    
baloneydude
New member
Username: baloneydude
Post Number: 8
Registered: 10-2007
Posted From: 72.254.162.142
| | Posted on Saturday, October 27, 2007 - 7:51 pm: | 
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hey george is this what you were talking about?
i googled the statement and his name, and this is a partial copy of what a guy said in an article blog etc.
is he full of baloney?
I disagree with Carman on many points, but he does embody a little of what’s best about American Christianity. His songs and writings advocate a personal, loving relationship with a god of grace who, in Carman’s words, “saves, delivers, and heals.” He realizes that Biblical scholarship and polite academic theologizing get you only so far, and so he strives to transform his life, and the lives of his audience, through direct relationship with Jesus. Essentially, he wants from Jesus what I want from art (and Jesus). He comes very close to advocating what Depeche Mode analyzed, a little facilely, as “your own personal Jesus, someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares.” If you’re literary critic Harold Bloom, you refer to this tendency more positively as “American gnosticism.”
Of course, Carman would recoil at being called a gnostic, and he’d be right. Mostly he’s a fundamentalist, what Bloom calls “a parody of gnosticism,” and Carman is more reductive in his scriptural analyses than Depeche Mode could dream of being. It’s one thing to give your love for Jesus priority over your understanding of the Bible; Carman tends to avoid understanding the Bible, lest it not support the beliefs he espouses. He’s got an annoying tendency of justifying sweeping moral statements with isolated Biblical passages that have no business supporting his claims.
For instance, in his book Raising the Standard, Carman proposes, “If you expose your mind and heart to a constant stream of sex, violence and cursing, you will eventually begin to act the same way.” That’s a big, controversial claim, backed up not statistically or anecdotally but psalmically: “David wrote in the psalms, ‘I will walk in my house with blameless heart. I will set before my eyes no vile thing.’ (Psalm 101:2-3).” From this Carman concludes, “The first step to moral purity in your body is to deal with your heart. And one of the first steps to doing that is to make a ‘covenant with your eyes’ (Job 31:1). You have to determine that you will not expose your heart, mind and spirit to those things that are an abomination to the Lord.”
Set aside the question of whether Carman’s proposition--essentially, “garbage in, garbage out”--is true or not. Instead, look at how he uses Hebrew scripture. Though he says, “David wrote in the psalms,” Carman, like many fundamentalists, reads the Bible as One Big Book, Written By God. Carman essentially reads this psalm and Job’s words as words to emulate, commands from great authorities speaking on God’s behalf. Job and David were blameless heroes of faith who recognized this eternal truth: looking at bad stuff leads to a sinful heart and dirty deeds. So if both David and Job advocate keeping your eyes pure--well, doesn’t that prove Carman’s “garbage in, garbage out” claim.
so carman doesn't believe that anymore apparently based on his condo channels array. |