What do you think of Vanhoozer's, "Is There a Meaning in This Text"?

He says that meaning in theological, which seems to me to be the same thing in other words.

I'm sorry: I take it you mean to say "meaning is theological"?

Sorry to quibble, but I just don't want to misunderstand you cuz I'm unfamiliar with the Vanhoozer quote.

I think (or I'm guessing) that I agree sorta. I wouldn’t want to suggest that all meaning is achieved through theology—which is how that might be interpreted. But I do think that all transcendentals and all meanings are resolved in the godhead; that if you have a problem with the divine provenance (or if you don’t trust him), knowledge is inevitably frustrated.

But sorry if I’ve misunderstood you—or him.

Yes! Sorry.

Postmodernity only deepens the riddle because it tortures Platonism:

With the death of God, all foundations dissolve, and all-encompassing grand narratives subside. Taylor says that God function within a semiotic system as the secure base on which everything else rests: “When this foundation crumbles or becomes inaccessible, signs are left to float freely on a sea that has not shores.”¹⁰ Reality becomes radically linguistic, with the result that all meaning gets its sense within language, there being no access to any extralinguistic reality.

(The Predicament of Postmodern Theology, Gavin Hyman, pp. 2-3)

A possible rapprochement?

For these thinkers [radical orthodox], the end of modernity does not merely give rise to the textualist free-for-all of postmodern nihilism. They maintain that such a move is insufficiently radical because this form of postmodernism is merely the logical culmination or apotheosis of modernity. ¹⁵ Instead, they seek to recover premodern modes of thought, in particular premodern modes of theological thought. For only theology can guard against nihilism . . . [T]hey attempt to recover the medieval paradigm whereby theology absorbs and makes possible all other discourses. In other words, theology returns as a metanarrative which (to use Milbank’s word) “positions” all other narratives, discourses, and disciplines completely and without reserve. This version of postmodern theology has been variously named – “postmodern Augustinianism,” “conservative postmodern theology, “ and “postmodern orthodoxy,” to cite but a few.

(The Predicament of Postmodern Theology, Gavin Hyman, pp. 3-4)

However, to really get a good critique on this “radical orthodoxy” which is touted by some to become the serious doctrinal commitment of emerging “Christianity” one should read this: http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2542 by R. R. Reno.

Pagitt, Bell, Jones, Driscoll, and Trucker Frank are merely the pop version of the postmodern “Christian” scene. More baroque discussions are being held elsewhere, typically without the tattoo and nose piercing. I’m not voicing any affirmation of their attempts – they may well be an obfuscation. But, we will probably need to interact with these folks, and leave the bush league to be covered by the fundagelicals.

ex:

Yikes! Now there is a prospect that fills the heart with an unnamed dread.

I dunno; there are things Milbank says that are true and there is a sort of seductiveness about RO, but I keep returning to the essential question. RO seems to hold out a hope that some sort of regrasp of old truths is possible…. I just don’t see it. I wish I could believe it, but I just don’t see it.

Take fundamentalism. There is a contingent that sees how its altar and pulpit have been polluted, but it still cannot reproduce what was lost. Fundamentalists think it’s like taking off the wrong tie and putting on the right tie. The movement makes the most superficial stabs at reform, but it is obvious that it hasn’t the heart for the work. Lawrence Welk just doesn’t have the Concertgebouw in him. The drivel might be slightly less juvenile, today’s stuff might be incrementally better than yesterday’s, but it is equally clear that the people don’t understand what is required.

Evangelicals know their theology is a pig’s breakfast and that the word orthodox won’t advance their interests. They know that this is common knowledge and a public disgrace; that’s why they keep offering us these apologies and promises. But they can’t change either.

I come away with the notion that all these people have a sentimental attitude toward what used to be loved, but they cannot produce it themselves. Their highest ideals are like a pre-adolescent girl’s notions about love: selective, flattering, gratifying….

The modern church has to take down the glittering pink unicorns from over the bed and start mucking out the stables.

Which of course brings us back to Pagitt, Bell, Jones, Driscoll, and Trucker Frank.

And Marie.

And Helen Howell.

I absolutely agree that they are bush league. I think it is apparent to all that they are bush league. Problem is: there are no majors in this game.

This is the only game in town.

