26 July 2006

Faith without foundations

I ran across an interesting column for The Weekly Standard on the CBS News web site. (This seems slightly odd to me - what do CBS and TWS have to do with each other? - but the news business makes strange bedfellows, I suppose.) In the piece, Jim rakes both liberal denominations and (more briefly) the Emerging Church over the coals for, in his words, "substitut[ing] sentiments for facts, passions for authority, and subjectivity for reason." In many ways, it's the same old rant that both liberal mainliners and emerging folk have been hearing for years, but at the same time - you know, maybe he does have a point. Maybe his critique outlines a potential danger zone as opposed to a present reality (I would say that this is largely the case for the Emerging Church, but perhaps less so for the liberal mainline denominations), but in either case it's probably a critique we need to listen to and pray about, even if it seems like we've heard it all before. (I say this as a card-carrying member - so to speak - of both types of "foundationless" faith communities.)

Anyway, if you're interested, give it a read and let me know if you think he's got anything to say to us.

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