Richard Rorty, Part 1

I regularly receive a copy of the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, a publication for alumni of Harvard Divinity School.

The cover of my other seminaries, Princeton Seminary and Gordon Conwell, always sport a famous theologian or a biblical figure, or at least an innocuous oak tree or something.

But, oh no, not my Harvard Divinity School Bulletin.  It always has a picture of a bright red Hindu god or something.  Or even worse, this last quarter the front had the picture of Richard Rorty.

I must tell you that there is nothing “divine” about Mr. Rorty.  Rorty developed a novel form of pragmatism, sometimes called neopragmatism, in which scientific and philosophical methods are merely contingent “vocabularies” which are abandoned or adopted over time according to social conventions and usefulness. In other words, “it ain’t so if you don’t say it.” Sounds like our former president Bill Clinton. Remember when one of his sidekicks destroyed some anti-Clinton damaging material in the national archives?  When confronted with this, the sidekick said, “it was an accident.”

News reporters asked Mr. Clinton, “Sir do you expect us to believe your associate?”

“Absolutely,” Mr. Clinton responded with a poker face.

“Why should we believe you?” The pesky reporters retorted.

Now with a sincere smile, Mr. Clinton responded, “Because I am telling you it is true.”

Oh, yea, Bill, follower of Rorty.  We believe you because you tell us it is true.

Martin Oliver, a specialist in modern philosophy, writes, “In the 20th [and presumably 21st] century philosophy has become a subject whose wisdom is for most of us out of reach.  It is filled with strange and often meaningless jargon which when translated into layman’s terms appears either to be irrelevant or obvious.”

Rorty is obviously irrelevant.  A typical post-modern.

Silly me, though, my Bible tells me that all have sinned and need redemption.  But, hey, if I did not “hear” that then it must not be true, right, Mr. Rorty!

Hum . . . I wonder.  What do you think?

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