And now for the (somewhat outdated) Platonic reference of the day:

http://emergent-us.typepad.com/emergentus/2006/05/doctrinal_state.html

These emergent fellows seem to feel the freedom to avoid doctrinal specifics where many of the so-called evangelicals seem to feel constrained by and resentful toward doctrinal specifics. Much of contemporary evangelicalism and fundy-bumpkinism would just as soon get rid of any pretense of orthodoxy were it not for peer pressure. I think a good washing and a wire brush would remove much of their pretense to "orthodoxy" like so much chipped paint.

Yes, both Jones and Shults are minor circus clowns who distract us while the crew prepares the ring for another act. “Bush league”, as someone else observed.

“Yes, we have been inundated with requests for our statement of faith in Emergent, but some of us had an inclination that to formulate something would take us down a road that we don't want to trod.”

Well, Tony, I can well understand why you wouldn’t want to trod [sic] that road; it’s a hard road to trod [sic]. Making a statement of faith very often calls for a) a belief, b) some knowledge of theology, and c) a rough idea of how words work in sentences.

This is not a place you want to go trodding around in.

Trust me on this.

But what about the philosophical standpoint of RO? It that not somehow recoverable, or better, defendable?

I mean specifically the belief in metaphysical realism.

Well, that’s why I say it is seductive.

Is it defendable? I say yes.
Is it better? I think so.
Is it recoverable? That’s the prob.

So long as RO stays on campus, we’ll never know. As in my answer to ex, can I envision a day when RO might be recovered by Pagitt? Jones? Trucker Frank? the editors of CT? Helen Howell?

Will there be a day when the theater becomes as obnoxious to fundamentalists as it was to Augustine and Pascal?

See, this is where I think the battle is fought. Culture is not what happens between our ears, it is what we hold in common as a society. I really don’t see recoverability here.

to add to diss:

Reading a little more broadly with RO, one will discover that they are trying to birth a reincarnation of Augustinian ontology whilst (love this cultural accoutrement of merry ol' England)remaining in the neo-natal ward of postmodernity. They attach to a trendy culture. They are adamantly socialist. They allow for all sorts of perversion in human sexuality. They use the Word in a very flippant manner (in this evangelicals are only slightly better). The "participatory" model (more Aristotelian than Platonic) of creation that they propose has an almost Hegelian twist to it, such that what is, is god. They can never seriously grapple with the Fall with this model. And this is just a short list of things that leap to mind.

Further, Corcoran is closely related to RO because one of his chief mentors and colleagues at Calvin happens to be chief exponent of RO - Jamie Smith. We've all seen where Corcoran takes people.

Yeah, I noticed that they were pretty positive about postmodernism and wondered about that.

Would Alasdair MacIntyre align himself with RO? He's Aristotelian, though. Grenz calls him a postmodernist, but Grenz's definition seems pretty broad.

Amen to all of what ex libris said; and this is a good illustration of my point. It’s not just the Augustinian ontology to be cherished as a free-standing bauble. We are drinking from a spittoon here.

Our culture is becoming more and more like scavengers at a flea market/auction/Ferengi trading post. We will never again live in the world of Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis.

all that with a mention of Star Trek . . . See you at the next convention, diss.

MacIntyre and RO are playing in different streams, but there is some agreement. The larger part of disagreement seems related to contrasting methodologies.

For instance, Milbank does not care for the way MacIntyre argues that we can persuade people against nihilism by appealing to their reason:

MacIntyre, of course, wants to argue against the stoic-liberal-nihilist tendency, which is 'secular reason'. But my case is rather that it is only a mythos, and therefore cannot be refuted, but only out-narrated, if we can persuade people - for reasons of 'literary taste' - that Christianity offers a much better story.

John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory 2nd ed. 2006, p. 331.

As I understand it, MacIntyre is a non-foundationalist Aristotelian, but here, Milbank graciously chides him for being too foundationalist, but I'm not a MacIntyre expert.

ex:

Is the convention at DTS again this year?

diss:

No, I think it is at Trinity. You know they alternate, don't you?

Visit old stomping grounds in the purview of the most corrupt state government in the union, and home of our soon to be president.

That quote above is very helpful in understanding the difference between and transition from modernism to postmodernism. I'm going to save it as a source of talking points.

You use the terms evangelical and fundamentalist. I've been curious about something and I'd like to hear your take. You are quite harsh on fundamentalists, and I think rightly so. You seem to be, and I might be wrong, less so with evangelicals, which I think might explain why you seem to be admired by Phil at Pyromaniacs. Why do you think that is? Don't evangelicals like Phil also "well and truly eviscerate the good, true and beautiful" (quoting you)? In my opinion, they disembowel these things even more. Has he and his like missed that he is eviscerating or is it that fundamentalists have found their niche in evisceration?

ex:

Man, I hate that! Between me and Deerfield is Michigan Ave. I'll never make it.

regulative:

That’s an interesting question.

