Describe your image here
Describe your image here
Describe your image here
Describe your image here
Describe your image here
Describe your image here
In the Image of God He Created Man
Essence and the "Law of the Mind"
In the postmodern era, existentialists claim there exists no Divine Perspective aka etic, no Ultimate Truth, and no meanings which are constants. Fomeanings are the property of people. There exists no revealed Knowledge which compels one to construe reality from a Divine Perspective. Instead, in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, "EXISTENCE PRECEDES and RULES ESSENCE."
2. The Task of Science: to Reveal Essence
Karl Marx declared: "It is the task of science to reveal the essence, the internal, deep and underlying processes behind the multitude of phenomena, outward aspects and features of reality." The late Nobel Prize nominee and linguist Kenneth Pike of SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) would have agreed. Uncovering essence should also be the task of every missiologist-linguist-anthropologist.
When I asked a group of married Chácobo men: “Would you guys prefer to have sons or daughters?” their collective, unexpected response was "sons." Their collective response revealed that ESSENCE PRECEDED EXISTENCE, that replacing the covenantal "one-flesh" principle of husband-wife with the biological "one flesh" principle of mother-daughter was a bad idea.
Whenever cultural forms like singing and dancing are reduced to magical forms to control "the elements of the world" (Col. 2:8), the forms no longer exists in the sphere of culture. but in the stimulus-response sphere of nature.
When anthropologist Edmund Leach asked: "How is it and why is it that men, who are a part of Nature, manage to see themselves as 'other than' Nature even though, in order to subsist, they must constantly maintain 'relations with' Nature?” he was, in effect, declaring his need for an INTERPRETATIVE SYSTEM, a system which could explain why people actually see themselves as “other than Nature." His evolutionary interpretative system provided no answers. For the theist, it is natural to think in terms of CULTURE and Nature
6. Created to be Free
As critics of the Chácobo sociocultural operating system, Chácobo son-in-lsw created satire condemning how their ancestors had structured the nuclear family The discovery enabled me to understand why the Chácobo were a maimed, dying society. There existed within their sociocultural operating system social forms which constrained freedom.
