Now for some more targum from Walsh and Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed.
Col. 2:20 Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: 21 ?Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!?? 22 These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. 23 Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self?imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.
Self-imposed postmodern guilt trips can do nothing to heal the heart and can do nothing to stop the violence. Only the exhaustion of that violence on the cross can begin a real restoration.
You see, my friends, the postmodern incredulity of all metanarratives is well founded. The modernist metanarrauve, of civilizational progress manifest in an aggressive conquering of colonized peoples, so-called scientific objectivism, a technological will to power and a market capitalism that would commodify all of life, deplete creational resources and create an ecological nightmare, was a tall tale ? a lying, self-justifying ideological narrative. Yet humans are inherently storytelling creatures. And any local narrative will necessarily and invariably function as a metanarrative in the lives of those who hold it as their story: So the issue isn’t whether to live out of a metanarrative or not, but which metanarrative, and whose grand story. Without a grounding and directing story, no praxis is possible. That is why the crisis of storyless postmodern people, animated by little more than media and market-produced images, is a crisis of moral and cultural paralysis.