The Great Synthesis (a work in progress)
My songs are truer than my words. I compose notes that rise like smoke from the censer of my soul; I neither know nor care where their light or fragrance drift, vanishing into the dark and hollow corners of unseen rooms. My essays, though meant to describe with greater precision than music ever could, march across the page in jackboots, barking decrees to an empty square. And my daily speech? I talk like a common fool, scattering myself thin over everything and everyone, straining always to meet the expectations of others.
Nevertheless, I conjure my best speech in this work: a labor I can only describe as poised somewhere between inspiration and compulsion: inspired, because it has an aim; compulsive, because the only difference between madness and genius is that the latter already has an audience, while the former still hopes to earn one by self-deprecation.
What is my aim, then?
There are things that only artists truly see. The art born of such vision is then studied by those who are not artists—reduced, dissected, and taught. The only proper use of a canon in the arts is to widen one’s eyes, to make possible the sight of new kinds of beauty beyond it.
Intentionality toward a telos lies at the heart of education. What I intend and offer is more than the possession of facts: it is the cultivation of reflection itself—a deliberate stretching of the soul toward the right ends—and such formation cannot be rushed. Above all, I want to widen eyes to see that the artificial intelligence world we live in is not a real one. Artificial intelligence may analyze every note of a symphony, compressing patterns and predicting their sequence, but it will never hear the music as the Composer intended.
For man, history is that symphony, and artificial intelligence is deaf to it. One of my vocations is to teach this; I will attempt to do so not merely by argument, but by demonstration.
Abstract
This essay asks whether the material record of human prehistory — tools, languages, cities, and isotope chemistry — requires tens of millennia, or whether it can be read coherently on a much shorter timescale: roughly five to six millennia since a global Flood (~2500–2300 BC). I argue that “deep time” is not demanded by the data per se but by prior rules (natural causes only, constant rates, gradual change). Relax those rules and the same sequence looks different: a catastrophic reset, followed by rapid population growth, abrupt linguistic fragmentation, redeployment of preexisting technologies, and swift urbanization. The model keeps sequence but compresses duration, and it makes testable predictions: (1) radiocarbon calibration “wiggles” should be reproducible via plausible post-Flood changes in ^14C production; (2) ice cores should retain multiple sub-annual layers during a transient, high-variability climate; and (3) any decay perturbations must remain bounded so as not to violate Oklo’s isotopic constraints. The aim is not to abandon science but to use it differently — to model the measurable consequences of a biblical history of judgment and recovery and assess whether that history can also fit the earth’s record.
Time, Tools, and the Story Beneath Our Feet
Modern readers are taught to imagine prehistory as a neat procession of ages: Stone, Bronze, Iron, one yielding to the next in a linear march across the millennia. It is a convenient framework for organizing the past, but it obscures more than it reveals. These "ages" are not epochs in any universal sense. They are labels created by archaeologists to describe dominant technologies and patterns of life, and they unfolded unevenly across the world. What seems, in a textbook, like a clear timeline was in reality a patchwork of overlapping worlds, cultures living side by side at different stages of material development.
This matters because the neatness of the conventional story shapes how we imagine the past and how we interpret the evidence beneath our feet. It also shapes what we think is possible. The question at the heart of this essay — whether the human story might be told on a dramatically shorter timeline — cannot be asked honestly until we see how much of what we take for granted rests on assumptions rather than on the evidence itself. The point of history is not to memorize dates; likewise the point of biblical history. It is to understand the meaning and movement of events, and to ask what kind of story the evidence is actually telling.
For orientation, I will often cite conventional dates when describing the standard story; later I will propose a compressed placement for many of those same horizons. The difference is intentional: same strata, two competing timelines.
This essay proposes that the archaeological and geological record can be coherently explained within a timescale of roughly five to six millennia since the Flood, rather than tens of thousands of years, if we allow for catastrophic resetting and post-Flood acceleration.
