AS FAR AS I CAN SEE

Of all the many exercises of distinctively human intelligence, the one unfettered to reality is story-telling. Amassing a fortune, attaining influence, traveling in space, building a house, having a successful marriage, or any of the other infinite variety of distinctively human things we do are very largely bound in many ways to reality, to how the world actually is. Great intelligence is poured into sending a rocket into space, but that intelligence is largely engaged in testing the actual tensile strength of actual materials, the actual amount of thrust provided by actual fuel mixtures, the fixed mathematics of geometry, and so on. The application of intelligence to space travel is strongly fettered to and by reality. And similarly for almost all other exercises of the great human distinction of being intelligent.

Storytelling is the exception, because it does not wield or shape or employ material provided to it, as do the other embodiments of intelligence. Neither does it conquer, polish, or cherish reality, nor is it frustrated or destroyed by it. Uniquely among the human gifts, it floats far above reality, less bound by it than the moon is by a butterfly’s gravity.

If we are careful not to lead ourselves astray by saying so, we may say that storytelling creates its own separate reality, what we might (carefully) call a fictional reality.

The activity itself is as mysterious as it is unique, and it is fundamental to all the special pleasures of human intelligence. There is nothing recognizably human that does not tell stories. What manifests in us in storytelling is pure creation and as such, were there no God, would exhaust divinity in the universe.

But as great as is its distinction, equally so is the danger it poses. The danger is that we are very prone to confuse fictional with actual reality. No end of human tragedy, both intimate and civilizational, results from that confusion. Nations tell themselves stories about war, and come to believe war itself is tolerable.  Individuals tell themselves stories about loyalty, and are devastated by betrayal. Christ’s frustration with His disciples was almost always because they confused their human fictions with their human reality.

The avoidance of such tragedy, to the degree it can be avoided, lies in recognizing what is fictional and what is real. That doesn’t negate the callousness of the real, but it does prepare us for it. It is the Way at the heart of Stoicism, the highest purely human philosophy.

But the Son of God brought us a higher philosophy.

We have spoken of reality and fictional reality, but there is another: the reality of God. We may call it spiritual reality, though we must not think we thereby understand what that means.

Until the Son of God became flesh, there was no way of knowing the reality of God in any way, at any level. There were stories about gods as there were stories about demons and sirens and talking serpents and turtles holding up the creation. But they were simply stories, more or less pleasurable exercises of this amazing human capacity, and the tragedies they occasioned were of a kind with the others, the tragedies of taking the fictional for the real.

The Son of God came to tell us about this other thing, God’s reality, and to tell us something about that reality. He came, not as a story teller, but as a reporter. I speak what I have seen with my Father… He used stories to tell us about God and God’s reality because we have no better vocabulary to communicate such things, but that does not mean He was telling stories in the way we’ve been describing.

He described a reality that in some sense lies under and supports and is prior to our reality, one which functions in certain ways and imposes certain responsibilities, offers certain incentives. These are the great revelations of the Word, offered to us for prayerful meditation.

Our privilege as Christians is to receive the Word of that reality; our great opportunity is to explore it, to open our eyes to it. But our great danger, as before, is that we begin to tell stories about it, stories of our own invention, and that we confuse those stories with a spiritual reality  that is almost certainly far less comfortable than our stories about it would imply, that we confuse them with the reality of God, who is a consuming fire.

When Jesus said that He himself was the truth, he was, among other things, warning us of the danger posed, not by lies, but by stories.

The three pillars of our relationship with God are faith, love and obedience, but what these words represent in the New Testament is very different from what they represent in our ordinary ways of thinking and speaking.  Much that is misguided in religious thought arises from a mistaken assumption that meaning is exhausted by language, when the truth is that language only occupies a small region of meaning.

Thus God’s love is something very different from human love. And the problem is not removed by substituting a word from an older language than English, and saying something like “God’s love is agape love.”  That only substitutes an older inadequacy for a younger.

We learn about the pillars of our relationship with God, not by focusing on the ‘meaning’ or nature of human love, faith, and obedience, but by focusing on Jesus, who is God’s meaning, the Word, made flesh.

If we do that, we begin to learn, for example, that Christian obedience is filled with faith, that Christian faith is filled with love, and that Christian love is filled with obedience.  (John 15: 10)

We cannot reason or think our way out of true spiritual doubt, because we do not  think or reason our way into it. There are a few mental states we can and do arrive at through a so-called rational process – ‘proving’ is another name for the process – but these mental conditions are few and, outside of the lecture hall, relatively unimportant aspects of the lives of virtually everyone.

