OK, one more highlight from JKA Smith’s book. This one is sort of related to something I said in my previous post about how the way the people of the church talk about the life of the church; how the Gordon Cosby interview “sound(ed) pretty conservative”….meaning that the language is recognized as unapologetically confessional.

So far, I have been suggesting that a properly postmodern theology will be dogmatic, not skeptical. This is not to advocate a return to an uncritical fundamentalism or the triumphalist stance of the Religious Right. Rather, it is to affirm that our confession and practice must proceed unapologetically from the particularities of Christian confession as given in God’s historical revelation in Christ and as unfolded in the history of the church’s response to that revelation. To be dogmatic, then, is to be unapologetically confessional, which requires being unapologetic about the determinate character of our confession, contra the Cartesian anxiety exhibited by much postmodern theology. This should translate into a robust appropriation of the church’s language as the paradigm for both thought and practice.

—James K.A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? p.123