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Signposts is the personal website of Phil and Dan McCredden. We are involved in leadership at Northern Community.
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Recent entries
August 1st, 2007 at 4:55 pm
David,
But if a matter is conclusively settled, what further thought is needed?
Most things wont be conclusively settled, even though one aims for clarity. There will always be biases, different viewpoints etc. Its just that I believe in general the way to proceed would be with more clarity, not less.
I recognise the limits of thought, rationality etc. But to devalue them and put ourselves in a world of unrestrained mysticism seems to me to be “the cure that kills the patient” as was previously said.
August 1st, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Could it be that we are reaching some kind of meeting of the minds? I too aim for further clarity, but the more I discover, the more I discover I don’t know. My postmodernity in some respect stems from an epistemological agnosticism than of the perspective that there is no truth. It should also be pointed out that Kierkegaard didn’t dismiss the idea of truth either - he merely suggested that our understanding is not determined by undiluted truth, but by our relationship to that truth.
August 1st, 2007 at 8:50 pm
mn the jesus parable thing wasn’t actually me.. I was quoting wazza..
rev
I actually do attack modernism in many different ways.. modernism under the guise of evolutionary naturalism-consumerism-logical positivism-economic rationalism etc. I also argue for freewill vs determinism, the objectivity of morals vs evolutionary ethics [or lack thereof] … I argue against PM as its the up and coming worldview in Australia and I see it as a very seductive philosophy which
August 1st, 2007 at 9:02 pm
mn the jesus parable thing wasn’t actually me.. I was quoting wazza..
rev
I actually do attack modernism in many different ways.. modernism under the guise of evolutionary naturalism-consumerism-logical positivism-economic rationalism etc. I also argue for freewill vs determinism, the objectivity of morals vs evolutionary ethics [or lack thereof] … I argue against PM as its the up and coming worldview in Australia and I see it as a very seductive philosophy which most Christians don’t know how to handle.
most PMists and atheists I talk with who once claimed to be Christians had a very simplistic understanding of their faith before being seduced by the ‘evidence’ of naturalism or the doublespeak of PM.
phone typing is a pain in the arse
August 1st, 2007 at 9:24 pm
so abtruth, if you had to put in on a bumper sticker, what is your problem with postmodernism?
rev
August 2nd, 2007 at 9:32 am
geez that’s a good question.
PM a denial of universal truth with an epistemology that denies itself and allows might to be right.
August 2nd, 2007 at 10:01 am
David - “My postmodernity in some respect stems from an epistemological agnosticism than of the perspective that there is no truth.” That’s a great line and I’m gonna steal it. abtruth - as I’ve said before, I think your definition of PM is a very narrow one (above at post 96), even accepting that that’s your “bumper sticker version”. I call myself “postmodern” for the very reasons encapsulated in David’s post there - the fact that I don’t believe in all-encompassing theories doesn’t mean that I deny the existence of some kind of truth (leaving the question of faith aside for a moment, my PhD is in the area of human rights and law - so clearly I believe in some kind of truth!!) I firmly reject the idea that PM “allows might to be right” - I think that the whole PM project has been aimed at acknowledging different voices and revealing where might prevails over what is right!
August 2nd, 2007 at 10:22 am
allows might to be right
I would see that as a danger - Nietzsche was very upfront and open about this with his will to power. Nietzsche wrote approvingly of the alleged Indian practice of not assisting an untouchable woman in child-birth. He approved of the caste system and would allow any cruelty on the basis that might makes right.
August 2nd, 2007 at 10:25 am
Bec
Do you believe that there is a God who is in authority over all that
God has created?
Do you believe that God has written (his) own law on every human heart
Do you believe that God has a purpose for all of us and that we will only find it in relationship with God.
Do you believe that Jesus was the ’son’ of God and part of the trinity
Do you believe that salvation can be obtained through obeying buddhist law or repeating mantra’s
Do you believe that Hinduism/Mormonism/Islam/Paganism etc are all equally valid compared with Christianity?
Have you read JP Morelands critique on the previous page? ( have you Dave?)
August 2nd, 2007 at 11:50 am
Abtruth…
Can you step back from your post for a minute? Can you see how riddled with assumptions it is, and how arrogant you sound? You assume that you are entitled to interrogate my beliefs in such a manner, but the questions. Your language is riddled with Christianese that is unintelligible to those unfamiliar with church culture, and perhaps even unfamiliar to those outside YOUR particular church culture (ie this stuff about “law being written on hearts” - I didn’t hear that in my decidedly orthodox Anglican upbringing, it was something I heard only when I ventured into charismatic and pentecostal churches).
However, for the sake of continuing the discussion, I’ll answer your questions (because if I don’t - dismiss me as PM and “not a real Christian”):
- I’m sorry to disappoint you, but my beliefs are rather orthodox. My upbringing means that I can recite the Creeds off the top of my head, and I will happily do so because I have no major issues with anything in them (by “major issues” I mean that I accept their statements, but recognise that their statements are big ones indeed and worthy of discussion).
