As I have been pursuing this little postmodern jag of mine, reading folks I wouldn’t ordinarily read, I have been struck with how much postmodernists share in common with the modernity they think they are rejecting. Shared assumptions leap off the page, invisible both to them and their modernist targets. Here are some obvious shared …
Bell Bottom Blues
Just finished McLaren’s book A New Kind of Christian. All in all, taking one thing with another, the book is an almost perfect jumble of cant, cliche, and bad trouble. A number of very true points are made throughout the book, but the problem is that they are offered as part of a breathless discovery …
The Aroma of Burnt Marshwiggle
In a world gone mad, it can be difficult to keep your bearings. When everyone around you appears to have lost their grip, it is hard to keep believing that the rest of the army is out of step. Athanasius was probably tempted, more than once, while packing his luggage for yet another exile, to …
Three Toddlers
I am continuing through the unfortunate book A New Kind of Christian, and a thought occurred to me about the very name postmodern. This came to me because the spiritual mentor in this book (a man named Neo) is primrose pathing the other guy, and one of the first things he does is draw out …
Postmodernism Is, As Derrida Might Say, Le Dead
I am continuing to slog my way through McLaren and Raschke, left hand raised high so I won’t get any on my watch. And I have come to the settled conclusion that postmodernism is dead. Why do I think this? What is the evidence? The proof is conclusive — we can tell that postmodernism is …
Postmodern Lechery
Many philosophical fads and currents should be considered as differing attempts at rationalizing the world in such a way that sexual immorality is no longer sexual immorality. And when the philosophical fog machine is completely up and running, and the incoherence fills the room with a misty haze, the chances are good that this is …
You Are Here
As part of my neo-fundamentalist masochism, I have been reading quite a bit of quasi-postmodern Christian writing lately, and the more quasi I read the more queasy I get. The latest entry that has found its way into my briefcase is Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian. One of the most frustrating aspects of …
Bright Red Orthodoxy
I appreciate what my friend John Armstrong has to say about postmodernism here. The postmodernists have climbed into the car of modernity’s premises, and have driven it into a tree. What the postmodernists do not appear to grasp, however, is that mumbling incoherently to oneself in the wreckage of that old car does not constitute …
Objective Exegesis
In a recent entry on his web page, Andrew Sandlin makes an important point about the incarnational nature of the Christian faith (“The Faith is What We Are”), but in my view misses the biblical balance dangerously. In rejecting an objectivity outside ourselves (that when detached from how we actually live should be rejected), I …
Demands for Apology As Weapon
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, …