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How does one 'read' the present?

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geoff3
Jul 14 2006
06:15 am

Just reading a bit of Eugene Peterson and he talks of the present as an age of adolescence!

Another characteristic of the adolescent that has spread into the larger population is [b:3560035b2f]the absence of historical sense.[/b:3560035b2f] The adolescent of course, has no history. He or she has a childhood, but no accumulation of experience that transcends personal details and produces a sense of history. Their world is highly personal and extremely empirical.

That’s from ‘The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction.’ [p125]

I think to read the present, you have to have an historical perspective. The Bush = Hitler opinion is extremely inadequate. (Not that I’m saying that’s what Grant was suggesting). So if this is where the discussion was leading then that would be pretty poor. Seerveld also talks about reading cultural time – as alluded to in another discussion [a call to subversion] – so with that in mind, how do we understand the so-called Postmodern Condition as promoted by Lyotard and his ilk. What do we as Christians have as a way of responding to it? Do we go along with it, to be culturally ‘relevant’? Do we shun it and retrench back into our Ghetto?

Hitler was of his time, a human, not a demon that transcends it, who exploited the German people’s economic, political and spiritual malaise for the sake of power. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a consummate example for the necessity of Christian action against totalitarian states, but isn’t a cheap example for the justification of killing George Bush, because you disagree with his foreign policy! Hitler on the other hand, and this is where the Bush Administration’s propaganda machine has failed, "engineered the consent" of what Noam Chomsky would call the "bewildered herd" (in Media Control).

So it is very adolescent to equate Bush with Hitler, it lacks that ‘historical sense’. So in the USA and England too, what do you do when you disagree with your Government’s policies? And this goes for any faith group or belief system really -

1. start a bombing campaign to increase the sense of terror and augment ‘our’ sense of power/importance/influence? This would be a very nihilistic response and not one for those who affirm the sanctity of life!

2. dispense our duty to society by holding a prayer meeting? Such meetings are not an end in themselves; we may not wrestle against flesh and blood, but we are made of the stuff for a reason: physical presence/involvement/engagement! A prayer meeting is the starting point of any affirmative or subversive action.

3. Remember the Incarnation? God’s way of bringing redemption to a situation was through flesh and blood contact with humanity! Cultivating the normative, not the exaggeration of the ab-normative (the deformations of life).