I didn’t know who he was until his viral post started appearing in my news feed. The academe’s argument chiding the youth who are railing against Marcos and the counter-argument that he received caught my attention.

He wrote: “The present generation that is loud in its condemnation of Marcos never experienced Marcos. So that rant is directed at their construct of Marcos. Shouldn’t they be studying Derrida and Lyotard more?” 

And because he was a priest, one retorted: “Naabutan niyo po ba si Hesu Kristo?”

Now I am no philosopher. My “barely made it” grades in Philosophy 101a and 101b attest to that but I am a trained theologian so any mention of our Lord will have my undivided attention. I followed the back-and-forth because of who the ordained academe was or to be more precise, who he was supposed to represent which some found to be at odds with whom he has allegedly been defending.

For those with no time or interest to click on the provided links, his contention was that one has to be a first-hand witness in order to arrive at an irrefutable conclusion. Anything less than that is a result of someone’s construction or deconstruction of what transpired. If this argument is valid, then we who came into being after 33 A.D. are in big trouble. We were not that there when God created the world and when He raised the Son from the dead so what we have been regarding as Truth may just be propaganda or wishful thinking which of course, we all know how there are people who do preach that. So following its logic, even if the biblical authors wrote of their first-hand experiences, they are mere construction. They are just their chosen narratives.

If for the sake of argument that that is true, the thing is, we are not just relying on their say-so because we have our own first-hand experience with the Lord Jesus today. Naabutan ba natin si Hesu Kristo? Yes because He is alive; He has conquered death; He is with us. He has risen and sits on the right hand of God. People may deny the Word but not the living Word in us. They may still choose not to believe but they cannot deny its reality in our lives. But how will they hear of our personal experience of the power of God if we do not share it? (Rom. 10:14) The harvest today is so ripe as a mere spit can bring us to eternity. Let us seize the opportunity to bring hope and let them experience constructing the truth about Jesus and deconstruct the fallacy of living without the Way, the Truth, and the Life.