ThinkBlog

Every part of history has its own set of characteristics that set it apart–its own Zeitgeist, if you will. These characteristics have two sides to them that our minds can understand: so that in each age, we have enough cultural and natural knowledge to choose to disbelieve the truth of the Bible–and we also have proportionally more knowledge and understanding of the Bible as a people. So we have a conflict here, evenly weighed: natural (of or relating to the world/universe and that which is in it) information that brings a greater sophistication to secular understanding–and that challenges the ever-more sophisticated beliefs of the faithful. We grow in the knowledge of our Lord and of His creation through superior research, both Biblical and secular, and the more we understand theologically via better-informed hermeneutics & exegesis, the more distractors we have to accompany these.

Just to be clear, distractors are bits and pieces of information we mistakenly call knowledge. If you listen to America’s NPR, or to your local television news channels, or read lengthy scientific reports, what do you have? Information. Facts. Things. That which is. And though the media would have you believe otherwise, the facts don’t interpret themselves, and there is not always a perfectly lucid interpretation thereof. The bottom line is, the more information we have access to, we think the more we understand. Is that really the case? Clearly not. I would wager that, though he lived two millennia ago, the apostle James understood more than a solid 80% of the members of today’s global population. Well, surely not! you might say. After all, he didn’t have access to political systems that didn’t yet exist, and he didn’t have information about all the species of plants and animals in North America, and he didn’t know the distance of the moon from the Earth! Ah, but are those things conducive to understanding in and of themselves? We can tend to look down on the old masters–the pre-Socratic philosophers who believed in a quad-elemental universe, the medievals who couldn’t paint in tri-demensional perspective to save their lives–but nor were they distracted. You don’t need to know all the things that scientists and the media tell us, to know God.

The problem comes in when we see that part of us–the part we’re forced to obey apart from Christ, usually referred to as “the flesh,” i.e., the nature of man as he is–interprets this data in a way that supports an atheistic viewpoint. We believe somehow, because we have heard it all our lives, that more information is unconditionally a Good Thing^TM, and that the likelihood that there is a loving God as described by a text dating several thousands of years old decreases as the amount of information about the world it purports to describe increases. There is another part of us, however, that searches for more and seeks good answers, which knows intuitively that the things we have and the facts we know really aren’t a complete picture in and of themselves–that part of us that cries out when looking for living water in the world it only finds ash.

There are layered metaphors here which, left unexplained, may be taken as merely poetic language. Jesus gives the believer “living water” that is the Spirit of God (John 4:10,25-26; John 7:37-39; Revelation 7:17). The way a man dying of thirst in an arid land desperately cries out for water even when he believes there is none who can hear him, so do each of we thirst in our unbelief for truth and righteousness.[1] But there is none to be found from each other, natural man to natural man. And so we meet each other in life, hands over our mouths, ashamed that our cracked lips are parted in a silent scream for redemption and feeling obligated to pretend we don’t see the other disguising himself identically. We hold out our other hand inconspicuously so as not to seem beggars but hoping against hope that a few serendipitous drops of hope and truth light thereon from some unseen store.

But there the story ends with natural man: left to ourselves, we die in the wilderness. Postmodern man finds a shadow of communion in this death: if in my rage, hatred, and fear, I drop my hand from my mouth and expose you to the scream I knew you knew was there–and if you do the same for me–we feel a cool draft of brotherhood. Desert heat turns cool for but a moment, though no less arid; and we are left with an immediately waning hope and unity to which we nevertheless cling.[2] But this breeze contains none such “living water,” and we find that while we lowered our limbs in surrender to one another’s probing eyes in the name of brotherhood, we have left exposed the chief cavity through which sand and dry wind may steal the very life from our lungs and mouths. We then clap shut our mouths only to find that the whole encounter has left but fine desert grit (ash) in our throats.

So natural man[3] from natural man, and from himself in the interpretation of data he mistakenly calls understanding, finds ash and a false unity where he seeks truth and something more than what he’s always known.

