A
AlanFromWichita
Guest
Matt 11:25:
At that time Jesus said in reply, “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.
Here’s one mechanism by which God hides wisdom from the wise and learned, and opens it to the childlike. This came to me a little while ago while I was reading a book on mystical theology.
Academia has an approach to complicated subjects (the “calculus” approach) by which they break it down into tiny pieces which are simple enough to analyze, then fit the pieces together like an intellectual jigsaw puzzle.
But here’s the problem. The Word is holistic. You cannot understand one part without reference to all of the others. If we tried to discuss or analyze the Bible, we must necessarily take off a bite of it. So we say, “this passage means this,” and “that passage means that” and then we try to put them together like a quilt or something. The problem is, few people have a realistic concept of the Word as a whole, so when looking at the pieces it is hard to figure out where in the Body of Christ to “position” them.
Worse is that we will find conflicts which from my observation are either denied or ignored most of the time, or very complex explanations are designed to try to sew together two pieces that on the surface don’t seem to match. So it’s more of a tangled web than a quilt by the time we get done trying to figure it out.
Consider an example from science/medicine. Let’s say we were researching body parts, but we never actually saw a whole living body for some reason. All we saw was a table full of parts. We might pick up the nose and say, “this weighs X amount. It is Y color. Topologically there are two holes in it. If we let it sit at room temperature it will begin to smell after a few days. It’s made of these chemicals. There is one of them in each body.” Same with the ear. “It has one hole in it, it has a rounded shape, there are two per body, etc.” Next, the brain, same sort of analysis. All three of these things seem to have the function of paperweights.
Now, imagine putting all the pieces together, without ever having seen them together. Since we’ve never analyzed an actual live body (remember we’ve only been able to examine parts) it wouldn’t even occur to us that the nose smells and the ears hear, as witnessed by the brain. That’s because we can’t take a bunch of disparate parts, slap them together, and come up with a living human being. We’d just have a heap of body parts.
Similarly, we can’t go out and analyze this passage and this chapter of the Word, exact meaning from each part, throw them together, and think we’re going to construct a Living God.
Now if someone who has seen a living human being walks in and says, “the nose smells things, the ears hear things, and the brain understands their messages,” we would say “what? We have three paperweights here and you’re talking about smell. Well they do smell if they set a while.” We think that person is being absurd, that person thinks we’re blind and stupid.
This seems to me to be a very important aspect of what Jesus was talking about in Matt 11:25.
To keep this post from being longer, I’ll let it end here. I have some supporting material I’ll unfold in the next post.
Alan
At that time Jesus said in reply, “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.
Here’s one mechanism by which God hides wisdom from the wise and learned, and opens it to the childlike. This came to me a little while ago while I was reading a book on mystical theology.
Academia has an approach to complicated subjects (the “calculus” approach) by which they break it down into tiny pieces which are simple enough to analyze, then fit the pieces together like an intellectual jigsaw puzzle.
But here’s the problem. The Word is holistic. You cannot understand one part without reference to all of the others. If we tried to discuss or analyze the Bible, we must necessarily take off a bite of it. So we say, “this passage means this,” and “that passage means that” and then we try to put them together like a quilt or something. The problem is, few people have a realistic concept of the Word as a whole, so when looking at the pieces it is hard to figure out where in the Body of Christ to “position” them.
Worse is that we will find conflicts which from my observation are either denied or ignored most of the time, or very complex explanations are designed to try to sew together two pieces that on the surface don’t seem to match. So it’s more of a tangled web than a quilt by the time we get done trying to figure it out.
Consider an example from science/medicine. Let’s say we were researching body parts, but we never actually saw a whole living body for some reason. All we saw was a table full of parts. We might pick up the nose and say, “this weighs X amount. It is Y color. Topologically there are two holes in it. If we let it sit at room temperature it will begin to smell after a few days. It’s made of these chemicals. There is one of them in each body.” Same with the ear. “It has one hole in it, it has a rounded shape, there are two per body, etc.” Next, the brain, same sort of analysis. All three of these things seem to have the function of paperweights.
Now, imagine putting all the pieces together, without ever having seen them together. Since we’ve never analyzed an actual live body (remember we’ve only been able to examine parts) it wouldn’t even occur to us that the nose smells and the ears hear, as witnessed by the brain. That’s because we can’t take a bunch of disparate parts, slap them together, and come up with a living human being. We’d just have a heap of body parts.
Similarly, we can’t go out and analyze this passage and this chapter of the Word, exact meaning from each part, throw them together, and think we’re going to construct a Living God.
Now if someone who has seen a living human being walks in and says, “the nose smells things, the ears hear things, and the brain understands their messages,” we would say “what? We have three paperweights here and you’re talking about smell. Well they do smell if they set a while.” We think that person is being absurd, that person thinks we’re blind and stupid.
This seems to me to be a very important aspect of what Jesus was talking about in Matt 11:25.
To keep this post from being longer, I’ll let it end here. I have some supporting material I’ll unfold in the next post.
Alan
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