“One can picture them [IVP] at their editorial meeting, wrestling with the contours of their stupid meeting, and the issue of whether they ought to call the Spirit “she” in print. “Oh, hell, why not?” one imagines them saying. “We’re postevangelicals. We’re not under law, whatever that is. We’re under grace, whatever that is” (Contours …
Come Again?
“Because women have historically been oppressed (although this must not be confused with any naive claim to historical correspondence between our knowledge and what actually happened to women back then) we must come to allow the text of Scripture to speak to us feminitudinously, painted up an objectivst masculine tree as we have been, and …
Lost, But Making Good Time!
“This is a portent of great promise indeed. We don’t need to adopt postmodern relativism, because we know that we are on the road to wherever it is we are going. We simply do not understand why someone has not figured out this angle before” (Contours of Post Maturity, p. 19).
Wrestling the Contours
“So we must do what all theologians do in this fix, at least when repentance is out of the question. We turn on the fog machine, and we wrestle with the contours of something or other” (Contours of Post Maturity, p. 18).
Circling the Drain
“Now wait. They lost us again. Are we to have a total war against totalizing readings? All of them? But when we do, are we not guilty of totalizing against totalizing? No wait . . . this is an additional subtlety perhaps? What better way to inveigh against totalizing than to totalize against it, thus …
A Pop Fly
“You know, this is really good. Don’t you just love it when gifted Bible expositors show you things in Scripture that you never saw there before? Some of us would never have thought that the embrace of marginality, to take just one example, could even have a trajectory. One hardly knows how to think about …
The Great Protection of Having No Roof
“The authors took the risk when they wrote this book that some bonehead readers (like the present reviewer) might be stone cold deaf to some of their nuances. You see, the Bible works against totalization and one of the reasons is that God has an overarching creational intent. Now how God can overarch something like …
Convergence
“Of course in the postevangelical world, when something is problematic, it is not necessary to solve the problem or answer the question. All that is necessary is to wrestle with the contours of it. Nevertheless, as listeners to the biblical story, our authors want us to consider doing the same. After all, if we listen …
A New Imperialism
“But actually, in the postmodern milieu, awareness doesn’t grow and nothing discloses anything–except for an occasional contour. Old patterns are hard to break, and we urge our authors to redouble their efforts at their sanctification. When they tell us to lay off the violence, I detect the contours of a new imperialism. Why are they …
Entropy
“Bygone trendiness is simply not good enough for the scholarship of current trendiness. This is a constant problem; trendiness never stays put, and what’s cool usually assumes room temperature at some point” (Contours of Post Maturity, pp. 10-11).