Old and new hands, wineskins..

Can I have it both ways?

Muse be a "yes and no" answer.

On the one hand, Jesus was clear the only one (including this well-meaning soul) who puts new wine in old wineskins is:

"No one."

On the other (Jesus is ambidextrous), he encouraged Kingdom treasures "new and old."

Len Hjalmarson has done great work on the relationship of old and new; if you have never found his blog, find it now and get lost.

If not, you can hang here a minute before visiting Len's place.

On the one hand, you have Rev. Chef Capon:

"The new insight is always at odds with the old way of looking at things. Even if the teacher's audience were to try earnestly to take it in, the only intellectual devices they have to pick it up with are the categories of the old system with which it conflicts. Hence the teacher's problem: if he leaves in his teaching a single significant scrap of the old system, their minds, by their very effort to understand, will go to that scrap rather than to the point he is making and, having done that, will understand the new only insofar as it can be made to agree with the old -- which is not at all."

-Robert Farrar Capon, "Between Noon and Three," pp. 140-142.

Then on another hand (or three),

The other Len (Sweet), who quotes the other Len (Hjalmarson) in his latest book ("So who is and is famous/infamous for reminding us "the postmodernist always rings twice":

What the church needs is not a clean slate, but a clear and clean reboot. Thomas Kuhn's argument that a 'paradigm shift' returns everything back to zero was first critiqued by Francis Bacon..when he suggested that we don't go back to zero but to one:
It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing
and ingrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very
foundations..

When we atempt to lay a new template (MRI: Missional, Relational, Incarnational) on top of an existing structure that is built for something else, Fritz warns, we will eventually return to the 'path of least resistance.'.. The word 'reboot' is also another word for 'repent'-
-Sweet, "So Beautiful," 38, 39

And on another (?) hand, and old (new) hand hands it to us:

"Kuhn was wrong..

unlike Kuhn's description, an a encompassing theory does not overthrow the older theory--instead, it defines the limits within which the older theory is reliably true. It puts the old theory in a box and tells us where the walls are."
-Primack and Abrams, "The View From the Center of the Universe, p.24-25.

Click photo to see their accompanying chart, as it relates to physics/string theory.



...and click here (with left hand) for more hands, including McLaren's..