Resting on the Lord Alone

The average America isn’t really much a thinker. They aren’t aware of their own legacy of intellectual pursuits. Classical education is mostly dead in the West. Among those who do tend to give some consideration to thinking logically, the vast majority of Americans tend to be linear and binary.

Binary logic is that things are either 0 or 1. This is the foundation of how most computers work, so this kind of approach is pervasive. Something can’t be both positive and negative; it has to be one or the other. And as for linear thinking, that’s a matter of refusing to consider parallel logic altogether. Again, this tends to follow the underlying logic of common computer devices. The idea of parallel processes coming up with different answers is just asking too much for most people.

Where this hurts the most is when people reflexively apply those limits to moral considerations. A thing is either good or evil; in their minds it cannot be some of both, or neither. There is some vague room for things being neutral, maybe, but you’ll rarely see that in common conversations about moral issues.

This is what happens when you saddle the intellect with the task of deciding what is morally good or evil, a task it was never supposed to handle. That’s why we are fallen creatures — we insist on evaluating good or evil with logic. It simply cannot handle the task.

I will tell you that the heart is capable of non-binary logic and parallel considerations, but there’s no way to prove that if your heart isn’t the focal point of your conscious awareness. The “logic” of the heart rests on revelation, not trying to reason things through. So the heart asks first what God has said, if it can be exposed to that. If not, it seeks its best estimation of what has been revealed in Creation. The heart can easily read reality or moral truth directly in the natural world. The hard part is convincing the intellect that the heart knows what it’s talking about.

This is part of our challenge in sharing the gospel message in America. Our audience is several layers removed from the natural design of human nature. Worse, we have a huge presence of church-folks who don’t appreciate what we are saying. They are beholden to a potent rationalist tradition.

I recall reading the works of Francis Schaeffer in college. These days you don’t hear his name much, but his teaching still influences the way church-folks think. He very forcefully pushed binary logic as the “Christian” view of reality. He was such a major figure in the previous century in his apologetics work, and most of the American churches absorbed it. I was strongly influenced until I realized that Jesus was an Eastern man, and the Bible is an Eastern book about an Eastern religion. I still wonder if Schaeffer had ever spent any time reading the philosophy of the Ancient Near East, of which the Hebrew Bible is a part. His take is radically different from what Jesus actually thought.

We affirm that things are not binary and not linear. That kind of thinking is what makes quantum computers possible, by the way. But we try to promote the idea that morality is shaped by divine revelation first, then it must be applied to the context. That context includes the individual calling and mission from God. We aren’t dependent on what seems to work, but whether it brings peace with our Maker in that moment.

Our departure from that still very influential classical Western standard puts us way out on the fringes. It’s a miracle anyone can find us, much less embrace our message. Don’t despair, because this is how God keeps us strong. We see only the folks He sends, people who seem to recognize that this whole thing rests entirely on Him alone.