There’s no doubt I have far less respect for fundamentalism than neo-evangelicalism (or even evangelicalism by its broadest definition).

Part of it is personal; I was younger when among evangelicals (and the issues were less volatile than they became) and older when among fundamentalists. I knew and spoke of these things more often and more earnestly with fundamentalists because of the very nature of the case, and I saw how peers went on to discredit these ideas in practice. I cannot say that of specific leaders in evangelicalism. I call what I saw in evangelicalism—in large part—culpable naïveté. I call what I witnessed in fundamentalism outright perfidy.

But again, that’s a judgment call. I’m quite sure it will not come up at the bema.

On a more historical note: I don’t think neo-evangelicalism had a prophet of near the stature that fundamentalism had in J. Gresham Machen. I think Tozer was a clear voice but not an imposing force. And he came later. JGM was ideally situated intellectually, academically, historically, culturally, even financially…to give proper warning at precisely these points and at the most auspicious moment, and it was the contempt fundamentalism showed for that warning that is most conspicuous. Neo-evangelicalism could not have existed without fundamentalism, either in its cultural disposition or in its over-reaction to excess.

Then there is the matter of conscience. I don’t think evangelicals gave it due consideration, but I do know fundamentalists savaged it. Read their rulebooks, their history or their policies and you find a contempt for the individual’s judgment on matters that fall entirely under the review of a man’s discretion. (Just to be timely, we could mention the BJ racial policy. Now they apologize; then was the time a generation ought to have been better taught.) Just when the movement needed perceptive, sensitive, reflective men, fundamentalism produced automatons. They acted like penguins and they even looked like penguins.

They cared more about burning cassettes than writing hymns.

I’m not sure about Phil and the folks at Pyro. They have been kind, I feel a sense of fraternity, and we certainly are on the same side of the barricades with respect to the day’s battles. In my fantasies (my fantasies being populated with men like Edmund Clowney, Stephen Olford, Barnhouse, J.M. Boice…) it would have been nice for—and I speak very generally here—the “confessing-evangelical types” to have pressed more firmly against the trivialization of the faith in their circles. But to do that would have required precision and exquisite discretion in distinguishing themselves from their wackier brethren. That just wasn’t going to happen. This was no longer a gentleman’s game.

The only personal connection I had to the leadership at Grace would have been a guy I knew in Illinois who went on to sing professionally in the opera. We were on friendly terms but there was no doubt that his sentiments had already been shaped differently from mine. How representative he was of today’s confessing evangelicals is debatable.

The last question about eviscerating the good, true and beautiful. Perhaps the folks at Grace/Pyro do what I wouldn’t do, but there seems to be a distinction that has to be made here. We consider Jesus’ strongest words to the Pharisees.

What I have said so far is my own judgment; I don’t expect anyone to see this through my glasses. But you asked about this in the context of my scale of disgust, about my disparate harshness. What I think is most pernicious and what has been most counterproductive is that fundamentalism preyed on people of similar disposition and they misguided the innocent. They very much made of people’s sensibilities a political issue, a banner of “standards” and “discernment” and “marks of separation” rather than an honest respect for Christian tradition and deference to a heritage. They gave these people with a natural distaste for popular religion such travesties as Majesty Hymns, the Pettit Hoedown Players and Oscar Wilde.

That is partly what I mean by perfidy.

The hurdle today is to get people to find a place in their imagination for the notion of proper and fitting worship and to value what is meaningful. That is harder to do now than before! "Christ-honoring music" is a joke and a profanity. No one at Soundforth or WCTS thinks he is the problem. The case can be made today in, for example, the PCA.

It is harder today to argue with a fundamentalist the necessity of the good, true and beautiful than it is with an evangelical. They’ve persuaded themselves they are the guys in the white hats. You can get an evangelical off the dime. You cannot get a fundamentalist to budge: either he knows he’s on the side of the angels or he won’t confront the bumpkins down the hall. What used to be a hard aesthetic case to make is now a political battle to fight and a feudal system to challenge.

