This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

A Project of Faithful Thinking VII

Building on Christian Foundations for Faithful Thinking: Tracing the Implications

1. Christian Thinking is Whole Thinking

On the basis of the foundations for Christian thinking which I have laid out previously, it is clear that Christians cannot be faithful in their thinking and at the same time dichotomize it. That is to say, a Christian can neither dismiss the subjective aspects of knowing nor can they eschew objectivity. A Christian understands that no human being can have purely objective knowledge. We believe that as creations of God, ours is a contingent knowing, inescapably subjective per se.

But this subjectivity is balanced and transformed by the only being who can claim pure objectivity, the Holy Trinity. The Christian has access to the objectivity which God himself provides in and through the Holy Spirit and his testimony in the Church, the Scriptures and the life of the Church, also known as Tradition. There is no other focal point outside the Holy Spirit's work in the Body of Christ through which any of us can have access to unchanging Truth.

Our personal (note that I do not say individual) knowing is darkened by our fallenness. Our mortality and sinfulness ensures that even when we legitimately come to know aspects of the Truth we misinterpret, misconstrue and misunderstand. Cut off from God, it is not the case we cannot know anything of the Truth, for the vestigial consciences we carry are bound up with the image of God in which we've been created and bear witness of at least the Truth of our mortality and fallenness. But it is the case that we cannot come to grasp in any meaningful way these broken pieces of the picture scattered around us. For us to make sense of our subjective knowing, God must reveal himself to us.

So it is not surprising that for one like Nietzsche who proclaimed the "death of God," the implication is that our knowing is little more than the will to power. If all we have is our subjectivity, then there are no ultimate metanarratives, but only stories, shadows dancing on the cave wall.

Christians, however, must engage in whole thinking. We must ensure that the particular, that is to say, the personal, is not lost, since the Truth is the Person of Christ. In Christ there are no universal truths that are not also particular. There are no unchanging principles that are not also personal. That God is love does not indicate some cosmic life force that emanates like a grand vibration throughout the universe. Rather that God is love means he is inescapably Person. Because only Persons can love; cosmic principles just hum.

So our subjective, contingent, mortal and fallen human knowing must be anchored in, which is to say, hypostatically joined to, the objective, per se, immortal and divine knowing of the Trinity. In this union, our subjective personal experience is sanctified, redeemed, and made to partake in the gracious and energetic objective Personhood of the Trinity. In that sanctification our subjectivity is objective, and the objectivity of God is subjective. His Person divinizes our person.

We no longer, then, know in the same way. "Therefore, from now on, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away, behold, all things have become new."

We have been transformed by the renewing of our mind. Science is not cut off from literature. Poetry is not cut off from philosophy. The laws of of the home are not cut off from international machinations. The spirit and soul are not cut off from the body. All knowing is unified in the Trinity, and therefore, human knowing must seek always to come to know the fullness of the Truth that is Christ God. Intellect is not cut off from will, so Christians will only come to know the Truth that is Christ God if they ever seek repentance from sin and death. We take captive every thought to the obedience of Christ. So we refuse to chase every vain and idle fantasy; refusing too to be concerned about how some marvel that we don't join in with them.

Our knowing is as much anchored in God, and as personal, when we meditate on God's law, as when we silently rock a child to sleep. Christian knowing embraces every nook and cranny of our lives, because that is as far as the Light which is the life of the world reaches.

Those who do not have Christ cannot but think in slices, though some think in larger slices than others. It is to Christians only that God has given the grace to unify their knowledge in and by the work of the Holy Trinity.

And if our thinking is whole, because participating in God, then our thinking also must be holy.

[Next: Tracing the Implications: Christian Thinking is Holy Thinking]

Posted by Clifton at February 18, 2004 06:00 AM | TrackBack