Beholding and Becoming

“‘Now I know what life is!’ beamed the artist. ‘It is love! It is being lifted above yourself, the rapture of losing yourself in beauty. What my friends call life and pleasure is unreal and as fleeting as a bubble; they know nothing of the pure, heavenly altar wine that initiates us into life!’” — Hans Christian Andersen

Jesus said “he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me” (John 6:57). In the Hebrew temple, the "bread of the presence" was literally the “bread of the face.” This “showbread,” as it was called, was commanded to be unleavened.

Classical education attempts to impart character by showing students the artful beauty in paintings, statues, and the prose and poetry of Greek and Latin. The idea is that once the student acquires an appreciation of art, his or her ethics will reflect a similar beauty in the way daily life is gone about. The Greek pursuit of beauty was, at best, misguided. Being ignorant of the “leaven” (original sin) that resides in every individual heart, their appreciation of “forms” turned into lust and licentiousness. With defiled understandings, they constructed their own meaning around things, misunderstanding and misusing the beautiful stuff of creation.

While we are full of leaven, Christ is not. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, He showed Him His unsullied attributes. And it is because all have sinned, and fall short of the glory, that we must be saved—restored to the image of God’s beautiful and "unleavened" likeness. God’s absolutes are not merely commands—they are the very essence of His being. And we are called to be like Him. Sinning is in large part wrong doing, but falling short of the glory is wrong being…wrong doing is a result of wrong being. Our “doing” should come out of our “being,” and our “being” should be in Him.

Christ-centered education is the opposite of secular education; it is not about self-realization. “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Socrates said, “One thing I know, and that is that I know nothing.” Secular academia has latched on to this notion, which seems like a humble statement at first glance. But upon closer inspection we find that Socrates was planting the seeds of finite relativism[1]—all is a matter of the way the individual sees things. “Know thyself” was Socrates’ greatest revelation. Contrast this with Jesus’ teaching to deny thyself, and the wisdom of Solomon to “lean not upon your own understanding.”

Indeed, everything is relative. But what or who is everything relative to?

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[1] What I mean by finite relativism is that all is relative to you, rather than you being relative to all. Technically, Socrates opposed relativism as the Sophists (who came up with the idea) taught it. They believed people were relative to their culture and experiences. Socrates, on the other hand, believed culture and experiences were relative to oneself—“know thyself” is finite relativism.

Reason and Mythology

My wife recently received an email from an old friend who is currently studying philosophy at a state university in Illinois. She writes:

“It's interesting…in secular universities how strong the bias is against God, particularly against Christianity. In one of my philosophy of religion classes, one of the girls got up in front of the class and said, ‘I was born and raised a Christian. But this class has torn me up. I don't know what to think anymore.’ I was at a low point spiritually when I first started studying philosophy. I'd had a lot of weirdness in my church and in my own spiritual life that became very confusing. It's a long crazy story, but part of it, I think, is that my church was so ‘spiritual’ that there was no room for rational thought. The ‘rational mind’ was preached against from the pulpit; my own spiritual experiences were almost always anti-rational. I always felt pushed and pulled in strange directions, compelled to do things that didn't quite make sense, and yet they were ‘spiritual’ enough for me to think God was talking to me. Anyway, my church and my life fell apart. I tried to hold myself together. I went back to school. I took anti-depressants. And this pragmatic rationalism that I was being offered was an enticing contrast to the messed-up spirituality I had come from and had bought into. My faith became quite precarious. There was no answer to any of my questions; all the answers were shallow, trite, and banal.”

To many, Plato’s reason makes more sense than Homer’s mythology. I have had experiences similar to my wife’s friend regarding church and secular education. When Christians leave off the very important ideas in nature, and solely stress the "spiritual" aspects (often more accurately identified as emotional aspects) of faith, they come to a rather impractical way of life. They are in danger of losing touch with reality when they lose touch with the whole.

For the gentile, the first lesson toward faith is creation (nature reveals God’s character). The Jews had an even further step—the oracles of God—in the Law of Moses. Nature is for the Gentiles what the Law is for the Jews.

Christian education does not abandon the natural side of life. The Christian life alone is truly holistic. Wholeness in Christ includes nourishment for the spirit, as well as the body and soul. To section off one or two parts from the complete person is to cease to be practical. One could even say it is to cease being a complete human (spirit, soul and body).

Perhaps Abraham was faithful to see God’s goodness in nature before he believed. God did, after all, show him the stars as symbols of His goodness. Guileless Nathanael had a moment of truth under a tree, and Jesus called him a “true son of Israel.” As a young man, I exercised my natural faculty of sight, and turned my eyes to the stars in honest wonder. God answered me in a fashion so undeniable that I would sooner doubt the sun than the heavenly Light revealed to me.

