"The problem is that my generation has decided that what they decide from all of there questioning is that what they come up with IS truth, which may not be the case."
I don't much think that this is true only of our generation. Our parents generation has done the same thing, only without the questioning! They have decided that what they come up with IS truth, however, they didn't arrive at those notions through serious wrestling with the Spirit, but rather through acceptance of dogma.
Accepting the party line, and chucking the party line, neither of these is acceptable (have you heard Derek Webb's track A New Law?) but merely a way of avoiding a life with an ear to the Spirit.
I think what Wright was getting at was exactly this, we must seek God, not anything else. No substitutes. Not even when honest and godly men stand up in the pulpit and say, "Here is truth, this is what the Bible says." There is no short cut.
It is this that our generation inherently grasps with all of its deconstruction and rethinking of established ways of doing, thinking, and being. And it is this that the previous generation often fails to grasp with its desperate hunger for the comforts of conformity. (Including theological conformity.)
I guess I see the previous generation of Christians as hopelessly enmeshed in cultural syncretism. Evangelical Christians are in bed with the Republican machine, for all of our (yes I consider myself a part of the flock) pro-life rhetoric, we really don't think through the inconsistency of supporting 'pro-life' politicians who rabidly support pre-emptively bombing foreigners, capital punishment, etc. (for example)
====================================
There are problems with giving people the freedom to wrestle with God on their own. But those problems are less than the ones that come from refusing to let people wrestle with God. It all boils down to trusting the Holy Spirit in people's lives...
...will we point people towards Jesus? Or towards our own conceptions of truth?
...will we release our control of others into God's hands? Or will we continue to impose our own frame of reference on others?
It is scary to say to someone, I don't want to answer that question for you; I would prefer that you seek God, wrestle with scripture, pray, read, contemplate, experience, and hear the voice of God for yourself! But this is of course, where Jesus has much to teach us about pedagogy. He pointedly refused to answer people's questions.
The goal of Jesus interactions with people was never to transmit information, but to instigate a radical shift in worldview; He did not seek to give people techniques, but to foment rebellion; His aim was not to educate, but to demonstrate and make available crucifixion and resurrection as a superior mode of living.
This poses real problems for the forms of Western Christianity that our parents grew up with (and I caught the tail end of in my own upbringing). This simply isn't comfortable for people who want to view Jesus through the lens of "absolute truth that I can rest on." This is not to say that there are not things that are real, or statements that do not correspond to reality, but merely that the post-modern critique of modernism's intellectual arrogance must be heard and taken into account (even if we ultimately come to different conclusions than that of certain postmodern philosophers!).
I guess it boils down to this. Our parents tend to think of truth as something static. Our generation tends to view it as dynamic. While I don't necessarily go so far as to agree with our generation in total (although a strong case could be made for truth being personal as opposed to propositional ie "I am the way, the truth, and the life"), we have to acknowledge that our experience of truth is dynamic, and that this requires an intellectual humility that older Christians lack (this, unfortunately, has not gone without notice by the world looking on, to the detriment of our witness)
==============================
This finally gets us, however, to the deeper issue:
God is not interested in us 'getting it right;' as though holiness was akin to having the correct answers to the math test, and it didn't matter if you worked the sums out yourself or copied your neighbors scan-tron sheet, so long as the machine read your answers as the right ones you "passed the test." He is interested in us 'becoming' holy; holiness is like the ability to take the equation and solve it, using your own resources to solve real mathematical dilemmas.
There is, of course, some value in possessing truth the way the cheater possesses correct answers to math questions. Knowing true things about reality has value. But of infinitely greater value is the ability to discern reality, to be able to answer math questions as they come. If someone parrots (and sincerely believes), "God loves me," they will have gained some significant benefit, however, if that person has a deep experience of the reality of God's love, they will take that with them into all sorts of diverse circumstances and automatically apply that love to various situations in their own life and the life of others.
This is where this conversation ultimately ends: God is not interested in have us 'do good,' but rather 'be good.' He is not interested in us 'saying truth' but in us 'aligning with truth.' It is not the external actions that God is primarily concerned with (adultery and murder) but the realities of the human will (lust and contempt) that God wants to deal with. The fruit of the tree is a mere byproduct, God is concerned with making the tree 'good.'
No comments:
Post a Comment