Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Saturday, May 18, 2002 In essentials, unity Louder Fenn is correct in thinking that I am not denigrating theology simply because I hate rational and discursive thinking as opposed to feeling our way into Truth. What I dislike I have written thusly: So much of what we face in theology is a result of Man's desire to know; except the desire is corrupted from one of simply wanting to know into one of dominating a problem and making it resolve under our force of will and power; as if with enough brute intellectual power we can crack the code which is God, and make him yield to us his secrets. Which then forces other men (like me) to come along and say, what a bunch of BS; that the way is not the mind, but the heart - in trust, risk, vulnerability, and a certain artistic boldness and audacity. Let me give an example. Art. To be skilled in any art takes practice and study, but more than the learning of execution and ordering one's mind and abilities to create something new, the artist has got to learn another way of thinking - a kind of intelligence (not emotionalism) that reaches into reality, or opens itself to the Holy Spirit (if you like). This skill cannot be taught. It can only be discovered. No amount of thinking about wanting to be inspired or insightful will accomplish the task, even though study and thinking may preceed it (but not necessarily. Create a music melody. No amount of critical thinking is needed ahead of time to prepare or lay the groundwork for a new tune. It may just come from nowhere.). The kind of thinking which reaches out and embraces the Beautiful is different than that which sits down and examines abstractions, concepts, and reasons deductively and inductively in a discursive, dialectical manner. Fenn writes: "The existence and nature of God are facts as much as the existence and nature of gravity. That God is a Trinity is a fact -- which you can accept or deny, but it's not just a point of view. It's as important to know the supernatural order as it is to know the natural, for that order is there to be discovered and is not whatever you want it to be." I completely agree with him. Where I might disagree with him is in the number and nature of various facts. As far as I can tell, God has revealed all of three things to us directly through revelation. 1) There is One God and he cares about you. (OT - He is, but you are not God.) 2) Jesus lives and is God which makes Man immortal, also, since death is not death.. 3) There is a Holy Spirit - God is Three. There a great many truths which we can surmise from those experiences, but not as many as some would have it. If we're going to be logical, deductive, and discursive then let's apply such thinking critically on all that we believe and not just on part of what we believe. We cannot except certain things from examination by calling them revelation or inspired which is what churches would do with so many dogmas and doctrines, and creeds. For example, there is no proof that God writes books, creates religions or churches, institutes sacraments, or endorses councils (this one but not that one). There is no revelation which provides for all those supposed Christian truths. Why not? Because all of those things are based on interpretation, speculating about what Jesus' incarnation, death, and resurrection mean. They are all about words conveyed by mouth or book. Events (facts) subject to the misunderstanding, invention, or reflection by the speaker of his experience to others who do the same thing. We experience the color Blue. We know what we saw. It was Blue. Everybody sees it, but later we start talking about its hue and people's reflections begin to diverge. There is nothing that can keep us all in agreement as to the original Blue. So we build a group that allows for lots of different shadings of blue (or not). Some people find a way to see the original Blue again and again through focus and concentration, but nobody is sure whether they are seeing Blue as it is, because they look at the sky, too, and each still sees something different from his neighbor. One of them tries to invent a machine to measure the Blueness of the sky (theological Blue), but the problem is, what direction to point it in. Different directions give different readings. Pointing it in all directions and averaging the reading is no help, either. You don't get Blue, then, but an average of Blue. You've proven there is a Blue, but not how to see Blue. The only person who knows he's seeing original Blue of Blue is the perceiver. Even when we see the same Blue, our perception is temporarily shared. We will not remember it exactly the same or interpret it's meaning the same. Let us not forget, at last, that it is the way of the child and not the learned that leads to heaven. No amount of thinking can buy us humility. Only by humiliation can we acquire it. Prayer is ultimately the way of humiliation and the suffering of the Cross. Humiliating events aren't enough. Without humiliating prayer, what we otherwise suffer is wasted on us. posted by Mark Butterworth | 3:03 AM | |
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