Ponderings...

Last night, after class, when I usually just chat with my classmates for a moment in the parking lot before dashing off in hopes of getting home at a relatively decent time, I instead stood in the parking lot talking for an hour plus with my good friend, Dan. We don't agree on some issues and that's fine. We agree to disagree but are both at least open to dialogue on the issues. In all honesty, last night I saw a new side to my friend. There were some interpersonal things that just oozed out and some intellectual concepts as well. I guess, well, I don't know. It was just one of those conversations that left you thinking. I think that's a great conversation.

Some items we discussed included the dogmatism held by many conservative, Protestant evangelicals. Now, to some degree, I'd put myself in that group. Yet, like my friend, Dan, there is a point to which I'll be willing to admit, although sometimes begrudgingly, that I'm, and this was his phrase of the evening, "not sure that I know what I know". The essential genesis of this idea was the almost blatant refusal to accept, agree with, or discuss some of the more liberal theologians of the twentieth century and before. These men, in their own right, were brilliant people who truly were in a search for truth. They were bound to their times in some sense, in the sense that they were birthed from a culture that held to a certain way of thinking that perhaps we do not now. But did they ask the important and compelling questions? Did they with honesty, humility, and genuineness seek to answer those questions? And can we not learn from them, both positively and negatively, and at least admit that some of our dogmatism is more of a cultural construct than something that we fully "know that we know"?

I don't know...I've got to think about it for a bit...