Your pitting Keller against orthodoxy seems to me a bit wishful.
What does orthodoxy really mean? We would both agree that no one is simply reading the Bible and doing "what it says." You have to interpret it. You need a community, or in Christian terms, the Holy Spirit at work in the body of Christ. So we are all postmodernists at this point - "the orthodox reading of scripture" is not fixed but is continually being negotiated across time. It is still being negotiated. (In retrospect, Keller may prove to have been an influential negotiator!)
Keller's whole raison d'etre is to be a lucid, articulate advocate for orthodoxy. He has no interest in saying anything that all of his evangelical friends/mentors would disagree with. What he IS interested in is any intersection he can discern between the preoccupations of the contemporary world and the preoccupations of Scripture, so that he can help contemporary Christians feel the import of Scripture for their day to day lives and at the same time do "apologetics," try to find points of connection between the unattached and this alien (to them) tradition.
You are not an alien! In your own way, you are remaining faithful to the tradition by caricaturing it and mocking it - maybe "blasphemer" would be a better designation than "apostate." You're in the complicated position of adhering to a particular view of what Scripture means *like a believer* without actually holding the beliefs that make such a stance coherent. Your strategy is to try to take Christians at their word and give Scripture enormous authority so as to show how they don't respect that authority in practice themselves. I don't buy it. Some of your points are very strong, some are weak, but they all presuppose this notion of mimicry or ventriloquism, - not finding a good analogy - like what matters about being a Christian can be accessed by remote control.
I propose that for Lent this year you should abstain from this RPG and try to forget Jesus ever existed. Seriously, what's longest you've ever gone since being a Christian without once consciously trying to think like a Christian?
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2009-02-17 03:19 am (UTC)What does orthodoxy really mean? We would both agree that no one is simply reading the Bible and doing "what it says." You have to interpret it. You need a community, or in Christian terms, the Holy Spirit at work in the body of Christ. So we are all postmodernists at this point - "the orthodox reading of scripture" is not fixed but is continually being negotiated across time. It is still being negotiated. (In retrospect, Keller may prove to have been an influential negotiator!)
Keller's whole raison d'etre is to be a lucid, articulate advocate for orthodoxy. He has no interest in saying anything that all of his evangelical friends/mentors would disagree with. What he IS interested in is any intersection he can discern between the preoccupations of the contemporary world and the preoccupations of Scripture, so that he can help contemporary Christians feel the import of Scripture for their day to day lives and at the same time do "apologetics," try to find points of connection between the unattached and this alien (to them) tradition.
You are not an alien! In your own way, you are remaining faithful to the tradition by caricaturing it and mocking it - maybe "blasphemer" would be a better designation than "apostate." You're in the complicated position of adhering to a particular view of what Scripture means *like a believer* without actually holding the beliefs that make such a stance coherent. Your strategy is to try to take Christians at their word and give Scripture enormous authority so as to show how they don't respect that authority in practice themselves. I don't buy it. Some of your points are very strong, some are weak, but they all presuppose this notion of mimicry or ventriloquism, - not finding a good analogy - like what matters about being a Christian can be accessed by remote control.
I propose that for Lent this year you should abstain from this RPG and try to forget Jesus ever existed. Seriously, what's longest you've ever gone since being a Christian without once consciously trying to think like a Christian?