13 April 2010

Comma Delimited

by Frank Turk



Yeah, yeah, yeah: Phil's at T4G, Dan's at home and I'm just barely on the North American continent. But my new friend Zach Bartels recently posted an interview of me at his blog for reasons which will be apparent in the near future, and in it I said this:
Maybe “discernment ministries” would be better off talking about what they believe and what the consequences of those things are rather than how many times Rob Bell sticks his foot in his mouth.

You know: we get it. Now what? What if everyone stopped going to Rob Bell’s church, and stopped buying Ann Lamott (sorry: I meant Donald Miller) books, and took all their PDL/PDC books back for a refund. Now what?…
I did say exactly that. And the response to that from "Christian Research Network" was this:
In an interview appearing here today Frank Turk, who blogs with Phil Johnson at Pyromaniacs, shares his love for online apologetics and discernment ministries, which apparently serve no purpose: ..
And you know what? I agree with their assessment -- except for the use of the comma in the last line.

Their interpretation of my statement is that all online and apologetic ministries serve no purpose -- the comma sets off the modifying phrase so that all these ministries "serve no purpose". The problem is that I think my statement applies to only those apologetic ministries which serve no purpose. If you remove the comma, you have said what I would say. But whether or not to use the comma requires actual discernment.

Thus, my actual point in action.

As you were. Comments are closed because I am not available during the day today to help you work this one out.