TRUEMAN, BLOGGING & NUMPTINESS
There is a lot of wisdom here in Carl Trueman’s latest look at blogging: The Theatre of the Absurd. Some great statements:
- “the free access to public exposure which the web provides has facilitated what appears to be a dangerous confusion of categories, that of the right to speak with the right to be heard.”
- “the danger of an uncritical attitude to the web and to blogging is that it comports very easily with the conversational model of theology which is now gaining currency among the advocates of advanced modernism (aka postmodernism) of the Western church situation… The absolute democratization of knowledge to which an uncritical attitude to blogging etc leads is, after all, inimical to any hierarchical view of truth, and thoroughly comfortable with the ‘this is my truth now tell me yours’ approach which is gaining ground even as I write.”
- “the category of scholar is one which should be reserved for those who have established themselves in their chosen field by actual scholarly achievement, not by simply talking a good game. This credibility is achieved by consistent, careful and scholarly contributions to a field in terms of refereed publications which then enjoy currency among qualified peers outside the person’s immediate circle of epigonous friends.”
- “pompous and arrogant numptiness”—I had never heard the word “numptiness” before I started reading Carl’s work—it is such a great word, one of those typical Britishisms that capture an entire world.