To negate nature—to lessen its importance—is to miss the first step in seeing God; it is to try to read without learning the alphabet. It has been the strategy of Satan to infuse the study of nature—science—with the pagan philosophy of unbelief. Not only pagan philosophy, but also pagan science is being crammed down the throats of students in secular schools everywhere. Like the Socratic poison, it is killing our nation.

The basic lessons of God’s goodness are fundamentally seen in the created world. The testimony of the natural world is being discredited, not by science, but by the connection of science to pagan philosophy. What is seen in nature is seen, not objectively, but according to the bent of self. If we discredit the alphabet, then how can we read? If philosophy begins when one doubts that a tree is a tree, then one can truly, like “humble” Socrates, "know nothing." How much less can one know the invisible God if one can’t even know if a stone is a stone?

God is seen through the heavens, and under the tree; He is seen in the stable and the carpenter’s shop. As learning the alphabet precedes writing, addition comes before calculus: line upon line, precept upon precept. The manger preceded the Ascension; a flower grows from a seed; a building is built on a foundation, and a foundation is built from a cornerstone. One can begin to know an artist by the art he creates; one can surmise there is a builder by seeing the building.

Relativism

It seems the one absolute to the relativists is that there are no absolutes. That this is a contradiction will at once be obvious to the logician, but to the philosophical magician, it escapes notice in the same way he might make his assistant disappear. When told by a relativist on an airplane that there are no absolutes, my wife's uncle calmly replied, “Are you absolutely sure?” Saying there are absolutely no absolutes is like saying the one law of the jungle is that there is no jungle.

Relativism is essentially the same animal as secularism. Most of the differences between the two approaches are purely technical. Whereas the ideals of secularism can be traced back to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, relativism in the Western World is believed to have originated with the Sophists.

Known for their clever thought, the Sophists predate Socrates in fifth century Greece. Plato acknowledged Protagoras as the first professional sophist (i.e. teacher of virtue). Sophists were traveling philosophers who noticed wide variations in customs and beliefs between the many cultures they visited. From their observations, they concluded that everything is subjective to people’s experiences: all is relative.

In certain ways, the Sophists were right. It is that they made relativity an “ism” which made them wrong, essentially. Sophists of today might say, “It’s all good.” There is a universalism about them, which embraces everything from Totem Worship to Environmentalism, Atheism to Zoroastrianism, and nearly everything in between. The only absolute the relativist seems to embrace is that there is neither one God, nor one way.

It is interesting to make a side-note at this juncture, which relates to relativism from the scientific angle. It concerns "The Theory of Relativity.” Einstein was actually not happy with that appellation, because he thought it sounded as if “anything goes.” Moreover, though The Theory of Special Relativity (E=MC2) shows that everything is relative to light, it has been taken by scientists and philosophers (in a kind of sophistry) to mean that everything is relative to the way individuals see things.

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle rightly argued against the Sophists, but neither are they quite right themselves. Aristotle held that through the proper employment of reason, one could know truth objectively. This is a reasonable idea, indeed, and a great improvement on the ethereal ideas of Socrates and Plato. The problem all of them had was akin to the problem a man missing his limbs has, or that of a woman missing her sight. They were not altogether incorrect, but their theories were incomplete.

Socrates’ conflicting beliefs that one can know “nothing,” but can know himself, were merely the reverse of relativism; that Plato leaned on his own understanding did not make him un-relativistic, it merely made his scope smaller. The secularist’s world is smaller than the relativist’s, but it is relativistic, nonetheless.

Rather than a universal relativism, secularism holds that all is relative to itself. The philosopher is, after all, superior to the common man. It is not every tribe which knows best, it is the secularist who knows best. By employing one’s own understanding, one can decide which god is real, if any, and which culture is right. Relativism and secularism are alike. Secularism does not leave a blank spot where God should be in the equation; it doesn’t merely pull out Buddha, Mohammed or Zeus. It seats self on the throne as an absolute ruler, deciding between good and evil, right and wrong, according to its own philosophy. And its philosophy is usually built around its particular emotional and cultural habitat. It is no secret that many in Christendom have misguided philosophies as well, but that topic is too big for the present discussion.

One can embrace almost everything, and at the same time embrace nothing, if in all one’s embracing one does not embrace I AM. Embracing the ideas of all religions, all philosophy and anything one can imagine, in the end, is to embrace nothing. It is to embrace figments and thoughts, and figments of thoughts. To embrace I AM is to be more truly universal than the universalist. Apart from the Light of I AM, human reasoning is fallible at best. God's Light alone rightly enlightens.