“Am I correct to assume you feel a person must accept a pre-modern worldview in order to be Christian?”

No sir, that would not be correct. However, the difference between you and I is twofold:

1. I do not assume—quite arrogantly, actually—that the pre-modern worldview has past. With the sweeping statement “but then allow it’s core truths to live on after that [premodern] worldview has past” you have dismissed the religion of many of our 2/3 world brothers and sisters which still operate in a very similar worldview (not to mention many who still cling to aspects of it in western countries!). This is why I accused you of colonialism.

2. While I agree with you that the gospel is not necessarily tied to any worldview, I do not, with you, have an operating assumption that by stripping the old worldview of its metaphysical claims thereby remaking it in a modern worldview I have “arrived,” or “recovered an authentic faith in the message of Jesus”. This is what I was describing as “re-particularization”.

By suggesting that I have created a straw man it seems to me that this is a priori evidence that you have not taken the critical gaze to your own tradition. Had you done so you would have realized that the attempts of liberal theology from Schleiermacher to the infantile theological attempts of Thomas Jefferson, to William James, Henry Nelson Wieman, Edgar Brightman, Douglas Macintosh, the rest of the Chicago School, etc., has been to “make Christianity acceptable to the modern mind” by doing what you are doing: a rejecting of the old and a re-particularization into a modern, empiricist and materialist mindset.

You simultaneously hammer people like Andrew for accepting what you feel are premodern assumptions as central to the gospel while then uncritically baptizing your own particularization as the more preferred. I don’t care how “sincere” it is—the fundamentalism that arose in reaction to the Chicago School and liberal theology was sincere as well. The problem in both is the hypocrisy: assuming that one is standing from an Archimedean point (scientific mindset or direct revelation) from which one can extend the finger of condemnation to others.

There is no Archimedean point. You can’t make universal claims or judgments without a tautological self-referencing to the worldview that underlies them for justification. No one has baptized modernity, just as no one has baptized premodernity.

Andrew openly assumes a (narrative) position that has the possibility of extending through multiple worldviews and epochs, though none of them will be completely dominant (I think we might have to tinker with that a bit more, Andrew) and, therefore, none will be thoroughly satisfied. Andrew incorporates the historical critical method often. That’s modern. But he also emphasizes the narrative. That’s to some extent premodern (not to be confused with historical time; premodern in the sense of “not modern” or “not Western”). It’s going to have to be that way. Sorry.

Also, Andrew’s position is still rational. Highly rational, actually. Rationality/irrationality has nothing to do with this argument, I hope we can recognize up front.