Faith: Part 3 (Originally posted Aug. 27, 2007)

Let me preface my response by telling you that C.S. Lewis has already discussed this issue at length in the first chapter of The Abolition of Man. By the end of my post, I hope to have provided what I have just asked AS for in my last post - that is, the “shape” of supernatural discernment. But so that we are first all agreed in my general premise, let me describe the “real world” correlative as referenced in Plato’s Republic (pgs. 122-125):

“It would seem…that the direction in which education starts a man, will determine his future life. Does not like always attract like?…Until some one rare and grand result is reached which may be called good, [or] may be the reverse of good?…[so then,] shall we condescend to legislate on any of [the] particulars? I think…that there is no need to impose laws about them on good men; what regulations are necessary they will find out soon enough for themselves…”

“…[but] without divine help…they will go on forever making and mending the laws and their lives in the hope of attaining perfection…[such men] are always fancying that by legislation they will make an end of frauds in contracts, and the other rascalities which I was mentioning, not knowing that they are in reality cutting off the heads of a hydra…” (pg. 122-124)

(If it is not clear what Plato is describing, think of these individuals as the ethical equivalent of a hypochondriac. The person is always troubling himself with trivial matters, when it is his general character which he should attend to. They “strain out a gnat but swallow a camel (Matt. 23:24).”)

“…the true legislator will not trouble himself with this class of enactments whether concerning laws or the constitution [of a State]…many of them will naturally flow our of our previous regulations.”

In the book, Socrates returns later to describe what is to be the emphasis of sound instruction with this illustration:

“You know…that dyers, when they want to dye wool for making the true sea-purple, begin by selecting their white color first; this they prepare and dress with much care and pains, in order that the white ground may take the purple hue in full perfection. The dyeing then proceeds; and whatever is dyed in this manner becomes a fast color, and no washing either with lyes or without them can take away the bloom. But, when the ground has not been duly prepared, you will have noticed how poor is the look either of purple or any other color. Then now…you will understand what our object was in [educating our citizens]; we were contriving influences which would prepare them to take the dye of the laws in perfection, and the color of…every opinion was to be indelibly fixed by their nurture and training, not to be washed away by such potent lyes as pleasure - mightier agent far in washing the soul than any soda or lye; or by sorrow, fear, or desire, the mightiest of all other solvents.” (pg. 128-129)

As C.S. Lewis comments:

“In The Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her (see Republic, pg. 95-96).’” (The Abolition of Man, pg. 16-17)

Up to this point, we have considered only Plato’s philosophy of education, and it seems to me a good one. Now, is there any reason preventing us from applying the same principles to God’s approach with man? I think, rather, that the Bible supports this principle, as evidenced in the verse below.

“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is - His good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Rom. 12:2)

The concept is that the heart is like an instrument requiring fine tuning if it is to resonate in harmony with God’s heart. Or perhaps it is better thought of us an antennae which must be regularly tweaked in order to tune in to God’s frequency. Or it could even be thought of as the helm of a ship. This is my personal favorite because it treats the heart as a fixed mechanism with an explicit purpose: to direct the ship. (Furthermore, it isn’t as accommodating of those cutesy clichés as my previous illustrations, and the fewer cutesy phrases I have to use, like “quiet time” for instance, the better.)

People - particularly academia - often ridicule someone who “follows their heart” or “trusts their gut” (by the way, the Israelites also placed the heart’s activities in the bowels and the kidneys, so the terms are interchangeable). Thomas Jefferson says it best:

“'Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity (The God Delusion, pg. 34).’”

Jim Watson, founder of the Human Genome Project, commented: “I’m a bit embarrassed [laughs] because, you know, I can’t believe anyone accepts truth by revelation (The God Delusion, pg. 99).”

And, here comes the slippery slope, we all probably agree that reliance upon feelings is unwise (reminiscent of the Fact-Faith-Feeling train from certain Christian tracts). But telling someone not to follow their heart is, relative to Biblical principles, the equivalent of telling someone not to navigate their ship at the helm. To further illustrate this point, consider Jesus’ rebuke of the Pharisees:

“You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.” (Matt. 12:34)

“The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.” (Luke 6:45)

What I like about the concept of living from the heart - well, one thing anyway - is that our hearts are capable of inspiring actions that we would not have otherwise made intellectually. It allows such experiences as falling in love, bearing someone else’s burdens, or even laying down our lives for someone else. I like that we describe this kind of inspiration in terms of being “swept up” into something “bigger than ourselves.” It seems to reestablish our position in relation to God - we recognize in we do are not doing the work, but participating in the divine nature. It distinguishes us from other creatures, even from ourselves when we are acting as mere creatures, and makes us feel truly human. “…for in the image of God has God made man.” (Gen. 9:6)

But back to the attitude of academia toward what Jefferson would call “unintelligible propositions”, that is, those that are based on some subjective intuition of the heart, let me clarify what is really being debated. What most critics mean when they call a proposition unintelligible is that it can’t be assessed empirically. And to further clarify, let me provide a definition. Empiricism is defined as the way we assemble what we know of ourselves and our world from the "association of ideas" that come to us from our five senses. Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. But is that all there is? Are the “five senses” really the only contributing constituents to what we acknowledge in our minds as sound reason? Philosophy would not exist if it were. But when we’re studying the natural world, that one side of what many acknowledge is a two-sided coin, all voices besides those coming from our five senses are silenced. And this is what we call being empirical.

