Like with most Christians, I suspect I share quite a few things with Scot McKnight; more than I differ with, at any rate. Scot is a professor of New Testament at North Park University in Chicagoland, worships at Willow Creek, converses among the emergent folk, and has a really interesting blog.

I was re-reading some recent blog entries I had saved over the past few weeks and found this gem from his blog Jesus Creed, where he talks about his connection with emergent Christianity:

Second, on those four rivers I detail in the WTS paper, and they are Postmodernity, Praxis, Postevangelical, and Politics:

I’m a critical realist: I think there is an object out there that is objective, and that making knowledge is not simply spinning a story in my head; but I think I’ve got a “cracked Eikon mind” and that means that my “story” or theology will never be purely objective, it will never be identical to that objective reality out there, and that I need to hold my story in tension with other stories and with ongoing learning. …

Scot continues to summarize his views on (ortho)praxis, evangelicalism, and Christian political action. Its a good blog entry, and a helpful WTS paper.

The phrase I’ve used to describe my stance towards epistemology isn’t critical realist but hermeneutical realist, which without having put a lot of thought into it yet seems to be getting at the same point: its a realist position insofar as it posits that there is truth outside of us that isn’t purely subjective; its hermeneutical, insofar as it argues that human beings are interpreting creatures with their own subjective frameworks that they bring to their understanding of reality. The term hermeneutical realism I get from William Schweiker (see particularly his dense but important book Responsibility and Christian Ethics),but I think that its pursuing the same point as McKnight’s phrase “critical realism”: it rejects relativism and yet argues against purely objective realism.

It helps me to see Scot argue this and against a more robust relativism, which is one of my major concerns with postmodern philosophy, at least in its early incarnations.