- Faith isn't an abstract thing we summon up or a token we put in a machine; rather Jesus said, 'I am the way, the truth and the life' suggesting that followership more than believership is the requirement for membership to the Christian way. A Christian is meant to be someone who goes a certain way and lives a particular life.
- Remembering the Jewish Shema we see that the Christian way and Christian devotion requires our whole person as we're told to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. The Christian way is an all involving path.
- Today I want to consider the role of knowledge along the Christian way.
The apostle Paul considered knowledge to be the main pursuit of his life and insisted that whatever else he may have considered meritorious he now not only doesn't consider it so, he actually reckons all previous gain as 'loss' compared to his final preoccupation - knowing Christ.
Loss.
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake.
- C.S. Lewis, The Case For Christianity
When you realise you're lost and are making your way back onto the path the loss you're recovering from becomes like a curse, with every step back accompanied by feelings of frustration that you ever took the wrong path in the first place.
Several years ago a friend and I were driving to Liverpool late one night for a conference. We'd been on the road already for four hours and were within the last forty-five minutes of our journey when he missed a junction and got stuck on a motorway without an exit point for several miles to come. We watched in horror as our SatNav's estimated time of arrival literally doubled; forty-five minutes left became one and a half hours to go! At that point our 'progress' became loss as we resented every mile of tarmac. It's only progression if it brings you closer to home otherwise you're wearing yourself out just to get back to square one.
If Christ is all in all then outside of him is only emptiness, a soulish vacuum that hollows a man reducing him to nothing but a whisper and a longing.
Let's consider in full at what St. Paul says in Philippians 3:
whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ – the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. I want to know Christ – yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.
The emphasis in Paul's expression is not on the pain of the loss but on the comparative worth of the gain and the knowledge he prizes isn't intellectual learning or mastery but relational intimacy. 'Knowing Christ' is the gain and goal of his life.
When I experience something good without Amy with me it feels by contrast like a loss. In fact any trip somewhere without her feels like reconnaissance; if I'd have visited Rome before I met her I'd need to revisit it once we got together. The prior trip would have been a non-visit, a loss even compared to the joy of going with her.
There is such all surpassing value in knowing Christ that everything done without him feels essentially like it needs to be redone with him. It's the difference between enjoying a walk in the woods attributing its glory only to blind and random chance, to then discovering the mind behind the woods, and walking it with him, its author; delighting in it and discussing it with him along the way.
It is the difference of intimacy that makes all the difference in the world.
It is the difference between being made to share a seat on public transport with a stranger to enjoying a dinner with friends.
Knowing a thing takes the form of objective and subjective knowledge, analytical and personal. There is a third form of knowledge however that occupies the space in between the two. Were we to draw a Venn diagram of overlapping circles, it would be the space shared by both objective and subjective knowledge that would be of most value. It is within this space that we speak truthfully and meaningfully. When I speak of knowing my wife I am using personal language that describes a subjective experience but about an objectively recognised collection of atoms that can be known and recognised in the world. 'Amy' is either a label for the particular collections of atoms and molecules or it is the name of the personal and particular being associated by them. Being with her and enjoying her (and even speaking meaningfully of such a being as 'her') describes a 'third' space of reality between the purely subjective and the purely objective; it is the world of relationships between souls.
To know Christ there is both the being of God incarnate (sitting objectively 'there') and the subjectively felt relationship I enjoy. The very fact however that I can understand and identify with the Apostle Paul's 'knowing' means that there is a truth between the cold fact and the purely-personal value, there is relationship. Christ exists, or at least a shared appreciation of the objective being of Christ exists, and is therefore able to be spoken of in a meaningful way.
This is the Christian way, an entering into a universally shared yet subjectively experienced life. It is not locked away from view and experience as mystical experiences might be, it is open and available to all who come to Christ. Come and come and reach out with your mind, your heart, your strength; reach out until this subjective knowing of him becomes yours as well, until you enter the universal church throughout time who have feasted their souls on him and known love and intimacy as its reward and mainstay.
It is the way.