Archaeologists use the phrase "Stone Age" to describe the long span when humans shaped their world largely with stone, bone, and wood. This was not a brief stage on the way to something better but the vast foundation of human experience. People in Africa, where the first known toolmakers lived, knapped flint into hand-axes, tended fire, and hunted in coordinated groups long before metal was known. From there, humanity spread outward. By roughly 50,000 BC, according to the conventional chronology, humans were painting the walls of caves in France, carving figurines on the Russian steppe, and building hearths in the Indian subcontinent.
This was not a uniform story. While the Natufian peoples of the Levant were experimenting with harvesting wild grains and settling for part of the year, others remained nomadic, adapting to tundra, savanna, or desert as their ancestors had done. These differences remind us that "Stone Age" is not a date but a description, and that the evidence itself does not speak of a single global timeline, but of countless human communities responding to their worlds in parallel.
Around 10,000 BC, again by current scholarly reckoning, a profound change appears in the archaeological record. People in the Fertile Crescent began to cultivate crops and herd animals, settling permanently in villages like Jericho, Jarmo, and Göbekli Tepe. In Egypt, small farming communities took root along the Nile. In South Asia, early settlers at Mehrgarh planted wheat and kept cattle.
These changes mark what archaeologists call the Neolithic, the "New Stone Age." Yet even here, the old ways endured. Stone remained the principal material for tools, and hunting and gathering continued alongside farming. What truly changed was how people related to the land. They were no longer merely surviving on it; they were reshaping it. And they were doing so in many places, independently, with no single center or moment of origin.
The Bronze Age, dated by conventional scholarship to around 3300 BC in Mesopotamia, brought another transformation. People learned to mix copper and tin into bronze, a metal far stronger than either on its own. With it they forged tools that could till heavy soil, weapons that could hold an edge, and ornaments that proclaimed status and power. Bronze enabled new scales of ambition. Villages grew into cities such as Uruk, Ur, Lagash, and Eridu. Writing appeared as a tool for accounting. Kings and priests emerged as administrators of the surpluses bronze helped create.
These developments did not occur everywhere at once. Egypt entered its Bronze Age somewhat later. The great Indus cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro arose around 2600 BC. China, still Neolithic by prevailing dates, would follow within centuries. Even within regions, some communities adopted bronze quickly while others remained reliant on stone or copper. The idea of a single, synchronized "Bronze Age" collapses under the weight of the evidence itself.
Iron working first appears, in the mainstream chronology, among Anatolian peoples by the mid-second millennium BC. Its spread was slow, but as the great Bronze Age kingdoms fell around 1200 BC, undone by drought, migration, and warfare, new peoples rose armed with iron: Israelites in Canaan, Greeks in the Aegean, and agricultural societies in the Ganges basin. Many regions, however, continued to use bronze for centuries. The so-called "Iron Age" was never a single moment. It was a patchwork of overlapping technologies and cultural rhythms.
By the Classical era, iron tools and weapons were common, yet the world remained deeply layered. Rome, for all its iron might, drew heavily on Bronze Age knowledge from Greece and Egypt. In India, Aśoka ruled an iron-wielding empire built on the spiritual heritage of the Vedic age. Each stage carried forward the memory and achievements of those before it. Progress was not a series of clean breaks but a series of continuities and adaptations.
Archaeologists reconstruct this story from the ground upward. Layers of earth preserve traces of human activity — the earliest hearths and stone tools at the bottom, then pottery, animal bones, and the mud-brick houses of early farmers. Above those layers lie bronze ornaments, city walls, and the first written texts, and above them again, iron nails, coins, and the remains of later towns. Each layer tells a story of change, yet none speaks directly about the time these changes required.
The layers themselves can mislead. A thick band of ash might represent a single devastating fire. A series of pottery styles might appear to span centuries but could belong to a single generation of rapid experimentation. Archaeology excels at showing sequence — what followed what — but it cannot by itself determine the speed at which events unfolded. That judgment comes from the assumptions scholars bring to the evidence.
It is here, in the gap between sequence and duration, that the central argument of this work begins. The standard historical narrative assumes that cultural change must be slow, that the climb from stone tools to writing, from villages to empires, required tens of millennia. That assumption is woven so deeply into the framework of modern scholarship that it often goes unexamined. Yet the evidence itself — the overlapping ages, the sudden appearances, the layered but discontinuous record — does not demand that conclusion. It merely records that one thing followed another.
