A Is for Abductive (Paperback)

by Leonard Sweet (Author), Brian D. McLaren (Author), Jerry Haselmayer (Author) "Deductive method: Start with abstract principles and build toward concrete reality..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, Grand Rapids, Downers Grove (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
A playful, witty, but substantive "postmodern ministry for dummies-type" book that fills the huge and getting huger hunger for something in one volume that introduces basic concepts and vernacular of "postmodern ministry."

From the Back Cover
A Is for Abductive B is for Body C is for Carpe Manana D is for Double-Ring E is for EPICtivities F is for Fractals G is for Grace H is for Holarchy I is for Icon J is for the J-Factor K is for Kaleidoscopic Change L is for Loopy M is for Metanarrative N is for Neurological Pre-Rewirings O is for Open-Endedness P is for Prayer Q is for Quest-ions R is for Radical Orthodoxy S is for Systems Theology T is for Tribal U is for Unknown V is for Voice W is for Wonder X is for Xenophilia Y is for Yes! Z is for Zending

Do You Know the Postmodern Alphabet?

The letters are all the same, but the things they stand for are as different as the future is from the past. A Is for Abductive helps you get a handle today on the vocabulary of tomorrow, and on concepts indispensable for living out the old-fashioned gospel in these newfangled times.

"You caused this book," writes one of the authors. "People like you were insisting on a beginner’s guide to the pathway of postmodern ministry." Here it is. There is no right or wrong place to begin—just pick a letter and start reading. You’ll acquire new words for a new world that will change how you think about church, about ministry, and about what it means to follow in Jesus’ footsteps—entering today’s culture in order to love it, serve it, and lead it home to God.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Zondervan (January 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0310243564
• ISBN-13: 978-0310243564
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #754,025 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars C is for Clueless, July 2, 2005

By	Timothy McGrew "Philosopher" (Kalamazoo, MI) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My initial reaction to this book, when a friend (laughingly) sent it my direction, was unprintable. But -- slightly redacted -- it went like this:

*****
WHO ARE THESE MORONS?

Have the editors at Zondervan lost their minds? Did they have minds to begin with?
*****

I cannot find a single redeeming feature to this tragicomical book. The authors are earnest, but they are completely clueless about the philosophical concepts they are trying to summarize and employ. They might, with equal hope of success, have attempted to explicate quantum field theory. (Hmm, let's see, Fock space -- well, have you seen "Meet the Fockers" ...?)

In the space of an Amazon review it is impossible to do more than point out a few typical errors. Here are three classes of mistakes.

First, the authors put their foot in it when they try to deal with terms from logic (p. 31). If they were merely making up some new technical terms, we might deplore their decision to redefine words that already have established meanings and let it go at that. "Deductive method" as they define it has nothing to do with deduction; ditto for the other terms. But no; they intend to pin the third category on the American logician Charles Sanders Peirce. And they seem to think as Stygius comments in another review on this site, that "abduction" here means "kidnaping":

*****
Abductive reasoning (a seismic little phrase coined by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce) has powerful implications for preaching -- and all communication, really. To go abductive, get rid of your inductive/deductive outlines and make your sermons pointless! In other words, don't build your sermons around analysis (the A-word of modernity), but instead, build them around an abductive experience, one that takes people out of their current world of assumptions and issues, of boredom and anxiety. ... Rather than leading your hearers along in an orderly, step-by-step, predictable, reasoned argument, like a lawyer before a jury -- proving and moving on, proving and moving on -- seize them by their lapels, like a friend in crisis. Grab them by the scruff of the neck (their imagination) and throw them into something they never expected. (pp. 31-32)
*****

Warning: Do not try this on people with trained minds unless you want your cognitive hand broken. The only good thing I can find to say about this passage is that the authors are doing their level best to practice what they preach. There isn't any sign of reasoned argument here. There isn't even any sign of grammar. (Or did they really mean to indicate, as a puckish part of me wants to believe, that the friend in crisis is the one doing the seizing?)

But there are some incongruous trappings of scholarship. A footnote refers the reader to K. T. Fann's sober little monograph Peirce's Theory of Abduction. I defy anyone to find a trace of this kind of silliness in Fann's book -- or in Peirce. (See his collected papers, section 5.189.) You will, I grant, find much nonsense (though more subtly presented) in Julia Kristeva's work, which they incomprehensibly bundle into the same footnote. I doubt if the authors have even read Kristeva. But unless we begin questioning their honesty we cannot possibly believe that they've read any serious amount of Peirce, the fellow who was so enraged by fuzzy thinking that he fulminated that "nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic." Amen.

