Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
I always had a creeping suspicion that this is the case, but I tried to discount by infusing a little originality into my life. Then I realized I could no longer ignore the suspicion and suddenly I was not sure if an original thought had ever crossed my mind. I had been given a worldview, a framework for understanding the world, a way of thinking that was a lens through which I lived and interpreted events. Through my Church History class I learned that there were other people, other Christians no less, who had a very different way of understanding just about everything than I did. I was just some strange mixture of my culture with a bit of reactionism thrown in. Through out the semester I started to get frustrated with everyone who told me something I had been told already. All the old answers were being recycled, over and over and they stopped being convincing anymore.
Fortunately I knew I could not doubt God. When it came down to it, my source for truth could either come from myself or from someone greater than me. I knew myself well enough to know I couldn't trust myself. I had been through all this before to a certain extent and so I had somewhat prepared myself for this kind of (hopefully) healthy questioning. Through out the semester I began to understand in a deeper sense the need for Jesus. The significance of the incarnation and God with us, Immanuel, with Christ as the climax of the bible and of human history. Don’t fret, I am still a Christian, perhaps even more now than ever because of the sanctification God has been working in me through this season.
But I am not at all alone in my struggles, it is the struggle of my generation. I share this for my friends who may be struggling with their faith, or for the older generation who are seeing their children and grandchildren question their faith.
To both sides on this struggle I can only say, have hope! There are things that will change, but Christ is still necessary and Christ will still be proclaimed. Christianity, or the Church, may not look the same generation to generation. Modern American Protestantism generally believes that, riding on the great wave of history it has taken all the ‘truth’ from former expressions and it is now the purest form of Christianity in all of history. I don’t think this is entirely the case. This kind of thinking immediately discounts other Christians who have the same Holy Spirit before we allow ourselves to fellowship with them and appreciate how they understand God, the same God that we serve.
There are limitations, the limit is God himself. According to the Shema, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). The expression of church should be seeking God, the God of the Bible and the God who became man. Yet the God who is One at the same time is also Three, and within this paradoxical tension we begin to see that His personality is multi-layered. Through out the bible, we see God acting differently in different circumstances. This mystical element of God, I humbly believe, gives us some freedom to explore the personality of God in our expression of church as long as we are still committed to God himself as our source of truth. *
*Some ideas taken from Mapping Postmodernism by Robert C. Greer
No comments:
Post a Comment