The chapters that follow will explore whether that evidence can be read differently. They will ask whether the long narrative of deep time, built without reference to the biblical record and excluding the possibility of divine action from the outset, is the only story the ground can tell. They will consider whether a world shaped by catastrophe and renewal, repopulated from a single family, and driven by memory and necessity might leave behind the very same traces, but on a far shorter timescale.
Modern debates about the origins of the world are often staged as a clash between irreconcilable camps: "science versus faith," "reason versus myth," "enlightenment versus ignorance." These slogans make for dramatic headlines, but they hide more than they reveal. The truth is far more interesting and subtle: young-earth creationists (YEC), old-earth Christians (OEC), and secular scientists are all examining the same earth, the same rocks and strata, the same fossils and isotopic ratios. They peer through the same microscopes, use the same instruments, and follow the same rigorous procedures. The raw evidence is shared. What differs, profoundly, is the story built around that evidence.
No layer of dirt, no flake of mineral, no fossil ever "tells its own story." Evidence is mute. It must always be interpreted — and that interpretation depends on what we already believe about what kinds of explanations are allowed. Most scientists today work inside a framework called methodological naturalism — the rule that explanations must involve only natural causes, never divine action. They also assume that nature’s laws have always worked the same way and that change has been slow and continuous over vast stretches of time. These assumptions are not conclusions from the evidence; they are the starting points that shape how evidence is read. Once they are in place, divine action is excluded before any samples are even studied.
Young-earth researchers begin with different assumptions. They treat the events described in Scripture — Creation, the Flood, Babel — as real history with physical consequences. They allow that the earth might show signs of judgment, intervention, or radical change, not just steady processes. Neither group is "neutral." Both filter the evidence through a worldview, and that worldview shapes not just the answers but the questions they think are worth asking.
This becomes obvious when you look at how both groups use the same tools. They map rock layers, measure magnetic patterns, analyze isotopes, and classify fossils. The raw data are the same. But their stories about those data diverge. To one scholar, the ratio of uranium to lead in a zircon crystal proves billions of years of steady radioactive decay. To another, the same ratio is evidence of a brief period of accelerated decay during a global cataclysm. A fossil sequence that looks like evolutionary progress to one scientist looks like the rapid burial of separate ecological zones to another. What changes is not the evidence but the framework wrapped around it.
This is why it is a mistake to argue, "Science works — airplanes fly and GPS satellites navigate — so deep time must be true." These are two different kinds of science. Operational science deals with what we can observe and repeat today, like how jet engines burn fuel or how medicines work. Historical science tries to reconstruct what happened in the distant past from clues left behind, like trying to piece together a crime scene with no witnesses. The fact that today’s physics lets us build rockets does not prove that radioactive decay has always worked exactly the same way for billions of years. Of course, present-day physics does help set boundaries for historical theories, so the two areas are connected, but one cannot prove the other.
Philosophical Foundations of Deep Time
The deep-time story rests on three key ideas that are rarely said aloud but are always assumed. Natural causes only: Explanations must exclude God by definition, no matter what the evidence shows. Uniform nature: Physical laws and rates must have been constant for all of Earth’s history. Slow continuity: Change must be gradual, interrupted only by natural disasters we still see today.
None of these ideas can be directly tested against the ancient past. They are not results of scientific experiments; they are the rules of the game. If you remove them, the standard deep-time picture collapses. If you keep them, divine action is not just unlikely — it is impossible by definition.
The power of the deep-time model is that these assumptions make many kinds of evidence line up beautifully. Radiometric dates match orbital patterns. Ice layers mirror changes in the ocean. Magnetic flips in rocks line up with seafloor spreading. The result is a tight, well-fitted story, but a coherent story is not the same as a certain one. Ptolemy’s Earth-centered universe worked mathematically for 1,500 years, and Newton’s laws described the cosmos almost perfectly until Einstein showed their limits. Scientific consensus is a model built on assumptions, and assumptions can change.
