Friday 1 April 2011
Mission from There to Here
A friend of mine was back home in Wales recently and heard a group of Korean mission workers in the town centre singing Welsh hymns in Welsh. At the end some of them greeted those listening, again in Welsh. This friend was, 'Quite frankly gob-smacked' as well she might be. We are used to African churches starting up in larger city centres and drawing in African refugees and residents, but we are not used to those from more Christian nations than our own coming to our country and adapting to our language and culture in order to reach us. This is both humbling and amazing. Long may it continue, and long may it be an example to us!
Bulverism is Alive Today!
It seems that Bulverism is as alive today as it ever was when C.S. Lewis had to invent the term to describe what was going on in his day to describe the much over-used art of analysing why people think what they think:
'In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism.” Some day I am going the write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father - who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third - “Oh, you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment,” E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.' C.S. Lewis, 'God in the Dock'.
http://www.barking-moonbat.com/God_in_the_Dock.html
accessed 1st April 2011
It seems today that we have now reached an advanced stage of Bulverism. We now expect people from the two-thirds world to have a chip on their shoulder about not being as developed as Western countries. Conversely those from the West feel unable to comment on issues in the developing world. When I was at college, we were told that Jews are better at interpreting the Old Testament than Christians are (no doubt true in some cases, but hardly a rule). This kind of crazy thinking means that, as Sugirtharajah as said, one would have to be a tree to be able to make any comment at all on deforestation (The Bible and the Third World). This is, of course, very postmodern, and it is typical that C.S. Lewis spotted it about 30 years before anyone else. But we cannot go back to being modern, as that would involve assuming a level of human objectivity we no longer believe in. Instead we need to treat people as people, and let them say what they think. Please, let's get together and listen and talk, instead of trying to work out what is going on in someone else's head!
'In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism.” Some day I am going the write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father - who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third - “Oh, you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment,” E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.' C.S. Lewis, 'God in the Dock'.
http://www.barking-moonbat.com/God_in_the_Dock.html
accessed 1st April 2011
It seems today that we have now reached an advanced stage of Bulverism. We now expect people from the two-thirds world to have a chip on their shoulder about not being as developed as Western countries. Conversely those from the West feel unable to comment on issues in the developing world. When I was at college, we were told that Jews are better at interpreting the Old Testament than Christians are (no doubt true in some cases, but hardly a rule). This kind of crazy thinking means that, as Sugirtharajah as said, one would have to be a tree to be able to make any comment at all on deforestation (The Bible and the Third World). This is, of course, very postmodern, and it is typical that C.S. Lewis spotted it about 30 years before anyone else. But we cannot go back to being modern, as that would involve assuming a level of human objectivity we no longer believe in. Instead we need to treat people as people, and let them say what they think. Please, let's get together and listen and talk, instead of trying to work out what is going on in someone else's head!
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