One tactic that is used to advance the postmodern agenda is an adroit use of “demands for an apology.” I have noticed that many Christians would be suspicious if someone simply announced that the lines between right and wrong, good and evil, truth and falsehood, need to be blurred. Believing Christians hear something like this, …
The Patron Saint of Epistemology
St. John is the patron saint of epistemology. That is, he is patron saint of a biblical approach to believing and knowing. He is not the patron saint of unbelieving epistemology. How do we know? How do we know that we know? These are reasonable questions to ask at the foot of the cross — …
Relativism and the Invasion of Iraq
Dear visionaries, The role of debate in a free society is often misunderstood — it is too readily assumed that people disagree simply because they are disagreeable. We also tend to misunderstand the corrosive effects of relativism. When objections are made to topless car washes — let us say — the whole thing is dismissed …
Hearth and Home
“Modernity has abandoned the household gods, not because we have rejected the idolatry as all Christians must, but because we have rejected the very idea of the household. We no longer worship Vesta, but have only turned away from her because our homes no longer have any hearths” (Angels in the Architecture, p. 117).
For Now
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11) Growing Dominion, Part 31 Many years ago, when I was laboring away in a class of classical Greek, whenever our instructor would give us some grammatical rule or other, the class would chant in unison, “For now!” We knew that somewhere, up around …
Impudence on Stilts
Fundamental assumptions are like the backs of our heads. We all have one, and none of us can see our own. One of the most exasperating features of working through literature on postmodernism is the fact that, for all the talk, the postmodernists can’t deconstruct their way out of a paper bag. One basic assumption …
American Gospel
Dear visionaries, I believe a fundamental flaw in analyzing America’s foreign policy in the Middle East (or anywhere else) is that we persist in speaking as though the “two sides” represented are limited to the Mutt and Jeff of our two party system. The real issue of substantive debate in foreign policy is between the …
Conservative?
“To say that someone is a conservative does not tell us what he is interested in conserving. Within our lifetimes, we have seen hard line communists trying to conserve the Soviet Union, fanatical Muslims trying to conserve ancient Islamic traditions, and American right-wingers trying to conserve the rich heritage of “Ozzie and Harriet.” The word …
After Darkness, Light
In a recent post on postmodernism, I commented on the timidity of many who will not handle their discontents in a scriptural manner. This ties in with postmodernism because of the primacy of feeling in postmodern subjectivism. Interestingly, after posting that I got an (anonymous) critique that acknowledged the truthfulness of part of what I …
Judah, Judea and James
In John 7:1, John tells us that Jesus did not go into Judea because the Jewish leaders were trying to kill Him. But the feast of tabernacles was at hand, and just a few verses later, his brothers (who did not believe in Him, v. 5), were taunting Him, trying to get Him to go …