God’s deconstruction
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
The epistemology of the cross is far more deconstructive of human ideologies and belief policies than anything post-modernity has yet produced. That God reveals himself on Christ’s cross as one who suffers and dies is an implicit correction, if not outright rejection, of the attempt to think of God on the basis of reason alone: “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1 Cor 1:20) This is why the confessions of the Reformed churches recognise the inherent corrigibility of theological formulations. The confessions themselves have only relative and provisional authority; they are under the Word of God and thus subject to correction from it. There is a built-in iconoclasm, an intrinsic guard against the tendancy to let a community’s language and concepts dictate what can be known of God. An epistemology of the cross incorporates ideology critique into its very fabric.
Kevin Vanhoozer in First Theology
Tags: church, postmodernism, theology
a fresh statement of redemption
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
it is .. urgent and vital that we explore … the way in which, within our own very different culture, we can rightly reapproporiate [Paul's] gospel in the world of late modernity, postmodernity, post-colonialism, neo-imperialism, and other things that swirl around our heads at the start of the twenty-first century. I believe it is part of the task of the chruch today to accept the postmodern critique of modernity but ot insist that it is not the last word. Modernity stands accused of arrogance… Postmodernity … has made its point. But, despite the misplaced enthusiasm of some, postmodernity does not give us a new home, a place to stay. What it provides is a fresh statement of the Fall, which in Christian theology ought always to invite a fresh statement, in symbol and practice as well as word, of redemption. I believe that part of the task of the church in our own day is to pioneer a way through postmodernity and out the other side, not back to modernity in its various, even in its Christian guises, but into a new world, a new culture, which nobody else is shaping and which we have a chance to.
N.T. Wright in ‘Paul: Fresh Perspectives’
Tags: church, culture, postmodernism
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...