it only addressed one side of the postmodern issue - skepticism towards theism and/or truth. There is an element of skepticism in postmodern thought that should be refuted. But there is also a postmodern critique that employs a hermeneutics of suspicion rather than skepticism. Such a critique is targeted at believers rather than the content of belief. It is directed at the motives the beliver and the function of religious belief in legitimizing oppresive social structures and projects and anesthetizing believers to their true conditions. These aren't metaphysical critiques, but are historical in nature. As Westphal has pointed out, such critiques don't address the truth or falsity of beliefs as such. Consequently they can't be refuted as if they did. Instead, they should be listened to and possibly heeded as one would an OT prophet making a similar accusation.
Regarding the atmosphere at DTS: There's a lot of diversity on campus and there are guys all over the board on this. I'm not sure about faculty. I'm on the Houston campus now and have limited access.
And of course I DO have Heiddeger on my shelf, but I'd be lying if I said I understood him! I am NOT a philosopher. I have read a fair bit of philosophy for a non-philospher, but most of my philosophy is second-hand, though I did muscle my way through Maritain's The Degrees of Knowledge a few years back. :^)
hmmm...that was a long defensive comment, wasn't it? :^) I just want to be understood! Somebody understand me!
Ok, I won't label you (at least not yet). I am probably more in the Groothius camp (although I haven't read his work). I have read lots of Grenz and Heidegger myself, so I won't criticize you for reading these pomo icons. I'm glad to see you can read them critically.
Bottom line: I won't draw any unwarranted conclusions based on what books you're reading.
I liked the Westphal book a lot, I read it while doing a paper on Marx's responses to religion, and found it very helpful.
I too am very wary of the movement towards evangelical postmodernism, though to be fair, I have not read too many books about it or in favour of it. In the pop-christian world, the book seems to be "A New Kind of Christian" by Brian McLaren... but then again, I try not to read too much pop-christianity.
Are there any specific pieces of literature that would best give me an intellectual idea about this turn in evangelical thought?
The Cambridge Companion looks like a good overview, though I haven't gotten into it yet. It overviews various types of postmodern theology and various doctrines as affected by postmodernism. Millard Erickson's Truth or Consequences is a good, balanced (yet critical) treatment of postmodernism. His Postmodernizing the Faith outlines six different responses to pomo from Evangelicals.
I've been told to avoid Stanley Grenz's A Primer On Postmodernism and Douglas Groothuis's Truth Decay because they misunderstand postmodernism, but they're informing huge groups of Evangelicals on pomo, so their approach is important for that reason, whether you end up agreeing with them or not.
Westphal's Overcoming Onto-Theology is one of the best introductions, though it's very forbidding. Don't be fooled by the readability of Suspicion and Faith. Parts of this book are a bear to get through due to the subject matter. I haven't read the entire book, but the introduction is a must, as are the articles I linked to in the previous comment. In my opinion, Westphal out-classes just about anyone else writing on the subject. Though he's an American he is a continental philosopher and as such, he thoroughly understands the the thinkers who shaped what we call postmodernism in a way that analytic philosophers (or traditional Evangelical theologians) seldom do.
I'd probably start with Westphal's article and move on to Erickson's Truth or Consequences for a good grounding.
What else did I leave out? John? Charles? Dave? Anyone?
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