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DLW
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457

Posted 12/14/2003 9:13 AM (GMT -6)

Apparently Brian McClaren wrote a letter, which is at the following,
http://www.emergentvillage.com/user_files/other/openlettertochuckcolson.pdf

that was a response to Chuck Colson's Christianity Today's article on Postmodernism...

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/012/24.72.html

It is primarily about the attempt of Christians to deal with postmodernity.

dlw

Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes."

Blood Washed Heretic
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2003
Total Posts : 167

Posted 12/16/2003 7:06 AM (GMT -6)

I read that...

Brian McLaren's solid. A great mind engaging his culture, trying to use it for his Master's glory.

In essentials, unity; In matters of opinion, liberty; In all things, love.

Ochuk
Registered Member

Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 102

Posted 12/22/2003 11:38 AM (GMT -6)

I'm not a fan of Mclaren. Grenz is better.

Read my blog at ochuk.gizzar.com

Alan Rhoda
Registered Member

Date Joined May 2002
Total Posts : 680

Posted 12/22/2003 2:13 PM (GMT -6)

Interesting exchange. Clealy, Colson's short piece is overly simplistic in its discussion of postmodernism. But I also think McClaren is mistaken in playing down the radical relativism that is implicit, if not explicit, in much postmodern thinking. Richard Rorty's work is a prime example. He argues that we should jettison "modernist" notions like 'truth' and 'objectivity'. And Derrida, while he may eschew relativism, has nevertheless defended positions on meaning and reference and knowledge that entail radical skepticism and relativism. McClaren is correct that postmoderns are generally very concerned about injustices stemming from modernist presuppositions, but in opposing the evils of modernism they tend to go from one extreme to the other. I can't go into details now, but the pivotal figure here is Immanuel Kant. In terms of the history of philosophy, postmodernism emerges from a partial critique of Kant that exploits the skeptical tendencies inherent in his system. The problem is that the critique is only partial in that post-Kantian continental philosophy from which postmodernism arose uncritically adopts certain Kantian (and modernist) assumptions about knowledge, assumptions that, if they had been properly identified and critiqued, would have taken us beyond both modernism and postmodernism to a contextually sensitive "contrite fallibilism", to use C.S. Peirce's phrase.

Anyway, that's my take in a nutshell. Merry Christmas.

Alan

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