----- Quotes from Understanding the postmodern mind and the emerging church by C. Michael Patton: "Much of who and what God is is a mystery to us. We are finite and we cannot define an infinite God without misrepresenting Him by our limitations in thought or language. Therefore, the best thing that we can do is refrain from our temptation to define Him—we just worship him." "Postmodernism unmasked [the] negative aspects of the fundamentalist church. Postmodernism is in rebellion against traditionalism, and this is not such a bad thing." "[The] maverick method of theological studies—all I need is me, my Bible, and the Holy Spirit—is something that we inherited from the humanism of the enlightenment. We exist in a community of believers who all have different circumstances which contribute to the truth which we seek. God is not working with us [only] as individuals, but [also as] people who exist in a body of believers." "Soft postmoderns are different than hard postmoderns. In general they are suspicious of all truth claims. Their suspicion, however, is not rooted in a denial of the existence of truth, but a denial of our ability to come to terms with our certainty about the truth. In other words, the soft postmoderns believe in the existence of objective truth, but deny that we can have absolute certainly or assurance that we, in fact, have a corner on this truth. To the soft postmodernist, most truth claims must be held in tension, understanding our limitations. We can seldom be certain that we have the right truth and are expressing it the right way. Therefore, there is a tendency to hold all convictions in limbo. 'This is what we believe, but who is to say that we are right' is the common confession of the soft postmodern. Again, it must be stressed—for this is where great misunderstanding exists—soft postmodernism is not built upon the denial of truth itself (a metaphysical concern), but with our ability to know the truth (an epistemological concern)." "The soft postmodernism of the emerging church is continually on the brink of compromise. ... We don’t have to have absolute certainty about something before we can act on and preach those convictions. ... It is important for Christians to hold many of our beliefs in tension, but these beliefs must be limited to those on which the Bible does not speak emphatically and clearly. ... Soft postmodernism has few convictions, and this is not necessarily a positive. As the country song goes, 'You have got to stand for something, or you will fall for anything.'" ----- Quotes from Dr. Tom Pittman from private email exchanges: "Either words mean what they mean and there is a well-defined meaning of the Biblical text which is not subject to private interpretation [2Pet.1:20], or else any interpretation of any text is as valid as any other, and NOTHING AT ALL CAN BE COMMUNICATED. But we do communicate, every day. The relativist argument self-destructs." "Literary absolutism stands on its own two feet; its opposite (post-modernist subjective relativism) *requires* literary absolutism to define and explain itself, which makes that subjective relativism self-contradictory and therefore meaningless. The same is true of all moral absolutes with relativistic deniers (each in their own way)." "God *did* personally reveal His meaning of Genesis to me (and to your and to anybody else who wants to pay attention). It's called the Bible [Luke 16:29], and I can look to Moses and Jesus and Paul (in that same Bible) for fine examples of how to understand it correctly. They were literary absolutists, and they expected their readers (us) to be so too." |