Today’s devotional: reclaiming the mystery of faith
Reason. Logic. Evidence. These are among the defining keywords of our contemporary era—they’re values and ideas that shape our approach to science, and to most other aspects of our lives. We like our lives to be organized, quantifiable, and understandable.
That’s certainly not a bad way to approach human life—the rational worldview has spawned countless good advances in science, medicine, and many other fields. But in this Slice of Infinity devotional, Margarat Manning wonders if, in our fascination with this Enlightenment-era worldview, we may be pushing aside some equally important concepts: mystery, wonder, and faith.
Inherent in this Enlightenment mindset, and common in our day as well, is the assumption that knowledge is good, certain, and objective. We often uncritically accept this Enlightenment idea as we look at Christian faith today, and we leave little room for ways of knowing that go beyond the rational or the scientific. As Blaise Pascal once said, “The heart has its reasons which reason cannot know.” But Christians do well to re-think this Enlightenment assumption, for we acknowledge that the fall of humanity impacted the whole self–including the mind.
Without jettisoning intellectual rigor and study, or succumbing to a faith without content, we must make room for the concept of “mystery” and be cautious about assuming an Enlightenment way of viewing knowledge and truth. Sometimes we simply do not know. Our minds are limited and God is infinite. We must reject the hubristic optimism of the endless, upward progress of human rationality to attain to omniscience. Moreover, our faith cannot be “reduced” to a set of fixed doctrines, even while it surely contains them. Rather, we must acknowledge “that the fundamental reality of God transcends human rationality” and “the heart of being a Christian is a personal encounter with God in Christ, who shapes us and molds us.” We come to know in and through personal encounter–both with God and with God’s people in community–and we must reject the notion that we are ultimately and only autonomous, thinking selves. We are reminded by the apostle John that Truth is ultimately and completely revealed in a person–“The Word (logos) became flesh and dwelt among us”–and it is as a result of this person that we come to know anything that is worth knowing at all.
Does your faith ever feel overly-quantified? Have the doctrines that define your faith ever started to feel less like proclamations of our savior Jesus Christ, and more like a laundry list of lifeless rules and annotations? Maybe it’s time to step back and reclaim the mystery and personal relationship that lie at the heart of Christianity.
