A History of Philosophy in One Paragraph

Courtesy of Marva Dawn:

A premodern umpire once said, “There’s balls and there’s strikes strikes, and I calls them as they is.”  Believing in an absolute truth that could be found, earlier societies looked for evidence to discover that truth.  A modern umpire would say instead, “There’s balls and there’s strikes, and I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em.”  For the modernist, truth is to be found in one’s own experience.  Now a postmodern umpire would say, “There’s balls and there’s strikes, and they ain’t nothin’ till I calls ‘em.”  No truth exists unless we create it. (p. 36)

That covers a lot of ground in just a few sentences.  Just one of the many gems I’ve discovered thus far in Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down.

The (Other) Hole in Our Gospel

Evangelicals are getting hammered from every quarter these days.  Mark Noll wrote of “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.”  (The scandal: there isn’t much of an evangelical mind.)  Richard Stearns has written of “The Hole in Our Gospel.”  (The hole: Jesus’ call to live radically, doing justice and loving the least.)

Here’s one more for the list, perhaps not as scandalous but perhaps overlooked: tradition.  Too many evangelicals, for various reasons, have spiritual, liturgical, and theological amnesia.  One evangelical who can serve as a corrective to this tendency is Methodist Grand Poobah John Wesley.  Thus sayeth Ted Campbell:

Wesley was, it should be argued, a very unique Evangelical who had an unusual commitment to Christian tradition (especially ancient tradition), and he therefore remains as a challenge (and hopefully a resource) to Evangelicals, who too often in the past have jettisoned Christian tradition as irrelevant to the on-going lives of individual Christians and to the life of the Christian community. (John Wesley and Christian Antiquity, [Nashville: Kingswood Books 1991], 114)