The Whole of the Parts....My Final Paper

OK, though I hesitate to post this in the middle of the wonderful conversation regarding the "Ministers in Skirts" article (especially as it is just starting to get back on track), here is the paper I wrote as my final in my epistemology class. The first third or so summarizes the main points of the previous papers, but I think it is helpful to see it all together as you get more of a lived feel for the thing. Be forewarned, patience is required as the paper is long, but I trust it will be worth the time and effort (at least I hope so!). And PLEASE let me know what you think. Conversation is critical to learning (and I admittedly have so much more to learn), as it allows me to share in your experiences and see things from view points and perspectives that I may have never considered, or even known existed, on my own. Also, please don't take this as me putting an end to the other post! If you have nothing more to say, that's one thing, but don't stop just because a new post has been put up.

Here goes....

As a new recruit in the Armed Forces, I was quite surprised to see how much down time I had while in boot camp. Notice I didn’t call it “free” time, for it was anything but that. The majority of this time was spent standing statue still, board straight, and silent in rigid confines of platoon formation. Fortunately, my place in the ranks was in the middle of the third row of the ranks, so I at least had something to stare at, even if it was the back of the soldier in front of me. As I stood there one afternoon, I found that the two sides of my brain found a happy union in an activity that was both useful in the scope of my being a soldier, and liberating in the exercise of my creative ability. This activity was pattern recognition. As I stood there, gazing into the splotches and splashes of drab earth tones on the uniform of the soldier in front of me, I began to make pictures and recognize shapes and give them names, much, I would imagine, like ancient astronomers saw pictures and form constellations in the stars. It was not long before this activity began to produce notable results. I could look at various soldiers, fix on a shape on their blouse or field jacket, and be able to predict the placement of another shape based on the location of the first. One of these was more recognizable than the others: I called it the rabbit.
Some years later, long after I had graduated from boot camp, after I had finished my service in the military, I was reunited with the rabbit on a most unanticipated occasion. I, along with a group of my friends, was engaged in one of our most enjoyed pastimes, the game of paint ball. There we were, about 15 grown men, decked out in camouflage, running around the woods with guns that shot gelatinous balls of paint, looking to get the other guy before he got us. It was wonderful. In this particular melee, I found myself crawling along the forest floor, as low as I could get to the ground, in order to avoid detection by the other team while making a stealthy maneuver into enemy territory. I had stopped for a moment to wait for a stiff breeze to blow, or for a volley of gun fire to break out somewhere in the distance in order to mask the sound of my movement, and used the time to reassess my current course of movement. I slowly lifted my head to a level above the forest floor where I could see through the tops of the reeds I was using for concealment, and scanned the woods in front of me. All seemed clear. I was confident in my plan of attack until, about 30 feet in the distance, I happened to see a familiar shape. The Rabbit. I was astonished. I pulled my focus back from the rabbit and saw the uniformed opponent that it rested on. I pulled my focus back further and saw the two, then three, then four other players that were accompanying him. In a matter of moments, the world around me changed from a quiet patch of woods near a quaint stream to a tactical kill zone. Seeing the immediate danger that lay before me, I was forced to change my strategy. The Rabbit in the bushes warned me of the danger of the woods. It served as a clue to the pattern of a whole. That whole caused me to rediscover the true nature of my environment, and called me to action.
Knowing starts with picking out clues. These clues, or parts, are all around us, in things, processes, events, sense perceptions, etc. As we gather these clues, we consider their relationship to each other and put them together (when the pieces fit) and form patterns from them. When we come to see those patterns, or the whole of the parts, we submit to them and contact the world around us through them. Through the parts, we come to know the whole and react accordingly. But the process continues. These new found wholes in turn may be found to parts of a larger whole. The more we know, the more we are able to know, and so knowing is shown to be a process. However, when taken at face value, it would seem that knowing goes on forever: parts to a whole, which become parts to a whole, etc. etc. etc. But this would seem to make knowing futile. If the process of knowing never results in a culmination of things known, can it be rightly said that we know anything? After all, pieces need a whole, or they are not truly pieces.
But what kind of whole can all the knowing in our lives point to? What is the ultimate culmination of our knowing? It must be something does not attend to anything higher than itself, but rather affirms the parts that lead up to it. I see this whole as God.
