Monday, January 29, 2007

Fight! Fight! Win! Win! OR serve, serve, lose, lose

Just enrolled properly for uni and got my timetable and everything. How very exciting. Being my last year I am going to be swimming in education propaganda and probably drown because of it. My hope is that I can get out of education and into academia- hopefully philosophy or literature. It's not very interesting this whole thing but I am fairly tired and it can be so difficult trying to come up with something creative every day- particularly when you are feeling not so.

My humanities subject this semester is modernism which should prove to be interesting and Anthony Uhlmann is a good teacher. I could hijack the elective in some great protest of objective progress but I don't think they would tolerate that from a novice upstart. That sort of thing is more reserved for institutionalised intellectuals and raving madmen (Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault and Derrida). Besides we tried being unintentionally postmodern in our high school English when they asked us to write 'an essay' we literally wrote: 'an essay'. It was incredibly witty and clever at the time although we couldn't really express why.

I sat in church last night and thought about how I shouldn't be able to sit in church. How the church is a dynamic people and how we are the church. The guy up the front (it wasn't a church I attend on any regular basis) talked about how to respond to cults like Jehovah's Witnesses. It seemed very defensive to me and I just wondered what is it that we defend in Christianity? I don't think we really have to defend the Church or tradition or history, if anything, we should probably divest ourselves of history. Is it worth defending the influence of the Church today? I don't really think so. I mean Jesus had a tremendous influence although he did not pursue it. On the one hand I understand that the Church is defending freedom in the end. The freedom to believe and also defending a number of parts that culminate into the freedom that Jesus talked about. But on the other hand, freedom is never taken it only can be given (I think). A lot of people talk about how Jesus defeated sin on the cross and use a lot of war analogies but I think that it kind of strange that he died in order to do so.

I have never studied theology and I don't know anything about substitutionary atonement blah blah etc. but God did not take faithful people out of the world and grant them salvation instead he gave of himself in order to save all. I wish I saw the Church do the same thing. A lady the other day came into Word Bookstore unaware it was a Christian store and upon realising what it was shook her head at me and said how sad it was that religion and commerce cavorted in the same bed. I wanted to agree with her but I was powerless to do so.

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