I think another part of this nonsense about not teaching the creeds and having students write there own is due to the rejection of knowable objective Truth and the superiority of the subjective truth of the individual. This is textbook post-modernism, isn't it?. One book which speaks to this I think is On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt. His discourse on BS is actually quite enlightening. He defines BS, at least in my understanding, as having a complete lack of care or concern for the Truth.
He writes,
"The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowning how things truly are. These "antirealist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by a dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.
"But it is preposterous to imagine that we are ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgement that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial--notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself if bullshit."
Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton, New Jersy: Princeton University Press 2005, pp.64-67
I think Frankfurt's description of BS as a lack of concern or desire to search for objective knowable Truth corresponds to Pastor Johnson's encounter with letting students write their own personal creeds. Why teach Truth when one can sincerly figure out what's true to each individual?
Another book that I cautiously recommend, just because I have only started it, is B16's On Conscience. This book contains two lectures given to the National Catholic Bioethics Center while he was Cardinal Ratzinger. The gist of the book is dealing with relativisim by arguing against what he calls "the infallibility of the conscience." Here he talks about the growth of the understanding of the "infallible conscious" within the RCC contra the magisterium of the Church. I am probably doing a horrible job of explaining the book. I'll do better when I've actually finished it.
I am sure somewhere on this forum there is a list of books on postmodernism. Could anyone point them out to me or if you know of some send me a private message with the titles and authors? I would greatly appreciate it!
Pax
Pr. Ian Wolfe