Imagination is a wonderful thing, and properly disciplined it can be a great tool. C. S. Lewis comes to mind here. But it should be used in conjunction with reason, not as a substitute for it.

Second, the authors make ridiculous claims about the current state of scholarship. "It is hard to find scholarship that is not destabilizing assumptions about rationality and challenging intellectual categories inherited from the Enlightenment," they crow on pp. 20-21. A footnote directs us to another po-mo chic tract but not to the supposed void in traditional scholarship. Actually, the problem is that the authors aren't reading anything outside of a pathetic little circle of their po-mo friends. Otherwise they would surely have encountered something by Doug Geivett or Doug Groothuis or William Lane Craig or Bill Vallicella or Peter Kreeft or Dallas Willard or Charles Taliaferro or Paul Copan or Stephen Parrish or Stephen T. Davis or J. P. Moreland or John Warwick Montgomery or John Gerstner or R. C. Sproul or N. T. Wright or ... okay, you get the picture. And I'm just listing people who would probably be comfortable describing themselves as (broadly) Evangelical Christians. In the main currents of secular analytic philosophy, "scholarship" that is "destabilizing assumptions about rationality" is nearly non-existent. Pick up a recent issue of Mind or Journal of Philosophy or British Journal for the Philosophy of Science and see for yourself.

Third, the authors fuddle and fuzzify major theological categories in the manner of old-fashioned theological modernism. "Easter," Sweet tells us on p. 12, "is all about dying into the new," and he goes on to identify "the new" with "postmodern culture" which "thrums with possibility." Odd. I thought Easter was about the resurrection of God incarnate. Can we at least find room to mention that little point?

Readers who think I have simply picked soft targets are welcome to leaf through the sample pages made available here on the Amazon site and see for themselves. I won't even recommend pages. Start anywhere.

Brian McLaren writes in his preface that this book has given the authors "a chance to lodge in key words some of our best thinking so far" regarding postmodern ministry (p. 13). The scary thing is, I almost believe him.

26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Abductive inference is not kidnapping, May 27, 2005

By	Nichomachus - See all my reviews

This book peddles a profound misunderstanding of abductive logic. McLaren either misunderstands the concept or didn't bother to try and understand it in the first place. C.S. Peirce's abduction is not the same as kidnapping. McLaren uses "abductive" in the sense of metaphorically "kidnapping" the imagination of one's(no doubt equally deluded) audience, rather than trying to make an analytic case. It's an anti-analytic argument, as McLaren sees it, but abduction itself is a form of analytic reasoning.

Abduction, briefly, is "inference to the best explanation." It is part of the American Pragmatist tradition of epistemology; where the pragmatic conception of truth bases the justification/plausibility of a theory on the practical effects it has in the world. Assessing which of competing theories "best" explain x has to do with evaluating practical outcomes in the world.

This is contrasted with inductive reasoning, which is the notion that one can justifiably reason from observable particulars to develop general theories that are truthful -- and from deductive reasoning, which is the notion that the truthfulness of a theory/statement/etc. can only be based on analytic conclusions that necessarily follow from necessarily true premises.

Abduction, on the other hand, has a different notion of the plausibility -- or justifiability -- of a theory or truth-claim. The problem is determining what consists of the independent notion of "bestness" that is used to evaluate competing theories or claims. But abduction is NOT anti-logic! (Nor is postmodernism, but that's another story.)

I only go into all of this because McLaren has misleadingly titled his book as if it has something to do with abduction, or abductive reasoning. It clearly does not, and I don't want people to get the wrong idea that they can employ this notion in McLaren's sense and have it be meaningful. How someone can name a book about something they haven't the foggiest notion of is beyond me. I imagine the rest of his work is as equally silly.

Fair warning.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Postmodern gibberish, September 5, 2006

By	Glenn H. Teal (Spokane, WA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Len Sweet usually writes more with more passion and intelligence that he evidences in this book. Snipets of insight into an eclectic alphabetized list of topics result in a whole lot of next to nothing.

BUT Sweet et al still have a few fascinating things to say -- just not many.