dissertation

World Student Christian Federation a new terminology was adopted. 103 This is typical
of ideological movements, which tend to “turn the world into language.” 104 This new
vocabulary, moreover, was antithetic to rational argument and analytic style – just as
we see among certain postmodern writers within the EMC. 105 Furthermore, “it was inherently
disdainful of institutions and arrogantly assumed a clear-cut and simple judgment
of who was for good and who was for evil.” 106 Looking back on these times, we
notice that the radical Christians had run out of steam by the 1970’s. 107 The same prospect
may loom for participants within the EMC if they refuse to learn from history. 108
This topic of ideology can be approached from still another angle. It is the willingness
to set the truth above a macroparadigm, no matter how compelling – whether ‘modern’,
‘postmodern’, or whatever – that prevents the latter from becoming an ideology.
Only a devotion to the truth 109 can enable our paradigms, self-serving as they are, to be
self-correcting. An uncritical adoption of postmodern thinking, however, can jeopardize
such devotion. 110 And such an uncritical openness to – sometimes quite explicit – forms
of postmodern epistemology can indeed be found in progressive parts of the EMC, as R.
Scott Smith has pointed out. 111 This is cause for some concern, since postmodern thin-
83
103
“‘In’ words, which separated the sheep from the goats included ‘conscientization’, ‘new lifestyles’, ‘education
of the masses’, ‘anti-imperialist struggle’, ‘system of repression’ and the like. Those who did not master
the use of this in-language were quickly written off by the supporters of the emerging radical left-wing of
the Federation.” Risto Lehtonen, Story of a Storm: The Ecumenical Student Movement in the Turmoil of Revolution
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 119.
104
See Frank Ellis, “Political Correctness and the Ideological Struggle: From Lenin and Mao to Marcuse and
Foucault,” The Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies 27, no. 4 (Winter 2002), 430.
105
One of the characteristics of literature that is produced in the EMC (especially by revisionist authors) is
its depreciation of what is traditionally known as linear, reasonable discourse, which is deemed to be ‘modern’.
Some authors even deliberately organize their books in fragments, thereby not only illustrating but
also advocating the shift to a postmodern paradigm of discourse. For example, Leonard Sweet, Brain McLaren
and Jerry Haselmayer wrote a book that follows the letters of the alphabet. “You will go through this
text at your own pace, starting where you need to, ending where you want to. We hope you will read it any
way except from A to Z.” Leonard Sweet, Brian D. McLaren and Jerry Haselmayer, A is for Abductive: The
Language of the Emerging Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), 29.
106
Lehtonen, Story of a Storm, 119.
107
McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 208.
108
Most EMC participants were not yet born in the 1960’s. Interestingly, according to Thomas Kuhn, the
individuals who invent a new paradigm almost always “have been either very young or very new to the field
whose paradigm they change.” Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 90.
109
Note that such a ‘devotion’ to truth is hard to reconcile with paradigm thinking à la Kuhn, because of
his opinion that scientific change is best understood as a process that does not move toward any goal at all.
“Rather, Kuhn insists that, like the process of evolution by natural selection, scientific change is a process
that is best conceptualized as driven from behind.” Wray, Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology, 112.
110
Cf. Gattei, “If truth is nothing more than solidarity, then all of our questions are political questions –
and the only question that matters is: which side are you on?” Gattei, Thomas Kuhn’s ‘Linguistic Turn’, 203.
See also Steve Fuller, who delineates the “essence of Kuhn’s Realpolitik of science” as follows: scientific revolutions
succeed not because the same people are persuaded of a new way of seeing things, but because different
people’s views start to count. Steve Fuller, Kuhn vs Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science (Cambridge,
UK: Icon Books, 2003), 37.
111
See R. Scott Smith, Truth and the New Kind of Christian (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005). More on the topic
of epistemology within the EMC follows in 5.2.1.