Yesterday the Apprising Ministries outreach Christian Research Net linked to an instructive Strange Baptist Fire post No Views Contradict—A Postmodernist Guide to Keeping God Out of a Box by Jim Bublitz of Old Truth, which concerned what is becoming known as Christian agnosticism.

It’s all part of a growing attack on “systematic theology”; most specifically Calvinism, currently being waged by the man-centered new evangelicalism and the semi-pelagianism slithering around within the grass of the neo-liberalism in the Emergent Church.

However, here’s what these “postmodern” people—right along with other skeptics—apparently fail to realize. To claim one has no systematic theology is to make a self-refuting claim; because, in very fact, they are then admitting to some other kind of system. Their system just happens to be hostile to the forms of systematic theology that they personally dislike.

With this in mind, today over at Triablogue we read from Paul Manata:

Chris Lyons has a beef with systematic theology. His post critiques the project of systematic theology by appeal to that old story about the 6 blind men and the one elephant. You know, they each felt a part of the elephant and thought that their experience of the elephant constituted the whole truth of the matter (one felt the trunk and said it was a snake, another, the tusks, and said it was a spear, etc.,) when, really, there were many truths of the matter; so goes the story…

But notice that the author can only make this critique (about others being wrong, etc.,) because he has knowledge (or has seen) the entire elephant. So, it is he who has the entire truth. If the moral is intended to critique those who say that they have the whole truth, it is self-refuting… I thus judge that Lyons’ critique fails miserably.
(Online source)

*UPDATE* For those who may not know, Chris Lyons is the leader of the self-proclaimed “Watcher of the Watchdogs” website CRN.Info. CRN contributor Jim Luppachino of Watcher’s Lamp has asked Lyons if he had seen the Triablogue piece. Here is his response:

Comment from Chris L
Time: December 6, 2007, 2:57 pm

I saw it, though I would suggest that (per a Calvinist tendency), they have run with it to make it

a) say/suppose things not said/supposed; and

b) they ignored the basis of my thesis of the non-contradictory nature between free will and predestination, that being the “box” we place God in is the one made of uni-dimentional [sic], uni-directional time…

As for misrepresenting Clavinism [sic], I know a good number of Calvinists who have argued about the things mentioned in that paragraph. Additionally, I was not trying to write a doctoral thesis, but a paper using commen [sic] terminology, as much as possible, so it is obvious that I could not be as complete as the subject would require for a thorough discussion on the issue…(Online source)