What, then, are we to do with this part of ourselves that cries out for truth, for that living water that it may not even yet be able to name? Not in more data, not even in theology[4] which at that point is merely another set of distractors, but in the person of Jesus Christ. When we’re dying in a land of shifting sand (by extension, bits of information via news and other sources), we don’t need more of it to survive, we need something altogether different. We need water to quench our thirst and rejeuvenate us. We were designed as beings full of water; without it we’re thoroughly unable to subsist. Christians and unbelievers alike are thirsting to death in the desert; the latter because they know no better, and the former have the dubious distinction of having a place at the well and not bothering to draw therefrom and partake of the gift of Life.

The more information that flows to us, and the more technologically advanced we seem, the easier it is to concede to secular humanism and the existential paradigm that has crept upon the mind of man in the past several centuries. There need be no concession: the distractors of this age can sometimes seem negatively powerful to us just as Galilean astronomy seemed thus to the Church. But instead of being threatened, let us instead give God the glory for what He has given us and for what He has made.

You who disbelieve because of intellectual reservations needn’t die in your angst and frustration: take the distractors into account, then look beyond them to what you so fear might not be there. He is. The pride of man is that we can do the kinds of things we have done and shall do–but we can’t sate our own deepest need, that thirst for Truth and Goodness. Come to the fountain that doesn’t dry up and drink, friend. Be satisfied in “the way, the truth, and the life” that is Jesus called Christ, the perfect Savior and God’s only son.

And we, Christians, let us not forsake drinking deep of this same font: the temptation is there just the same for us as those who don’t know Him. I sometimes have the tendency, in my flesh, to wander back to the world to commune with those who are unsatisfied and, lingering in their company[5], find myself beginning to scream silently with them once again, as though I had never known the love and joy of Christ. Therefore do not forsake the better communion for the base: it is better to be alone with the Creator and Savior of the universe, drinking of the only water that satisfies, than amidst a thousand throngs of our fellow man, complaining of our spiritual dehydration and unquiet mind to people who can only echo our cry.

You needn’t buy the lie that information interprets itself and that what we know automatically means that the world defaults to Godless creation and sustenance. But don’t take my word for it. See for yourself.

Footnotes

[1] We are quiet and sophisticated about it, of course, even when we haven’t seared the sensitivity to that cry within ourselves and within others: it’s socially unacceptable to show weakness, and it’s recently become politically incorrect to acknowledge the inconsistency that no one wants to show vulnerability but wants to connect with others; every one wants the foundation of truth but doesn’t want the responsibility that comes with absolutes.

[2] Illustrating this most concretely today is the mosh pit (and to some extent, the rave, but I’ll stay with the former for this example). You and I meet to express our anger in such a way that most likely will prove mutually painful, but within certain tacit limits that shall not be breached. The honesty in a mosh pit is therefore startling: I will make myself vulnerable emotionally by exposing to you my pain via rage, and you will expose yourself to me by allowing me to take it out on you. Furthermore, vice versa: I make myself physically vulnerable to you while you expose your emotional pain to me. (Further analysis of this specific mentality is outside the scope of this article.)

[3] I have said that this applies to natural man, but this attitude afflicts Christians as well, who have swallowed the existential lie that man is dead, God is dead, and life is meaningless. These are the ones who say with Joker, “The dead know only one thing: that it is better to be alive;” and with Solomon, “I said in mine heart, `Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure’: and, behold, this also is vanity.” Don’t misunderstand, though: natural man or spiritually reborn, the cure for this lie is the “Way, the Truth, and the Life” that is Jesus, the Son of the living God.

[4] Good theology is invaluable to the understanding of our Lord and everything that has come from Him (that covers just about 100%, right?). The kind of theology I mean here is the largely academic kind (as opposed to the foundational tenets of the faith), the kind that hones the edge of a blade already forged, polishes the armor already donned, or debugs the program already coded. It’s like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: this self-actualization of the faith is of course all well and good, but useless until the basics like hunger and thirst are taken care of. Only the person of Christ can satisfy those.

[5] That is, in their mental state, their attitudes. Some Christians have forsaken friends who do not believe, but that’s not Biblical–we are called to go and be a light to the world. “Let your light shine before men,” not from afar but up close. But we mustn’t pad the soot and ash of postmodern “God and man are dead” thinking on our lamps or even to us the flame may begin to flicker.

[End Part 2 of 2.]

