2 Corinthians 4
About a year ago I woke up at 4 in the morning and could not get back to sleep. This doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I usually get up and go for a walk. And so was walking around the North Davis green belt and I started to pray. And no one else was out at this hour so I started to pray out loud because it helps me focus. Plus, it is not as embarrassing to get caught praying out loud as it used to be. It used to be that the only other people who talked out loud with no visible companion were the mentally ill. Now if someone catches you praying out loud in public they just assume you have Bluetooth.
So anyway about 10 minutes into my walk, around Northstar Park, I hear a strange sound. It is the unmistakable rhythmic periodicity of trampoline. And before long, I see the occasional head and shoulders of a a college age dude bouncing behind his fence, just to the left of the bike trail. It was just him, no one else, He wasn’t practicing any trick or anything like that. It was just him, bouncing up and down on a trampoline in his backyard, in the dark, at 4:30 in the morning. Now, this struck me as totally absurd. And I wondered what his story could possibly be. How does someone end up bouncing on their outdoor trampoline at 4:30? Was he high, was he drunk, or maybe he was just weird. But then it occurred to me. I was walking around the neighborhood at 4:30 in the morning talking out loud to my invisible friend…Suddenly his choice does not seem quite so strange. I thought to myself “Bounce away morning trampoline guy.”
So let start with a question:
Why do you believe in something you cannot see?
And if you don’t, why on earth should you?
A lot of people, especially intelligent University types would say that you shouldn’t. You are at one of the top universities in the world. You are getting a first class education, many of you in the sciences. Surely you do not have confidence in realities that cannot be verified by sense data.
This perspective was popularized in the 1940’s and 50’s by the famous British philosopher AJ Ayer, the and came to be known as Logical Positivism. Ayer argued that all talk about god was, strictly, non-sense in the strict definition of the word…in that it could not appeal to sense data and, therefore, fundamentally has no meaning. He argued that a statement can only have meaning if it can be verified by sense data. Of course, positivism was not long lived, largely because the idea that statements are only true if they can be verified by sense data cannot be by sense data…but we have all felt the sting of this critique.
Well, the critique is not new. Paul, one of the authors of the New Testament, felt the weight of it as well. And he winks at it in the end of chapter 4 with this subversive little riddle. He says: “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.” Excuse me, What?
In this passage Paul reflects about why some people believe in Jesus and others do not. I mean, it’s an interesting question right. I know brilliant people who believe and brilliant people who do not. There is too much brain power on either side of that equation for it to be a simple matter of intelligence.
In fact, the most famous paleontologist in the world, the late, venerable Steven Jay Gould wrote in the pages of Scientific American, that “Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism”[1] Gould suggest that there are just too many smart people on both sides of this question to be definitively adjudicated by intellect. So this evening, I want to look at a couple of surprising things that the Scriptures say about how we come to know God…and then why I want to look at two brief applications. First, Paul lays the groundwork with ‘Why God seems so hard to know.”
1. Why God Seems Hard to Know
You do not come to know God in the same way you Calculus, Chemistry or Kafka. Knowing God is different. But why? To address that Paul starts out with a curious and borderline offensive observation.
He says that “the god of this age has blinded the minds of those who do not believe” and then follows up with this “God…made is light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory…”
Do you see what he is doing there? Do you see the contrast he is making? He seems to think that the mind might be a liability. Now, I don’t know about you, but my first impulse there is to be a little embarrassed by Paul. If you are a scientist, like me…Paul just lost you. But stay with us for a minute. You will have a hard time finding a bigger nerd than me. I love the life of the mind. Shoot, I am working on my fifth degree…my fourth in engineering and the hard sciences.
And while at first it seems like by questioning the role of the mind he is playing into the stereotypical religious anti-intellectual bias…what you have to understand is that Paul was a nerd too. He loved the life of the mind. He was better educated than 99% of the Roman Empire and was a rigorous thinker. So what happened here? Well, Paul is warning, that while learning and rational thought are incredibly valuable, overemphasizing them can distort our humanness. Paul is suggesting that perhaps we should not…”believe everything we think.” He suggests that though the life of the mind has immense value in the Christian life it can also be a liability if it is not experienced in the context of the other things that make us human.
Think with me about what Jesus says was the central purpose of life. He said to “Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, strength.”
