Goldsworthy on true and exhaustive knowledge

Graeme Goldsworthy in his book Gospel and Wisdom (part of the Goldsworthy Trilogy, Paternoster, 2000), which i’m reading for a course in Old Testament Poetry and Wisdom Literature, presents the following brief and helpful discussion of the relationship between true and exhaustive knowledge, and how this applies to the Christian and non-Christian.

[T]he empiricist or humanist will claim to know things truly while not knowing exhaustively. In this he is inconsistent. No humanist would say that things exist in total isolation from each other.  For a start he couldn’t investigate them if they did, for they would also be isolated from him. And there could be no such things as natural laws, or complexities of matter, for there would be only random particles. There would be no organisms, no people to become humanists! Once we recognize this, we will see that what things really are includes their relationship to everything else. When the humanist claims to know something truly, he is saying that he knows how it relates to everything else in existence. In other words, to know even one thing truly he must know all things exhaustively.

We can summarize this discussion by a contrast of three positions. First, the atheistic humanist claims to know enough to say that God does not exist. This is a claim to know everything, for if he admits that he does not know everything, how does he know that God is not included in what he does not know? Secondly, the agnostic humanist things to avoid the problem of the atheist by saying that we cannot know if God exists or not; he may or he may not. But this is also to claim exhaustive knowledge, for how can he know that God’s existence cannot be known other than by knowing everything there is to be known? The last thing left for him to discover may be the evidence that God either exists or does not exist. Finally, the Christian knows that he does not have exhaustive knowledge. But he knows also through revelation that God does have exhaustive knowledge and can therefore define for us what reality is. By the same revelation this God has told us all that we need to know in order to know truly. The Christian can know God truly. He can know man truly, and the created order truly. He knows none of them exhaustively, but he does know them truly.

(Goldsworthy, 2000:369-370)

Looking at the Cross: Newton’s autobiographical hymn

This hymn by John Newton (1725-1807) must be one of the greatest autobiographical hymns ever to be penned, yet sadly it is not well known.  It speaks both subjectively and objectively of the amazing grace Newton found in Christ.

In evil long I took delight,
Unawed by shame or fear,
Till a new object struck my sight,
And stopped my wild career.
I saw One hanging on a tree,
In agony and blood,
Who fixed His languid eyes on me,
As near His cross I stood.

Sure never to my latest breath,
Can I forget that look;
It seemed to charge me with His death,
Though not a word He spoke.

My conscience felt, and owned the guilt,
And plunged me in despair,
I saw my sins His blood had spilt,
And helped to nail Him there.

Alas! I knew not what I did;
But now my tears are vain;
Where shall my trembling soul be hid?
For I the Lord have slain.

A second look He gave, which said,
“I freely all forgive;
This blood is for thy ransom paid;
I died, that thou may’st live.”

Thus, while His death my sin displays
In all its blackest hue,
(Such is the mystery of grace)
It seals my pardon too.

With pleasing grief and mournful joy
My spirit now is filled,
That I should such a life destroy,
Yet live by Him I killed.

(Public domain.  Reproduced from Classic Christian Hymn-writers by Elsie Houghton, 1982.  Fort Washington, Penn.: Christian Literature Crusade)

Tolerance

In the past, tolerance meant respecting people and treating them well even when convinced they were wrong. It meant treating people as people, with dignity, even when one disagreed with them. In post-modern society today, “tolerance” means never regarding anyone’s opinions as wrong. Instead of tolerance for people, we have tolerance for ideas. Instead of love for truth and love for people, we have denial of truth and fear of offending people. Post-modern tolerance is cheap.

Lessons from Baruch and “The Prodigal God”

Pretending or performing – two of the things that draw Christians away from a God-centred, gospel-saturated life to a self-centred life of impression management. i know i’m guilty of both. It’s so easy to keep up appearances, especially playing up to others’ expectations (“You’re studying at BI? Oh, you must be such a holy Christian…”). At heart i remain deeply competitive and insecure, feeling the need to prove myself to other Christians, if not to God. And with this comes the temptation to feel that the world, or God, owes me something. i need to keep coming back God’s rebuke to Baruch in Jeremiah 45: “And do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not…” If i understand Baruch correctly, he was a diligent and faithful secretary to Jeremiah, serving God, pained at the the wickedness and suffering and impending judgement on his people. Yet somehow he seems to have slipped into a dutiful service – a joyless service where his experience of God’s goodness indeed did become very small. Did he think, “I’m not as bad as those people,” or, “I deserve better”?

i see myself reflected in Baruch, in his desire to serve, in his heartache at the evils of the world around him, and at his apparently self-righteous expectation of something better for himself. i consider my motives in serving: usually, i hope, genuinely to help others and to serve the gospel, but often tainted by a desire for recognition and something in return because i “deserve” the favour of others in this world. And, paradoxically, i am aware also of evading service by justifying that my work in some other area is of greater importance, and others should do the more “mundane” work because, again, i “deserve” something better. In all these tendencies i see my sinfulness in the midst of my desire to serve. i inadvertently reduce God and His righteousness; i make service of Him something through which to win the favour of others, even if i’m not trying to win merit with Him. i never actively think of it that way, but when it comes down to the heart of the issue this is really an attempt to add to the righteousness i have in Christ the favour and approval of others. And insofar as i try to add to Christ’s finished work on the Cross, i cheapen the costly grace He has so freely given; i shrink the Cross and minimise my sinfulness and need of the Saviour.