And you know what, this is a perfect standard for the field of science. Science is only concerned with the natural, therefore it only makes sense to exclude non-empirical data. The problem comes in when someone becomes so habitually dependent on the natural, that he/she forgets its limitations. It is nothing but a case of nearsightedness. Narrow-mindedness. Bias. None of the terms are meant to offend, only to remind anyone who has forgotten that such a state of mind is quite common. We all do it. But every once in a while, we need to expose ourselves to the many correctives this world has made available. We are acted upon by reality in the same way our government is acted upon by the system of checks and balances. As C.S. Lewis has said, “All reality is iconoclastic (A Grief Observed, pg. 66).” There are experiential counter-weights everywhere, if only we are open to them.

In the illustration below, we see the potential consequence of a life lived shut off from the reality and its iconoclastic nature. As you read it, keep in mind that we are sometimes kept from the reality by forces outside ourselves (as is the boy in the story); but at other times, we are our own imprisoner (as we have just discussed).

“Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and when they imprisoned her she managed to bring with her a drawing pad and a box of pencils. As she never loses the hope of deliverance, she is constantly teaching her son about that outer world which he has never seen. She does it very largely by drawing him pictures. With her pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities, and waves on a beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that the outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole he gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother pause. For a minute of two they are at a cross-purpose. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. ‘But,’ she gasps, ‘you didn’t think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?’ And instantly his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition - the waving treetops, the light dancing on the weir, the colored three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes with at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve. The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother’s pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.” (The Weight of Glory: "Transposition". pg. 109-110)

Needless to say, we have all had personal experiences with individuals who affirm - and under no compulsion - certain feelings or experiences which Christianity presents as evidence of our origins but which science (or more strictly, the monist perspective) disregards. One of the most wide-reaching examples of this kind of experience which I have found is that which Lewis describes as Joy. This experience, when understood as Lewis intended, is to me one of the strongest arguments on the side of Christianity and deserving of a separate discussion all its own. For now, suffice it to say that even atheists are sometimes caught off guard with experiences that draw them outside themselves.

Before closing, I would like to discuss the thing which takes the conversation full circle…I have already suggested that faith is a reliance upon those things which God has made known to us intuitively, in our hearts. But this is a double-edged sword, because as intangibility protects intuition from being ruled out by science, so it also prevents us from making empirical judgments about its conclusions. It, perhaps unfortunately, introduces a measure of subjectivity into the discussion, allowing not the accountability to peer review as does science, but personal accountability to one reviewer: God. As the Bible affirms, “For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him?…The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment (1 Cor. 2:11).” But if you think about it, is this not a much more appropriate type of accountability for intuitive knowledge, since morality (or better, right standing with God) is at its heart? Morality really goes no further than the heart (as in, there is no prior source). Actions in themselves are morally benign; it is sin in the heart that brings death to the soul. “…but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death (James 1:14-15).”

For all these reasons, I am inclined to agree with A.W. Tozer’s assessment (I think this is Tozer?) that “God’s voice must speak from within to bring enlightenment. It must be the Spirit of God speaking soundlessly within. That is what brings in man and makes him accountable to God.” (Peter Lord, Hearing God, pg. 20) And if all this is true, true of Christianity at least, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to return to my position as devil’s advocate for a while…the consequence of establishing a system of such immense expectation - that of God entering into intelligible dialogue with man - creates the potential for deep emotional / spiritual wounds to develop. It is as if God signs on to what is very largely, in our experience anyway, a human enterprise, where the rules of engagement are well-agreed upon. How does the God who reveals Himself to Job as an unpredictable, uncontrollable whirlwind (Job 38:1) condescend to such a position? How does He then borrow such emotionally-infused qualifiers as friend, brother, father, and lover to describe His relationship with us? God was not wary, not the least bit cautious, in building up the incredible expectation that exists around Him today. And I find this is a frustrating, an exasperating, promise of scripture that demands our deeper exploration.

(Suggested reading on this subject includes John Eldredge’s Journey of Desire; Peter Kreeft’s Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing; C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man (Chapter 1: Men Without Chests); Peter Lord’s Hearing God, and of course all of the context implied by quotes included in this response.)

