Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

Ditto and doubly so for the "intelligent design" folks who try very hard to make their religion sound like science. Have you ever read Karen Armstrong? She wrote a global history of fundamentalism called "The Battle for God." Her thesis roughly is that, while fundamentalists always claim to be returning to the true and ancient version of faith, they paradoxically instead create something new and modern.
 

Wait! Hold it! Let us pause for a moment... ER and Timothy agree!



Yea!!!! :)
 

Holy ...
 

Three is a magic number after all.
 

"Ditto and doubly so for the "intelligent design" folks who try very hard to make their religion sound like science. "

Amen.
 

I'd be shocked if that group read Comte.

The enlightenment beat the crap out of Biblical narrative and mythology for centuries. Evangelicals came up with different strategies to cope.

One, the big miracles of the Bible were a matter of faith and outside of natural laws.

Two, to prove they belonged to modernity, conservative Protestants used new linguistic understanding at the micro-level of Biblical lexicology in order to assert conservative control of doctrine.

Three, to recapture the inspiration of God acting in human history at all times, mythology - beaten out of the Bible and the past - was rolled forward into the future where it was now out of reach of science and "human" "reason." So.... nuclear fission in Ezekiel, arctic Jews in Jeremiah, and modern Israel is a fig tree to be protected by the State Department in Foggy Bottom.

These three are combined on a groundwork of blind, conservative faith that both rejects and yet participates in modernity to create ideal theories of the future.

This is what looks like Comte, who built his ideal vision on a naive confidence in the ability of science (preeminently including what we call the social sciences) to perfect humankind.

Interestingly, post-modern academic evangelicalism is returning to Biblical narrative as a normative patterning model where post-modern breakdown of "truth" is baptized as "mystery."

They do this because deconstruction and other post-modern approaches helps them ignore the internal biblical references to external forces that shaped the Bible itself. If the reader composes, the reader can ignore the shapers and the fact that the shapers stand outside the text.
 

Re, "the reader can ignore the shapers and the fact that the shapers stand outside the text."

That's what just blows me away.
 

You have a self-interest. You are a text shaper.
 

True. And everybody needs an editor. Even G- ... (hee) ... even the biblical writers.
 

Dispensationalism as post-modern Bib-crit? Nah, it's so thoroughly modern it's outdated already. Indeed, it was the modernists - the fundamentalists, and especially the dispensationalists - who accepted the modernist critique of Biblical literature, and responded in two ways. Either by constructing the kind of elaborate eschatological encumbrances one finds in dispensationalism, by calling higher criticism blasphemy done by heretics and non-believers. What I find interesting is the kind of textual criticism (if one can apply the word) done by fundamentalists very often sounds very similar to legal reasoning, with all the hair-splitting and focus on a particular word or phrase as "key", rather than concentrating on the text as a whole.
 

Yes, that's my point.

Dispensationalists are at the mercy of the Enlightenment and the later modernity, fighting eighteenth and nineteenth century battles (like Scofield and EL Ashley).

On the other hand, there are some contemporary evangelicals in the academy who are different from the kind ER is bringing up and who, instead of doing battle with modernity, are doing battle with post-modernity but similarly using post-modern tools behind their back where they can't see what they are doing.

Two different groups.
 

In some ways, though, fundie complaints about the higher criticism that date from the 19th century sound an awful lot like some strands of pomo lit-crit. Like the down-playing of authorial intention and the social setting of the authors, etc. Which is, of course, different from the kind of silliness one reads in dispensationalism, which is just really bad reading.

For some real fun, Feodor, go check out 4simpsons if you haven't yet. If you're lucky, you might get banned like ER, Alan, and I all have. He might even question your Christian faith, probably do that before he bans you.
 

I was banned a month ago for suggesting that he and his daughters should repent for their dancing in a musical (The Nutcracker) originally written by a pagan syphilitic (ETA Hoffman), adapted by a mulatto (Dumas) and set in a ballet by a gay commie (Tchaikovsky).
 

Oh, that is hilarious. LOL

Correction: Neil didn't ban me. He changed one of my comments, therefore I do not trust him, therefore, while I lurk occasionally, I haven't left a peep over there in a long time.
 

Too funny. Hee hee.

ER, I apologize. You/re gonna have to try harder, man.
 

ER

Incredible aid to understanding the Christian dilemma as it remains from the last two hundred years;

Hans Frei's The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics

Difficult, heavy, will influence your understanding for the rest of your life.

The man had the inelegance to die the week before I had seminar with him. He was the foundation to what is loosely called a Yale School of Theology that clustered four or five men in the eighties/nineties.
 

That's one! The list is under way!
 

BTW, I cast a diaconal vote by e-mail today. Routine thing. But how cool.
 

"I was banned a month ago for suggesting that he "and his daughters should repent for their dancing in a musical (The Nutcracker) originally written by a pagan syphilitic (ETA Hoffman), adapted by a mulatto (Dumas) and set in a ballet by a gay commie (Tchaikovsky)."

Excellent.

Personally I've always found his protestations regarding his own dancing and make-up wearing in the Nutcracker to be a tad well ... shall we say ... overcompensating.

Anyway, I indeed have been banned. ER is just a poser. :) I believe I was the first to be banned, actually, so in that respect you're all just pale imitations. ;) I've also been banned from Timmy's, and about half a dozen other blogs in case you're keeping score. I am. I mark a hash on the bezel of my monitor each time a fundie bans me. LOL.

(Oh, and every time I get banned, a fairy gets its wings.)