cogito, ergo sum

Reason.

Reason, it should be clear, is assisted by the conviction of the Holy Spirit. Some have renamed this side of the quadrilateral “Holy Spirit” altogether for this reason. The best metaphorical illustration I have heard of this spiritual usurpation of human reason is in John Donne’s “Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God,” (also called “Holy Sonnet XIV”) where he laments the weakness of human reason, and invites a divine invasion that will cause it to remain loyal to his best interests and those of God:

...I, like an usurped town, to another due,
labor to admit you, but oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

...Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you entrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The foremost argument I have to make about the role of reason in faith, much like any form of dedicated inquiry or exploration, reason must have time and the right circumstances to work things through. “Chewing” on a scriptural passage, as a metaphor for cogitation and meditation, helps me. Just as it is unlikely that my body can ever pull every ounce of nutrition from my food, it is unlikely that I will ever pull every last insight from a passage of Scripture, but will like a cow have to re-digest it over and over through several iterations. This is delightful to some, but others are frustrated by the process, and want the surety of a first-time, prefab interpretation that is recognized as “correct” by the majority of Christians. Worse, some who have had the benefit of their own, lengthy cogitations over Scripture insist that newcomers reach their own conclusions virtually overnight (as if their own digestive processes can provide the same enjoyment and nutrition to others) and even become offended if they are not immediately agreed with as experts on the subject. Usually, chewed-up food is only given to immature creatures by their parents, so it is not easy to see why this is offensive to someone just arriving at a passage in Scripture.

I sympathize, however, with the impulse for quick resolution; C.S. Lewis once wrote in his Mere Christianity that “questions were made for answers,” and I emphatically agree. I only know that the answers I learned to mark in my math classes were meaningless if I did not understand every step in the process, which sometimes took a long time to attain. I want to take the same approach with Scripture: if my solving an algebra equation required an understanding of various laws and theorems, and other conceptual tools developed by others to codify the process (even when there is often more than one way of arriving at the correct answer, and more than one way of annotating it), then the same is true in Scripture. I will give myself all the time in the world to wrestle with the particularly difficult passages, where God’s justice or mercy seem in question, where the views of the writers seem to cloud the message, where what’s being said seems inconsistent with my own encounters with the world. It is vital that I understand not only the context for each passage read, the finer points of the lenses through which we all read, and especially the shifting linguistic realities in which we all operate.

God deal with me as God will, but I cannot see the point in insisting that people read a certain translation of Scripture only, that people read so much every day, that people read in a specific order to become highly qualified interpreters of God’s word. This is partly due to my belief that, while literacy and language are vital and enriching to the human experience, they are not required for access to God. If they were, infants, autistics, coma patients, and animals alike would all be cut off from the experience of God. “If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love,” says Paul, “I am a banging gong, a clashing cymbal.” I have certainly met these kind of cacophonous individuals. Some of them just started reading the Bible recently. Others have been reading it faithfully for years. So the discipline of reading Scripture, as I understand it from the Church, is a vital and worthwhile one, but it can be conducted in diverse ways to suit different individuals, communities, times, and places. The condition of the reader’s heart is the determining factor in how effectively Scripture leads to right thinking and right relationship to God and others.

The disposition of one’s heart toward the word of God, in my understanding, has to do with both the presence of the Holy Spirit and a kind of epistemic humility. The two may ultimately be synonymous, for who can truly remain in the presence of God, fully aware of one’s own mortality and sin, without the intercession of Christ and the Holy Spirit? “Who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap...” Malachi’s question is always set for me in the music of Handel’s Messiah. The implicit concern is that this experience is too much for any one of us to bear, that the crushing weight of God’s holiness will leave everyone on our knees: as Isaiah says, “Our righteousness is like filthy rags,” insufficient to make us stand before God. Perhaps it is for this reason that God chose to manifest the gift of the Holy Spirit in “tongues of fire”--the Holy Spirit is a precursor who prepares us for the day of judgment, introducing God’s purifying fire in doses we can withstand, sanctifying us bit by bit in life to prepare us to face God’s fiery judgment.

