An Interesting Quote Regarding Correlational Models of Theology

"One of the concerns I have about the shape of the postmodern or emerging church is what could technically be described as a correlationist model. 'Correlation' refers to a theological strategy whose pedigree is distinctly modern. It operates as follows: beginning with a certain confidence in the findings of a secular discipline - whether philosophy, psychology, history, or sociology - a correlationist theology adapts this neutral or scientific framework as a foundation and then correlates Christian theological claims with the facts discovered by secular science. For instance, Bultmann accepted the neutral (supposed) facts of Heidegger's existential account of the human condition and then correlated Christian theology to fit this model. Or liberation theology took the findings of Marxist sociology as disclosing the scientific facts about human community and then correlated Christian theology with this "scientific" foundation. In every case, correlationist theology has a deeply apologetic interest: ultimately, the goal is to make Christianity intelligible or rational to a given culture (even if it operates on the assumption of a transcultural, neutral, objective reason). In the process, however, primacy is given not to the particularity of Christian revelation or the confessional tradition but rather to the poles of science, experience, and so on, which are taken to be neutral 'givens.'"

James K.A. Smith, "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church." (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 123-124.

Cartesian Certainty, A Problem?

"Figures such as Derrida and John D. Caputo rightly point out (and many who are part of the emergent conversation and very sympathetic on this score) that the modern Cartesian dream of absolute certainty is just that: a dream, and admittedly, one that has been a nightmare for those who have become victims to such rational confidence (colonized peoples, an exploited creation, etc.). And far too often, some version of Cartesian certainty has attached itself to particular religious expressions - the result is what we call fundamentalism - and engendered untold harm." ~ James K.A. Smith "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?" pg. 118

Some Brief Thoughts On Foucault

Through the course of his analysis, Foucault documents the formation of what he calls a "disciplinary society" - the primary goal of which is the creation of the individual - a "reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that [he has] called 'discipline'" (DP, 194). So the goal of a disciplinary society, and the institutions within that society, is the formation of individuals by mechanisms of power. Society makes individuals in its own image, and the tools for such manufacturing are the disciplines of power. Here Foucault adds an important provisio: "We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it 'excludes,' it 'represses,' it 'censors,' it 'abstracts, it 'masks,' it 'conceals.' In fact, power produces; it produces reality" (DP, 194).

Some Thoughts On The Relationship Between Power and Knowledge

Question: If power is knowledge, and knowledge is not power, does a pluralit of competing power machinations give rise to a higher probability of the discovery of transcendent truth? Is it possible that trans-epicurean presuppositional narratives are more abundant in societies that maintain a higher degree of competition? (Context: Foucault's “Discipline and Punish”)

Poetic Thoughts On History

The past has been a mint
Of blood and sorrow.
That must not be
True of tomorrow.

~Langston Hughes

A Christian Perspective On Postmodernism

“The church does not exist for me; my salvation is not primarily a matter of intellectual mastery or emotional satisfaction. The church is the site where God renews and transforms us – place where the practices of being the body of Christ form us into the image of the Son.” ~ Smith, James K.A.. "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church". Baker Academic. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 2006. pg. 30.

"...classical apologetics operates with a very modern notion of reason; 'presuppositional' apologetics, on the other hand, is postmodern (and Augustinian)! [...] The primary responsibility of the church as witness, then, is not demonstration but rather proclamation - the [...] vocation of proclaiming the Word made flesh rather than the thin realities of theism that a supposedly neutral reason yields." ~James K.A. Smith, pg. 28. 

An Interesting Perspective On The Church of The Holy Sepulcher

"At the center of the old city [Jerusalem] stands the Church of The Holy Sepulcher, reputedly on the sight of the original Calvary and the original Garden if the Ressurection. It stands, but only because ugly steel scaffolding permanently supports the walls inside and out. This church is one of the dirtiest, most depressing buildings in all Christendom. It should be torn down and rebuilt. This is not possible, however, because the Church of The Holy Sepulcher belongs jointly to the Abyssinians, Armenians, Copts, Greeks, Syrians, and Roman Catholics, and their priests will hardly speak to oneanother, let alone cooperate in a joint enterprise of rebuilding. Each communion preserves its own seperate chapel, and conducts its own ceremonies; and to make the situation ludacrous, the keys of the church have been entrusted to a family of Muslims who in order to answer the call of Allah five times daily, have turned the entrance into a Muslim Mosque. Nowhere in the world can you find a more tragic symbol of the mutilation of Christ's body than the Church of The Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem."


~Arthur Leonard Griffith, God's Time and Ours (New York: Abingdon Press, 1964), 83.

Dualism's Effect on North American Christianity

"With a sharper thrust but from a different angle, Peter Berger moves beyond the role of the clergy in the secularization of the world to the role of Protestantism as a whole. He concludes that in their preoccupation with 'otherworldliness' and in their emphasis on redemption as 'personal and individual,' Protestants unwittingly abandoned the arena of this world itself, leaving it a vacated venue. The 'New Jerusalem' became the place of focus for them, and this world was relinquished to secular causes and activity, In effect, with 'angels' no longer in this world, the astronomer and, indeed, the astronaut could now interpret space and time."