But what I have always loved about this passage is that it also gives us insight into what it means to be human. Holistic personhood is a balance of these components. By elevating any of these components of our personhood to a dominant position we become a distortion of who we were meant to be. Think with me for a minute….what happens if you place too much emphasis on the life of the:
Emphasize the Heart (Emotions) – You Become Emotional
Emphasize the Soul (Supernatural Experiences) – You Become a Mystic
Emphasize Strength (Action) – You Become a Pragmatist[2]
Emphasize the Mind (Sense Data and Thought)- you become an Intellectual
CS Lewis, a man who did not lack intellectual firepower, called this distortion, of intellectuals who put disproportionate emphasis on the life of the mind…‘Men without chests’
“(Excessive emphasis on the life of the mind will) produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardor to pursue her…It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.” CS Lewis – The Abolition of Man
This is like that guy at the gym who only works out his upper body and looks like a distortion.
What Paul is trying to say is: The mind is not unproblematic and our affections are not without value.
This passage doesn’t undermine the usefulness of the mind. It undermines the primacy of the mind. It deconstructs the enlightenment paradigm that our best shot at understanding reality is to figure it out by dispassionate analysis. What Paul is saying is that if you want to know something…but especially if you want to know God…you are going to have to engage it with your passions, your actions, and spiritual realities.
Paul suggests that what we think, the way we perceive reality is a function of what we love and what we expect.
Now I know this sounds countercultural, especially at an institution dedicated to intellectual development. But think about this with me for a minute: If knowing God was a matter of analytical ability, smart people would have an advantage. That does not really seem fair. Doesn’t it seem like a just God would set things up so that people who don’t have your IQ had an equal shot at knowing him. Smart people are welcome, but you have to recognize that the analytical analysis of sense data is not the only or even the primary process that God is known by.
So, you have to consider the possibility that you do not see God because you do not expect to. How we process sense data is influence by what we expect to see there.
One of the first movies I went to see as a kid was ET. Now, I am the same age as Drew Barrymore, so that will give you some idea of the age I was when I went to see it. But there is a scene in that film where the kids are hiding an alien from their mother and the mother walks into the bedroom. ET hides in the stuffed animals…but he is a brown leathery alien with an enormous dome…so plush kitty cats are not exactly a stellar camouflage. But she looks right at him and does not see him because when you look at a pile of toys in a child’s room, you expect to see toys, not an extra terrestrial being. You see what you expect to see.[3]
If we learned anything from the philosophical gyrations of the twentieth century it is there is no ‘view from nowhere.’ All knowledge is perspectival, it is affected by our passions, our categories, our loves, our hates. Sense data is not impartial.[4]
So how is God known if not through hypothesis testing an empirical observation?
Well that leads me to the second big idea in this passage...
2. You Can Only See With The Right Light
So Paul says you cannot know God in the same way you know Calculus, Chemistry or Kafka. He says, do not trust everything you think because the mind is not an unbiased tool. It is influenced by your affections and your expectations.
Well, OK Paul, then how do you suggest that we come to know God? Paul’s response…You have to turn the light on. In verses 4-6 he uses the metaphor of light four times. Paul says you have to process sense data under the right light. This, of course, reminded me of my favorite 15 seconds of the Office of all time:
I understand there was a similar incident at a CL Halloween party. The way the story goes, Brant came dressed as Fred from Scooby Do but when the black light came on, it became clear that Brant’s house had a mouse problem and that he probably should not be hugging anyone that night.
The black light illuminates reality to reveal the unseen. But there are less disgusting examples of phenomena or entities that are only visible under the right light. It is common for scientists to use polarization or phase contrast to illuminate realities that would otherwise be unseen.
Paul says, ‘you want to understand the essence of reality…you need the right light.” He suggests that there are fundamental realities that we simply do not see until we illuminate them with the right light.
And then he goes on to say…that light, is Jesus. Jesus is the black light of reality. He is the interpretive key by which things make sense. He is the seen thing that makes sense of the unseen. He is the empirical reality that gives us access to the unseen realties. In verse 4 he calls Jesus the ‘Image of God’. Elsewhere in scripture Jesus is called “the image of the unseen God.” The key to seeing unseen reality is to look at it in light of Jesus.
So, wrap up by unpacking this idea a little with two brief applications
Application 1: Want to Know God, Look into the Face of Jesus
Check out v 6. “God…made his light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God[5] in the face of Christ.”
He says you want access to light, knowledge, and glory of God look to Jesus. But I love the language here. He doesn’t say ‘learn about Jesus.’ You know God by looking into the face of Christ.
