December 2005

I tell ya’, the conversations that Carrie and I can have on the way back from Erie/Edinboro can be great. Last night Carrie and I were up in Erie, hanging out with my mom and Roy as well as my grandparents.

We left there at about 11:45 and had some great conversation on the way home – the problem is that if I don’t get it down soon afterwards I forget portions of it. We talked about the relationship between propopsitional statements, propositional truth and our belief systems. The relationship between propositional truth and our beliefs can only go one way; propositional truth can in itself affect our beliefs, but our beliefs in themselves cannot affect what is true about reality. Just because people believed that the world was flat in the medieval age didn’t make it flat, but the fact that it proved to be round has affected most people’s belief about the world. The same extends to religious faith or scientific findings – some faiths must be wrong if there is any faith that says it is the one true faith because of the absolute statemtent involved; either a hypothesis or theory is true or it is not, there is not a middle ground.

I think this is the point at which postmodernism fails, the claims of our culture are “Whatever you believe is okay, and whatever I believe is okay, even if they’re mutually exclusive.” Which just does not stand up to reason. This is not to say that modernism or rationalism is 100% vailid either.

One of th other things we talked about is the contemporary American Christian culture’s obsession with “makeing a decision” for Christ and “getting saved” with the emphasis on knowing the point in one’s life where they flipped the switch from being a non-Christian to being a Christian; and our employer, Campus Crusade for Christ, is squarely in this camp. For centuries (until the beginning of the evangelical movement in the 19th century) it was understood quite solidly that God’s movement in someone’s live was a more like a journey than flipping a switch.

The metaphor of the journey fits well even with the idea of a point of salvation though. Say for example we’re hikers and we want to spend a couple of weeks hiking an area of the Rockies in Montana, we’ll start just north of Columbia Falls (map). As we begin hiking generally north, after about 2 weeks we’re running low on supplies – food, tolietries, etc. and we decided to head into the next town we see. As we cross a ridge we see a small town and as we head into the crappy little store and round up some essentials we hand the man behind the counter a couple of dollars and he says, “Sorry, we don’t accept American money here, just Canadian.”

Okay, so we know we’re in Canada now. We don’t know when we crossed the line, but there is no doubt that we’re located somewhere either in British Columbia or Alberta (thank you Mr. Arnold – 6th grade). At some point we ceased being in the U.S. and began hiking through Canadian mountains. This, I believe, is very similar to many people’s walk with God – at some point they crossed the line from “not-saved” to “saved” through a willful choice to trust Christ, but even they don’t know when it was; just like we took the step that landed us on Canadian soil.

Today’s Christian culture doesn’t like hiking, they like the Niagra Falls method. As you cross the Rainbow Bridge that connects Niagra Falls, NY from Niagra Falls, ON the signs, flags and customs make it plainly obvious when you’ve crossed that line from the US to Canada. Our culture very much likes to know at what exact point you made that choice.

It is far more important that you know you’re most definitely in Canada, than when you crossed that border.

I-79 does crazy things for conversation…