Here, too, is a connection between the Holy Spirit and language: those who received the Holy Spirit spoke to onlookers in languages they previously didn’t know, “and each one heard them speaking in his own language.” Such experiences have largely evaded me, although I have attended communities where others received these gifts. Despite witnessing some disorderly and outright abusive attributions of this Acts passage, I remain open to the notion and the experience that the Holy Spirit “intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” For me, this has never been clearer than in times of grief and loss. Without words, without being able to name the overwhelming sadness or frustration, I know that the Spirit expresses what I cannot. Too, the Spirit recalls Scripture to mind, sometimes giving me illustrations or paraphrases that meet me in my disorienting postmodernity, to remind me to search out and reexamine a passage, to pass it on to someone else, or to meditate on it for my current situation. Often, while reading an enigmatic passage, the Spirit will clarify, in the moment or happening into my thoughts later, what seemed hidden in the text.

There have been times where the Holy Spirit prompted me to speak to someone I had never met, communicate with someone specific who I did know, or even seek out solitude. In many of these cases, I received the gratification of feeling these promptings confirmed by the person, or by my own spirit, based on information or connections learned as a result of obedience. Now, the Holy Spirit is harder to distinguish from my own suspect “conscience”: I have learned that people often claim to hear antithetical and even heretical messages from the “Holy Spirit,” and can even use it as a blanket excuse for the most egregious instances of group-think imaginable. When I think I have heard something from the Spirit, then, I test it against the other three sides of the quadrilateral--which can take some time--in order to discern whether my thoughts are really being reshaped in the image of God’s, or whether I am reshaping God’s thoughts in the image of mine. Underlying everything, I have the sense that “now we see through a glass dimly, but then face to face; I know in part, then I will know fully, even as I am fully known,” and this is both disconcerting and comforting. I must acknowledge what I do not yet know or understand--this is intellectual honesty as well as being totally vulnerable before God.

I expect that a similar disposition made it possible for scientists like Galileo, Newton, and Curie to pursue new understandings of the created world, even in the face of cultural and religious dogma that contradicted their findings. Using science as an example, then (we could easily explore the same reality in the arts or in politics), reason is what allows me to believe that the world operates according to God’s intentions--it may appear both random and orderly depending on our understanding of it, but his role as creator and sustainer underlie every predictable cycle, every surprising novelty. This conviction allows me to dismiss the classic animosity between science and religion as a false dichotomy, managing the tension by a willingness to either reconcile new information to the current theory, or to move with a paradigm shift when enough data does not fit. For this reason, Darwin and Genesis are currently not at odds for me. Since others have voiced this position far better, I will defer to the book, Biology Through the Eyes of Faith for further explanation. Suffice it to say, I don’t believe that regarding as metaphor the length of time God took to create Adam from the earth and breathe life into him negates the reality of God as creator, or humankind as bearers of the divine image. To say that perhaps the process took millions of years (as our instruments currently measure, though they can always err), takes nothing away from the Incarnation or the Resurrection, and these must be defended at all costs or the message of Christ is pointless, as Paul asserts in his first letter to the Corinthians.

Of course, there are others who feel that finding our ancestry among apes diminishes their understanding of the imago dei, the Incarnation and Resurrection. I submit that these differences are due to our understandings of what the divine image is (does it consist in four limbs, two eyes, a hairless body, intelligence, language, or something else--the ability and accountability to discern good and evil?) and also of Christ’s humanity (did he just appear to be human, or did he really suffer as we do, relish a good wine, or feel the fight-or-flight adrenaline rush when people came to arrest him in the garden?). These debates go all the way back to the early church, and while I am sometimes eager to debate them, I am also content to say that often believers will have to agree to disagree: we are seeing different sides of what is essentially a mystery. Now I know in part, then shall I know fully, even as I am fully known.