~Ravi Zacharias, Deliver Us From Evil, 51.

Political Consequences of the Sophists

"It was the clear relativism of the Sophists, not the mystical insights of Plato, nor Aristotle's aspiration after the Supreme Good, which dominated the thinking of the classical Greeks in their decadence. The failure of the Greeks to find an enduring popular religious sanction for the order of civilization had been a main cause of the collapse of the world of the polis."

~Russel Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 93-94.

Social Commentary in Poetry

First dentistry was painless.
Then bicycles were chainless,
Carriages were horseless,
And many laws enforceless.
Next cookery was fireless,
Telegraphy was wireless,
Cigars were nictotineless,
And coffee caffineless.
Soon oranges were seedless,
The putting green was weedless,
The college buy was hatless,
The proper diet fatless.
New motor roads are dustless,
The latest steel is rustless,
Our tennis courts are sodless,
Our new religion-godless.

~Arthur Guiterman, "Gaily the Troubadour," from Gaily the Troubadour (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1936).

A New Kind of Man - Reconceiving Identity and Society in 1957

Norman Mailer predicted a new kind of man in the 1950's who would enter the arena of ideological conflict:

"He was the hipster, who knew from the atom bomb and the Nazi concentration camps that societies and states were murderers, and that under the shadow of mass annihilation one should learn... to give up 'the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization,' to live in the moment, to follow the body and not the mind, 'to divorce oneself from society,' and 'to follow the rebellious imperative of the self,' to forget 'the single mate, the solid family, and the respectable love life,' to choose a life of 'Saturday night kicks,' especially orgasm and marijuana. For 1957, this was prophetic. It contained in a nutshell much of the self-liberation part of the cultural program of the sixties."

~Norman Mailer, "The White Negro," 1957. Quoted by Myron Magnet in The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass (New York: William Morrow, 1993), 35.

Saint Augustine On The Interpretation of Genesis In Relation To Science

"Now, sobered by his own earlier speculations and by repeated contact with learned individuals of his own age, Augustine, while defending the need to interpret Genesis "literally" (as he defined the term), nonetheless had no patience with those who used the early chapters of Genesis to promote views about the natural world that contradicted the best science of his day:

'Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and the orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and the moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of the Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think that our sacred writers held such opinions, and to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the ressurection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].'"

~Mark Noll's quote of St. Augustine's The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1:42-43.

Biblical Literalism Quote

"A biblical literalism, gaining strength since the 1870s, has fueled both the intense concern for human origins and the end times." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, 194.

Intellectual Giants of Christendom

"What J.S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Johnathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A.H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle's research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T.S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicaanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind - precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, 138.

Evangelical Thought

"Evangelicals do not, characteristically, look to the intellectual life as an arena in which to glorify God because, at least in America, our history has been pragmatic, populist, charismatic, and technological more than intellectual." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind , 55.


"In a culture that mounted a frontal assault upon tradition, mediating elites, and institutions, the Bible very easily became... 'a book dropped from the skies for all sorts of men to use in their own way.'" ~Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 182; the quotation is from John W. Nevin.

"The Keswick, "higher-life" movement ... also contributed to a reduction of interest in biblical theology and deeper scholarship. No Christian in his right mind will desire anything other than true holiness and righteousness in the church of God. But Keswick had isolated one doctrine, holiness, and altered it by the false simplicity contained in the slogan, "Give up, let go and let God." If you want to be holy and righteous, we are told, the intellect is dangerous and it is thought generally unlikely that a good theologian is likely to be a holy person ... You asked me to diagnose the reasons for the present weakness and I am doing it .... If you teach that sanctification consists of "letting go" and letting the Holy Spirit do all the work, then don't blame me if you have no scholars!" ~ Iain H. Murray, D. Marytyn Loyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith, 1939-1981 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1990), 72-74.

"If that community's habits of mind concerning those things to which the community pays most diligent attention and accords highest authority - that is, to the Bible and Christian theology - are defined by naive and uncritical assumptions about the way to study or think about anything, so will its efforts to promote Christian thinking about the world be marked by naivete and an absence of rigorous criticism." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind , 130.

"Thus, when fundamentalists defended the Bible, they did so by arguing for the inerrancy of Scripture's original autographs, an idea that had been around for a long time but had never assumed such a central role for any Christian movement. This belief had the practical effect of rendering the experience of the biblical writers nearly meaningless. It was the Word of God pure and simple, not the Word of God as mediated through the life experiences and cultural settings of the biblical authors, that was important." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, 33.

Sleep Now In The Fire

Just to clarify for some of my more conservative friends, I do subscribe to the ten principles of economics - including the relationship between a nation's standard of living and it's productivity (Principle #8). There is, however, principle #7 which deals with the positive market outcomes government can produce in relevance to property rights, market failure, externalities, and market power. Generally speaking, economically liberal (by this I mean economic liberalism, rather than political liberalism) economic policies enhance a nations productivity and thus its wealth. However, one might ask at what bright-line the trade-offs become too costly? What about social programs? The widows, the orphans, the disabled, the helpless. This can be a trade off. A larger pie is obviously a good thing, but at what cost? As with most things there is a balance to be played.