Thanks for the comment. Interesting. I get your point on fundamentalism. I understand the personal nature. Can you name one fundamentalist that "gets it" with regards to the true, the good, and the beautiful, and does he have an audience? Is there an evangelical that "gets it?" I mean really "gets it?" I don't mean nibbles around the edges.

regulative:

There are several answers to your question. I’ll describe two extreme positions and you can easily work out the mediating positions.

We have a very ornate theology, more developed and more nuanced than the early church had. Our critics charge us with a kind of rogue obsession with the baroque. This is not true. We’ve lived through centuries of false claims made against the meaning of our texts, and each attack provoked a defense. That’s not just reasonable, it is necessary. So our statements of orthodoxy are essentially the timeline for that combat; centuries’ worth of dialectic.

And what can be said about our propositional statements can also be said about “the affective domain”, our humanistic apprehension of and aesthetic appreciation for that same truth. Not just what we have said, but how have we felt, how have we have “testified” in our cultural moment in time. We can’t argue that one truth must touch our sensibilities and another cannot. We will have a reaction just as the first century church did; not an identical reaction but an equivalent one. So this contention over proper sensibilities shouldn’t surprise anyone. We should be surprised if there were none.

On the other extreme we have the bunch that goes off to The Bojo Summer Camp for Gospel Goat-Ropers, and they all come back with a Sertifeekate of Awthentisty that qualifies them to decide what “checks” and what “doesn’t check”. They then unpack all their CDs and Trills-N-Thrills Piano Arrangements of Top-Forty Hymns for sale in the foyer. This becomes the law of the land, and marshals are appointed to ensure that only piano arrangements that “check” find their way onto the platforms of your better churches.

Two different views of how worship gets done “right”.

Someone sent me a url for an article about how a gazillion Chinese children are learning Western classical piano. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JL02Ad01.html

If my first path is right the right one, then Christians would be doing something similar to the Chinese: packing off their children in container ships to learn not just the piano, but all the ways we qualify ourselves to enter the stream of human understanding. We wouldn’t send them off to study just the history of Christian doctrine in the “cognitive arena”, we would send them somewhere to be immersed in the history of Christian sensibilities. Remember Eliot? We suffer not just a loss of belief in God but how we feel toward him. And how we ought to feel toward him.

There must be a right way for us to humble ourselves before God today even as there was a right way for David and Bach and Tersteegen. Fundagelicals really don’t believe this.

So, getting back to the question I only appear to have forgotten.

If we were following the first path we would be acting very differently from the way we are. Everything would be upside down. We would be sending children to Jorge Bolet and Daniel Barenboim. We would be writing hymns and liturgies, not making and selling CDs of our favorite gospel Liberace.

Are there fundagelicals that “get it”? Well, there certainly are some in both camps who might pick the same hymns for Sunday’s morning service that I would pick, yes. But I think that number comes way down when we ask if “getting it” means choosing between my first example and second example.

And then beyond that, the real question is not how many people who “get it” might we squeeze into a phone booth. The question is, Are there enough to assault the profane fundagelicals who are even now corrupting yet another generation of Christians?

Dissidens,

When did Evangelical Christianity (in both corrupted streams) lose interest in fighting the battle for the affective domain? That is to say, when did the substance of one's feelings about God cease to matter practically, and what occasioned that cessation?

Oh, I think the church walked hand-in-hand with the world pretty much since the American Civil War. I think Matthew Arnold heard the note of sadness on Dover Beach.

Once faith was stripped away the professing church grabbed at anything within reach to make itself presentable, and once pop culture came along it was an incessant quest for plausibility. If the church had no real faith to offer, it couldn’t know how empty the artificial stuff was.

A lot of people, especially the reformed, like to cast aspersions on Finney. I have no love for Finney, and I wouldn’t shed a tear if I heard some people poured crankcase oil on his grave at the Westwood Cemetery. But we forget that Finney’s new measures were an attempt to re-attach faith and sentiment.

I think we’ve had a long and thoughtless tradition. It comes down to how you want to slice your history.

If Finney was attempting a re-attachment, who were the destroyers prior to him?

Which sentiments was he trying to reattach?

The Great Awakening was at least two generations old. Prior to (and contemporary with) Finney, America was a cauldron of Enlightenment thought, Transcendentalism, German idealism and even weirder ideas like theosophy, Swedenborgianism and what I call the Chautauqua Enthusiasms.

I would not say there was any single, discrete sentiment that preoccupied his thinking so much as a desire to return to a more “productive” civil religion.