I just wanted to add to this that on the ‘news aggregator’ function which Andrew has added to the site, I came across another critique of Don Carson’s lectures on postmodernism, which in itself I found to contain helpful insights into postmodernism and the emergent church. It’s by Dr David M.Mills (an academic at the institution where Carson gave the lectures) http//people.cedarville.edu/employee/millsd/mills_staley_response.pdf

Carson apparently made the statement which heads this post (‘Damn all false anitheses to hell’) as a criticism of ECM (which he regards as tending to make ‘false antitheses’). Mills points out, amongst much that is insightful, that Carson himself is guilty of precisely the same tendencies - in his crtiticisms of ECM, and that ECM, and MacLaren in particular, cannot be all be tarred with the same brush. (Mills is not an apologist for ECM, and shares some of Carson’s own concerns about tendencies in the ECM and its theology).

The article also has a bearing on Andrew’s comments in this post. I personally found myself thinking: is this another way of saying that communities create meanings in texts (such as biblical texts)? That texts don’t have ‘independent’ meanings? That authors/editors cannot convey ‘intended’ meanings?

But Mills has, what are to me, some highly potent things to say about the difference between ‘certainty’ in knowing (which was Modernism’s quest), and ‘knowing truly’, despite our partial, finite and fallible knowledge, which he argues for.

Narratives can convey truth as much as propositions; Mills shows how MacLaren seeks not to set one kind of ‘truth’ against another, but to reinstate both alongside each other.