Every part of history has its own set of characteristics that set it apart–its own Zeitgeist, if you will. These characteristics have two sides to them that our minds can understand: so that in each age, we have enough cultural and natural knowledge to choose to disbelieve the truth of the Bible–and we also have proportionally more knowledge and understanding of the Bible as a people. So we have a conflict here, evenly weighed: natural (of or relating to the world/universe and that which is in it) information that brings a greater sophistication to secular understanding–and that challenges the ever-more sophisticated beliefs of the faithful. We grow in the knowledge of our Lord and of His creation through superior research, both Biblical and secular, and the more we understand theologically via better-informed hermeneutics & exegesis, the more distractors we have to accompany these.

Just to be clear, distractors are bits and pieces of information we mistakenly call knowledge. If you listen to America’s NPR, or to your local television news channels, or read lengthy scientific reports, what do you have? Information. Facts. Things. That which is. And though the media would have you believe otherwise, the facts don’t interpret themselves, and there is not always a perfectly lucid interpretation thereof. The bottom line is, the more information we have access to, we think the more we understand. Is that really the case? Clearly not. I would wager that, though he lived two millennia ago, the apostle James understood more than a solid 80% of the members of today’s global population. Well, surely not! you might say. After all, he didn’t have access to political systems that didn’t yet exist, and he didn’t have information about all the species of plants and animals in North America, and he didn’t know the distance of the moon from the Earth! Ah, but are those things conducive to understanding in and of themselves? We can tend to look down on the old masters–the pre-Socratic philosophers who believed in a quad-elemental universe, the medievals who couldn’t paint in tri-demensional perspective to save their lives–but nor were they distracted. You don’t need to know all the things that scientists and the media tell us, to know God.

The problem comes in when we see that part of us–the part we’re forced to obey apart from Christ, usually referred to as “the flesh,” i.e., the nature of man as he is–interprets this data in a way that supports an atheistic viewpoint. We believe somehow, because we have heard it all our lives, that more information is unconditionally a Good Thing^TM, and that the likelihood that there is a loving God as described by a text dating several thousands of years old decreases as the amount of information about the world it purports to describe increases. There is another part of us, however, that searches for more and seeks good answers, which knows intuitively that the things we have and the facts we know really aren’t a complete picture in and of themselves–that part of us that cries out when looking for living water in the world it only finds ash.

There are layered metaphors here which, left unexplained, may be taken as merely poetic language. Jesus gives the believer “living water” that is the Spirit of God (John 4:10,25-26; John 7:37-39; Revelation 7:17). The way a man dying of thirst in an arid land desperately cries out for water even when he believes there is none who can hear him, so do each of we thirst in our unbelief for truth and righteousness.[1] But there is none to be found from each other, natural man to natural man. And so we meet each other in life, hands over our mouths, ashamed that our cracked lips are parted in a silent scream for redemption and feeling obligated to pretend we don’t see the other disguising himself identically. We hold out our other hand inconspicuously so as not to seem beggars but hoping against hope that a few serendipitous drops of hope and truth light thereon from some unseen store.

But there the story ends with natural man: left to ourselves, we die in the wilderness. Postmodern man finds a shadow of communion in this death: if in my rage, hatred, and fear, I drop my hand from my mouth and expose you to the scream I knew you knew was there–and if you do the same for me–we feel a cool draft of brotherhood. Desert heat turns cool for but a moment, though no less arid; and we are left with an immediately waning hope and unity to which we nevertheless cling.[2] But this breeze contains none such “living water,” and we find that while we lowered our limbs in surrender to one another’s probing eyes in the name of brotherhood, we have left exposed the chief cavity through which sand and dry wind may steal the very life from our lungs and mouths. We then clap shut our mouths only to find that the whole encounter has left but fine desert grit (ash) in our throats.

So natural man[3] from natural man, and from himself in the interpretation of data he mistakenly calls understanding, finds ash and a false unity where he seeks truth and something more than what he’s always known.

