I had asked Ed if I might share with you this article from last week’s North County Times. I thought it was a very good and somewhat troubling article assessing this writer’s view of God in our society today. I found it perceptive and disturbing and felt it would bring insight and discussion.
FAITH & VALUES: God is weightless in our modern life
It is one of the defining marks of our time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal, but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life.
Those who assure pollsters of their belief in God's existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgment no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers' sweet fog of flattery and lies.
That is weightlessness. It is a condition we have assigned him after having nudged him out to the periphery of our secularized life. His truth is no longer welcome in our public discourse. The engine of modernity rumbles on, and he is but a speck in its path.
Few would deny this is the case in our modernized society. The untrue appears true, the bad passes itself off as good and often the trivial masquerades as important.
Have you found this true for you in your daily living?
Using a different figure of speech, God has not disappeared in the sense that he has been abducted or overwhelmed. He is not like a child snatched away while its parents were momentarily distracted. No, God is more like a child that has been abandoned within a family, still accorded a place in the house, but not in the home.
Because the doctrine is professed, perhaps even routinely in creed or confession, it seems as if all is well. But it is like a house that gives no outward signs of decay even though termites have rendered it structurally unsound.
The weightlessness of God is an affliction that is neither peculiarly Protestant nor peculiarly Catholic, but is the common form in which modernity rearranges all belief in God. It is an illness that has entered the bones of religious liberals and conservatives alike.
Weightlessness is a condition, a cognitive and psychological disposition. It can sweep through all doctrinal defenses because it is not itself perceived to be a doctrine. It can evade the best ecclesiastical defenses, sidestep the best intentions, and survive the most efficacious spiritual techniques because it is not recognized as a kind of belief.
Although the weightlessness is not a doctrine, it has the power to hobble all doctrines; although it is not an ecclesiology, it can render all ecclesiologies impotent; although it is not itself a spirituality, all spiritualities are withered by its presence.
Weightlessness tells us nothing about God but everything about ourselves, about our condition, about our psychological disposition to exclude God from our reality.
1. Have you found God weightless in your life? A child abandoned within the family? A close friend you haven’t spent much time with lately or just when you need him?
2. “The untrue appears true, the bad passes itself off as good and often the trivial masquerades as important.” Does that hit a chord? Explain
3. Read James 4:4-10 Are you friend or foe? Or are you trying desperately to stay neutral?
4 You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5 Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely?[a] 6 But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:
7 Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
LAST WEEK TO REGISTER FOR PROMISE KEEPERS - BE SURE TO USE NCC CHURCH CODE - 0912-NOCC
AND NOW BRING A FRIEND AT 50% OFF
AND NOW BRING A FRIEND AT 50% OFF
Promise Keepers has always been about guys inviting other guys and seeing their lives changed. Help us keep that tradition alive! Now you can get a second ticket for your buddy, your son, your family member at half off (limit 5). Use this discount code: 9012-ALRE
No comments:
Post a Comment