Blogging Towards Sunday

August 3, 2008

Genesis 32:3-31 [The Message]

Matthew 14:13-21 [The Message]

We tend to put everything into a box.  We classify, understand and translate the world around us based upon our experience.  The big foundational tension today in our culture (whether we see it or not) is our changing or emerging notion of knowledge and experience of the truth.  Classic modern worldview thought affirmed that there exists a knowable Truth that exists outside of our pragmatic world that we can know, discover and possess through observation, scientific analysis and prowress.  An emerging worldview disagrees, declaring that science is not objective in itself, that there is in fact no one quantifiable truth that remains outside our realm of personal - and thus subjective - experience.  Whichever worldview you possess it does matter in particular in terms of how we experience, relate to and discern God in the world, the ultimate TRUTH beyond us.

Richard Rorty is an American philosopher who wrote, spoke and worked extensively on this notion.  He says in the end that truth is always particular, contextual and personally experienced because of cultural norms.  And he adds that life isn't hopeless because there is no one unifying scientifically-provable truth, but rather that truth is pragmatic, that the truth for us is truth because it pushes and pulls us to action, specifically social/political action.

The two principal Bible stories this week tell of revolutionary, life-changing out-of-the-box experiences of God.  Jacob who literally wrestles with God, trying to force God to do Jacob's will, to bless him and thus protect him from his brother Esau.  Jesus who feeds the massive crowd after his disciples refuse to imagine any sort of out-of-the-box resolution to the shortage of food problem that they face.  Both stories relate and encounter with the God who claims to be "the truth, the way and the life," a God who when personally encountered invites first and foremost neither to philosophical musing, nor moralizing grandstanding, but rather to social action.  As I reflect on the meaning these texts make for me this week, I'm challenged to look at my own pragmatism in what I believe to be true.  Does is push me to action?  Do I follow through socially and politically in the public sphere?;  or am I simply content to muse, wonder and think about the mysterious love of God in private?