Bounded Sets

On June 7 I posted about evangelism and discipleship and how we approach it. Randy F., who is sometimes too smart for his own good, (just kidding) jumped on it because I think he was uncomfortable with not having a clearly defined line between christian and non-christian.

I spoke with Randy last week and he shared about how he was relating it to Paul Hiebert's bounded sets. Hiebert has a model of extrinsic sets that can be well-defined (or "centered" he likes to call them) or fuzzy. Extrinsically fuzzy sets are hard for most evangelicals to swallow because they lead to a lot of difficult problems, all of which seem to orbit around relativism.

The extrinsically centered sets do have a defined boundary between christian and non-christian which makes it much more palatable. In other words, there would still be defined extrinsic factors that determine if a person is in relationship with the center, in this cse Jesus.

I think what got Randy was my drawing of the set with a dotted line. Such a dotted line seems to represent a fuzzy set. However, since I was not familiar with Hiebert's bounded sets I have to say that was not my intention. My intention was not to show when someone became a Christian but how we share the good news with non-christians. I know these two issues are very closely related but I was not trying to address both.

After seeing Hiebert's model of a centered set I like it better than mine because he shows the circle not as a dotted line but with an ameoboid (is that a word?) shape. I like this because those far from the center but within the a long tentacle of the ameoboid shape would represent someone who as not yet grown close to Jesus but has accepted Christ as Savior and Lord. This maybe a new Christian who has recently been introduced to Jesus.

On the other hand, the model can show people who are fairly close to the center (Jesus) but are still outside the set. This may be someone who has wrestled with God for a long time but has yet to accept Him as Savior and Lord.

All in all I find this interesting but I think I need to do some more reading on it.