Categories: uncategorized
Date: 27 September 2004 01:58:38
I'm enjoying Colson. It's intellectually stimulating and very challenging, an opinion piece that is supported by lots of facts and evidence.
But here's the thing: Colson keeps bagging postmodernists and deconstructionists as the worst things to have happened to the world. His book essentially wants to return to a Christian Modernist point-of-view, where we are sure of the facts of the empirical world (and they all lead to an understanding of God). Sure, he's got facts and evidence, but he's aware that they don't mean a heck of a lot to Postmodernists and he doesn't know how to accept that.
Quite often I don't know what to believe, I feel like I'm afloat in a rocking boat in unfriendly seas, aware that I must even question the nature and existence of the boat and the sea. Typically postmodern. But rather than make me into some victim who cannot find God, this makes me more aware of his existence.
My own view is quite obviously formed by my own initial revelation of God. I grew up a Christian, but I met God when I was at a Christian Youth conference in Tassie. Towards the end of the conference I was in a group of people having a discussion of "issues", including all the biggies: creation, problems of evil, religious pluralism, free will, even the deity of Jesus. There was LOTS of arguing, a very broad range of opinions (typical Uniting Church). It totally wiped from my mind everything I had ever learned about God. How can all these people, who I see practising their faith every day, have such different opinions?
I remember thinking at the time that it was like my mind was a blackboard, and my whole life people had been writing on it things I should believe, and in that discussion I had questioned them all and found no basis for believing any of them. The blackboard had been wiped clean. But what I found underneath the chalk was an unshakable, real, powerful experience of God. I prayed, and he answered. He spoke, and I listened. I could physically feel God living in my chest, the lower left-hand side.
Essentially, what I found was that the statements of belief I had always followed and opinions I had held had hindered my experience of God. With all the dogma out of the way I experienced God as a truth that I didn't have to justify rationally, he was there in my very deepest, darkest place, mysterious and suprememly fascinating.
Since that time I have obviously had to remake decisions about what I believe on issues that everyone faces in life, but deep in my soul I feel that all those decisions are still just balanced precariously on a rocking platform, and that they could all be proved wrong at some point. God is the only unshakable thing in my being.
All that is a rather long and rambling background of what I am thinking as I read How Now Shall We Live by Charles Colson. It's very good, well organised and although fairly opinionated in parts most of the statements are well supported. I agree with most of the basics tenets put forward so far (I'm still ony at chapter 17).
BUT despite his clever arguments, I don't know if it means anything real. It's still working in the realm of self-built opinions. I can use this framework to build a truth structure, but it's still going to be in the uncertain arena of my personal opinion. As a postmodern, I cannot escape that.