What, then, are we to do with this part of ourselves that cries out for truth, for that living water that it may not even yet be able to name? Not in more data, not even in theology[4] which at that point is merely another set of distractors, but in the person of Jesus Christ. When we’re dying in a land of shifting sand (by extension, bits of information via news and other sources), we don’t need more of it to survive, we need something altogether different. We need water to quench our thirst and rejeuvenate us. We were designed as beings full of water; without it we’re thoroughly unable to subsist. Christians and unbelievers alike are thirsting to death in the desert; the latter because they know no better, and the former have the dubious distinction of having a place at the well and not bothering to draw therefrom and partake of the gift of Life.

The more information that flows to us, and the more technologically advanced we seem, the easier it is to concede to secular humanism and the existential paradigm that has crept upon the mind of man in the past several centuries. There need be no concession: the distractors of this age can sometimes seem negatively powerful to us just as Galilean astronomy seemed thus to the Church. But instead of being threatened, let us instead give God the glory for what He has given us and for what He has made.

You who disbelieve because of intellectual reservations needn’t die in your angst and frustration: take the distractors into account, then look beyond them to what you so fear might not be there. He is. The pride of man is that we can do the kinds of things we have done and shall do–but we can’t sate our own deepest need, that thirst for Truth and Goodness. Come to the fountain that doesn’t dry up and drink, friend. Be satisfied in “the way, the truth, and the life” that is Jesus called Christ, the perfect Savior and God’s only son.

And we, Christians, let us not forsake drinking deep of this same font: the temptation is there just the same for us as those who don’t know Him. I sometimes have the tendency, in my flesh, to wander back to the world to commune with those who are unsatisfied and, lingering in their company[5], find myself beginning to scream silently with them once again, as though I had never known the love and joy of Christ. Therefore do not forsake the better communion for the base: it is better to be alone with the Creator and Savior of the universe, drinking of the only water that satisfies, than amidst a thousand throngs of our fellow man, complaining of our spiritual dehydration and unquiet mind to people who can only echo our cry.

You needn’t buy the lie that information interprets itself and that what we know automatically means that the world defaults to Godless creation and sustenance. But don’t take my word for it. See for yourself.

Footnotes

[1] We are quiet and sophisticated about it, of course, even when we haven’t seared the sensitivity to that cry within ourselves and within others: it’s socially unacceptable to show weakness, and it’s recently become politically incorrect to acknowledge the inconsistency that no one wants to show vulnerability but wants to connect with others; every one wants the foundation of truth but doesn’t want the responsibility that comes with absolutes.

[2] Illustrating this most concretely today is the mosh pit (and to some extent, the rave, but I’ll stay with the former for this example). You and I meet to express our anger in such a way that most likely will prove mutually painful, but within certain tacit limits that shall not be breached. The honesty in a mosh pit is therefore startling: I will make myself vulnerable emotionally by exposing to you my pain via rage, and you will expose yourself to me by allowing me to take it out on you. Furthermore, vice versa: I make myself physically vulnerable to you while you expose your emotional pain to me. (Further analysis of this specific mentality is outside the scope of this article.)

[3] I have said that this applies to natural man, but this attitude afflicts Christians as well, who have swallowed the existential lie that man is dead, God is dead, and life is meaningless. These are the ones who say with Joker, “The dead know only one thing: that it is better to be alive;” and with Solomon, “I said in mine heart, `Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure’: and, behold, this also is vanity.” Don’t misunderstand, though: natural man or spiritually reborn, the cure for this lie is the “Way, the Truth, and the Life” that is Jesus, the Son of the living God.

[4] Good theology is invaluable to the understanding of our Lord and everything that has come from Him (that covers just about 100%, right?). The kind of theology I mean here is the largely academic kind (as opposed to the foundational tenets of the faith), the kind that hones the edge of a blade already forged, polishes the armor already donned, or debugs the program already coded. It’s like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: this self-actualization of the faith is of course all well and good, but useless until the basics like hunger and thirst are taken care of. Only the person of Christ can satisfy those.

[5] That is, in their mental state, their attitudes. Some Christians have forsaken friends who do not believe, but that’s not Biblical–we are called to go and be a light to the world. “Let your light shine before men,” not from afar but up close. But we mustn’t pad the soot and ash of postmodern “God and man are dead” thinking on our lamps or even to us the flame may begin to flicker.

[End Part 2 of 2.]