If you missed it recently, Packers QB Aaron Rodgers was interviewed by his girlfriend Danica Patrick for her podcast, and told his tale of leaving behind the Christian faith.
In the five minute segment I saw, Rodgers spoke of his upbringing in the church and delight in attending Young Life during high school, but how that early faith was pushed aside during college days as he met new folks (to include eventually the Dalai Lama) and found himself moving away from the simple “binary” faith of Christianity. You know, Christian and non-Christian, Heaven and Hell, light and dark, etc.
If the “binary” term is new to you, you should know that Rodgers (undoubtedly no intellectual slouch) was espousing postmodern theory. Postmodernists hold that binaries are exclusive (“Us four, no more”, “I’m in, you’re out”), and therefore bad…though that is a somewhat binary way to sum up their thinking, and therein lies the problem.
For all his attempts to be open and non-judgmental, it was hard to miss that Rodgers was nicely declaring his old faith passé, a fine point to make if it’s what you believe, but a little disingenuous if you are at the same time saying you are against binary thinking.
As Terry Eagleton writes in The Illusions of Postmodernism,
“For all its vaunted openness to the Other, postmodernism can be quite as exclusive and censorious as the orthodoxies it opposes…It is a thoroughly orthodox heterodoxy, which like any imaginary form of identity needs its bogeymen and straw targets in order to stay in business.”
Against being Against?
To put it plainly, there is a certain nonsense in declaring, as Rodgers did, that you are against being against things.
And Jesus (that guy who was either risen from the dead…or not) had no problem at all with binary thinking:
“Whoever believes in (Me) is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. John 3:18, 19 (ESV)
The Real Reason Rodgers Left…
Uncomfortably binary, I know, yet our Lord points to what is likely the real reason Aaron left behind his faith; and so, as for me, I’m praying that his thinking off the field will become as clear and lucid as it usually is…on.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/aaron-rodgers-opens-religion-danica-200501823.html
Entrusted with the Gospel 