The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

Now that I'm pretty much done with my degree, I have the luxury of filling my days with just about anything I wish to busy myself with. I picked up Walker Percy's "Message in the Bottle" again, and stumbled on a chapter that I liked a lot and got me thinking about Christianity today - not the magazine, mind you, but rather Christianity in our culture, today.

Percy suggests that we increasingly evaluate our experience of something according to whether or not it corresponds to the way it was advertised. He takes the example of a sightseer visiting the Grand Canyon, whom I will further refer to as *drum roll* Barnabas.
Where the discoverer once laid eyes on it for the first time while wonder, awe and delight overwhelmed him, Barnabas is somewhat bored and unmoved by the great thing yawning at his feet. The beauty eludes him, somehow. Barnabas measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the performed complex. If the canyon doesn't reflect what the brochure advertised, if the colours are slightly more sombre, then Barnabas will only be aware of the disparities and will not be able to enjoy the canyon for what it is. His awareness of how different it is in real life stands as a separating screen between him and the canyon.

Percy proposes two other examples to illustrate his point - a young Falkland Islander finds a dogfish while he is walking along the beach and by working on it there and then with his jackknife, has a great advantage over the Scarsdale high-school pupil who finds the dogfish on his laboratory desk. Similarly, the citizen of Huxley's A Brave New World who stumbles across a volume of Shakespeare in some vine-grown ruins and squats on a potsherd to read it, is at an advantage over the Harvard sophmore taking English Poetry II. In other words, the student wanting to get at a dogfish or a Shakespeare sonnet may have the greatest difficulty "salvaging the creature itself from the educational package in which it is presented."

Lastly, Percy recalls the scene in The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, where the girl hides in the bushes to listen to the Capehart in the big house play Beethoven.
"Perhaps she was the lucky one after all. Think of the unhappy souls inside, who see the record, worry about scratches, and most of all worry about whether they are getting it, whether they are bona fide music lovers. What is the best way to hear Beethoven: sitting in a proper silence around the Capehart or eavesdropping from an azaela bush?
However it may come about, we notice two traits from the second situation:
- An openness of the thing before me - instead of being an exercise to be learned according to an approved mode, it is a garden of delights which beckons to one;
- A sovereignty of the knower - instead of being a consumer of a prepared experience, I am a sovereign wayfarer, a wanderer in the neighbourhood of being who stumbles into the garden."

Having just finished reading "Searching for God Knows What", I thought Percy's observations were pertinent to the issues Miller raises in his book, regarding the dangers of following and relying on formulas in our 'journey of faith'.

"I know it's tempting to believe if we will walk through ten steps or listen to only a certain kind of music or pray in a certain way and for a certain number of days then we will find favour with God, but we won't. The formulas, I understand, were created by their authors to help us, but they do more hindering than helping. If we trust in a formula, if we trust in steps, we are not trusting in God. Formulas, while helping organize our faith, also tempt us to trust in them rather than in God... He is the authority we need. He is the God we must cling to for salvation. And He is a Person, not a list of ideas, not a theology."

I ask myself, have formulas and theories replaced the intended relationship we were to cultivate with Jesus?
Are we the unhappy souls inside?
Are we worrying about scratches on our Christian-performance record?
Are we trying to get it by putting into practice bullet-points and one-two-three philosophies?
Is our faith an exercise "to be learned according to an approved mode"?
Does our faith need salvaging from the packaging that surrounds it?
Are we "being a consumer of a prepared experience" by relying on these formulas and steps?
Are they robbing us of potential awe, wonder and delight?
Has beauty eluded us?

"Because we have approached faith through the lens of science, the rich legacy of art that once flowed out of the Chrisitan community has dried up. The poetry of Scripture, especially in the case of Moses, began to be interpreted literally and mathematically, and whole books such as the Song of Songs were completely and totally ignored.They weren't scientific. You couldn't break them down into bullet points. Morality became a code, rather than a manifestation of a love for Christ, the way a woman is faithful to her husband, the way a man is faithful to his wife. These relational ideas were replaced with wrong and right, good and bad, with only hinted suggestions as to where wrong and right, good and bad actually came from. Old Testament stories became formulas for personal growth rather than stories to help us understand the character and nature of the God with whom we interact.

In a culture that worships science, relational propositions will always be left out of arguments attempting to surface truth. We believe, quite simply, that unless we can chart something, it doesn't exist. And you can't chart relationships. Furthermore, in our attempts to make relational propositions look like chartable realities, all beauty and mystery is lost. And so when times get hard, when reality knocks us on our butts, mathematical propositions are unable to comfort our failing hearts. How many people have walked away from faith because their systematic theology proved unable to answer the deep longings and questions of the soul? What we need here, truly, is faith in a Being, not a list of ideas."


What we need, truly, is to know God and be known by Him. What we need, is to go out and discover him afresh, delight in Him, hide in the bushes and hear the sound of His voice anew. Our laboratory manuals, theories, dissecting boards, instruments and mimeographed lists only deprive and starve us from a living encounter with our living God; a God who promised to offer life to the full.



My ears are currently seduced by: Miranda Stone - 7 Deadly Sins