God alone claims to be the creator of all things; man, animals, nature, space, time, etc. As we read the scriptures, we see that God, as creator, has initiated a covenant with His creation. In this covenant, He is the ultimate authority, the sovereign Lord over the entire cosmos which in turn speaks of Him in not only its form, but also in its function and purpose. When this is applied to the process of knowing, with God being the culmination of the process, we see a circle. God reveals Himself to us through His creation. We then can see God more clearly, which enables us to go back and see the clues for what they truly are: His covenant creation. Just as seeing the rabbit allowed me to see the enemy in the woods, God’s revelation opens us up to further revelation. And as those further revelations in His creation mesh together with other revelations, we see more of God, and so the process goes on with purpose. That purpose is to know God and enjoy forever the blessings of the covenant that we as His creation find ourselves in.
So what now? What does this knowing require of us? What bearing does the revelation of God Himself to our humanity have on our being human? This is a necessary question; Knowledge is pointless unless it somehow changes us. After all, it either adds to or changes our mind, which is intrinsically connected to the whole of our being as it is one with our body and spirit. How can only a part of a whole be changed when that part is inseparable from the rest? Either the whole is changed or none of it is changed. This is where knowing gets scary. The terrible price of knowing is that it calls us to action. It forces us to live out that which we know, that which we are confident in, that which we claim to be true. As Polanyi said, we cannot “commit uncomittally.” We must interact in our whole being with the world around us, and we must do so as a product of what has been revealed to us.
Let us look at what we interact with. The world in which we live is by and large a product of a dark period ironically known as the Enlightenment. During this time, men such as Hume and Kant attempted to dissect knowing by separating reason and perception. Though they went about obtaining it in two opposite ways, the goal was the same. Kant asserted that the individual imposes a pattern upon nature and thusly compels it to come to order. Hume, on the other hand, proposed that the mind was helpless in understanding nature outside of sense perception. In simple terms, both say that reality, the known, is subject to either the mind or the senses of the individual. The known (reality and creation), therefore, is determined by man. You see, when Kant says that man compels nature to come to order, he is ascribing deity to the individual; he is saying that man, not God, gives order to the universe. Kant has attacked the role of God and has, in fact, made man God himself (Is this not the temptation offered by the Serpent?). Hume has done the opposite in relieving man of his responsibility to know the world outside himself. The senses are not reliable, and if man can not know nature outside of these senses, how can he know nature at all? What we see here is a strategic initiative against humanity. The Enlightenment was an evil ploy to nullify the covenant between God the Creator and man, His creation. If, as according to Kant, man is God himself, then he holds no responsibility to another. If man is not able to know, ala Hume, how can he be held accountable to a covenant in which he is required to do that which he cannot? Covenants require at least two parties; Kant has taken care of that. Covenants require stipulations; Hume removes those. Both men, from different flanks, have endeavored to reason away their responsibility and accountability to God. What we see in the Enlightenment is a denial of both God’s authority and man’s responsibility, therefore removing the possibility of any covenant between the two. What we see in the Enlightenment is the destruction of the created order, the dethroning of God by stripping Him of His sovereignty, and the dehumanizing of man by eliminating his role.
This line of thought has pervaded our culture. It runs rampant in our educational system, it is promoted in commerce and business, it has even entered the church. The notions that truth is relative to the individual, that no one can be wrong, and that what’s good and true for one is not so for another takes a prominent seat in modern philosophy and modern life. It is ironic how people can be so committed to something that requires no commitment. But the problem is so much deeper, so much more dangerous than simply having a world full of various and opposing opinions. For in dehumanizing man and restructuring the created order, it robs God of His creation. And, where there is no creation, there is no Creator. As Christian knowers, we are pitted against a world that does not simply deny God, as the fathers of their thought process did, but a world that does not know God at all. As the Enlightenment gave birth to philosophies such as post modernism, and as those philosophies metastasized over time, the remaining bits and pieces of who God is have faded away. We Christian knowers are called to action in a world that sees us as ignorant and foolish because we are committed to something that they have no knowledge of, and therefore, according to their philosophy, is not real.
