Page 9 - THE CHURCH BEFORE THE MOCKING WORLD

Death of Certainty Creates Nihilism
The problem is that women and men crave, yearn, and long for answers to questions that relate to their origin, existential being, and destiny. When all we can give is, ?For Me......?their hearts faint with a desire for something more solid, fixed, and foundational.
Tragically, the end result is nihilism. I define nihilism here as being a milieu where there are no answers to life?s questions, no values that can demand loyalty, and nothing concrete in the realm of knowing.
When a bubbly young Evangelical comes along and says ... ?If you were to die tonight where would you spend...??The response is ?What on earth are you talking about??
In essence, to the real world, it is not so much that ideas do not matter as it is that ideas ?dare?not matter.
Ideas no longer have consequences. Rather the bumper sticker should now read, ?Non-Ideas Have Consequences?.
A New Epistemology
This is where symbols or semiotics come into our schema. Symbols embody ideas, but not in propositional form. Rituals are simply sets of symbols placed in an order. Symbols in rituals construct for the participant a consciousness. This consciousness moves beyond the confines of what was previously known as faith, based upon the early Reformation concept ofNotitia ? Assensus ? Fiducia.
This neo-traditional and highly effective Reformation model of faith worked itself out whenNotitiawas understood as ?required facts?,Assensuswas the ?intellectual assent?to these facts as being true, andFiduciawas the placing of ?personal trust?in those facts to which there had been intellectual assent.
Salvation was procured when a person moved through three critical phases of faith.
I hear the truth claims.
I intellectually assent to these truth claims.
I make a conscious decision to trust these truth claims as my own.
Today, I would suggest a different model exists that fits very well into the concept of Eucharistic Socialism. Nothing has changed in terms of content or the actual bedrock of truth. What has changed is the process in which we relate to and engage with that truth.
I would suggest the following is where we are going in terms of this new means of knowing. For those of us who come from more defined Reformed or Evangelical backgrounds, this is going to take quite an adjustment. It is a reworking of what ?once was?into the new reality of ?what now is?.