Liminal Christianity

In the last post, I raised eyebrows at 9 Marks's presentation of the Gospel. I didn't go into it too far, but I did say that the Fall is not a part of the Gospel, and that Jesus died to save us from our sins is basically it. There is more to be said here. Insofar as many who identify as "deconstructing" are struggling with this, I figure my view on things is unlikely to hurt and might even help. So, first, how do we know what the Gospel is? Well, the Bible. How do we know the Bible is true? I don't want to get bogged down in the details of epistemology here, but let's start with what I take the Gospel to be. Good News The name about sums it up, in a lot of ways: The Gospel is the  good news or Good News full stop. It is good news par excellence , the best possible news. If you hear it, and that is not how it strikes you, then you have not actually heard it. Either they said "another gospel" or you misheard--and, these days, I'd predict the former...

Twitter is a relatively novel medium. At first glance, it appears to be a bunch of people just yammering into the void, contextless. At a second glance, it seems that every tweet gets interpreted in just about every  context: the ultimate in Derridean repeatability, with the author held responsible for all the contextualized interpretations. When we stop at this second glance, we tend to get bothered: "I can't account for all the contexts with so few characters!" So, we need to take a third look. This time, we notice that speakers clump into various groups. Much as in real life, many people will follow the same people, some will be in multiple groups, and often we follow people because the people we already follow are interacting with them. This gives a kind of social context, but an open one. When I post a tweet, then, it is in a context of an ongoing stream of other tweets I am aware of. Others who follow enough of the same people may be able to guess this context. This...

Here, I am going to do something very simple. I am going to expose 9 Marks as subject to deconstruction, that is, susceptible to having incoherences pointed out. I will follow a simple strategy: assume that "The 9 Marks of a Healthy Church" are, in fact, correct and normative. 1. Preaching: "An expositional sermon takes the main point of a passage of Scripture, makes it the main point of the sermon, and applies it to life today." The deconstructing Christian is very happy with this point. Indeed, one of the calls many of us are making is just this: you have read things into Scripture which are not there, and you have been blind to this because of your privilege and pride. 2. Biblical Theology: "Biblical theology is sound doctrine; it is right thoughts about God; it is belief that accords with Scripture." Here I want to introduce a very postmodern niggle: sound according to who? The main point of the passage of Scripture according to who? This is the decon...

 So, I figure if Leeman is going to try to go with Derrida's original meaning for "Deconstruction" we should hold him to it. First, however, if he wants to play the game: learn to use the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy when talking about philosophers/philosophy. It is the Wikipedia of philosophy. So, Derrida's deconstruction : Well, according to the SEP, which I'll go with since I'm not actually a Derrida scholar, there are three of these, or three aspects of it. 1. Deconstruction as pervasive egalitarianism opposing unfounded hierarchy: Simply, deconstruction is a criticism of Platonism, which is defined by the belief that existence is structured in terms of oppositions (separate substances or forms) and that the oppositions are hierarchical, with one side of the opposition being more valuable than the other. The  first phase  of deconstruction attacks this belief by  reversing  the Platonistic hierarchie s... In order to clarify deconstruction’s “two p...

 Gone to Total Depravity, every one? When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn... There is a tension in the best evangelical theology between the fallenness of the world and the goodness of creation. How we elaborate on that tension says and does a lot for how we engage with the world and ourselves. This is one of the many places where I feel as though I do not fit in some of the circles in which I have spent a great deal of time. At my Wesleyan college, I learned to emphasize the original goodness of Creation in a way that tends to resist much reformed white evangelical emphasis on total depravity. But this is an Augustinian emphasis. The world was created good, and all evil in it is a falling short of the good. Things, in the Augustinian imagination, exist only by participating in the good in some sense and to some degree. Total depravity can only be a healthy doctrine in the context of the goodness of creation on which all evil is parasitic. The very evils which the d...