{"id":1387,"date":"2009-07-16T20:44:38","date_gmt":"2009-07-17T04:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2009\/07\/16\/reverse-disclaimers\/"},"modified":"2009-07-16T20:44:38","modified_gmt":"2009-07-17T04:44:38","slug":"reverse-disclaimers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2009\/07\/16\/reverse-disclaimers\/","title":{"rendered":"reverse disclaimers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was listening again this week to a presentation on the state of evangelicalism by a very prominent evangelical. I think this was delivered a year or two ago, I don\u2019t remember exactly, just have the mp3 sitting on my hard drive.<\/p>\n<p>The individual and the content of the address aren\u2019t all that important for the purpose of this post. I was interested in how the speaker was describing various movements, in distinction with the evangelical movement.<\/p>\n<p>My regular readers may remember how we have had some tussles over \u2018disclaimers\u2019 in the past few months. (Not that it is disclaimers I am after!!! I still protest that I am misunderstood.) But when fundamentalists talk about the need for disclaimers, it works this way:<\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#c60063\"><em>The fundamentalist says something positive about some teacher\/preacher outside \u201cthe camp\u201d. The fundamentalist at the same time feels obligated to issue a disclaimer, making sure everyone knows that he knows that the guy he just said something nice about is bad in some way.<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n<p>In evangelicalism, the opposite seems to be true. They use reverse disclaimers.<\/p>\n<p> <!--more-->  <\/p>\n<p>What are reverse disclaimers?<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m glad you asked. Here is how it works.<\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#a80054\"><em>The evangelical says something negative about some teacher\/preacher outside evangelicalism. The evangelical at the same time feels obligated to issue a reverse disclaimer, making sure everyone knows that he thinks the guy he just said something bad about is good in some way (or is at least nice).<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n<p>Have you observed the same thing?<\/p>\n<p>The speaker I was listening to was saying some critical things about liberals, but he had to mention that, well, we are all liberal in some ways, and the liberals do have some good points, and we don\u2019t want anyone to think that we aren\u2019t <em>nice<\/em>, after all.<\/p>\n<p>In the presentation, the fellow even had some nice things to say about fundamentalists.<\/p>\n<p>Am I right in this observation? Isn\u2019t that difference an ongoing marker of the radical difference between the fundamental and evangelical world-view? Is it likely that our divergent world-views will ever be bridged without radical change on one side or the other?<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" title=\"don_sig2\" style=\"border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; display: inline; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px\" height=\"50\" alt=\"don_sig2\" src=\"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/don_sig24.png\" width=\"150\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was listening again this week to a presentation on the state of evangelicalism by a very prominent evangelical. I think this was delivered a year or two ago, I don\u2019t remember exactly, just have the mp3 sitting on my hard drive. The individual and the content of the address aren\u2019t all that important for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[105,37,71],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-mn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1387"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}