Cakehole is a terrible curse word, isn't it pooh boy. My oh my, and this is a no rules thread?
A holy roller goes around telling people that they are going to hell for their behavior. I have never done that, but you just did. I guess that makes you a hypocrite as well.
Postmodernity: Gethsemane and postmodernity
United Press International - April 06, 2001 13:40
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By PAUL HINLICKY
(Editor's note: This is the 19th installment of the UPI series, "Christ and postmodernity," where authors propose theological solutions for this era's most daunting problem: the profusion of subjective "truths.")
SALEM, Va., April 6 (UPI) -- As we approach Holy Week, two categories seem particularly pertinent: Power and Difference. Postmodern people should know this. People are driven by the vital force within them to establish difference from one another.
This results in pervasive relations of domination and submission. Postmoderns have learned to deconstruct the faade of human community along these lines at the feet of teachers who subverted modernity from within.
Marx, Nietzsche and Freud each in his own way dispelled the Last Illusion, that Grandest of all Mystifications, which beclouded sober grasp of the hard truth about life.
When the "illusion" of God is abolished in thought, the "true" state of things appears: hapless human beings are insignificant exponents of a mindless world of eternally recurring collisions of violent force. Violence is scripted into the very nature of things. Violence is the ineluctable fact. Deal with it.
The Difference between humanity and God, on the other hand, once made all human beings equal in nature before their common Creator and bound them together before his final judgment. The Difference was famously expressed in the Declaration of Independence as "self-evident truth," that "all are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain, inalienable rights"
Acknowledgement of the Difference was the foundation of modern political institutions of popular sovereignty (the early moderns prophetically criticized the 'divine right' of kings or popes of the pre-modern regime precisely for obscuring this Difference).
But post-moderns hold no truths, let alone self evident ones: Human beings are not created, let alone as equals. They are not endowed by a non-existent Creator with natural rights, let alone definite and inalienable ones, since the Nature of Things could care less. The impolite and impolitic name of this nay-saying is nihilism.
Conscious of this state of affairs, the best attain to a brief flicker of celebrity splendor in endless cosmic night. But the masses of people are witless cogs in the machine of indifferent nature, driven by one or another mechanism, claimed by its partisans as key to the riddle of human misery: gender, race, class, early childhood neglect or, lately, rogue genes.
In relentlessly playing out this line of thought, however, postmoderns have discovered an important truth: discomfort with difference is part and parcel of the extraordinarily vicious violence that has characterized the modern world.
The crimes of Hitler, Dresden-Hiroshima and Stalin-Mao-Pol Pot not only dwarf by a vast magnitude whatever previous sins the antecedent religious cultures committed in holy wars and inquisitions.
They are qualitatively different evils, in that they have attempted totally to destroy others as others. Total war, like totalitarianism, is a distinctly modern possibility. This grim insight is at the heart of the postmodern critic of modernism.
Many postmoderns want desperately for this tough-minded insight into the connection between difference and violence to be a liberating one, which frees by teaching us to welcome diversity. But postmoderns find themselves on the horns of a dilemma here.
If the perception of difference seems to correlate with violence, how does one welcome difference without inadvertently inviting violence? Ironically one downplays difference (as only "skin-deep," as merely "cultural,") and appeals instead to the common core hedonism of our animal nature.
But then all the razzle-dazzle of deconstruction itself deconstructs into a merely libertarian apology for the existing liberal regime. The mantra of "tolerance" becomes the arm-chair radical's bad faith evasion of the crucial differences in a world where socialization, as they say, "goes all the way down."
By these lights, however, there is no rational way of judging a sincere Nazi as sincerely guilty of holding to an objective moral evil.
The postmodern rhetoric of diversity and tolerance has neither norms nor resources to make the move towards non-violence it earnestly and rightly wishes. It consequently amounts to nothing more than the sentimental piety of the existing order in its advanced state of moral and spiritual decay.
The Christian Scripture also knows something about power and difference. Its key character, God, is the Difference generating all other differences. The Creator is the author of real distinctions among creatures.
Whoever is uncomfortable with difference among creatures is uncomfortable with this Difference, which differentiates one kind of creature from another. Whoever wants to abolish others in their otherness is quarrelling with the One who is Wholly Other, to use Rudolf Otto's famous definition of God, who indeed stands against us and with all who are other than us, whenever we find those others intolerable.
Not that it's an equal contest. God's difference from creatures lies in God's almighty power as Creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. God's will therefore always prevails in the end, whether we want it or not. Even rebellion against the will of God is made to serve God's purpose.
"You meant it for evil," says the patriarch Joseph to his brothers who had sold him into slavery, "but God meant it for good."
This thought of God's over-ruling reign of a wayward creation is at the heart of the Christian message. Christ is handed over by God "into the hands of sinners;" they mean to destroy him who has brought God uncomfortably near to them.
But in God's wisdom, this very act of refusal becomes the occasion of the redemption of those sinners and all other sinners -- a sinner being precisely the one who cannot and will not deal with the Difference, which God is.
One deals with the Difference, which God is, in prayer. Prayer is not a magical means to power, as superstition has it, but the acknowledgement of God as the one and only Almighty, whose will, though good, is and forever remains other than our own.
Prayer thus becomes the existential basis for welcoming others in their otherness and learning to receive them as gifts from above, even when we cannot by our own lights see our human community with them. Prayer takes others on faith.
In this, the prayer of faith follows Christ, learning from him who prayed in the agony of the Garden of Gethsemane: "Not my will, but thy will be done!"
This prayer is the key to the riddle of history. The drama of human history is the contest between acknowledgement and refusal of God's will for a community of love among genuine others.
This contest has been decided once and for all in Christ the Crucified, who in God's name welcomed even sinners, though unworthy, and bore that invitation all the way into our hell of Godforsakeness, that we might in its power welcome one another.
The Christ of the Gospels surrendered in the Garden of Gethsemane to God's will that he perish in the Godforsaken shame of solidarity with his very tormenters, just as if there were no ultimate difference between the persecutors and the persecuted.
That erasure of difference between victim and victimizer in the final court is a stone of stumbling for many. It is perhaps the one good reason (of believing Judaism) not to believe the Christian gospel, that all have equally sinned and that all may be equally redeemed.
But it was also a stone of stumbling for Christ himself in that agony of prayer in the Garden. Surrender meant for Christ himself a devastating loss of identity, a truth death, which obliterated potentially forever the line between righteousness and sin.
Accursed and Godforsaken yet for love of sinners and in obedience to God, Christ resolved in prayer to perish 'reckoned among transgressors.'
If word of his resurrection on the third day is true, these tremendous contraries were united and transcended in the crucifixion of the Son of God for us. There, God in an act of almighty power obliterated the difference between us.
The blind alley of postmodern preoccupation with difference and power might therefore yet encounter in Christ the Crucified the redemptive alternative path of prayer and righteousness. The power of prayer lies in surrendering to God's almighty will.
The difference this surrender of prayer makes in the world is to constitute new communities of Christ's righteousness, where God is worshipped for God's sake and people know one another as equals in dignity, fulfilling the apostolic word: "Christ who knew no sin was made to be sin, that in him we might become the righteousness of God."
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(Paul Hinlicky teaches Christian theology and modern philosophy at Roanoke College in Salem, Va.) |