As God is not real for the secular knower, there must be someway for him to reconcile the existence of the idea of Him and all things “religious” or “spiritual”. What we see has developed from the secular world is a further separation of truth into two realms: Public Truth and Private Truth. Frances Schaeffer called it the “two story building” of truth. Public truth is all that can be proved scientifically: math, science, medicine, etc., while private truth is things such as faith, religion, morals, and ethics. Both can exist, but only if public truth is never influenced by private truth. Some examples: A doctor may be a Christian as long as her medicine is purely biological and is never influenced by, never conveys her religious beliefs of divine creation; Businessmen may be Christians as long as their practices never enter the realms or morals or ethics; Missionaries, ministers, and pastors may be Christians, as long as their services stay within the walls of the church and never enter into politics or education; A designer may be a Christian, but only if the structure he is designing relies solely on the laws of physics and practiclity; Teachers and parents may be Christians as long as they teach only public truth and never speak of absolutes or their private convictions, as long as they never encourage thier students and children to think for themselves or have faith in anything. Is it not apparent that the world today is unleashing a relentless assault against the remaining image of God that is in it? You are that image. Do you not see that we live in a world that wants to strip you of who you are? The world is not only attacking God, it is attacking you as His image bearers. It is terrifyingly personal, and this is what we are called to know in the midst of. This is what our knowing demands we act in the face of. This is what we are up against.
And so, the test of our confidence comes. The strength of our commitment is pushed to its very limits. On every last level of our being: mind, body, and soul; as the one unified image of our Maker, in our humanness, we vector out of ourselves and connect with a world that knows not our God and wants to kill us. How confident are we? Do we truly believe in and trust the truth of the God that we claim? Answer honestly, for your very lives are at stake. Commit comittally, for, really, you can do no other. [Christian knowing is all or nothing.] Christ commands us to be either hot or cold and forbids us to be lukewarm. We can only either stand fully with Him, or fully against Him. As frightening and demanding as knowing is, there is hope for those that stand with Him. Certainly this hope is a blessing beyond measure, for standing fully with Christ is precisely what our knowing, with God as the center and covenant head of all creation, requires of us.
Let me bring you back to my circle. As we see the clues as they attend to God and reveal Him, we are then enabled to see those clues more fully. God reveals Himself through the clues, which are revealed through Him. He draws us to Himself, and then opens our eyes to the truth of that which he drew us through. In knowing with God as the unavoidable known, we have a confidence not only in that which we know, but also in that which we will come to know. When we view God, in all His character, as the end product of knowing, we have confidence that all we experience, all that is revealed to us, all our pieces, will fit into His pattern and bring us to a greater knowing of Him. Look at it “publicly”, to borrow a term. If we know that the sum of an addition problem is 4, we rightly have confidence that the parts will add up to 4. So, we go forth confidently and boldly to find the parts that equal 4. Likewise, as Christians, we know that the sum total of our knowledge is the glory of God. Why then do we hesitate to step out confidently and boldly to find the parts? Come what may, be it pain, suffering, even death, is it not worth reaching the sum which is the glory of God? And this is the confidence that we have, that is greater than any confidence offered by man, that we are covenanted with God and that fulfilling our duties in that covenant WILL result in the knowing of and contact with the glory of God. If rightly placed, our confidence will pass the test.
So, let us vector outward. Let us know in this world that seeks to destroy us. But, let us do it not simply to survive it, but to engage it. But how do we do this? The great commission as recorded in Mark’s gospel commands us to, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.” Here, Christ exercises the authority He holds in His role in the Godhead and commands His knowers to go into the world and make known that which has been made known to them. So what is the gospel? The gospel, in words, is that Christ is the Savior to a fallen people. But what do these words attend to? But what overarching truth must precede these words in order for them to be true? In this sense, the gospel, as proclaimed by man, is more than simply words we speak; it is actions that we take, actions that attend to God as the unavoidable known. The truth of the gospel is that we, those that believe in Him, as individuals have been redeemed by the shed blood of Jesus Christ, renewed by the Holy Spirit, and enabled to engage in knowing the self revelation of God through the created intention of His cosmos. This truth must be proclaimed in our lives by our actions (our evidenced commitment to our knowledge), regardless of what the world around us says. We have received the gospel and, via the commandment to proclaim it, are forbidden to keep it to ourselves. Faith without works is dead. We are told to lay down our lives as a living sacrifice. And why? So that we may prove the will of God which is good, and acceptable, and perfect. As Christians we are clues to the pattern of the gospel for the world that we live in, and as such all that we do must rightly attend to God. Certainly we fail, but this is why the gospel is still relevant to the believer. Lest we become entangled in the mindset of the Enlightenment and forget that we are created beings and assume that our actions determine who God is, we are reminded that we sin daily and are only seen as pure and spotless in the eyes of God through His Son Jesus Christ who dwelt among a fallen world, and who did attend to His Father perfectly in every way. Through continued knowing, God reveals to us more and more who He is, and we are therefore changed to be more and more like His Son, which in turn enables us to more and more attend to Him. God redeems us through our knowing. If this is the effect of the gospel in the lives of those saved by Christ, what should be the effect of the presence of the gospel as we proclaim it to the world?
