Back to the Book

Pages 63 - 74

Belief -  In Who Do I Put My Trust

I have come back to following the book chronologically.   I think I had trouble with the whole "Technical Thinking" thing because it touches so close to home.  It is the flaw of my time.  Although many people who  seem intelligent have grabbed hold of this thinking and pursue it to death, there are cracks in the philosophy and they are showing.

The flaw is not so much in the idea of technical thinking, but in the idea that such thinking holds the answer to "What is Truth?"  Do you "believe in" that which man creates or in that which God reveals? And before you answer, do you understand the question?

To understand means that you answer this question from the position of standing on the foundation.  That there is nothing deeper or broader or firmer than that upon which you stand. Personally I cannot wake up and look out at the world we live in and trust that mankind will make something better than this. Possible because of the obvious, mankind has only the materials provided by his environment through which to work. This does not mean that it is not a worthy pursuit to learn about this world and to create from this world much that benefits man.  However, belief is a separate pursuit. Knowing about molecules and how to build a replacement body part from them is a separate thought process from the one that decides who gets the body part, or indeed who sacrifices the cells necessary for the construction of said body part. That decision is based on belief, always, in every circumstance, it is based on belief. Belief is not an "incomplete kind of knowledge" that must be converted into practical knowledge, but a separate "intellectual attitude" which cannot be traced back to practical knowledge, but which stands beside it forming the bases of our decisions. 

(Therefore run from those who state that belief is faulty logic.  They do not even understand their own thought process. But through denying the importance of belief they have placed their own trust in the ancient lie, the one revealed in the beginning, that knowledge, rather it be of good or evil, will make them gods. If you think I am off base or reacting in the extreme, remember that Marxism is about the manipulating of man by his own planning with the foreseeable future of being "god."  We now have a Marxist president, known through his agenda which embraces these ideas. Yet he is a man of his time, and many have bought into this agenda and think it smart. Forgive me if I have gotten preachy.  This is the problem I foresaw with this section.  Thankfully, the next section moves back into the beauty of the beloved, of understanding God's revealed purpose for man, and expanding upon the concept of "understanding.") 

Page 186 and the thoughts it brought to me

In this section Benedict is talking about the Triune God.  I just pick the book up and started where it opened.  I did not get any further than that one page.

Benedict is in the midst of making the point that although Jesus states that "The Son can do nothing of his own accord." he also states that "I and the Father are one."  I have heard certain churches quote this first verse as meaning that Jesus was less than the Father, however when you connect it to the second verse you find that they compliment or finish one another.  The Son does nothing of his own accord because he is one with the Father.

This is important for me because Jesus also tells us that, "Apart from me you can do nothing."  And if we are in him than we too are connected to the Father.  Jesus prays , "that they (those who belong to him) may be one even as we are one." ( Jesus the Son and God the Father)

This teaching has always been hard for me, but making this connection has made things more clear. Because if Jesus is one with the Father, then there is a loss of his "I" of , his "me", of his "mine".  I am reminded of another teaching, "You must die to yourself before you have life in you".  For me, these ideas are difficult to think about, much less to actualize.  I fear the loss of my "self."  I have always believed that God created me as an individual because my individuality is important to him. But just as God the Father and God the Son are two persons, so are we invited to be Jane the Christian and Pope Benedict the Christian, two individuals and yet one in Christ and therefore in the Father.

Maybe this is easier for the Catholic mind that grew up recognizing the Church of God as a physical reality, a presence in the world whose unity of thought and belief fleshes out a "body" with Christ as its head.  But I grew up with the Protestant faith. With this great idea that the Holy Spirit will help me "interpret the scriptures"  an idea that has lead to anything but unity. I think I can see why, because this idea is founded on "me", "mine", "I".  A position that even Jesus, the Christ was unwilling to take.

When I read the scriptures now, I ask "what does the church have to say about this?"  Funny thing, verses that the protestants skip over as mysterious and therefore unknowable this side of heaven, become clear and the whole begins to open up.  And as it opens up, it also draws me deeper. I am realizing that there is no part of the me in myself that I would not give up in order to find this unity to which Christians are called.

Somewhere Around page 200

Okay, so I have ditched my intention of reading the book straight through.  But I can highly recommend pages 198 -206 to anyone, especially anyone with an atheist in their life that they want to reach out to.

