April 1 - Come All Ye Fools


2nd Peter 1:16

For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

Never was an age so sophisticated and so foolish. We hold powerful gadgets in our hands, we have no idea of how they work. They have been engineered by geniuses to be used by simpletons. The digital divide between the device and the individual.

When I was in the process of being converted, it was in stages---of God dispelling the darkness with the light of Christ, as morning ushers out the night by degrees, faith for doubt. It was very critical to me that my faith be grounded in fact, not fancy. Facts require analysis, interpretation, and decision.

The dirty secret of deep epistemology is that our hearts always determine what our heads believe. Not two plus two stuff but meaning, purpose, and destiny. Facts are adopted or discarded according to what we want to believe. Faith is a matter of will.

I am convinced for example that Darwinism is a house of cards, built to give moderns an out of the implications of origins called forth by a Creator. I am well-schooled in premises of Naturalism having been in an educational system from Kindergarten until Post-Ph.D. steeped in the ideology. Life from Non-Life, God can make the rocks call out, but Scientism cannot.  

I am not sure how we have come to the place where faith and fact are seen be to be foes. As if to believe in one, means the diminishment of the other. Both are reality-based, both have finiteness in terms of our faculties. And only fools believe we can reign over faith and fact as Kings and Queens rather than vassals. The wisest man knows himself to be a fool.

I had a brief discussion with my brother on Saturday in reference to one of those cable TV programs (playing in the background) that arise around the Easter season like weeds, where some pseudo-scholars talk ad naseum about the lost books of the Bible, typically the Gnostic Gospels. I made the simple point that the entire New Testament was written by individuals who were either one of the original twelve Disciples, or who were in close contact with the original twelve Disciples (John Mark, Paul & Luke).  Those relationships created an enormous amount of review of the writings.

It was one of the parameters that the early Church used to establish Canonicity. That is a fact. My brother seemed surprised by this. It took him aback. Facts do that.   




   


 

  

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