- I believe that there is a Creator God who created everything and is omnipotent. I can’t comprehend believing in or worshipping any lesser God.
- As your question stands, I’d probably have to say: No. I don’t believe that we are puppets on a string. That sentence states things far too simplistically for me to say yes.
- I’ve already said I have no problem with the Creeds.
- I find that question offensive. Why? Because I know that you would believe that anyone who did think that was not a “real” Christian, and you also believe that anyone who is PM will believe that, and is therefore not a real Christian.
- See above.
- Re: Moreland’s critique - no, I’ve only skim read it. I didn’t read it closely because I’ve heard it all before, and there’s some fundamental flaws: for a start, he’s trying to dismiss an entire cultural movement and an entire body of theory - I don’t believe that this is possible. I believe you have to engage more deeply and critically than that. I believe that he over-simplifies postmodernism. One cannot treat all PM theorists in the same one, let alone assume that a PM novelist can be treated in the same way as a PM theorist. I have to wonder whether anyone who treated the Englightenment, or the Renaissance, in such a manner would ever be taken seriously. I think they would not.
August 2nd, 2007 at 11:51 am
I agree with most of those statemens Abtruth, and I would say that I am far more postmodern than modern. I believe that God is so far above us that his ways are not our ways, and that our knowledge is always suspect because of this. I believe that God in his transcendent wisdom allows that the relativism of many things, like morality, calls us into a dynamic relationship, rather than a structured dry system of facts and rules. I believe the revelation of God in Christ shows us that this ethic of the kingdom of God, is one that calls us to stand against systems and structures that marginalize and oppress people, including the elitism of the “truth holders”. That there is truth I have no doubt. But this truth is a person, the person of Jesus, and I nor any human can contain, or order this truth.
rev
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:02 pm
^ ^ I agree with all of this too.
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:24 pm
^ ^ I agree with all of this too
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Does that make me PM?
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Yes, and therefore no longer a Christian, please turn in your bible and cardigan.
rev
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:47 pm
One of the things I like about postmodernism is that it acknowledges, or at least provides space to acknowledge, the immense mystery of life…and for the Christian, the inherent unknowability of God. I also find that people rooted in PM cultures and ways of thinking are much more open to the sacred, to ideas of God etc…the conclusion of “Life After God” being a classic example of this.
Abtruth - I actually think that there’s an issue of cross-cultural communication here.
August 2nd, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Get off your high horse Bec .. people seem quite happy to question me on my beliefs and i was asking those questions to clarify things for you… offensive my arse.
i can stand back from my post and say yes they are legitimate questions to be asked of someone who proports to be a Christian.. if i was speaking to someone who i thought had no understanding of Christianity then i would have spoken very differently
the answers that you have given don’t correspond to the questions as far as i can see
something that is hard or a tall order is not a fundamental flaw .. an example of which would be an epistemology based on ‘there may be truth but we can’t know it’ …. that is a fundamental flaw
i suspect that this refers to my question of moral law on the heart of every man.. if so then how does this make us puppets on a string? we are still free to disobey and will be convicted by our conscience.
explaining the fundamental flaws of PM Theory is not oversimplifying anything… if the basis of PM rests on an illogical assumption then PM falls like a house of cards
the same goes for Christianity. If you can disprove the existence of God or that Jesus didn’t die for our sins etc.. the building blocks of Christianity then Christianity collapses entirely…
that sort of argumentation is not oversimplification.
for intance “logical positivism” was a large philosophical movement in the 20c that said that the only thing that was real was that that could be tested through the five senses. it went for years with prof ayer as it main backer… until someone pointed out that the hypothesis itself could not be tested through the five senses.
an entire cultural movement based on a lie can be dismissed with one word of truth
August 2nd, 2007 at 1:28 pm
abtruth, I did not intend to be “on a high horse” - I genuinely found them offensive, because…well, I get offended if I feel interrogated, I guess, and I avoid doing it myself! I don’t believe in a “tick the box” approach to Christianity, and that’s what your post made me think of. Perhaps something was lost in the medium - comments on a blog are, after all, not the best way to communicate.
I missed the one about moral law - my apologies - my response was to your question about God having a plan. I’m not sure how I’d answer the “moral law” question…I guess I don’t really believe that God “writes a law on our hearts”, but rather that there are ways of behaving, thinking and being that are better than others, and the closer we draw to God, the greater chance we have of reflecting the “right” ways of being/thinking/doing.
A question for you, abtruth: do you believe that there are cultures from which God is absent?
August 2nd, 2007 at 1:41 pm
btw abtruth - I’m not saying that PM theories are not flawed (see my comment above re: David’s phrase). I guess I see theories as tools - they’re sets of spectacles through which to view things.
My frustration with many critiques of PM coming from Christian quarters is that they fail to recognise that PM is an entire cultural shift. Postmodernism is dismissed in a manner in which I hope most Christians would no longer dismiss, say, a culture in another country. I’m not saying we can’t critique certain aspects of a culture - in some of the contexts I work in, what I would call “sexual abuse” is arguably a part of initiation rites. However my criticism of that particular practice doesn’t mean that I reject the entire culture.
