Jeremiah and Derek Web Continued (Back to Main)

Here is a little scripture for you. This is how we are.... listen to this, it's amazing...

Jeremiah 2:19 - talking about the greatness of our sin

"Your wickedness will punish you; your backsliding will rebuke you. Consider then and realize how evil and bitter it is for you when you forsake the Lord your God and have no awe of me. Long ago you broke off your yoke and tore off your bonds; you said, 'I will not serve you!' Indeed, on every high hill and under every spreading tree you lay down as a prostitute. I had planted you like a choice vine of sound and reliable stock. How then did you turn against me into a corrupt, wild vine? Although you wash yourself with soda and use an abundance of soap, the stian of your guilt is still before me."

That's the dark part (actually it gets even more graphic than that)....the prophet characterizing Israel as a prostitute, thinking she can get pleasure from sleeping around and cheating on her husband and not knowing that this pursuit of pleasure in that way will kill her.

Then, it goes on to paint a picture of how not only are we slaves to sin, bound up in pursuit of our own lovers instead of our true lover, but we couldn't stop if we tried.

2:25 - "But you said, 'It's no use!' I love foreign gods, and I must go after thm.'...They say to wood, 'You are my father' and to stone, 'You gave me birth.' ... Why do you go about so much, changing your ways? You will be disappointed by Egypt as you were by Assyria."

This paints a picture of how we LIKE to sin, how it is no use trying to stop. It's who we are...we seek after pleasures that are not good for us and yet it always dissapoints. Even so we can't stop chasing after it.

Now but here is the awesome part. Given the greatness of our sin and even while we are in the midst of it (as Israel was when Jeremiah was a prophet), God, while we are still sinners and cheating on him, promises to restore us if we repent and believe.

3:12 - "Return faithless Israel, declares the Lord, I will frown on you no longer, for I am merciful, declares the Lord. I will not be angry forever. Only acknowledge your guilt - you have rebelled aganst the Lord you God, you have scattered your favors to foreign gods under every spreading tree and have not obeyed me. Return faithless Israel, declares the Lord, for I am your husband. I will choose you ...and bring you to Zion...return faithless people, I will cure you of your backsliding."

So this is our condition as Christians. We are sinners and we only have to 'return', to look to God for salvation and help from our horrible sinful condition.... God will cure our backsliding. It is a promise, something HE does TO us...and this promise of God is our only hope in life and death. Notice he does not say "Obey all the laws like you are suppposed to and maybe I'll think about forgiving you". No. We only have to believe, to repent and then trust him for healing. This is HIS promise to us.

So no matter how much like a whore I feel. I know that He promises to restore me and heal my disease of sin. If the Church is the bride of Christ and he promises to beautify and restore us, then I am like a girl who is being pursued by my true lover who has gone to the end of the earth, to death and then to Hell for me to restore me, make me beautiful like in the days before my rebellion that made me so ugly and then marry me and treat me as if I had not cheated on him.

It reminds me of this Derek Web song:

If you could love me as a wife
And for my Wedding gift you life
Should that be all I'll ever need
Or is there more I'm looking for

I am a whore I do confess,
I put you on like a wedding dress
And I run down the Isle....
I'm a prodigal with no way home
I put you on just like a ring of gold and I
Run down the Isle...

So could you love this bastard child
Though I don't trust you to provide
With one hand in a pot of gold
And the other in your side
Cuz I am so easily satisfied
By the call of lovers so less wild
I would take a little cash
Over your very flesh and blood

Cuz money cannot buy
A husband's jealous eye
When you have knowningly
Decieved his wife

I am a whore I do confess,
I put you on like a wedding dress
And I run down the Isle....

That should be our attitude as Christians, understanding the greatness of our sin, and putting on the promise (like a wedding dress, the cloths of Christ's righteousness) and running down the isle.... because God is so great.

Postmodernism Continued (Back to main Page)

Many Christians I notice, critique postmodernism in the wrong way because they don't understand what guys like Nietzsche and Foucault are up to. They think that applying their critique to themselves will show their inconsistency. I can remember posing that very idea to postmodern thought. It never seemed to convince anyone, in fact we always seemed to be talking past one another. The conversation would go something like this:

Postmodern - There is no absolute truth
Me - Is that absolutely true?
Postmodern - You are just using logic. You use logic because that's your personality.
Me - Well have you considered that YOU might be using irrational randomness because that's your personality. Just give me a reasons why you think your picture of the world is more right than mine.
Postmodern - This is just a language game.

See the POINT about postmodernism, is that if you can use logic to create a kind of skeptical argument to show that the foundations of modernism or rationality or objectivity are not certain, then logic has done what it needs to do (for them) as a kind of tool. It is almost as if it is okay to use logic to tear things down but not to build them back up again. History can be used to show that the ideas of truth and morality are socially constructed, or side-effects of natural selection (including rationality, another reason to doubt the "absolute" nature of truth discovered via rationality).

So this is why the charge of inconsistency does not fly with postmoderns. They are trying to tell you that every view is inconsistent and that YOU only think what you do for some (probably historical) reason (like Nietzsche's prehistory of morals or Foucault's hostorical account of the relationship between truth and power). If this account of history and human nature is what happened, then it is okay to re-evaluate things, re-form our environment for our benefit.

Of course, the charge of inconsistency will not fly. But there is still the "IF" in postmodernity. IF morals are truly groundless, IF truth is socially constructed by the institutions of power, THEN do what we say.

I still want justification for the "if". The more sophisticated postmodern philosophers attempt to do this, but I, somehow, am not satisfied. Perhaps I don't understand why what they say is believable. Some people certainly are convinced. But I wonder what it is that convinces them...? What causes one to believe that truth, for example, is socially constructed? Does anyone really believe that everything that I think is true was told to me for some reason relating to power and the universal human desire to subjugate others? If this desire is not conscious (because it certainly is not in me), then how in the world did it become loged in our collective unconsciouses? Blanket universal and unsubstantiated psychological theories do not convince me. They are all too often based on presuppositions that I am unwilling to accept (not because I don't want to, but because I have no reason to accept them).

I plan on continuing my reading. Pehaps Erickson can shed a little more light on my nagging questions.