Loving God with heart, soul and mind – with all of our
faculties – is our calling. This is because He has bought us lock-stock-and-barrel!
Oddly, the Emergent – think “postmodern”
– guru Tony Jones writes as if he is onboard with this understanding:
- I defy him [Ben Witherington] to find one post or podcast by anyone with a link to the emerging church who has suggested a dumbing down of seminary or college curriculum, the dismissal of Greek and Hebrew from syllabi, or a diminishment of the teaching of literary, exegetical methods.
What’s so perplexing about this challenge? The Emergent Church and their gurus are opposed to statements
of faith or truth. According to them, “truth” is in flux. However, this never
stopped them from writing books about it. Here is my response, which I posted
on Jones’ blog.
Tony,
Contrary to your denials, a dumbing-down is ENDEMIC to your
stance. You wrote:
• This fixation with propositions can easily lead to the
attempt to use the finite tool of language on an absolute Presence that
transcends and embraces finite reality. Languages are culturally constructed
symbol systems that enable humans to communicate by designating one finite
reality in distinction form another. The truly infinite God of Christian faith
is beyond all our linguistic grasping…and so the struggle to capture God in our
finite propositional structures is nothing short of linguistic idolatry. (The New Christians, 234)
Once you discredit “propositions,” what you term “linguistic
grasping,” and “our finite propositional structures,” you are left with only
feelings and conversations – a searching but never finding. This equates to a
dumbing-down.
You also wrote on the next page:
• Giving in to the pressure to petrify the conversation in a
‘statement’ would make Emergent easier to control; its critics could dissect it
and then place it in a theological museum alongside other dead conceptual
specimens… (235)
When you disparage “statements” of truth as “dead conceptual
specimens,” you are virtually saying that there is nothing worth learning,
holding to, or standing-up-for. Hence, you value the search but disdain the
possibility of finding any answers. Such a search is therefore meaningless,
because any finding is non-existent.
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