Congratulations! You're a Jerk!

I'm not sure what I want to say right now, but there's something I need to say. I'll try to work it out.

As I go through this journey of exiting the Evangelical church and then trying to re-enter it as a guest, that is as a temporary participant at any given time rather than a permanent resident, I am realizing more and more how self-congratulatory a lot of the Emergent conversation is. A lot of this is coming from the very little I have managed to read of Jacques Derrida. He says that if a future historian tries to treat structuralism (which is, as far as I can tell, the basis of Modern theology) as on object he will, so to speak, miss the point. Structuralism, Modernism, Evangelical-ism is a story that looses meaning if it is not lived inside of. Again, Derrida: "Form only fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force from within. That is to create."

If we are really going to do this 'post-modern' thing, we have to stop trying to stick a pin in modernism and explain why they're wrong. That's not the point - in fact, as long as we are talking about 'wrong' and 'right' in terms of knowledge and truth we are really fooling ourselves. We are stuck dead in the middle of modernism. We don't need another denomination - and we don't REALLY need another Reformation - not in the terms of the old one. We need true re-formation. We need to be able to find our own place, and celebrate with others (including Evangelicals) that they have found their own place. Even when we don't like their place.

I think that this is the story Jesus lives inside of: he doesn't care about the tension. He cares about the healing. He doesn't care about the right and the wrong. He cares about making all the wrongs right.

So, I say to myself: congratulations! You're a jerk! You want to pick out the modern speck in the Evangelical church's eye - deal with your log. That image never looses its power.