Faith: Part 2 (Originally posted Sept. 13, 2007)

Ok, so now that we’ve gotten to the point of proposing a “mechanism” for receiving and discerning spiritual truth, we can move on to testing our hypothesis. Just to recap AS’s definition, let me cite some of his statements along with the supporting scripture references:

“Why do differences in doctrine exist? Sin. Laziness- an unwillingness to do the hard work of interpreting the Scripture rightly, which may include things like learning the original languages and reading books by gifted teachers, etc. etc. Spiritual immaturity or perhaps better stated as a lack of spiritual maturity in certain areas - we may just plain be unable to handle certain truths at particular points in our lives. Bad English translations of the Bible. Who knows what else?”
-AS

“My point in reviewing all those texts you provided that speak of spiritual enlightenment coming via the Holy Spirit was to emphasize I don’t think that the Holy Spirit is necessarily the means by which every spiritual truth is understood.” -AS

“But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.” (Heb. 5:14)

“Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.” (2 Tim. 2:7)

“I think there is a fine line between understanding spiritual truths as intellectual constructs and understanding them as spiritual insights.” -AS

This is one distinction which I have to recognize. The intellect certainly plays a role in discerning truth, spiritual or otherwise, and intellectual laziness can certainly be blamed for poor theology. Jameson already did a good job providing the scripture to support this point (Heb. 5:14, 2 Tim. 2:7 and 15).

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth, for He will not speak on his own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak, and He will declare to you the things that are to come.” (John 16:12-13)

“Again, I think this is a disciple-limited promise that the Holy Spirit will guide the apostles ‘into all the truth’ in the early church age so that they may speak the very words of God and communicate the ‘whole counsel of God’ to believers as was achieved via the New Testament.”
-AS

Someone could probably ascribe a name to this position, whether it be one of the proposed “dispensations” or something else. Whatever the case, I don’t know that I subscribe to the idea that God revealed spiritual truth to his apostles any differently than He does to us today. Even if I could accept that they received a heightened capacity for discerning spiritual truths, I cannot accept that we operate by any different principle. And it’s the principle that I think we are most concerned with. The simple fact that Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth in John 14:17 (see also John 4:23-24) reveals that spiritual discernment is one of the roles of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. (And anyway, what part of the scripture you cited do you not believe to apply to the modern-day believer?). I think our contention, if there is any, concerns the location of that subtle line distinguishing that truth which is discernible through the work of the intellect versus that only discernible by supernatural revelation. I think in many cases the latter is no more than a unique condition of preparedness to receive the lesson…Spiritual revelation in my experience has always come to me as a sort of chain reaction connecting hundreds of previously understood lessons which effectively produces a glimpse of the larger picture of who God is and what He’s all about. I call that “revelation” because it’s a moment where the intellectual components work together in a uniquely orchestrated fashion that allows me to “see” God. Perhaps the only supernatural part of the whole thing is that God is responsible for directing the course of my intellectual growth that allows that moment of “enlightenment” to unfold (see Ps. 119:130). In this case, maybe the question is more about the extent to which we can expect to hear from God via means other than our intellect. Can you think of any instances in which spiritual discernment is more strongly differentiated from discernment via intellectual constructs. How are such revelations validated? Against what measure or standard are we to test these revelations?

“What I do know though is that we have the Bible. Why? Why didn’t God just give us a systematic theology book that we could just turn to a page and get the answer to whatever question we had under the appropriate heading? I can’t be sure, because I’m not God, but I could guess that one of the reasons is because he wants us to work.” -AS

This is a worthwhile question to consider. Why is the majority of the Bible (particularly the Old Testament) written in story form rather than as a book of systematic theology? Why also, within these stories, would God choose to be less than clear on the intrinsic lesson - assuming there is one (not very didactic of Him, huh Jameson)? As Justin has previously pointed out, the Bible tends to be more descriptive than prescriptive. It tells the story as it happened and very seldom takes the extra step to supplement the events that are occurring with any moral qualification. So, why Story? Let me provide the only possible explanation I have come across as presented in John Eldredge’s book, Epic.

Story is the language of the heart. Or, in other words, the heart receives and frames its beliefs within the construct of story. As Eldredge suggests, “Life doesn’t come to us as a math problem. It comes to us the way that a story does, scene by scene (Epic, pg. 2).” He goes on to suggest that story is also how we figure things out (as evidenced by our fixation with the news, novels, and movies and our tendency to look to them for illumination into our own lives).

