The new Generous Relativism

Doug Wilson's doing a good (though lengthy) review of Brian McLaren's Generous Orthodoxy here.

Here's a short piece that summarizes. Explanation of terms:
- foundationalism = believing in absolutes and certainty, and building beliefs on them
- Cartesian = belief in absolutes and certainty based on individual, mental deduction
- "they" refers to McLaren types, who are trying to accommodate Christianity to the latest philosophies (my take!).

"And for good measure they run away from an authoritative and infallible Bible because it reminds them of a Cartesian idol they saw once. They object to the metaphor of basic beliefs providing a "foundation" with lesser beliefs stacked on top. That concept is being laughed at in all kinds of philosophy departments these days, and so our duty as evangelicals [satire alert] is to act the part of the desperate nerdy kid trying to laugh his way into the inner ring. He doesn't get the jokes but he always knows exactly when he has to laugh.

"So instead of a metaphor that sees knowledge as building blocks, let us use the metaphor of an interlocking network or web. Hmmm? Okay, fine. Just as a mason needs a foundation on which to lay his brick, so a spider needs some fixed branches from which to spin his web. The idol of modernity falsely claimed to be able to fix the starting point, while the triune God of the Bible actually does fix it in Himself and His self-revelation. But it turns out that they don't abhor idolatrous certainty; they abhor certainty period. And the place these people are seeking, a place where there is no traction point, no place to rest, no point to settle, has a name. It is called the outer darkness, a place where there is, at last, no foundationalism of any kind....

"Watching erstwhile evangelicals trying to earn the respect of the philosophical world is just tragedy in slow motion. It is like watching film of somebody giving a couple of glasses of Scotch to a three-year-old, except that the three-year-old might not drink it. You start reading these johnnies, and if you don't watch yourself, after a couple of drinks you start caring what Wittgenstein might have meant by something."