Think-Living

It is important, very important, in Christian perception that the thinking of the humanist oriented person will not fully jibe with the thinking of spiritually oriented persons.  When there is overlap, the Christian needs to be alert to acknowledgment of truth that is in the course of reasoning available in common grace, and the course of reasoning available in divine grace for interpretation.  This is vital in discussing the facts of either context, the extensions from the logics, the presuppositions, and whatever other factors are to be accepted or rejected in the course of thinking and discussion.  Some of this has appeared in the Pages for this date preceding this senior Page.  Those backgrounds are helpful to this Page.  Important to this four years’ journey are such themes as humanistic (mankind) and theistic (God); evaluation (judgment) and award (acceptance); morality (source emanating out of the nature of God) and law (source emanating out of the control of society); righteousness from heaven (found in the holiness of God) and practicality from nature (found in natural evidence).  The sub-themes for these larger themes would extend our clarity related to the issues of mankind (in nature), and mankind (in super nature).  It takes careful thinking to follow the lines even if some of the presuppositions will not be accepted by this or that group.  It is possible to have a whole conclusion that is preferred from a logical treatment without having a true development to conclusion.  In mankind’s context there may appear an odd process, and a true conclusion.  There may generate a false conclusion from excellent processes.  Advocates wait for final word.  We wait for the final conclusions to meet our assumptions, or to never review them again.  We choose various life forces.

Elizabeth Elliot wrote the magnificent story of the life of her husband to the point of martyrdom in a book entitled: Through Gates of Splendor.  It is my favorite title of all modern biography related to Christian experience, as Pilgrim’s Progress is my favorite for the Renaissance period of Christian life literature. In the recollection of her husband, Elliot reiterated his statement about faith meaning that may become a remembered statement about faith in the future remaining to the Church: He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.  In this Elliott was making statement that whatever he might gain in mortal life can be sacrificed to God’s requirements of life to immortality.  The remark must have made Blaise Pascal nod approvingly from his heavenly abode – if he now bothers with anything mortal.

I feel that much of the public does not catch on that the Christian, given biblical presuppositions, holds sound logic for faith, a faith not provable in the human demand for validity formed from nature.  Further, it offers even in arbitrary chance much more than can be designed from what may be extracted from nature.  Nature offers nothing but temporary reality to death and ending.  God offers continuance.  Further, the near universal gratification for faith context during a lifetime, guided by sacred writing, is so significant that if I suddenly discovered that it was all a dramatic and gracious dramatic dream for a life to be lived, but with no award beyond the grave, I would not choose to go back and find the exciting life so to take advantage of time to reduce the quality of life.  It is a waste, even in a wholly secular context, to eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.  I find myself reading as though I were a student in college; eating as though the nutrition will make me stronger for longer life; enjoying recreation as though I need it as R & R; looking for new understandings as though I may need them to survive; and so the story enlarges.  My body weakens, the breath of old age wafts death each day, but my mind remains remembering lines and outlines from long ago, love and family, profession and colleagues, beauty and opportunity, and a sense of elevation about life that gratifies me to take each new day even with reduced sight and hearing acuity.  I live partly in the lives of some of my great-grandchildren, and the life is real.  I live in the realization that life is the evidence of God.  Where there is life, God has visited, and whatever is of God cannot be dissolved by mankind or any other force.  Thinking is one of the ropes tethered to life.  Life under God will go on as long as the earth lasts, and God will redeem the life of lives choosing to live before transitions from nature are to be taken – up or down.  There is something magnificent in the words of Moses just before he died: Choose life!