Month: May 2004

The next few days I’m going to be putting up some articles on some basic theological ideas I’ve been working through. Some of it may be re-hash, I’m not sure. I know a lot of it’s going to be very incomplete. A lot of these ideas would probably be good topics for books all by themselves, and I’m going to try to cover them in a couple or three pages. But they are all interrelated, and they do build upon each other, and I’m trying to work through these ideas, so you’re just going to have to sit there and suffer. Comments are welcome. No doubt there are going to be huge gaps that I’m missing. That’s what comes of trying to cover these kinds of ideas in just a few pages.

I’ve already made an illustrative attempt at expressing how God is the origin and foundation of everything. But let me go back real quick and touch on it again:
From a scientific perspective, the universe is held together by the power of His will. I’m not a scientist, so I’m not going to bother to try to substantiate that idea. I’m a better philosopher, so let me try from that angle.

Descartes is famous for saying “I think, therefore I am.” His basic point was that everything in the world that we experience could be an illusion. The whole darn thing could be a giant virtual reality trip. It seems solid enough, but then, so do the experiences of a schizophrenic man. So how do we know anything exists at all? Descartes’ answer was that we can’t. Since everything I get is filtered in through my senses, I can’t be sure than any of those things are real. The only things that I can ever be certain of are those things that I experience directly, whatever directly is.

So far, I’m actually okay with this. Now, I’ll say again that I’ve never actually read Descartes—I’ve only gotten summaries. But what comes next is where I think he and I diverge. From what I understand Descartes came to the conclusion that the only thing you can experience directly is yourself. Therefore, the only thing you can know exists for certain is yourself. If you turn your attention completely inward and focus on your own existence for just a moment, then you might catch yourself thinking. In that moment you have experienced yourself directly, without any intermediary filter, and you can rest assured that you exist. Typical humanistic foolishness.

Put that way, it doesn’t really sound very Christian, does it? That’s because it’s the farthest thing from Christian that there is. It’s man centered. More specifically, it’s self-centered, and self-absorbed, and as a result, it’s inherently wrong.

Here’s the flaw: No one can perceive himself. I am myself. I’m too busy being myself to experience myself. I can’t pry into people’s minds for an example, so let me zoom out a little bit and use something physical for a reference point: Hold up your hand for a minute. Can your hand experience itself? No it can’t. Unless there is something in particular happening to your hand, your hand doesn’t feel like anything at all. Unless an outside force acts upon your hand, your hand feels like absolutely nothing at all.

Now pick up an ice cube. What does your hand experience? COLD! What does that mean? Well, for one thing, it means that ice cubes are cold. Cold compared to what? Well, compared to your hand. So what does this tell you about your hand? It tells you that your hand is warmer than an ice cube. There was absolutely no way for you to experience the fact that your hand was warm, except for it to come into contact with something that was not warm.

This is true about every area of the human condition. Unless a person is in contact with something… different, then everything about them just feels… normal. Unless it is compared with something else, nothing exists at all.

I have hair on my face. But unless I touch my face or look in a mirror, I can’t tell that I have hair on my face. My face just feels…normal… like it isn’t even there at all. In fact, unless I make a good comparison, my face feels to me exactly the same way it did when I was ten or eleven. So this brings up another point: without a basis for comparison, not only can I not tell what I am, I can’t even tell if I’ve changed from what I used to be.

So much for “I think, therefore I am.” In the moment that I am actually sitting around contemplating the fact of my thinking about my existence, my existence becomes reduced to exactly what it is—nothing. Like I said before, unless I have something outside of me acting upon me, as far as I can tell, I simply do not exist.

Now. If I want to know that I am, all I need to do is have contact with something different. In a physical sense, touching an ice cube tells me that the ice cube exists, and that I exist. It also tells me that the ice cube is cold, and that I am not. If you ever touch an ice cube and don’t notice anything, it may mean that you have the exact same characteristics as the ice cube—which would strongly imply that you were .

That covers it for the physical world. But what if all that’s an illusion? Well, it would have to be somebody else’s illusion. My self-delusions always work exactly the way I want them to. The minute things don’t work out the way I want, I’ve encountered reality. And I know, because it’s different from me. I can rest safely assured that the world is not an illusion, as long as nothing ever goes the way I want it to. Rejoice when you encounter all kinds of trials and afflictions, because when you do, you will know that it isn’t all for nothing. Isn’t it good to know that we don’t live in Nirvana, that state of perfect nothingness?

But what if I want to know who I am? Again, I have to have contact with something different. For instance, I know that I am a morning person, because I grew up with my sister. My sister is not a morning person. She’d rather sleep in till noon every day. But “morning person” is not a very complete description of who I am. If I was left to compare myself only with my sister, it would never even occur to me that I was a bookworm. She’s a bookworm. I’m a bookworm. So if that was all I knew, I would think that “bookworm” was “normal,” that is to say that, as far as my awareness of reality was concerned, that whole aspect of me simply would not exist.