August 2nd, 2007 at 2:35 pm
an entire cultural movement based on a lie can be dismissed with one word of truth
Rubbish.
Hmm … I did it!
August 2nd, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Bec, in criticizing postmodernism I am critiquing my own culture. It is not as if everyone born before 1980 is a modernist and the others are postmoderns. There seems to be an idea that there are 2 distinct cultures in the West, moderns being hopelessly unable to understand the PMs. This is not correct, the elements of both world-views have been circulating around for hundreds of years.
This concept that we are dealing with a totally new culture seems to have been put out by people who wish to gain leadership in various areas. In other words they frame the problem as an inter-cultural one and then say that only they have the intellectual framework that will be effective in this context. Surely this is a power-play the same as all the others.
August 2nd, 2007 at 2:57 pm
warren…
I know what you’re saying, and I don’t totally disagree - but I don’t think you can ever draw a clear line between cultures, I think there’s always some intermingling and blending. That doesn’t mean that we can’t identify trends…if you talk to someone who did an Arts degree in the 1970s, they will have studied very different theorists to those studied by a student in the 1990s (I’d also say there’s a marked difference in disciplines…disciplines like law and theology are only just beginning to grapple with some of the issues that are passe in geography and sociology!)
August 2nd, 2007 at 4:00 pm
i am not trying to draw a line between cultures but the philosophical foundations upon which cultures may be based.
I would hope that any thinking Christian would recognise this cultural shift and realise that just as Modernism was opposed to Christianity that PM is likewise opposed and that we need to highlite the flaws of both. Modernism mind you was just as fundamentally flawed as PM.
i know you reckon youve heard it all before but i would really implore you to read what i put up the other day.
i don’t want to appeal to authority but Moreland is a professor of philosophy and should be taken seriously.
and by your above posts i don’t think that you are as PM as you think…
August 2nd, 2007 at 4:29 pm
If there was a sudden entire cultural shift to Nazism, would the Church be entitled to criticize it? Or would we have to incorporate this new cultural movement to be relevant to the youth of today?
August 2nd, 2007 at 4:35 pm
abtruth,
I agree that we should approach PM with the same scepticism with which we would approach modernism. I guess my frustration is that I don’t think most Christians do this - ie you constantly here of the “evils of postmodernism” in penty and evangelical circles…I’ve never yet heard a sermon on the “evils of modernism”!!
I’m also wary of…I’m wary of paranoia about “culture”. I grew up in a church, but I didn’t grow up immersed in a Christian subculture, and it was a real shock to me when I moved out of home, to the city, and found myself in that subculture. I was stunned by the mentality of “us and them”, the fear of “the world” etc…there was a real paranoia, and I remember suddenly dealing with all this guilt and fear, and feeling like all the joy and beauty had been sucked out of life. I remember coming across a quote from a Christian - I completely forget who - that “One should never be afraid to go to far (intellectually), for the Truth is beyond”. That has certainly been my experience in my own life.
August 2nd, 2007 at 4:45 pm
warren terra,
I was waiting for someone to draw that analogy.
Of course the church should critique it - but it would be pointless to just rabbit on about how evil nazism was, in a manner that completely alienated those who identified as nazis. There would be a need for careful critique that acknowledged that the Creator is ever-present, and that no individual or culture is beyond redemption. I don’t say this lightly - I realise how unpopular and how difficult it is to acknowledge that even Hitler is not beyond redemption, but what does grace mean if we deny that?
August 2nd, 2007 at 4:49 pm
ahhh yes breaking free from or at least identifying our culture for what it is and separating truth from what we believe specifically as a result of our culture.
i remember posting in response to you i think a while ago saying that when i was young that i thought Christians should drive holdens because (as a 5 yr old mind you) we drove holdens and couldn’t get my head around the Christian that was driving a Ford..
Christian subculture is not Christianity nor is it necessarily born of a Christian world view. The current christian subculture seems to be more influenced by modernism and will in the future be influenced by PM… unfortunatley…
August 2nd, 2007 at 8:12 pm
oh…I googled that quote…apparently it was Proust that said that.
August 2nd, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Well Abtruth for what its worth I think postmodernism is closer to the truth than modernism, but even if it isn’t, it definately appears that you are on a crusade against post modernism, and that you do not address the short comings of modernism anywhere near equally.
Am I right in taking your position as being: Christianity is a unique, and complete world view, and both post modernism and modernism fall drastically short of the fullness contained in a trinitarian world view.
rev
August 2nd, 2007 at 8:26 pm
If there was a sudden entire cultural shift to Nazism, would the Church be entitled to criticize it? Or would we have to incorporate this new cultural movement to be relevant to the youth of today?
I think that there is mch about the current culture that is criticised by those of us who still see ourselves as postmodern. Consumerism for example