I'm continuing through Robert Webber's The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World. I'm finding it an incredibly clear guide to the postmodern impact on evangelicalism--way clearer than anything else I've seen, including James Smith's Who's Afraid or anything by Grenz.
In chapter 6 on apologetics among younger evangelicals, he describes the very modernist separation of truth from "embodiment" that typified the founding voices of neo-evangelicalism in the mid-twentieth century. What this means is the modernist sense that you can detach truth neatly from you as the one discussing it.
He illustrates this modernist evangelical approach to truth by way of 3 of Henry's 15 theses regarding revelation:
10. God's revelation is rational communication conveyed in intelligible ideas and meaningful words, that is, conceptual verbal form.
11. The Bible is the reservoir and conduit of divine truth. [in contrast to the person, Jesus Christ and the church that continues his embodiment in the world today].
12. The Holy Spirit superintends the communication of divine revelation, first, by inspiring the prophetic apostolic writings, and, second, by illuminating and interpreting the scripturally given Word of God [understood in terms of words].
For the younger evangelicals, said Webber, truth must be embodied in a person and is only known truly by those who live it.
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3 comments:
Yes, a commitment to truth as we know it are the values we hold most dear, as these are the values we live by. But, these values change, thus, truth for us, changes, too.
We commit to the things we believe in and value.But, personal commitment cannot be judged by another, as "true" in the historical sense, only observation can be made about what a person spends time on. Nor can anyone else determine for us what our passions, values, or priorities should be about. This is a personal embodiment of personal commitment and conviction.
Christian culture determines what is true through the dogma of the Church or the interpretation of Scripture. This is not personal truth, but group think that one can commit to, but does not answer the question of what is of most importance to a person, or the values that one would commit to...some would want to universalize what a disciple should be, do and think, using Jesus specific encounter with a specific individual. While these "examples" of care and concern on Jesus' part, is a universal example, it is not "word specific". A disciple is just a person that is committed to a certain paradigm of personal conviction and truth. The "secular"(if you want to separate the sacred and secular)understanding is Leadership training.
BTW. your highlighted words, of 'categorization', 'Word", "rational' lead me to think of Kant. Is this where your leading with how a reader response "happens"? Like Gestalt therapy...
When you talk about Foundationalism, isn't this modernist, as it is based on epistomological certainty....Scripture, which I don't believe...that the text is universal in the modernist sense...only as in Kant's sense...
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