May 10 2008
From post-modernism to a priapic pun
Too much to read, to much to comment on. Here are a handful of posts that have caught my eye.
Let’s start off with a controversial one. I’d been wondering where Stephen (aka Q) had got to. Now he explains. (And it’s god to know he’s well if apparently disillusioned by the lack of agreement among Christians.) I have suggested to him (which suggestion he does not accept) that his explanation – an embrace of postmodernism – means his blog ought to be renamed “Diving headfirst into Babel”. I am not so ready to give up on the idea that some perspectives may be more true and more Christian than others. Stephen thinks postmodernism simply describes “what is”. I think that’s just his point of view; besides, postmodernism can’t actually talk about “what is”, only about “what is narrated in my tradition”.
There are, as Pentecost approaches, various posts about speaking in tongues and other gifts. (A special award for making me laugh to Chris Tilling.) It seems to me that evidence from other cultures and religions, to say the least, would point to a natural phenomenon of dissociative speech, that, like other natural phenomena, may be used to glorify God. It is the use of tongues, rather than the phenomenon, that can lead to it being regarded as a gift of the Spirit.
John Hobbins upsets Jim West when he calls St Paul a Zionist. Having described himself as a fundamentalist, Calvinistic, inerrantist in the past, describing St Paul as a Zionist is probably just John’s latest effort at a humpty-dumpty-ish recasting of Christian vocabulary. Terms mean what he says they mean. What might be more useful than anachronistic labelling would be to take into account is the way in which St Paul seems to replace the promise of the land with his vision of a heritage of new creation.
Finally, Loren Rosson (who rather suspiciously rates each Dr Who episode exactly in line with his predictions) has an intriguing post about whether the ark of the covenant inflicted the Philistines with impotence. Well, I suppose it’s in line with making Jacob limp.