Lent Day 35

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Begin 

Silence, Stillness, and Centering before God (2 minutes)  


Scripture Reading

“But, strange as it seems, we Christians actually do have within us a portion of the very thoughts and mind of Christ.”                                                      1 Corinthians 2:16 (TLB)

Devotional     

 Is There  More than One Way to Know something?  Part 1
Tuesday, March 24, 2015

How does anyone know anything?”   

The baby in the picture has adopted a taste based epistemology (a way to know something)!    

Historians have called the 1700’s the period of the “Enlightenment”, when influential European thinkers such as Renee Descartes, Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Feuerbach adopted reason based,  scientific, empirical knowledge as the “gold standard” for how we can know anything to be true.  Since that time even much of European and American Christianity has adopted this view of how to know things.  

This is evident at Easter when most Easter sermons teach the resurrection as an epistemology, that is as a “proof”, as the primary way to know that Christianity is true.    I have done myself so many occasions.   Easter gets reduced to a proof of the veracity of Christianity.  

In the last few years there have been many public debates, now viewable on YouTube, between Christian apologists and the “new atheists” and the debates are almost always along the lines of reason, proofs, scientific evidence, logic, reason and the accuracy of historical records.   It seems to me, however, that our brightest and best Christian apologists are tacitly ceding the argument for Christianity in favor of their opponents by inadvertently debating on the epistemological turf (reason, science, proofs, physical and historical evidence) of their opponents.   But this is not the only turf on which the game can be played.   In fact it may not be the best turf at all.  

There is more than one way to know something! 

There is an epistemology of love, where I learn what is true only in a relationship of mutuality and self-giving love with another person.  In giving myself away in this way I have entered a realm of existence which is God’s realm.  There I can know things that the mind cannot conceive (1 Cor. 2:9).  In mutual self-giving and dependence I have entered into the “Divine Dance” of God’s world.  Just as Father Son and Holy Spirit are in a continual self-giving relationship, so also the entire cosmos as well (obviously since it is God created and God reflective), right down to and especially to the world of strings and quarks.  

There is an epistemology of beauty.   Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. That would be the view of Descartes and Feuerbach.  Beauty is a thing in and of itself into which we enter by invitation and when it captures us we are changed.   We’ve experienced something “out there” which beckons us and works on us and transforms our tastes, indeed works to conform them to the beauty which existed before the foundation of the world and which now breaks through into our broken worlds.  

There is an epistemology of suffering.   When I lose my life I find it.   Only those who are humbled and suffer and actually release themselves to God can ever know the deep treasures and mysteries of the real world which exists beyond all of our wantings and demands and cries of entitlement.  Paul wrote of knowing the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, not in a martyrdom kind of way, but in the only way that Jesus said we could ever truly know anything, that is, when I Iose all things for his sake I then gain all things.   

There are also the epistemologies of imagination, yearning, and incompleteness.   To those I will turn tomorrow.

Question to Consider

How have you come to know the most important things in your life?  Was it through empirically tested rational processes?  Or some other way?

Prayer

"Lord, I wonder if I can know anything about the real without you revealing it to me.  Forgive me for trying to know you by way of my narrow and incomplete ways of knowing, which inevitably put You into a box of my own making.  Help me Lord to meet you on your terms, not mine.  In the name of Jesus Christ, through whom You have revealed yourself to the world.  Amen."

Conclude with Silence   (2 minutes)

 
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