Sounds simple enough. So who am I? I don’t know. I mean, I could tell you a few things, by comparison, but you’d never get an accurate picture from me. You can know who I am by experiencing me, but I can’t experience me, because I am me. I can learn a little bit about me by experiencing everybody else, but humanness is such a smudgy thing. You spend too much time with somebody and you start to become like them, especially in the areas that you were already like them anyway. People are too relative to get a good picture of who I am from them.

Imagine if I got up in the morning and tried to find out what I looked like by looking at my wife (ignore the fact that I don’t actually have a wife right now). I would come back, at best, with the information that I was hairy, had rough skin, and was generally not very pretty. An in-depth perusal might produce the insight that I have separated ear lobes and a narrow nose. What I need is an absolute basis for comparison—something so altogether unlike me that it would show me for what I am. So I get up and go to the mirror. A quick glance at the mirror tells me exactly what I am, down to the individual pores on my face. It can do this because it is flawless. It is absolutely perfect along two dimensions, so that whatever comes to it is reflected back exactly.

Of course, a mirror is only flawless in two dimensions. All attempts at a 3D mirror inevitably result in a flawed 2D mirror. Once you try to bend a mirror around, you get an inaccurate reflection. Is there anything in the world that can do the same for telling me who I am in every dimension? Wanna make a guess about what is out there that is completely different from me in every way, and absolutely flawless in every dimension? Let me give you a hint: His name is Yahewh.

The bible says that God is altogether holy. Holy means to be absolutely different, separate and distinct. This tells me that if I really want to know who I am, or even that I am, then I’m better off looking to God, than looking to my self or to some other person. Self-absorption tells me absolutely nothing, or worse yet, that I am nothing. Comparing with other people gives me an out of focus, and often ridiculously incomplete picture.

There have been a few times where I have really experienced the presence of God in my life, and every time my experience has been to say, “Whoa. That was different.” I honestly cannot be confident that I exist, let alone be certain of who I am and where I stand, except in comparison with the living God. Moreover, not only do I discover who I am, but also who I ought to be. Beyond even that, I discover that he has the ability to make me into what I ought to be. His holiness is as infectious as our fallibility.

I’m waxing poetic, but I need to back up just a little bit. Humanness is a very smudgy thing, and we become like whatever we behold. Which is kind of funky, because we can only know what we’re like by experiencing something different, but then as we experience it, it becomes less and less different. God is… pardon me… different. He’s not very smudgy. He simply is. Part of that, I think, is because he doesn’t behold. God doesn’t learn about me by experiencing me. He simply knows me. He’s already in me and on me and around me and through me. There’s no learning process for Him, because he’s already “well adjusted.” Because God is the origin of the graph, he doesn’t need to compare himself to us to know where he is. Where he is is the center of things. He is Father Son and Holy Spirit, like the x, y, and z planes of the graph and who knows how many other dimensions of him that we simply cannot fathom.

A good example is in Job. This man goes through all these truly awful experiences, and then his friends show up and say,

“Dude, what did you do?”

And Job says, “I didn’t do anything!”

And the friends say, “Aw, come on, man, it’s pretty clear you screwed up something, big time.”

And it goes on like that for some time, and vast confusion ensues. Everybody’s got a point, and they all sound good. Then God shows up. And do you know that God doesn’t answer even one of Job’s questions? He doesn’t even explain how Job or any of his friends got it right or wrong. Instead he goes through a great catalog designed to demonstrate how different He is from everybody else. Job’s response? “Oh.”

I know that you can do all things;

No plan of yours can be thwarted

You asked, “Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge”

Surely I spoke of things I did not understand

Things too wonderful for me to know.

You said, “Listen now and I will speak;

I will question you

And you shall answer me.”

My ears had heard of you

But now my eyes have seen you.

Therefore I despise myself

And repent in dust and ashes.

Everything is confusion, until we perceive God. When he shows up, by our very awareness of Him, he puts things in perspective.

We need God, for reference, for relevance, for basic sustenance, but He doesn’t need us. Instead, He loves, He exudes, He gives. The radiance of who He is is so powerful that, from our perspective, we almost can perceive it as a need—a need to give—and we will know that we have become like him when we have beheld him long enough that we no longer absorb his goodness, like so many miniature black holes, and have instead begun to reflect him. We won’t be like him because we will somehow be able to radiate our own goodness (he is different you know), but because we will be shining, like He is shining, with the same substance that he is shining with, like carefully arranged crystal, that makes the light seem that much brighter.

Everything hangs on Yahweh, and you will fade out of existence, unless you can put your whole focus on Him.