Radiometric Dating and Its Limits
Radiometric dating is one of the most powerful tools scientists use to estimate the ages of rocks, fossils, and archaeological remains. The basic idea is simple: some atoms are unstable and slowly change into other atoms at a predictable pace, like sand falling through an hourglass. By measuring how much of the "parent" atom is left and how much of the "daughter" atom it has turned into, scientists calculate how long the process has been going on.
But this technique depends on two key assumptions — and neither can be directly checked for events millions of years in the past. First, it assumes the "hourglass" — the rate of decay — has always ticked at the same speed. Second, it assumes that the system has remained "closed," meaning no extra sand (atoms) has been added or lost over time. If either assumption is wrong, the calculated date is off.
Within periods we can check, radiometric dating works well. Carbon-14 dating, for example, is excellent for artifacts up to a few thousand years old. When scientists date wooden beams, papyrus manuscripts, or coins whose historical age we already know, the results match. Potassium-argon dating of volcanic eruptions, such as Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, also gives the correct results. Even the annual growth rings of living trees, like California’s bristlecone pines, line up closely with their radiocarbon measurements. These are powerful confirmations that the method is reliable where we can verify it.
Yet the tree-ring record also reveals a deeper challenge. These are not guesses about past conditions; they are counted, physical layers of wood, and the carbon within them shows small but precise rises and dips in 14C concentration over time, known as calibration wiggles. A shortened timeline must explain not only how many rings exist but also why those wiggles appear. This means proposing a realistic physical model — for instance, that Earth’s magnetic field, the Sun’s radiation, or the cosmic-ray environment changed after the Flood — and then showing how such changes would create the same wavy pattern without contradicting other evidence like cave deposits or layered lake sediments.
This is where physics enters the picture. Changes in cosmic rays or magnetic strength would leave specific fingerprints in the 14C record: baseline shifts, bigger or smaller wiggles, or differences between hemispheres. A compressed-time model must try to reproduce those fingerprints. If it cannot, the idea weakens. If it can, the case grows stronger.
One way to test this is to simulate how a more unstable post-Flood environment — with a rapidly shifting magnetic field or more intense solar activity — might affect 14C production. These conditions could also explain the "heartbeat-like" wiggles scientists see. The goal is not to claim miracles as scientific facts, but to model the physical consequences if such conditions really existed.
Beyond the radiocarbon range, the method’s limits become obvious. 14C decays too quickly to measure anything older than about 50,000 years. Other techniques, like potassium-argon dating, have the opposite problem: their decay is so slow that they are unreliable for young rocks. That is why, for example, volcanic rock from Mount St. Helens’ 1980 eruption has been measured as "hundreds of thousands of years old" — the method simply does not work on such young material.
Even when methods are used correctly, complications remain. Rocks may mix minerals of different ages. Older crystals, called xenocrysts, can be carried into new magma, making the sample seem ancient. Gases like argon can escape or become trapped. Geologists know these pitfalls and work hard to correct for them — isolating individual minerals, checking for contamination, and comparing results across multiple isotopic systems. When done carefully, the results usually match the broader geological picture. But "usually" is not "always," and even the best results still depend on assumptions about decay rates and closed systems that we cannot directly verify over millions or billions of years.
It is important to clarify what this argument does and does not say about radioactive decay. It is not claiming that decay rates have been wildly different for billions of years, or that they must have changed dramatically everywhere. The suggestion is far more modest: that if any changes did occur, they were likely brief, limited, and possibly local — perhaps triggered by unusual environmental conditions in the centuries after the Flood. This idea allows most decay to behave just as it does today, while leaving open the possibility of a short episode of accelerated decay that slightly altered isotopic "clocks."
This distinction matters because the main evidence for steady decay does not come only from the dating methods themselves. It also comes from a network of cross-checks. These include:
The basic physics of radioactive decay, which is well understood in the lab.
The chemical "fingerprints" left behind by a natural nuclear reactor in Gabon called Oklo.
The internal agreement of different isotope systems (like rubidium-strontium, samarium-neodymium, and uranium-lead) that behave differently under heat, chemical changes, or water movement.
Records outside radiometric dating, like cave formations dated with uranium-thorium, lake sediments layered year by year (varves), and tree-ring radiocarbon patterns.