4 B. The Turn Toward Technical Thinking

The development of Technical Thinking has once again redefined the philosophic answer to what man can understand as truth. Since man cannot know God in the sense of putting him in a laboratory and proving his existence, indeed man cannot even understand totally all the facts of his present moment much less interpret the historical actions and reactions of which he has taken part, we come to this: attempting to know what we can create from the now into the future. Philosophically we have moved through seeking truth in the invisible to the allowing only what is visible, from searching the cause and effect of history in order to understand the now to find ourselves imagining that we can understand the future because it will be our creation.  We are called to make for ourselves our own truths, indeed, the world is to become what we imagine.  We see this already in that evolution has fallen into the past to be replaced in importance by the science of cybernetics or our ability to "plan" the new man. ( A pretty scary set of circumstances. By turning in on ourselves our view of Truth becomes smaller. Surly someone is noticing that the more we learn the less we know?)

Section 4 A: The Boundary of the Modern Understanding of Reality and the Place of Belief

Pages 57 -63 

The modern age sees the development of these two thought processes.  Descartes moves us toward pure fact or mathematics, and Vico’s thoughts move toward an exploration of cause and effect or the study of history.  Mathematics and History come to dominate science and History in particular devours the whole field of learning, transforming it fundamentally. Through Hegel and Comte, philosophy becomes a historical question "in which being itself is to be understood as a historical process."  F.C. Baur turns theology into a rigorous search for proof to be found in history and Marx gives economics a historical slant.  Darwin’s classification of living beings is a history of life in which all things descend from one another.

As this movement expands we find that speculation on the metaphysical mind of God as revealed in our being has been replaced with the pursuit of facts which add up to our being as just another fact in the development of the history of all life. 

FACTS:

Here we hit the rube; we can’t know all the facts.  And so we come to the development of Technology.  Here at last we come to the pursuit of truth being centered on the future and action.

Section 3: The Dilima of Belief in the World Today

Pages: 52-57

So what stands in the way of modern man’s belief in the invisible?  For one thing the value man once placed in tradition has been transferred to progress.  The importance of faith has been relegated to the past.  We are a people who look to the future and therefore worship progress. 

When we look into the past we find the Christian scandal. That God became man and therefore what is invisible became visible.  By revealing Himself to man through flesh and blood, God enters a point – history- and history can be relegated to the past.  This gap between then and now is added to the leap of faith which carries us from the visible into the invisible.

And we murdered Christ. This same power of man to put a supposed end to the Lord of the Universe is at work today when we rewrite the traditions of faith in order to mesh with the ideals of progress.

But how did even men of faith come to the place where they would take this power upon themselves?  To start we can trace the development of man’s attitudes toward reality from the magical, the metaphysical, and finally to the scientific.

In the medieval mind and before, God was thought of as pure intellect.  All being came from the thought of God and therefore all being is meaningful, logos, the truth.  Truth permeates and governs man and matter. 

The “Age of Enlightenment” saw the beginning of scientific thought.  Philosophers took this method of exploring the natural world and expanded it to encompass a whole new way for man to understand reality.  Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) began the modern movement with a radical idea that man can only completely know what he has made himself.  This is developed further by Descartes who ascertains that we cannot even fully know what human hands have made, because it is lost in the past.  Therefore reality consists only of the present facts.  (And since any individual man can only know a limited set of facts for any given situation, what man knows shrinks from the possibility of encountering the eternal to a reality that encompasses only what he can ascertain through his senses.) Parenthesis contains my own thoughts.

Chapter One: Belief in the World Today

Section One: Doubt and Belief  

Section Two: The Origin of Belief

Pages 39 - 52

I believe:  A personal I must through an act of will turn from what can merely be touched or seen and seek that which cannot be seen, God.  And since my tendency as a human is to seek what can be touched or seen, I must make this decision daily to turn to the unseen.  To do this is a leap, an act of faith, it requires belief that there is some other to turn toward, but in so doing, my world expands. I enter into an existence that deepens and broadens beyond sight or touch, indeed I enter into reality and leave the illusion of the material behind. This turning from the material to the invisible is conversion and I must be converted daily because my propensity is toward that which I can touch and see.

Why must I then be converted?  Why does conversion make me more human, when to become so requires an act of faith?  Because I can do so.  Because this seeking of what is beyond with eyes of faith is an essential human act and to do less is to be less than human.