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Thursday, October 11, 2012

Unlively and Spirit Quenching Bilgewater

I recall reading somewhere of a person stating on a blogspot that his reason for leaving the Sydney Anglican (Episcopalian) Diocese was the widespread equivocation within the Diocese over just what a Bible passage was saying. In essence, many in the Diocese would assert more than one intention could be derived from a given passage.

That is no help whatsoever to a person wanting to know God and the will of God for those who love Him.

If one was to seek a current day example of the concern expressed by that blogger one need go no further than to take a look here.

What you will find there are two instalments on the subject of literary genre from a current lecturer at Moore Theological College. Each instalment is weighted with the same degree of Spirit quenching content.

Why would a theological lecturer dish up this stuff? What good is it to Christians in their walk with their Lord and Saviour? I firmly assert that it has no positive worth. Instead it is destructive. It is a path not to be taken. Many quoted sources are God haters and offer no help to understand the Word of God.

I urge readers not to give any time to the blogs other than to quickly note the quicksand that it is to a lively faith and for trust in the clear message and will of God in His Word.

Sam Drucker

2 comments:

John said...

Fool, Sam! Don’t you recognise parody? Our dear brother Michael, son of the Archbishop, was lampooning contemporary theological writings and its tendency toward postmodernal epistemology and turn of phrase. And you didn’t see it. Some Christian you are. You are bereft of wit!

Michael’s present piece, so intelligently crafted, reminds us of Alan Sokal’s cleverly written hoax of several years ago. Sokal submitted ‘Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’ as a serious paper to the American cultural-studies journal Social Text. In fact, his paper was completely without meaning, apart from the quotes inserted here and there to make it seem an insightful academic exercise.

Mindful of the importance of not inappropriately removing a word, a phrase from its surrounding context, I quote from Sokal in order to remind all of the brilliance mimicked in the archbishop’s son attempt to send up the pleonastic imperspicuity of liberal theology. When Sokal writes the following it isn’t at all hard to see to whom Michael was paying homage.

“[T]he content of any science is profoundly constrained by the language within its discourses are formulated; and mainstream Western physical science has, since Galileo, been formulated in the language of mathematics. But whose mathematics? The question is a fundamental one, for, as Aronowitz has observed, “neither logic nor mathematics escapes the ‘contamination’ of the social.” And as feminist thinkers have repeatedly pointed out, in the present culture this contamination is overwhelmingly capitalist, patriarchal and militaristic: “mathematics is portrayed as a woman whose nature desires to be the conquered Other….”

So true, Alan, so true.

sam drucker said...

John, I'm sure your commentary would be appreciated over there at the Blogging Parson.

Your comment here today and the blogs of the Blogging Parson are made for each other.

Hand in hand you can wander together through the garden of Post-Modernism taking a sniff here and a sniff there.

Sam Drucker