Page 94 - The Poetic Books - Student Text

pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think
he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first.”
157

We might not think that such ideas are widely held, yet especially in the arts and literature, certainty has
been thrown aside in a dramatic way.

“At Ohio State University stands the Wexner Center for the Arts…The structure features
stairways that lead nowhere, pillars that hang from the ceiling but do not touch the
floor, and angled surfaces designed to create vertigo… The architect designed the
building to show the incoherence of life, to picture the ‘capriciousness of the rules that
organize the built world.’”
158

In the life of an individual, the results are very practical and very destructive. When standards are torn
away from the personal God, from what he says and has created, much of life becomes uncertain. He
exists for us, if we think about him at all, to do our bidding. “Most U.S. youth tend to assume an
instrumental view of religion. Most instinctively suppose that religion exists to help individuals be and do
what they want, and not as external tradition or authority or divinity that makes compelling claims and
demands on their lives, especially to change or grow in ways they may not immediately want to.”
159

The same can be seen in the life of an entire nation. Mental powers are given over to securing what is
considered best for one group of people at the expense of the rest. The examples in modern history are
many. Here is one from an African conflict.

The last best hope for Hutu Power was to assert – in its usual simultaneous onslaught of
word and action – that honesty and truth themselves were merely forms of artifice,
never the source of power but always its products and that the only measure of right
versus wrong was the bastardized “majority rule” principle of physical might.
With the lines so drawn, the war about genocide was truly a postmodern war; a battle
between those who believed that because the realities we inhabit are constructs of our
imaginations, they are all equally true or false, valid or invalid, just of unjust, and those
who believed that constructs of reality can – in fact, must – be judged as right or wrong,
good or bad.
160

A study of Proverbs confronts these concepts forcefully. God exists. His name is Yahweh. He has specific
characteristics. He has created right and is intensely interested in his world run in the way he intended.
Anyone who claims to know him and be in awe of him must pursue also Yahweh’s right. Without such an
interest, a keen interest, a person will end up a fool.

157 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (West Valley City: Walking Lion Press, 2008), 153.
158 David Clark and Jim Beilby, “The Times are a’changin, What’s the church to do?” in The Standard, 7/00, 9.
159 Christian Smith, Soul Searching (New York, Oxford University Press, 2005), 148.
160 Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York:
Picador, 1998), 259.
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