Tim Keller, in his hard-hitting book The Prodigal God (New York: Dutton 2008), talks of the “elder brother” mentality of “[using] his moral record to put God and others in his debt to control them.” He quotes a profound rebuke from a wise teacher, identifying the barrier between Pharisaical righteousness and God as “not their sins, but their damnable good works.”  (See the parable in Luke 15.)

He continues: “To find God we must repent of the things we have done wrong, but if that is all you do, you may remain just an elder brother. To truly become Christians we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right. Pharisees only repent of their sins, but Christians repent for the very roots of their righteousness, too. We must learn how to repent of the sin under all our other sins and under all our righteousness – the sin of seeking to be our own Savior and Lord.” (pp. 77-78)

Amen.

Christmas Eve, 1968: Apollo 8 mission

Anyone who was alive then will remember Christmas Eve of 1968.  On that day, the Apollo 8 became the first manned mission to orbit the Moon.  The crew, Mission Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders, launched on December 21, 1968 and reached lunar orbit on Christmas Eve.  Over a period of 20 hours the spacecraft orbited the Moon ten times.  On its fourth pass across the front of the Moon, Anders took the famous Earthrise photo pictured, later selected by Life as one of the hundred photos that changed the world.

The real “happily ever after”

Sûsî Gees (my motorbike) and i had a bit of an accident yesterday evening returning from Stellenbosch when i clipped a run-off channel on a farm road. Neither of us sustained any serious injuries (i got away with just a sprained thumb, some roasties, and injured pride, while Sûsî Gees needs a little doctoring to fix up broken indicators and speedometer and a bent headlamp housing and mounting bracket), but it did give me pause to think last night about the fragility of life and our mortality. Now, i’m not afraid of death, for as Paul writes to Timothy, “I know Whom I have believed”; i know i’m ready when that time comes. But i know also that i have so much more to live for even in this life than does anyone who lives for this life only. In Elbert Hubbard’s words, which i’ve taken for the by-line for this blog, “Life is a preparation for the future.”  Or my own thoughts on what LIFE is: Life Is For Eternity.

CS Lewis captures the enormity of this future, of eternity, so beautifully in the closing words of The Last Battle from the Narnia series:

“There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Finito

Finally.

i finished the last of my third-year psychology and linguistics exams two weeks ago, and have been messing around with admin and work and reading since. It will still be some time before Unisa publish the results, and there were a few exams about which i was not supremely confident, so i’m not going to talk just yet about where on the wall to hang my BA.  i really struggled to focus this time around.  This year’s studies have felt a bit more of an ordeal than the past few years’.  i guess part of the reason has been the feeling that several years’ studying were about to come to an end and that end couldn’t come soon enough.  It’s been quite an anticlimax. But now i’m glad it’s over :)

Collecting and organising Christian resources

i’ve got a lot of talks, articles, sermons, etc. that i’ve been collecting over the past few years.  i’m trying to put together a good resource library to share with others — all stuff that’s freely available on the Internet, but sometimes hard to find, and expensive to download here in South Africa — and starting to review and promote some of it here on my blog (see, for example, the recent post on Gordon Fee’s excellent series of talks on Reading and studying the Bible for life).  i’m hoping to dedicate some time in December/January to cataloguing it a bit better, but basically at this stage i’ve got the following major collections:

Reading and studying the Bible for life

The past couple days i’ve redeemed the time listening to a series of three talks Gordon Fee presented on how to read the Bible.  Fee, who is professor of New Testament at Regent College, Vancouver, is widely known for two books he co-authored with Douglas Stuart, How to read the Bible for all its worth and How to read the Bible book by book.  These two are excellent books for anyone who desires to read and understand the Bible better, and i heartily recommend them.

Redeeming the time

My friend Bradley keeps exhorting me to “redeem the time” (echoing Ephesians 5:16) — something i’m trying to take to heart.  Some years back, when i first started exploring Project Gutenberg and the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and playing with text-to-speech synthesis, i discovered that i could “read” some of the classics, or articles and lecture transcripts while messing about the house or waiting for sleep to come.  i managed to “read” through Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and many other great books in the public domain like this.  Now, as broadband has become cheaper, i’ve been able to collect some fantastic audio resources over the past few years.  i always keep a few series of lectures or sermons on my phone, ready to listen to while washing dishes, walking to places, or waiting for trains.  i intend to highlight some of these here over the next while.

When i’m at my computer, i use VLC Media Player for playing media files.  One of the benefits of VLC is that it allows one to speed up playback without affecting the pitch.  i find that i can generally increase the playback speed by 40-50% or more and thus listen to an hour-long lecture in only 40 minutes.

i seldom go anywhere without a book and Bible in my bag, but i have still found it useful to keep an electronic Bible on my phone.  i’ve downloaded a couple of free ones from GoBible (KJV) and BiblePhone (various translations in several languages available).  From the latter site i’ve also downloaded a Greek New Testament (Westcott-Hort text) and Hebrew Old Testament for my phone — so now i can continue my attempt at learning Greek wherever i am.  These are all Java MIDP 1.0 or MIDP 2.0 applications, so they should work on most recent Java-capable cellphones (mine is about three years old).