As you know, when we come to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we have wine available in the outer rings of the trays, and grape juice is in the center. We do this because some Christians have developed scruples about drinking wine, and the New Testament is very plain about how such things are to be …
What Actually Is the Case
The title of McLaren’s book, A Generous Orthodoxy, comes from a phrase coined by Hans Frei. And while there are serious objections to what Frei argues for elsewhere, he certainly has a firm grasp on the nature of pre-critical Christian thought. As he puts it, “In the earlier Protestant interpretive tradition, we have noted, the …
Aboriginal Hip
“The patron saints of the counterculture idea are, of course, the Beats, whose frenzied style and merry alienation still maintain a powerful grip on the American imagination. Even forty years after the publication of On the Road, the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs remain the sine qua non of dissidence, the model for aspiring …
That Wholesome Glow
“The critic of Thomas Kinkade paintings, where all the puddles on the ground have their eerie radioactive glow, and all the bungalows look like the living room has just caught on fire, is assumed to be a critic who is hostile to home, hearth, and wholesome family values. But the actual object of his hostility …
Inerrancy Too Weak
In the past I have criticized the inerrantist position (as popularly conceived) as being too weak. And in dealing with the assumption that theological conservatives somehow want the Bible to be their foundation for certainty about universals, thus making me a “foundationalist,” which I hotly deny, I find that I still have to explain how …
Christ the Foundation
I suppose that if believing in Jesus Christ as the cornerstone makes one a foundationalist, then I am a foundationalist. But otherwise not. Andrew Sandlin wants to describe an aspect of the contemporary conflict this way. “Today’s battle between us Christian postmodernists on the one hand and some Christian foundationalists on the other is at …
Revolution Through Consumption
“What we thought was really eerie, though, was the way mass culture reflected the high critics’ priorities. While they spoke proudly of their own subversiveness and turned out account after account of the liberating potential of each act of consuming, the culture industry itself grabbed with both hands at the golden promise of rebellion-through-consumption. The …
Adjectives Don’t Exist
“Abstractions like truth, beauty, and green are necessary in order for us to communicate at all. But we must be careful here because our entire problem rests in what we have thought we are allowed to do with abstractions. The lack of ‘existence’ is true of all adjectives, including those adjectives we call numbers. One, …
Modernism and Plato
“But Western culture needed more time in the detox center than was actually spent there, and the temptation to go back to realist assumptions has been constant and unrelenting. This has been particularly the case with mathematics and its cousins — theoretical physics and symbolic logic in particular. Many modern fads and fashions — the …
Honky Tonk Piccolo
“Far more is involved in learning how to do this than just making a list of words that can be used — whether never, occasionally, or all the time. Someone who has a generally pietistic cast of mind cannot just throw a word in here or there — that would be like trying to play …