July 12, 2007

God: A Captive of Religion?

I know how odd that sounds, I'm still working through it myself. Why wouldn't the notion of God rest in the religious realm? According to syndicated writer Robert Koehler, God needs to be released "from the captivity of religion...so that we secularists can dance and celebrate what we have wrought. I speak of the God at the edge of language, the God that blesses all loving human endeavor-the God within, the life force, humanity's collective conscience, the diverse, flawed, manmade Gods of all religions..." You can read the article here.

Koehler describes himself neither as a believer or unbeliever; to introduce a more interesting term, he prefers to call himself a trans-believer. This is someone he describes as more than tolerant of diversity, but rather someone who relishes it. For him, salvation does not rest in the power of a transcendent higher authority, salvation is when everyone in the world has a full appreciation, a genuine embrace of everyone's views of ultimate reality. And for this world to exist, Koehler states that "we need a world where church is separate from state." He actually believes that the "public side of the wall' protects the interests of the private sector.

I grow weary of the constant berating of evangelicalism because of it's commitment to absolutes and its desire to transform culture. Secularists like Koehler have been working hard for a long time to "release God" by embracing every possible view of a higher power that exists, obviously seeking to transform culture as well. He views this ecumenism as the highest value of a free society, I call it his right to believe whatever he wants. But popular editorial writing will not muster the critique of basic logic....developing dogma to undo dogma just doesn't make much sense. Secularism is trying to win what seems to be a turf war on values (and the ability to account for them)....and I'm just not sure that the whining is an ample defense for their worldview.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Postmodern eccumenism takes words on such a turn that there is, as you have seen, not a bit of sense to any of it.