The beliefs that matter to people, that is, that give direction to their emotions and energy, we sometimes refer to as convictions, and we may be convicted to doubt as well as affirmation. Convictions as so understood are almost entirely due to processes that are not rational in this strict sense. They find their genesis in environmental influences, peer pressure, genetic proclivities, and so on. Our political convictions are not birthed by our logic, although, once birthed, the various mental filters that define our ‘politics’ do most certainly guide the application of whatever forms of intelligence we possess. Our ethics, our taste, virtually all the important motivational elements congregated under the umbrella ‘personality’ arise from unknown depths and enlist our native cleverness into their service.

The same is true of our religion, understood as out spiritual convictions (including our doubts). Two people of equal intellect can look at the same tragic elements of human life. One sees them as confirmation of a belief in atheism; the other as elements to be incorporated into a trust in God. Both can argue eloquently in defense of their points of view, but simple observation reveals that no one has even been debated into convicted belief or disbelief in Christ, though many come to Christ and many fall away.

Is this an argument against evangelism? Not in general, but it helps us to understand why Paul avoided “lofty speech.” He had come to see that the infection of Christ passes, by the power and grace of the risen Christ alone, from spirit to spirit, and not from intellect to intellect.

These are three figurative ways of referring to the elements of  human life that resist and oppose the accomplishment of God’s purpose for each of us. The first figures the seductions of the social milieu within which we find ourselves. The second figures the seductions of the animal appetites. And the third, the devil, personifies the most venomous seductions of all, those deriving from self-consciousness, and the prideful desire for self-sufficiency it entails.

The parable of the sower and the seed illustrates each of these: the thorns of the world; the energetic superficiality of animal desire; the intransigence of self-esteem.

The parable of the temptations in the wilderness focuses entirely on the third, because it is the stronghold – the strong man’s house – that shelters all the rest.

Human forgiveness and divine forgiveness are not the same. Human forgiveness accomplishes the improvement of the one doing the forgiving, regardless of its effect on the other. When I forgive my neighbor, a wound is healed in my spirit, even though my neighbor remain oblivious.

Divine forgiveness is different.  God’s forgiveness accomplishes the improvement of the one being forgiven, even if the one being forgiven remains oblivious.  God’s ways are not our ways, and our language so often obscures that reality.

Divine forgiveness is an ongoing blessing, a constant availability of God’s ministration, of the application to the individual of God’s loving concern for the condition of his or her spirit. Human forgiveness is the means of opening oneself to that ministration. The only means.

When we forgive, God’s love can bathe our spiritual wounds, whether self-inflicted or circumstantial. This does not make God’s love conditional on our behavior, it makes the agency of God’s love conditional on our attitude towards others. Jesus makes this point over and over.

The sin that’s unforgivable (in God’s reality), is being unforgiving (in our reality), that is, being unavailable to God’s ministration.

Doing something to or for the glory of God does not add anything to God, because God’s glory isn’t something like a bank account, not something that can be increased or diminished. It is not a possession at all, in the sense that a person might possess a house. God could not set aside or dispose of His glory, any more that a beautiful painting could set aside its beauty.

But if to do something for God’s glory is not to add anything to God, then what is it?

When we are encouraged to act for the glory of God, it is we who are the object of concern, not God, the variable in the equation is the state of our own mindful spirit.

When a child does something admirable, her mother’s love and concern and effort in raising the child are validated, are brought to their intended and longed-for realization. It does not add anything to the mother, it is the fair fruition of her parentage, and so to her glory.

The acorn is the glory of the oak.

When we are speaking seriously of attributes of character, we must necessarily enter into the realm of subjectivity. What makes an action generous is unique to the actor much more than the act. The widow’s mite is generous in a way the lavish donations of the rich Pharisees aren’t.

And what is true of generosity is true of many other attributes as well; courage, for example, can be manifested in something as simple as crossing a street; kindness in withdrawing from all society; commitment in fleeing from responsibility. The complexities involved in the attribution of character to specific, real individuals are the material for novels, not flippant judgment.

The same is true of sin, of being sinful, in the Christian sense. From the world’s point of view, sin refers to various violations of one moral/religious code or another. These all establish lists of or criteria for prohibitions, and sin consists in defying the prohibitions; and they are all general in the sense that anyone who violates the prohibitions is ipso facto sinning, is a sinner.

But from the Christian point of view, sin refers to one thing only, and it is something utterly unique to the individual. My sin is very different from your sin; it is not even possible for you to commit my sin.

Sin from a Christian point of view is anything that runs counter to the achievement of the special revelation of Himself that God entrusts to each individual. That’s why a murderer may be less sinful, from God’s point of view, than a worldly saint.

That’s why tax collectors and prostitutes may lead the parade into heaven. (Matthew 21: 31)

Paul refers to Jesus as the second Adam. Whether Paul believed in a literal first Adam, I cannot say. I can say that I do not believe in a literal Adam, and yet I think Paul was speaking to spiritual reality.

The basic Jewish perception was that God can have a special relationship with a people, a relationship that stretches over time. In their understanding, the people, of course, were the Jews, those who supposedly shared a common historical ancestry in Abraham. And the relationship was one of mutual agreement, what the Jews called a covenant.

