Brad

But I did want to say that some of the feedback I’ve gotten on all of this is encouraging me to try to make this discussion more accessible. Frankly, I started typing about something that interested me with no real thought that it would be read by many people! But I think there’s a real interest in this kind of topic, not just among a lot of (younger?) Baptists, but among evangelicals in general.

In a nutshell, paleo-orthodoxy (paleo=”ancient”) is a name coined by Thomas Oden to refer to a movement back to ancient orthodoxy. It’s an attempt to listen to the “classical consensus of orthodoxy” (a phrase that could be debated all day and night! i.e., does such even exist?) mainly by listening to the witness of the post-apostolic early church. In other words, it’s trying to pull Evangelicals out of an enslavement to modernity and postmodernity and into an ancient conversation. In many ways, paleo-orthodoxy is just a call for those steeped in modern culture to listen again to what those who were chronologically closest to the mouth of the stream have to say.

Finally, I think in a very real sense that it’s a way for us to respect our parents, and their parents, and their parents, etc. I think that a lot of our interpretation of the Bible is enslaved to a kind of modern snobbery that is incapable of evaluating our own modern tendencies. Paleo-orthodoxy is just allowing the voices of ancient Christendom to pull up a chair to the evangelical table and enrich us with their presence.

I think it would be very interesting for somebody to explore the question of how paleo-orthodoxy interacts with the emergent church.

I would really, really recommend reading Oden’s The Rebirth of Orthodoxy.

Thanks Michael, and God bless.

He would probably find his task easier if he’d forget the whole paleo thing and developed instead an excursion into a padeo-baptist orthodoxy. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist)

A periodic post of things I’ve read and like in the Kingdom part of the blogosphere …