A New Kind of Christian Chapters 1 & 2

• Dan is a pastor who is thinking about quitting. He’s struggling with his own faith journey.

• This guy is safe to talk to – he understands.

• Evolution

• It was a simple matter of intellectual honesty. My faith has plenty of room for science, and my science only strengthens my faith – and I guess that just flows out of who I am.

• What makes you so sure I’m a liberal? I used to be a fundamentalist. I’ve found that liberals can be fundamentalist too. Liberals are often just fundamentalists with a different set of beliefs.

• You have a modern faith, a faith you developed in your homeland of modernity. But you’re immigrating to a new land, a postmodern world. You feel like you don’t fit in either world. You can’t make the transition to the other side alone. You need a sponsor – someone who has already settled and acclimated, who can help you do the same.

• Diagram:

1. Prehistory
2. 2500 B.C. Ancient World
3. A.D. 500 Medieval World
4. A.D. 1500 Modern World
5. A.D. 2000 Postmodern World

• To be postmodern doesn’t imply being antimodern or non-modern.

• Discuss ten characteristics of the modern age.

• I believe it possible to describe postmodernity – the broad culture defined by its having moved beyond modernity – without having to go too deeply into postmodernism as a philosophy.

• Whatever postmodern philosophy is, it is still in its infancy.

• In a new philosophy’s early stages, it tends to be negative – to focus on what’s wrong with the prevailing school of thought. It takes time for the phase that deconstructs the prevailing view to give way to a phase where a new view is articulated, a new vision is proposed. We aren’t in that phase yet.