Professor Alvin Plantinga
(Wikimedia Commons public domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019m occasionally\u00a0accused of being a \u201cfundamentalist.\u201d \u00a0So too, apparently, is the distinguished Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. \u00a0Here\u2019s a comment from him on that accusation \u2014 please pardon the ever-so-slightly strong language, or, at least, be warned of it in advance \u2014 drawn from his Warranted Christian Belief<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000):<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term \u2018fundamentalist\u2019. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like \u2018son of a bitch\u2019, more exactly \u2018sonovabitch\u2019, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) \u2018sumbitch\u2019. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of \u2018fundamentalist\u2019 (in this widely current use): it isn\u2019t\u00a0simply<\/i>\u00a0a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have\u00a0some<\/i>cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like \u2018stupid<\/i>\u00a0sumbitch\u2019 (or maybe \u2018fascist<\/i>\u00a0sumbitch\u2019?) than \u2018sumbitch\u2019 simpliciter. It isn\u2019t exactly like\u00a0that<\/i>\u00a0term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase \u2018considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.\u2019 The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like \u2018stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine\u2019.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u00a0 \u00a0 I\u2019m occasionally\u00a0accused of being a \u201cfundamentalist.\u201d \u00a0So too, apparently, is the distinguished Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. \u00a0Here\u2019s a comment from him on that accusation \u2014 please pardon the ever-so-slightly strong language, or, at least, be warned of it in advance \u2014 drawn from his Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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