tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3915617830446943975.post2655990493297690328..comments2024-03-29T22:00:02.999+13:00Comments on Anglican Down Under: The right kind of reliability of the Bible?Peter Carrellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09535218286799156659noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3915617830446943975.post-13432050101194440272016-02-17T02:52:07.617+13:002016-02-17T02:52:07.617+13:00
Some, Brian, use postmodernity to refer to the lo...<br />Some, Brian, use postmodernity to refer to the lost currency and reach of the institutions and practises that were legitimated for a time in some of the world by the modern episteme. Thinking of an Anglicanism simultaneously engaging Pentecostalism, Orthodoxy, and the global south, that is what I have in mind when I use the word. The question is not so much what Right Thinking People will give the Church their permission to be, but what sort of church one gets among peoples and in places where voting in representative synods modeled on parliaments looks like a foolish and confused way to try to know God.<br /><br />Bowman WaltonAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3915617830446943975.post-7893335922267350372016-02-16T19:26:04.339+13:002016-02-16T19:26:04.339+13:00Postmodernism is (or was) a fixation of certain un...Postmodernism is (or was) a fixation of certain university common rooms; I do not know if it has pervaded wider culture much. That is not to say it can't or won't, because cultural Marxism certainly has, and that is largely a product of the university.<br />But postmodernism - the offspring of cultural Marxism - in its most advanced (and degraded) form is really a species of literary studies which had the capacity to corrupt the study of literature (which it has done) and philosophy (which no one pays attention to).<br />For people who take historical study (and historical texts) seriously it really has nothing to contribute, while scientists think it is nonsense from soup to nuts.<br />Christianity is not opposed to rationality since God is the author of both faith and reason (the two means of knowing). BrianR https://www.blogger.com/profile/11084982458935874569noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3915617830446943975.post-5902663127059979832016-02-16T19:01:30.912+13:002016-02-16T19:01:30.912+13:00Yes, Bryden, Newbigin, Polanyi, and Black probably...<br />Yes, Bryden, Newbigin, Polanyi, and Black probably can sell "knowing with confidence," as you suggest; neglect of the *tacit dimension* of lived faith is very much the problem. But alas you know what I mean...<br /><br />"The tendency, particularly amongst patristic scholars, to challenge the legitimacy of personalist readings of the fathers by Zizioulas and others has led one theologian, Alan Brown, to pen a somewhat fiery and provocative article defending the latter. He accuses the whole field of Western patristic scholarship of being enslaved to a postliberal Anglican model which cannot acknowledge or accept any approach to the sources that is in conflict or even tension with the historico-critical method. Such an approach (which seems to be characterized according to Brown by a dull, uncreative repetition or bland historical investigation of the texts) has seeped into Western Orthodox scholarship too, he claims. This results in making ‘the consensus of Anglican patristic scholarship Orthodox theology simpliciter’. From here he goes on to deplore this attitude encapsulated in ‘the fact that Zizioulas’ position cannot be derived straightforwardly from the scholarly positions obtainable within the modes of enquiry acceptable within Anglican patristic scholarship’ which thence ‘entails that it is therefore illegitimate as Orthodox theology’. Whether or not Brown’s comments are justified, it is evident that the issue of Orthodox personalism touches not simply on narrow questions of matching a certain patristic text or patristic terms to this or that idea, but stirs up far wider questions related to how we in fact read, study, assimilate, and expound patristic (and not just patristic, but biblical) thought in the modern world."<br /><br />-- Alexis Torrance, Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate. Heythrop Journal LII (2011), pp. 700–707.<br /><br />Bowman WaltonAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3915617830446943975.post-13868619445537755642016-02-16T17:33:38.205+13:002016-02-16T17:33:38.205+13:00Reasonable question based on a reasonable observat...Reasonable question based on a reasonable observation, Bowman. Yet there remains the matter of “truth” (of various kinds); and so I’d offer to both hyper-rationalists and sceptics what I hinted at earlier: a form of “confidence” re human knowing. Otherwise, what’s the difference between a triune fideism and Vedanta - or “the man who mistook his wife for a hat”?Bryden Blackhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15619512328964399016noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3915617830446943975.post-50074791051420907952016-02-16T14:02:08.525+13:002016-02-16T14:02:08.525+13:00"Nowadays (in our so-called postmodern contex...<br />"Nowadays (in our so-called postmodern context), we have to address... radical scepticism, even nihilism..."<br /><br />Bryden, that "we have to" sounds rather imperative. What do you say to those who bracket that fixation on epistemology as a Western modern hangup now so properly stripped and whipped by Western postmodern critique that only the faithless would bother with it, and who prefer to just get on with life in God among people who do not waste precious time on it? Perhaps one can either try to satisfy rationalists, or one can let the dead bury their dead, but one cannot do both. <br /><br />Bowman Walton Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3915617830446943975.post-14969338837992824342016-02-16T11:27:00.124+13:002016-02-16T11:27:00.124+13:00Peter; there is a vital characteristic of our own ...Peter; there is a vital characteristic of our own age which has largely determined how we approach this question of the “Bible’s reliability”.<br /><br />Janet Martin Soskice puts it concisely in her contribution, “Naming God: A Study in Faith and Reason”, in Griffiths & Hütter, eds, Reason and The Reasons of Faith, pp.241-254, at p.242:<br /><br />“The early modern crisis of knowledge was such that philosophy in many quarters became <i>epistemology</i> - the problem of knowledge. In retrospect, the anxieties about salvation that shook the late medieval church, although doubtless provoked by clerical corruption, indulgences, failed conciliar movements and so forth, had a good deal to do with uncertainty about everything. It is not clear that we are beyond the trauma of <i>knowing</i> yet.” (emphases original)<br /><br />In other words, the early modern and modern desire for alleged “certainty” (viz. Descartes) has precipitated a multitude of issues. Nowadays (in our so-called postmodern context), we have to address both radical scepticism, even nihilism, and the kind of pathway proposed by the likes of Newbigin after the likes of Polanyi - “knowing with confidence” (NB the root of that last word). All of which greatly colours the topic of your two recent posts.<br /><br />Yet again, a high degree of self-awareness, both collective and individual, is desirable ...!Bryden Blackhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15619512328964399016noreply@blogger.com