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Hermeneutical Deconstruction: Always Deferring, Never Arriving

Deconstruction is hard to pin down in terms of its understanding of where to find meaning, to some degree because it is not looking for a meaning, but is usually trying to overthrow meanings to create new ones. Consequently, this approach can only loosely be called reader-response.1 The focus of deconstruction, like that [...]

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Asides

• "The loss of truth is being offset by increasingly adventurous experiments in worship and by various attempts at recovering a lost sense of mystery. My view is that this kind of offsetting is an illusion. There is no offset for the loss of truth. There can only be a cover-up of what has taken place. When our knowledge of God's truth is diminished, our understanding of God is diminished, and no amount of contrived mystery through ancient liturgies or gathering in the presence of dim, flickering candlelight can compensate for the loss. Emergents too, are standing outside the house that Ockenga, Henry, Graham, Stott, Lloyd-Jones, and Schaeffer built in that earlier generation. The difference is that they are standing outside the house, whereas the seeker-sensitives, the marketers, still imagine they are living inside it." David F. Wells. The Courage to Be Protestant. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. p. 18. #
• "Pride is without doubt the chief occupational hazard of the preacher. It I has ruined many, and deprived their ministry of power.... In some it is blatantly obvious. They are exhibitionists by temperament and use the pulpit as a stage on which they show off.... Other preachers are not like Nebuchadnezzars, however, for their pride does not take the form of blatant boastfulness. It is more subtle, more insidious, and even more perverse. For it is possible to adopt an outward demeanor of great meekness, while inside our appetite for applause is insatiable. At the very moment when in the pulpit we are extolling the glories of Christ, we can in reality be seeking our own glory, and when we are exhorting the congregation to praise God, and are even ostensibly leading them in praise, we can be secretly hoping that they will spare a bit of praise for us. We need to cry out with Baxter, "O what a constant companion, what a tyrannical commander, what a sly, subtle and insinuating enemy is this sin of pride!” (John Stott, Between Two Worlds, 320-321) #
• "Never lose heart in the power of the gospel. Do not believe that there exists any man, much less any race of men, for whom the gospel is not fitted." --C.H. Spurgeon #
• "On Christ, and what he has done, my soul hangs for time and eternity. And if your soul also hangs there, it will be saved as surely as mine shall be. And if you are lost trusting in Christ, I will be lost with you and will go to hell with you. I must do so, for I have nothing else to rely upon but the fact that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, lived, died, was buried, rose again, went to heaven, and still lives and pleads for sinners at the right hand of God." --C.H. Spurgeon #