while i doubt that many (if any) of you will care to read this or the preceding four articles
www.americanthinker.com/2007/04/the_deconstructed_jesus.html i must post it as i found it fascinating. bo, ali, nelly, britt may find it interesting as well. (but i doubt you'll actually read it).
if you do, then let me say this... this is the kind of thing that makes me want to study philosophy. many have asked why i want to... it simply fascinates me in a way nothing else really does.
reading these articles has reminded me of my thoughts that have been stirred by the book 'a new kind of christian'.
one of the things from that book that i have mentally been wrestling is the concept that, while Christ is THE way you might be following him by following say buddha. the book makes a great effort to affirm the concept that you must come to the Father via Christ while at the same time saying that you may have come to Christ via something else entirely. i'm not sure i can make that leap. while i certainly agree that 'christianity' is horribly wrong for thinking that 'converting' (i despise the way this term has been used, but it is appropriate in the context) people means stripping them of their culture, i can't agree that their current and previous beliefs are congruous. maybe i have misunderstood the book and maybe it and i agree. i believe that scripturally someone who 'follows the law, without having the law' is still considered to have followed God's plan, even without awareness of it as such. so, in this sense someone could follow the teachings of buddha or mohammed and also in the process followed God's laws for right living and so be justified. (however the Bible seems to make it clear that justification is next to impossible by the law, for if you're guilty of breaking one commandment then you've broken all of them.) it seems to me (unless i am misunderstanding him... which incidently would actually go along w/ his postmodern view) that he has swallowed far too much of the postmodern soup. this way of thinking i think comes dangerously close to complete relitivism. i cannot follow the path of no absolutes, no knowable things. there is truth. there is even absolute truth. (now whether or not we can discover and comprehend it is more debatable) i suppose that philisophically speaking there could be no way to know for sure whether you had discovered absolute truth, because that absolute truth is still being filtered by your personal beliefs, ideas, cultural understanding etc.
anyway this is just a bunch of rambling thoughts... i suppose i should do this more often for my own sake, not yours as i'm sure that most of you stopped reading several sentences back.
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4 comments:
My kind of post. I read the whole article. I do consider myself influenced by the the EXISTENCE of of the post-modern era. The fact is that we are living in a time when the assumptions and assertions of modernism are failing. This is the VERY loosely defined post-modern era (and yes, I consider the hyphen crucial in how one defines the word). My thought is that deconstruction only works on some, but not all levels. Let me explain. Decontructive thought is adept at exploding (like a pie chart) the pieces of world systems of ideas and thoughts FOR ANALYSIS. In other words, it serves man-made constructions. Those things made by man are based in finite contexts and limited vision for the future. On the other side of the coin, I do not feel deconstruction works well (or even at all on some levels) for the truth of God and the truth of Jesus. How so? Divinity. It throws a kink into the gears of philosophy on a certain level. Faith steps outside the bounds of our systems and dares to embrace something so large and uncomprehensible. How great is our God, indeed.
http://www.georgefox.edu/journalonline/
archives/fall05/emerging.html
That article is an interview w/ my man Len Sweet. Here is the relevant excerpt if you dont want to read the whole thing:
"Relativism is illogical and selfdefeating. If all truth is relative, what is the truth status of the assertion that all truth is relative? What I am trying to do is end the apartheid of absolutism and relativism in Christian theology. I am a relative absolutist. That means that absolute truth has to become incarnate in relative time. Faith is for the living of this hour, and the Bible has reference to and relevance for the living of this hour.
The world in which Jesus came could not conceive of a world without slavery. In fact, the ancient economy was based on slavery. Jesus did not deal violently with human nature and first-century culture. He did not go about brandishing “absolute truth.” He dealt tenderly and patiently with the culture and people of his day. If he was harsh with anyone, it was the religious establishment. By regulating our treatments of others, and rejiggering our thinking about others, Jesus led us inexorably into a place where things like slavery and polygamy were abolished.
Just as absolute truth had to be made relative to the culture in which it was first proclaimed, so absolute truth today must be made relative to our day and to our 21st-century culture."
I could not say that any better, for sure.
Hope that long thing I just wrote makes some sense. Ha.
i understand your point here...
"On the other side of the coin, I do not feel deconstruction works well (or even at all on some levels) for the truth of God and the truth of Jesus. How so? Divinity. It throws a kink into the gears of philosophy on a certain level. Faith steps outside the bounds of our systems and dares to embrace something so large and uncomprehensible. How great is our God, indeed."
but i must say i firmly believe that one can come to 'saving knowledge of Christ' on a completely logical, philisophical level. some take leaps of faith, but i do not believe it is necessary to do so. a sterling example is cslewis. he said that the night he accepted Christ was (for his internal self) the worst night of his life. he had come to logically believe that Christ must have been right in his assertion of Deity and he felt he had no other option but to choose to follow him. for not to follow Him would have been self defeating and an affront to his (lewis') mental capacities. but everything w/i him resisted at the same time because he hated the notion of being 'christian'. (and i think of having to admit he had been wrong)
your sister could probably explain his conversion experience in far better detail and accuracy than can i, but i think this will suffice.
I agree with you. maybe I should have said that specifically, deconstructive philosophy of the secular postmodernists/poststructuralists does not hold up. Sweet's line about relativism applies in that case. Deconstruction fails as an argument against faith because without RECONSTRUCTION - what is one left with if something new is not arrived at. For Lewis, and others like him, the fact is that they are are VERY different from the deconstructionalists. They engage and reconstruct...and for Lewis, it led him to Christ. So, in a way - i think you and I are both right?
sure sure, we're 'both right'... relativist! ha ha
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