All right — we need to talk for a moment about propositions, and tie it in with the point of my previous post. Emergent advocates consistently oppose the importance of “story” to the land of arid “propositions,” whence they are departing. I have argued that this is simply a profound category confusion — stories are made of propositions, emergents argue in their theological works for the importance of story by means of propositions, and so on. So whatever it is they are doing, it is not abandoning propositions. Rather, what they are doing is rejecting one story in favor of another, and the story they are telling is that they are departing from the land of darkness, where there are no stories. This is simply false.
As an aside, I am aware of those modern-day Platonists who want to argue for the ontological existence of propositions up in Euclidville, and who want to understand these heavenly propositions in a way detached from dirt, grass, oil and other manifestations of concrete particularity. They want their pristine Ps and Qs, and little invisible hoses running from the heavens down into our sentences to impart to those earthly sentences whatever meaning they might come to possess. I am not interacting with them directly here because I stopped paying any attention to them many years ago. When I say something like “propositions rock,” I am exhibiting no indebtedness whatever to these analytic people who have Hellenism wrapped tight around their axle. Rather, in full Hebraic mode, I am exulting in the fact that “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” concludes with a rousing proposition, and “Jesus is Lord” is entirely propositional, even when written in Greek. A proposition is true or false to the extent that it is being true (or not) to the world the way God made it.
Now, do propositions exist? Sure, they exist for the same reason that my English muffins for breakfast used to exist. Propositions, like muffins, are events in the world. I ate my muffins, and I just now wrote the proposition that “the grass on my front lawn is green.” Now Plato would want some sort of ontological super-proposition in the sky (and that’s what he would call “existing”). But I don’t pay attention to him because he wanted a giant muffin the in the sky too.
Incarnational propositions, street propositions, rough and tumble propositions do not exist off in some autonomous spiritual zone. They fill up our sentences, hymn books, Bibles, prayer books, not to mention books of emergent whining. They are events in the world. The propositional events in the world that are true are those which conform to creation as God gave it. Those that are false do not conform to God’s Word. When we go this way, life is simple. I want to think the way God wants me to think, and this means thinking His thoughts after Him. And if He reveals to us things like “Jesus is Lord,” along with “Jesus entered Capernaum,” one of the first duties of Christian discipleship is to throw up our hands in the air and shout, “Yay! Some true propositions! Let’s believe them!”
Now let us bring this back to the foolish emergent juxtaposition of “story” and “propositions.” Just as propositions are inescapable, so are stories. The emergents and pomos have their story. The modernists have their story. The Christians have their story. Our propositions are at war with the propositions of the other teams, and our stories are at war as well. It is simply false to assume that the modernists are “story-less.” They have a compelling story. They have a big bang story of creation, they have the story of Darwinian evolution, they have the story of slavery in the Egypt of medieval superstitions, they have Moses bringing in the Enlightenment, they have the story of how religion creates nothing but one Thirty Years War after another, and so on. Now in the last several generations their story has gotten threadbare, and they have grown weary (and vulnerable) in the telling of it. And the pomos are trying (unsuccessfully) to mount a challenge and offer an alternative story, but one that cannot be successfully because of all the internal contradictions and confusions.
Christians have a story (chock full of propositions, and true ones to boot) that genuinely mounts a challenge to the dominant modernist story. Now we in the confessional Christian church have sinned, but not because we have no story. Rather we have sinned because we have told that story in a dull and lackluster way. We have spoken without authority, just like the scribes. There is a vast difference between a story badly told, and no story at all. The modernists had a story that beguiled the western world for several centuries, but they also have fallen off their game, and have begun to tell it in a tired way. The emergent advocates (with their postmodernism lite) think to take advantage of the opportunity by telling us all an incoherent story, filled with piffle. So the fact that pomos and emergents are taking shots at the modernists is not an encouragement. I feel about it the same way I feel about Dwarves shooting arrows at Calormen.
And this is the real issue — authority. The one who tells the story right, wins. The postmodernists see at least this much, but interpret all “winning” as a raw power game. But we serve a God who raises the dead, and the power of the resurrection is not coercive power but resurrection authority bestowed on a servant heart. There is much more to say about this matter of authority, but for the present, Jesus lived and told the story right. And He rose from the dead. And He is Lord. Arid propositions? They wish.