Focused on Jesus

I know I just posted a blog yesterday, but it wasn't all that interesting and I thought of something interesting to talk about (ok, well, I find it interesting).


I was reading an article on the church (no surprise there) and it really resonated with things that I've been thinking about. First of all, I would really recommend reading the article (especially if you don't know what modernism and postmodernism are... since then you may not understand what I'm talking about) and I put the link at the bottom for ya'll.

(for the purposes of this rant, I am referring to the philosophical worldview of postmodernism, not the cultural view of postmodernism)

I've always had a problem with postmodernism. It has some nice qualities to it, and I can really identify with a lot of its concepts. However, I really struggle with its foundation. One of the foundational building blocks of postmodernism is that there are no absolute truths. This is in response to modernism, where essentially everything is explainable by absolutes. Of course, modernism leaves the church in a pickle because it can't explain miracles and other unexplainable Biblical concepts. Yet, on the other side of the spectrum, postmodernism destroys the authority of the Bible. If there are no absolute truths, than how can we trust the validity of the Bible? This thought process leaves some churches with the mindset that we can simply pick and chose things out of the Bible that "feel true to us".
I hold strongly to the fact that the Bible is authoritative and eternally absolute.
I also hold that there are works of the Spirit that are simply not explainable by science (not to mention that the existence of God is not explainable by science).
Therefore, I do not have a modernistic or a postmodern worldview.

As a church, we ought to hold on to the worldview that is Jesus.
We shouldn't entirely focus on proving things through science
We shouldn't entirely focus on being "hip"
We shouldn't entirely focus on being intensely structured
and we shouldn't entirely focus on being "spiritual"
We SHOULD be entirely focused on Jesus and doing what He did.

I used the word "entirely" because I don't think that those things are necessarily wrong, as long as they come second to being focused on Jesus.

I would also like to point out that I rarely see those priorities in the right order in churches, but it does happen.

That is my rant on the church's worldview, thanks for reading... oh, and here's the link for the article that got my brain moving.

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/columns/church-today/348-stick-a-fork-in-it-postmodernism

community

With a few edits and touch-ups this morning, my term paper is finally complete. I really can't express how relieving that is. So now, I'm going to take a bit of time to write here before i get back to the rest of my homework.


If you read my last post (well... last two, since they were basically one) you can see that I've been a little discouraged. Ok, a lot. So, let me update everyone on this. Yesterday might have been the worst of it (didn't help that I had a splitting headache). There wasn't anything in particular that happened yesterday that would have worsened it, it was just cumulative I guess. Anyways, I just sort of vegged out in front of the TV last night and stopped caring about reality for a while. I will finish out this thought by saying that today is much better. The roller coaster is clearly going back up.

I'm pretty excited for March Madness... anyone else? GO STATE!

I'm tired of being in this state of not belonging anywhere. It's really bizarre, and I don't like it. I have friends all over the world, but I don't feel at home anywhere. Well, I feel at home at camp, but that only consumes 3 months of my life and then its back to being homeless. I see people having real community and I long for it, but it always seems just outside of my grasp. I don't even have a hometown to go back to and visit it seems. The actual place is still there, but practically none of the people i knew remain there.
Community... its just one of those things to add to the list of "later". It'll happen later in life when I'm established. really?
I get the feeling that its like tithing... in the sense that if I don't get in the habit of it NOW, it's delusional to think that I will later in life "when I'm established". like I'll ever be "established" anyway... lets face it.


I'm a little curious if my splitting headache yesterday was related to the fact that I didn't have any coffee all day... In which case I should probably detox
who knows... it could have been completely non-related.