This past weekend on retreat at St. Gregory's I finally put my finger on why I don't think postmodernity - ultimately - offers the place to start to explore faith and knowledge. I found and used much postie lit in my work to make the argument for universal faith; which is to say that all have recourse at some point to articles of argument which are not fundamentally deconstructible. Fair enough - Wolterstorff makes similar points in Reason within the Bounds of Religion. It's a useful enough line of logic in the contemporary academy.
The problem comes in execution. Faith remains an autonomous activity of human beings, something that we take as a leap, as Kierkegaard would say, or a "mad decision" as Derrida would later argue. But the Christian experience knows faith is too impossible for mere human beings to make on their own.
Faith begins in God, not the actualization of self. And until we recognize and embrace that we can't make it ourselves, but it is a gift, mysterious, unfathomable and outrageous in this broken world, we shall never rest easy in its constituent beliefs and activities.
How small and foolish I feel after such simple revelations.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Postmodern Faith
Posted by Adunare at 7:18 AM
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2 comments:
This is a profound insight. Thank you, Adunare.
Ah thanks for this! I had this really profound experience as a teenager at a massive "Acquire the Fire" conference in which this very point was brought home to me. That is, I experienced a "loss" of faith for a brief period of time that taught me the really important lesson of recognizing faith as a gift. It's helped me in conversations with others who go through periods of drought...we don't just need to work harder, we need to wait on God for that gift.
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