This principle has applications to our spiritual life as well. For instance, God uses this tendency to redeem all those dead, stagnant periods of time (chronos in Greek) by providing also divinely orchestrated moments (kairos in Greek) which infuse them with meaning. But if we understood life and internalized our experiences with our bare bones intellect, we wouldn’t find it necessary to draw a distinction between chronos and kairos at all. But the fact of the matter is that we do perceive such a distinction, and this is why human beings love stories. All the elements of a great story - setting, plot, conflict, character, point of view, theme - work because there exists a corresponding quality in our nature. If we can accept this principle, then we’ve understood the premise of Eldredge’s worldview. He goes on to say,

“Every story, great and small, shares the same essential structure because every great story we tell borrows its power from a Larger Story, a Story woven into the fabric of our being - what pioneer psychologist Carl Jung tried to explain as archetype, or what his more recent popularizer Joseph Campbell called myth.” -Epic, pg. 12-13

“Every story we tell is our attempt to put into words and images what God has written there, on our hearts.” -Epic, pg. 73

While I might be missing some inherent flaw in his theology, I think Eldredge’s explanation serves at least one crucial purpose and that is to provide a framework within which we can understand our communion with God. If God has made our hearts to learn and grow through the medium of Story, then it might follow that He meant for our communion with Him to be an experience more centered around the heart than the mind. We can all agree that our intellects are more adept to learning through concise, systematic presentations of facts and principles. Stories, on the other hand, tend to teach us things which our intellect often has difficulty putting to words. The lessons take a “back road” to accomplish its intended purpose. Blaise Pascal writes in Pensées, “The heart has its reason which reason knows nothing of.” We’re all familiar with the idea of a girl’s emotions preceding her intellectual comprehension of those emotion’s source. They cry before they even know intellectually what’s wrong. Stories do that…after watching the movie Braveheart, you might feel inspired to take up arms with William Wallace without ever grasping the politics or necessity of his cause. It moves our hearts, and so we act.

As implied in this framework, Story is the language of the heart; and incidentally, Story is also the dominant form of divine expression available to believers. It must follow that God intended a communion of the heart to be the center of our relationship with Him. Story is an especially powerful tool to teach, grow, and challenge believers in their faith walk with the unique characteristic of transcending the intellectual limitations of its hearers (positive actions can be inspired without the antecedent of intellectual comprehension). This quality of Story relieves the tension that exists between intellectual capacity and one’s ability to “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15).

I believe God intended for our heart, rather than our intellect, to be the center of our faith walk. I think this point is communicated in Prov. 3:5-6: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding…”; and Prov. 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” We cannot ignore the emphasis the Bible seems to place on the heart’s activity and the debilitating limitations He has placed on our intellect. In Ecclesiastes 11:5, Solomon writes, “As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.” In 3:10 he writes, “He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” David reflects on God’s intimate knowledge of him and responds, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain (Ps. 139:6).” And Proverbs 25:2 suggests that God conceals things in mystery for the sake of His glory (it’s interesting to consider the “God of the gaps” discussion in this light).

The intellect is indispensable in discerning spiritual truth, but I believe that God intended our heart to be the primary instrument for communion with Him. Granted, the concept of the heart is kind of ambiguous and can hardly be separated from the mental process, but I think we are all aware of the distinction between the type of meditation our hearts engage in as compared with that of the intellect. The intellect, stripped to bare bones, would produce a naturalist or a monist. The metaphysical heart is the bridge between our bare bones intellect and that abstraction which we call the supernatural (see The Abolition of Man, pg. 25). An acknowledgment of both is essential to the Christian worldview, yet they have different means of receiving truth.

So, anyway, let me bring this back to the essential question. How does God’s choice of story form to express Himself (according to Eldredge’s worldview) relate to the discussion of discerning spiritual truth? For one, It appeals to a heart-centered form of communion whereas our discussion up to this point has more supported discernment via the intellect. I feel pretty certain that, if we are to take the Biblical perspective, we are going to have to accept some degree of supernatural discernment which is not so dependent on intellectual capacity. Likewise, I think there are fundamental qualities of the Christian faith that are lost to an intellect-driven faith walk. On the other hand, I think the alternative forces us back into that uneasy territory of subjectivity, which is very difficult to defend. In one last quote, AS, you said:

“But if the primary means through which God speaks is the Bible, and I think it is, it might would be an apt illustration to say that that voice is in a language that needs to be interpreted. Interpretation, of course, involving the intellect.” -AS

What would you propose is the “shape” of spiritual discernment (that not arrived at via intellectual constructs). What does it look like? How is it practiced? What is it and what is it not? Is there communion with God beyond that which is freely accessible through intellectual exploration of His word? Can we truly expect the type of intimacy which many Christians are claiming is available to us or is nearness to God nothing more than harmony with the theology of the Bible? WHY DOES IT SEEM THAT CHRISTIANS ARE CONTINUALLY MISSING IT!?…“Like sheep without a shepherd…” That is the question.