We must accept some elusive mysteries of our lives, but we need to form our perceptions of mystery. This is not a play on words or to create an odd sentence. It is important to those who mean to be creative, to work in life contexts that become too large for us, visited with complexity, ignorance, impotence, and personal preference. Life is larger than we are; information is limited by unavailability and our incompetence to gain all that is available; our influence is modest in gaining adequate attention to what we have to offer or the end we seek; and, we deal with personal circumstances in presuppositions, prejudices, experiences, and orientations that push us in directions that create different maps, perhaps for grouping persons. Even when we were together back-a-ways, we now may divide over some small points, and create separate paths hoping to reach the same destination (conclusion). We may end in wrangling, name-calling, ill-will, even revolution. We find the patterns in Scripture and we may learn by them, but if we take another tack we may wonder why God puts up with it. If God exists, why doesn’t he do something about the messy ways humankind manages thought and action? He has his plan for lives. We look for it.
Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) became a dominant philosopher in German idealism. He created a philosophical system that has greatly influenced society in the interpretation of the individual, especially in the areas of government and religion. He rejected realism (that reality exists independently of the mind) and subjective idealism (that reality is the product of individual consciousness). For him contradictions were too great. (We have referred on several occasions to contradiction and paradox in the management of what we do know about creation, mankind and God. Any serious student must deal with that matter. We need also to remember that what may be contradiction to one mind is not for another.) From Hegel there have emerged influences on religion as in the negative biblical criticism begun by D. F. Strauss, and the Hegelian influence on Karl Marx that led to the formation of the Communist context for government. Hegel interpreted facts so to set up the kind of government Marx would advance.
As surely as any philosopher, Jesus Christ enunciated a way of life for human beings built on a pattern of discovery for truth about God, and God’s identity with mankind. The individual is made self-responsible so is free in the mind of God to search for truth, not only about self but all things. It is a journey, but the individual is central to the matter. Since mankind can’t manage successfully to gain hope (immortality) without aid from God, the plan of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is offered so to provide an avenue to move from an imperfect context ending in death, to a perfect context variously identified as Heaven, the Kingdom of God, the Elysian Fields – an other than worldly location where death is unknown. If persons accept by faith this Gospel offer, and prove to themselves (perhaps also to others) by obedience to the revealed Word of God, they interpret the meaning of natural facts and truths into a holistic approach to life and society. They may, in normal course, influence the natural course in virtue of: freedom, love, peace, family, creativity, order and all that is affirmative to truth in the human experience. The negatives of life are the opposites of these virtues. So it is that the individual does not change reality, but interprets it either in a natural context or a spiritual one. There is no neutral as a category. It belongs to the natural which tolerates or bears good and evil, sweet and sour, joy and sorrow, and the complex combinations – sometimes found in logical philosophies. The Christ interpretation comes from God, based on his nature identified as holiness and perfect love offered to those who will receive it. Since God is free, he offers his largesse freely for those who choose to be formed to his image. That doesn’t make the faith person into a god, but it does gain the status of God’s offspring. Hegel, and scores of other major philosophers could not gain that idealism. With all their doubts about the contexts of mankind, they generally looked only to mankind for ways through, or out of, the human complexity. Some philosophers looking for solutions were eventually labeled theologians. Like their humanist counterparts, some sought truth more from nature than God. Christians are best situated in accepting Scripture, permitting it to interpret itself. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020