Jack Said, one of the original co-founders of the Agora has started a new blog with Young Ambassadors for Christian Hope and Truth in Penang. May the Yacht sail a thousand blog posts!
Here is a great article by Jack, and after reading "Truth is stranger than it used to be", I have been impressed with how relevant the biblical story of the proud, 'modernist' Tower of Babel and its 'postmodern' judgement of disintegration by language, found resolution at Pentecost when the gift of the Spirit brought healing and meaning...
Jack wrote:
So what are the problems of pluralism? I wish to highlight two:
The first issue is that Christianity is no longer holding the monopoly of ideology such as in the West. Even in the West today, there is a trend of decline in the popularity of Christianity. The Christian claims have to vie with Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Marxism, Atheism and all sorts of 'ism' within a multi-ism society.
The second issue, which i believe is more critical, is that in today's pluralistic society, we usually elevate tolerant above truth and has unfortunately equate tolerant with keeping quiet. Sociologists often define our times into modern and postmodern. The modern man, like the folks in Babel, was self-sufficient and believed that given time, he will be able to achieve great heights, even heaven. Progress made by humanity in all areas since the Enlightenment seemed to agree with this and continue to become the fuel for the project of modernity. But come two world wars and all the turmoils of our dark 20th century, the tower is now collapsed. And suddenly, the many different ideologies of man become for him "babble".
The great-great-grandchild of Babel is postmodernism and all her posterity. When the egoistic tower of modernity was crushed, we have become utterly confused . Having so many different contenders to Truth, the postmodern man finally gave up and resort to rejecting all sorts of objective claims to truth. Therefore in a pluralistic society, when a multiple choices of 'ism' is offered, it is virtue to consider all of them and accept none of them. All roads lead to Rome, and truth depends on how we look at it. Exclusive claims, such as the Christian claims of one way to god, are from the egoistic modern past. Truth, if objective, becomes oppresive they say. Therefore, lead us tear down the tower project and be contended with our ideolog ical confusion.
And these problems often leave the Church paralysed with the question, what then shall we do to be saved?
Relook
If we are to be faithful to the call of the gospel in this age, we must begin to understand what the gospel really is. Yes, the glorious gospel was proclaimed to us firstly by the blood and sweat and tears of faithful missionaries from the West. But we do not want an inherited gospel. The Church has to read and experience afresh the good news, not least from the word of god and from the illumination of the Holy Spirit our everlasting and everpresent Teacher.
We are often caught up with the notion of the gospel being a fast track, non-stop bullet train on a one-way journey to shangri-la. The Church saw that the world as Titanic sinking and therefore there it is meaningless to reorder the tables and chairs and put up decorations. The vital task is to rescue as many folks as possible into the life-boats. Oh, has god rejected the world and only wish to save as many possible to heaven?
The Creation story tells us that god has not! Oh, god created the world and he created man and woman and he declared that it is good. And indeed it was strangely very good as he look lovingly at the newly created creatures bearing his image walking clumsily on the first grass of the world.
READ ON FOR THE REST OF THE ARTICLE
Comments