Each of these checks reinforces the others. None of them proves that decay has always been perfectly steady, but together they make it very hard to argue for huge, long-term changes without producing obvious contradictions in the physical evidence.
Because of that, a compressed-timescale model cannot just wave away the standard assumptions. It must show how all these independent pieces could still line up under new conditions. For example, it would need to explain:
How different radioactive systems could speed up slightly together and still give matching results.
How a short burst of faster decay could occur without ruining the chemical record left by the Oklo reactor.
How the wavy "wiggle" pattern of 14C in tree rings could still appear even if the Earth’s magnetic field or cosmic-ray intensity was different in the past.
Without that kind of quantitative explanation, the idea of changing decay rates remains speculation rather than science.
As noted earlier, the Oklo natural reactor in Gabon provides one of the most serious constraints on this discussion. Its isotopic products match what we would expect if decay rates during its operation were about the same as they are now. Any proposed change must either have been very small (a few percent or less) during Oklo’s activity or must have occurred before or after it was active. Otherwise, the isotopic signature would look very different from what scientists measure today.
Internal Checks and Their Limits
Scientists use several clever techniques to check whether their radiometric dates are reliable. One approach is to apply different isotope systems to the same rock. For example, uranium decays along two different "paths" — uranium-238 to lead-206 and uranium-235 to lead-207. If both methods give the same date, confidence increases. If they do not, it is a sign that something disturbed the system, such as heat from metamorphism, the loss of lead, or the movement of water through the rock.
Other methods use what is called an isochron, a graph that plots multiple samples from what is assumed to be the same original rock body. If those points fall on a straight line, the slope of that line gives an age. Argon-argon dating adds an extra step: it heats a mineral in stages to see whether the gas it releases is consistent throughout. All these methods help detect errors and are powerful tools for cross-checking results.
But there is an important catch: these are still internal checks. They show that the system is behaving consistently according to its own assumptions, not that those assumptions are necessarily true over millions of years. It is a bit like checking that three different clocks all agree: they may indeed match each other, but if they all run fast or slow, their agreement does not prove the time is correct.
There are known ways such "false agreement" can happen. Rocks of different ages can mix together and accidentally form a straight isochron line. Zircon crystals can contain older "inherited" cores that make the host rock appear older than it is. Argon gas can leak out of minerals or become trapped long after the rock formed, skewing results. For a compressed-timeline model to be taken seriously, it must do more than point these problems out — it must demonstrate how the same kinds of cross-system agreement could happen naturally without assuming deep time. That means showing, with a real example, how zircon inheritance, rubidium-strontium open-system behavior, and samarium-neodymium mixing could all create the illusion of ancient ages and still match the order of rock layers and volcanic events we observe.
Geologists know about these complications and attempt to correct for them using empirical diagnostics — such as checking for mismatched decay chains, analyzing the scatter in isochron points, or studying how atoms diffuse through crystals. The argument here is not that these checks are useless. It is that a shortened chronology must explain why these same "signs of reliability" could still appear even if the timescale is shorter.
As noted previously, the Oklo reactor provides one strong data point: during the period of its operation, nuclear decay behaved much as it does today. That conclusion is valuable but narrow. It does not automatically extend to all eras for which we have no direct checks. Radiometric dating — powerful as it is — ultimately rests on philosophical assumptions about the past that cannot be observed directly.
Philosophy Beneath the Physics
This brings us to the deeper issue. Radiometric dating is not fraudulent, nor is it useless. It is a powerful and carefully honed tool. Within the last few thousand years — where its results can be anchored by tree rings, historical records, or archaeological artifacts — it performs admirably. Even beyond that, the internal consistency of multiple isotope systems is often impressive. But none of this directly demonstrates the reality of deep time. What it shows is that, if the assumptions of constant decay and closed systems hold, then the data fit a model of great age.
That "if" is philosophical. It rests on a belief about the nature of the universe: that physical laws and processes have always behaved as they do now, that no divine act has intervened to reset the clocks, that nature is a closed system. If one grants that belief, the case for deep time is extraordinarily strong. The clocks align. The isotope systems agree. The model holds together. If one does not grant that belief — if one allows for the possibility of divine action or radical shifts in natural order — then the same evidence demands re-examination. The neat coherence of the system becomes less a demonstration of fact and more a reflection of the assumptions that built it.