As we vector out in confidence and contact the world in which we live with the gospel we know, our actions attend not only to the truth of the gospel, but ultimately to God. We go out bearing His image, wearing His name, representing His authority, revealing His clues that He first revealed to us. As these clues are revealed in the world, God’s created order is slowly restored to its created purpose: to reveal God Himself. As believers, as the children of God, we have not simply the obligation, but the duty to go and proclaim the gospel of Christ, to reveal the clues that attend to God, to restore the creation and its created order back to its intended state where all things point rightly to the source of all truth, the center of all knowledge, the unknowable known: The Creator and Covenant Head of the Cosmos, the Almighty Yahweh God. Knowing is God’s merciful and Self-glorifying plan of redeeming His creation, and we have been extended the high privilege of participating in it as the instruments of the Covenant Head Himself.
How does this bear on your knowing? With what conviction, with how great a confidence will you now interact with and contact the world that Christ Himself prayed that we would not be taken out of? Where will you seek to find and reveal God’s clues and with what passion will you seek to reveal them to your neighbor? There are rabbits to be found, there are rabbits to be pointed out to others.
The thing about rabbits is that they are found in the most unexpected of places. In fact, they can be found everywhere. One of the pervasive effects of the Enlightenment period that has managed to find root in the lives of Christians, and is fostered by the accepted split of truth, is that clues attending to God can only be found in explicitly “Christian” things. The result of this attitude has been a turning inward instead of a vectoring outward by the Church. We have taken to shaping our “private truth” with “public truth”: devotion books that read like 12 Step programs, “worship” songs that can’t be distinguished from the songs on America’s Top 10 list, sermons that revolve around the latest top seller rather than the Bible itself. We may have good intentions, to make God accessible, understandable, and appealing to the world, but those intentions are not being guided by God’s created order; they do not attend to Him. I say this because these tactics do not stem from the task of going out and proclaiming the truth (Christ said nothing about a purpose driven anything when delivering the great commission), they stem from the desire to be successful. They are aimed at filling pews and getting people to walk down the aisle. But, let us look again at the great commission. As we saw earlier, Mark records it this way, “Go.... and proclaim....”. Matthew’s gospel says, “Go.... make disciples.... baptizing them.... teaching them.” Luke does not record the commission as Matthew and Mark do, but states that Christ told His disciples of repentance being proclaimed throughout the world and that they were, “.... witnesses of these things.” Pay close attention to the language used. Christ never gives the command to persuade or convince. And so it is with our knowing and our proclamation of the gospel and our contact with the world. We are not commanded to be victorious; we are only commanded to be obedient. We are not commanded to certainty, simply confidence. Only God Himself, the Covenant Head and knower of all, can be victorious and certain; and He has chosen, as stated before, to carry out His victory and redeem His creation through us. So we see that we must not shape our private truth, knowing with God as the center, with the methods of public truth. Rather, we must insist that public truth be determined by this private truth; that knowing be centered around God. We see now that we must first look for rabbits everywhere: In how we are educated and how we educate, in how justice is served, in how we vote, in how we are governed, in how and where we worship; and once we find them, reveal them to the world so that they might see to whom the rabbits attend. And whether they see them or not is neither up to us nor is it a reason to not reveal them. Our duty to obey, God’s command to us, must never be evaluated by our circumstances. He will never tell us not to obey; we will never be allowed not to know.
Knowing seems like a perilous thing to be involved with. Yet we are called to action with the instruction not to be victorious at any cost, but to simply be obedient, to follow the guidelines of our covenant with God. And we can take comfort that what looks like going to war is really the laying down of our lives, for the God has already won the victory, and is leading us across the battlefield to the celebration. The consequences of our obedient action in engaging the world, in discovering and revealing the unknown, can only result in the victory already won by God. We can know, and we can know confidently, and so we must contact boldly.
Our knowing dictates action, it requires confidence, and it is carried out through obedience. The covenant head, Yahweh God, reveals Himself to His people through clues, which are in turn fully revealed through Him. We are then conformed more to His image and enabled to see more of His revelation. And so, then, we must go into the world, proclaim His truth, proclaim what we know, and reveal the God that sent us, reclaiming the created order of the parts we find there, and restore His creation to its proper role in the covenant. Knowing is redemption.