“There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet – Shakespeare)
Age softens the connective tissues, but also perhaps one’s dogmatism. I have been struck across my (many!) decades at how human knowledge is ever expansile. The more we know, the more we find there is to discover. Questions beget questions. Many of the world’s Ivy League universities were founded on the principle that God delights in our vigorous intellectual endeavour - as in Frances Havergal’s well-known hymn:
“…. Take my intellect, and use
Ev’ry power as thou shalt choose.”
Some things that “everyone knows” have later been proved false – the flat earth, the atom being indivisible, the shroud of Turin – Stephen Hawking even disproved his own PhD thesis! Mechanisms that make intuitive sense are not automatically true: cold shrinks - but ice expands from its liquid state. Beta blockers slow the heart rate, so it sounded like a bad idea to prescribe them to patients in heart failure – until someone found out they actually help! And so cardiologists scrambled into a new world of physiology, generating terms like “preload” and “afterload”.
There have been debates, theories, analogies and even bitter ecclesiastical divisions over some theological issues – the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, why the book of Revelation seems anything but… Perhaps that is why “being right” is not listed among the fruit of the spirit. We operate to the best of our knowledge, which is also in biblical terms “through a glass darkly”. KJV
I am surely not alone in looking forward to the day all enigmas, doubts and apparent contradictions are explained.
“Now I know in part, then I shall know fully…”1 Cor 13:12
Disconcertingly for all the academics among us, there is a suggestion it will not even matter –
“… where there is knowledge, it will pass away… ” 1 Cor 13 :8
“But these three remain: faith, hope and love.” 1 Cor 13:13.
And/in the presence of our triune God.
Arthur Weiser, in The Psalms, says “… the experience of God’s presence involves fear and trembling and rapturous joy being interwoven, indicating the … mood and attitude of the person who is deeply stirred by the greatness of God.” What a destiny!