The problem is that ‘nations’ are a legal fiction, and so cannot enter into relationships or agreements. Only actual, breathing individuals can do that. And so the pressure of their need to believe in such a relationship required the thought of representative figures. God makes agreements with actual men, but since those men are representative figures, the relationship actually exists between God and those the various men represent. Thus the Davidic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant. The Jews required the thought of representative figures to realize their intuition of a relationship between God and a community, over time.

This concept of representative figures enabled the Christian thought of Original Sin. Had there been someone who was representative of all of humankind, then the sin of that individual would be morally binding on everyone, just as the Mosaic covenant had legally bound all Jews.

The story of Genesis provided just such an individual, and the intellectual framework of early Christianity incorporated that opportunity.

Because I do not believe in a literal Adam, I do not believe in Original Sin as it is normally portrayed. But I do believe the creation of God’s children out of material stuff posed a difficulty that could only be overcome by a spiritual process that, in human terms, we can, because we have no better way of conceptualizing it, describe as requiring a representative figure. In this necessarily inadequate human way of speaking and thinking, the glorification of Jesus was the enduement on Him of the status of representative figure for all of God’s children.

Or as Paul, given his world, could imagine it: a second Adam.

Christian conversion means the coming to conscious acceptance of the claim of Jesus Christ on one’s life. In my own case, this acceptance was a very slow and gradual process, more like drifting in and out of sleep, rehashing dreams, making coffee in a grouchy mood, and so on.

But there are many reports from reliable Christian writers of such an experience having the phenomenology of an abrupt awakening to a new way of seeing the world. I am not referring here to the far more numerous examples of ecstatic ‘coming to Christ’ in settings where the reaction is more likely due to mass hypnotic suggestion. There are presumably a percentage of these that are genuine conversions, but I suspect the percentage is small. I’m referring to those cases where, without tribal psychological pressures, the converts report some experience like suddenly seeing the light or the scales falling from my eyes, or something else along those lines. And I would like to say three things about that kind of experience.

The first is that there is no way of gauging how common it is. The reports we hear about are almost entirely from people who recorded it in writing – so, for example, C. S. Lewis, Martin Luther, Charles Spurgeon, Saint Paul – but these are perforce the ones we would know of, by virtue of the public histories of those who underwent them. Left unreported are those whose lives are conducted away from the public eye, and they are presumably a good deal more numerous than the famous few.

But second, whether a matter of public record or not, such transcendent moments are themselves the fruit of prior and deeper processes. Jesus makes this quite clear in the parable of the seed growing quietly and under God’s nourishment, before thrusting itself above ground. We must remember that Jesus was not a soothsayer, foretelling how worldly events will transpire. His audience is always one person. His audience is always and only you.

And so, last, the moment attested to by these good witnesses of wrenching personal transformation was only one step in their own conversions, preceded and followed by many others. Had their lives not continued with additional steps in the same direction, these dramatic moments would never have acquired any public significance. It was because he posted the ninety-five theses that we are particularly interested in how the lightning strike affected Luther. And the lightning strike only affected him then, there, because of the many steps of conversion that had preceded it.

The reality is that Christian conversion begins the moment human life begins, and lasts as long as human life lasts.

That is to say, conversion never ends.

Thinking highly of oneself isn’t pride, it’s vanity. Pride is thinking critically of others, in comparison to oneself. That’s why pride is so often unaware of itself, and only revealed in our attitude towards others.

Implicit in every judgment is an element of pride, because judgment necessarily assumes a position of elevation over the one being judged. Those whose fundamental attitude towards the world is judgmental are riddled through and through with pride…though very few are fully innocent here, and they are mainly regarded as fools. The fact that pride is principally other-directed is why even those of little achievement can be prideful; malignant pride is in fact perhaps nowhere more common.

Pride is the Original Sin, and it is an inheritance, not of genetics, but of self-consciousness, an awareness of separation from others, from the world, and from God, along with the pain of that separation. Pride is the flower of that pain.

There is no worldly escape from it; the myriad of attempts to do so are the text both of the human comedy and the human tragedy. It is an existential dilemma, a Catch-22: Would you be human, then must you be self-conscious, with the fear and the camouflages of fear that self-consciousness entails. Hell is our starting point, not our destination.

The only solution to the dilemma is to shed self-consciousness. When Jesus tells us that we can’t even see the Kingdom until we become (again) like children, that’s what He’s talking about. When He speaks of regaining our family through following Him, that’s what He’s talking about. When He speaks of the greatest love being loss of one’s own life, that’s what He’s talking about.  When He tells us we must be born from above, that’s what He’s talking about.  It would contain part of His Truth to say, that’s what He’s always talking about, to us.

The long and winding road back to childhood is the Way of Christ.