Contradictory Culture.

Hm.. I was talking with Eric today, and something that we talked about caused me to think about the postmodern culture that we live in and how contradictory it really is. Have you ever noticed that? I've found myself guilty of it as well. I think that the cause of this is mainly just the effects of postmodernity in general. While I don't believe everything about postmodernism is wrong, I think that it has greatly affected us in how we believe what we do. So many things center on there not being an objective standard of truth in today's culture, and I think as Christians we unfortunately are susceptible to being sucked into that. We are inundated with the world telling us that truth is subjective and it's how you want it to be that it becomes difficult to separate what the world is telling us from what God is telling us.

As Christians, we know or at least we should know that the Bible is our objective standard of truth. I'm sure you've all heard the cliche that "all truth is God's truth." This is... well... a true statement, as cheesy as it is (I might be a little more critical of it since I've heard it at least once a semester since jr. high). However, I think we tend to get more caught up in the unknowns about the Bible instead of focusing on the objective reality. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it causes us to be more easily swayed when we're told about different interpretations of certain Scriptures and how we should apply Scripture to our every day lives.

No, the Bible doesn't give us an answer about every situation of life. And frankly, I don't think it's necessarily supposed to speak to every situation that we face. It's good to apply the general biblical principles to life, but we also need to consider what we know to be true about God (which also comes from the Bible) and we need to use the wisdom and discernment that God has given us as His children. Honestly, I don't think we use our minds enough when dealing with certain aspects of life or trying to make decisions. Instead we try to gain knowledge and wisdom from other people by buying books on the subject, and talking to as many people as we can in order to get "advice." In my experience though, sometimes that really just makes the situation worse. People are always going to have their own opinions of what the "right" thing to do in the situation is, and we just end up being more confused than we were before.

However, I think I'm getting off-topic. Kind of. This is still an illustration though of how contradictory even our Christian culture can be. We don't have an objective standard that we look to anymore, but we just generally look for what other people's opinions are; after that, we just end up doing what "sounds" best. What "feels" like the right thing to do. This is why I know that God gave us the ability to have discernment in our spiritual lives. We have the ability to make logical and rational decisions on our own without all this help, but we decide not to because we're too afraid of making the wrong choice. This is not to say that I don't believe in asking for other people's advice, but I think there has to be a balance, and you can ask too many people.

Overall however, I think that if we use the combination of the Word, what we know to be true about God, and the minds that He has given us, we can overcome the contradictions that our culture has so inundated us with.

Yeah, I don't know if this post makes sense at all, but it's just something that I've been thinking about and figured I'd throw into a blog. :)