Some of you here tonight just need to realize that God is not known like you know Calculus, Chemistry or Kafka. He is not known by accumulating facts. He is known by looking into the face of a lover. If you want to know God, read the accounts of Jesus…but go beyond that, try talking to him. At first this will seem awkward. But you will start to see things differently. It is a lot like that scene in the matrix, where Neo has just been flushed, and he laying on that bench with all those weird electrodes in him to rebuild his muscles. He is going in and out of consciousness, and he asks Morpheus ‘Why do my eyes hurt.’ Morpheus replies “because you have never used them before.” If you look into the face of Jesus, your eyes will be calibrated to a new reality.
So, read the stories, talk to him. But then, the Scriptures teach something kind of strange. A third way you can look into the face of Jesus is by hanging out with his people. Now this is counterintuitive, because we are nothing special. You would not know that we have any special insight on reality by looking at us. We are messed up and often kind of strange. But Paul anticipates this in verse 7 where he describes us as ‘jars of clay’. He says that Jesus’ people are like unremarkable clay pots. Nothing special…but yet, they contain treasure. That is what you will find in Christian community. We are unremarkable, and sometimes we are just plain peculiar. But that is the way Jesus has always preferred it. He came to earth in a barn and now hangs out in Kliber 4. Look into the face of Jesus.
Application 2: Do Not Lose Heart
And finally…Paul’s whole point of going into this topic of ‘seeing the unseen’ is kind of surprising. He says it two times: in verse 1 and in verse 16. He says therefore, because God we have found ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ’…’We do not lose heart.’ And then he goes on to describe…midterms. He says we were ‘hard pressed’, ‘perplexed’, we were ‘struck down.’ I mean is there a better three word description of the academic life. But you see, this is a dark chapter in Paul’s life. He is discouraged. He has been physically and emotionally hurt. But he says, because we can see what is unseen, we do not loose heart.
It is discouraging get all our data from our eyes and minds and when we look out there, and in here all we see are broken people, broken relationships and broken things, piles of history books, blank word documents, impeding deadlines and more chemistry, more calculus, more Kafka. It's hard to remember the glorious and eternal things God is doing beneath the surface. So I think the point of this text is to remind us about the unseen REALITY: not seen, but real nonetheless, which is of greater value and glory than the pressing/discouraging/broken world we live in.
“We are hard pressed, but not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed…though outwardly we are wasting away, inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”
Our circumstances do not define our reality. We have insider knowledge that gives us courage and strength. I think if Paul were here tonight speaking into our context he might say “You are the loved child of a cosmic King, you have access to the face of Jesus. Don’t you dare allow some professor to tell you how much you are worth. No one can define you with a number.” The reality of your value is unseen. So go home and work hard to develop your mind and your ideas. But refuse to let the grade you see at the top of your paper define you.[6]
Paul says, look into the face of Jesus, let his light illuminate the true nature of your reality…and because of that, press on with and for him and don’t lose heart…because:
“We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.”
____________
[2] This could also turn into a moralist. If you put all of the emphasis on what you do…action…then correct action becomes ultimate. This is interesting because there are conservative and liberal versions of this. Conservatives tend to stress personal action (what bad activities do I avoid) and liberals tend to stress communial action (what good actions do I do for the public good) but both are distoritions by evaluating human value based on actions.
[3] This happens to me all the time as a scientist. Last quarter I went on a field trip with an entomology class I was taking. We went to a vernal pool and the whole class stared at this pool for 20 minutes looking for anything interesting. For 20 minutes we saw mostly nothing. Until someone said, what are all those little black things jumping around. There, right on the water edge, were hundreds of colembola jumping all over the place. They had been there all along, and once we were looking for them, you could not miss them, but it took 15 scientist 20 minutes to see them…because “How we process sense data is influence by what we expect to see there.“
[4] There are impediments to knowledge that are not purely cognative – how we interpret sense data is affected by personal and cosmic influences, and some of the cosmic influences are pernicious
[5] Ravi Zacharias has a great contextual note here where he points out that the pursuit of the Hebrews was light, the pursuit of the Greeks was knowledge and the pursuit of the Romans was glory…in other words, the highest pursuit of each person who was in Corinth (a Greek city, under Roman occupation, with a substantial Jewish community – especially in the new church) is culminated in Jesus.
[6] This is harder than I make it sound. I am intentionally trying to get sub-optimal grades in my most recent degree because it is superfluous. In a sense, getting an A in my current class is evidence I need to spend more time with my kids. Still, I got an A- on my first paper and it stung.
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