It is crucial to clarify what such an allowance does and does not imply. No physical model can capture the act of divine causation itself, nor should it attempt to. The historian’s task is not to reverse-engineer a miracle as if it were a natural process. But if divine action has, at moments, radically reshaped the physical order, those interventions will have left measurable consequences. It is these downstream signatures — altered isotope ratios, shifted atmospheric conditions, or distinctive stratigraphic patterns — that lie within the scope of scientific modeling. A compressed chronology is therefore not obliged to explain how God altered decay kinetics or environmental variables; it is obliged to show what the physical world would look like if He had. That distinction marks the line between speculative theology and testable historical science.
The alternative is not a vague appeal to miracles or mystery. It is a coherent historical model that anticipates rapid post-catastrophic change, accelerated diversification, and technological redeployment within a few millennia. It predicts precisely the patterns we observe: sudden urban emergence, abrupt linguistic fragmentation, explosive population growth, and tightly clustered cultural horizons. These are not anomalies that deep time struggles to explain; they are the fingerprints of a world rebuilding itself on a compressed timescale.
This is the heart of the matter. The confidence many scientists have in deep time does not arise from the data alone. It arises from a metaphysical conviction that miracles cannot occur, that the cosmos must always have behaved as it does now. This is not a conclusion that can be tested or falsified. It is a creed — and, as with any creed, its acceptance or rejection shapes how one reads the evidence.
The Myth of Independent Clocks
One of the most persuasive arguments in favor of deep time is the apparent agreement of many different "clocks." Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, tree-ring records from Europe and North America, layers of lake sediment (varves) in Japan, and mineral deposits (speleothems) in Chinese caves all seem to tell the same story. Each points to a long, slow chronology, and the convergence of so many separate datasets seems to offer powerful confirmation. Yet this convergence is not as decisive as it first appears. The clocks may not be as independent as they are often portrayed.
A useful analogy can help clarify the problem. Imagine a city square filled with clocks — on towers, on café walls, above shopfronts. They all chime at the same moment, and the townsfolk, pointing to their perfect agreement, declare that they must be telling the correct time. At first, this seems persuasive. But suppose we open the mechanism and find that every clock is driven by the same main gear — and that the gear itself is spinning fifty times faster than normal. The clocks’ agreement no longer tells us the time. It tells us only that they share the same source of error.
The same logic applies to the great chronological records of the natural world. Global processes can synchronize many different archives, producing apparent agreement without guaranteeing that the timescale is correct. A major volcanic eruption, for example, does not merely lay down an ash layer in Greenland’s ice. It cools summers so severely that European oaks grow narrower rings. It stirs atmospheric dust that settles in Japanese lake sediments. It alters the chemical composition of Chinese cave water. Of course the records align — they are responding to the same event. The question is not whether they record the same sequence of events. They do. The real question is whether that sequence represents the slow pulse of individual years or the rapid beat of a perturbed climate system in flux.
Any compressed chronology must also address the way separate archives — such as Greenland and Antarctic ice cores, varved lake sediments, and speleothems — align with one another. These datasets are often treated as "independent clocks" precisely because they respond to different physical drivers and form under distinct conditions. If sub-annual climatic oscillations created multiple layers per year in one archive, the same forcing must also explain why the others exhibit comparable counts and chemical signals. This demands a coherent physical model, not merely a conceptual possibility — one that links atmospheric composition, dust flux, and isotopic shifts across both hemispheres and shows how such conditions could arise and persist in the centuries immediately following the Flood.
Today’s relatively stable climate produces one dominant seasonal cycle per year, so scientists often assume that each visible layer — whether a light-dark pair in an ice core or a couplet of sediment in a lake bed — represents a single year. But there is no a priori reason this must always have been so. In the centuries immediately following the Flood, if such an event occurred, the planet may have been far less stable. Shifts in ocean circulation, changes in atmospheric composition, rapid crustal rebound, heightened volcanic activity, and possibly variable solar output could have driven multiple strong climatic oscillations within a single solar year. If so, many of the layers we currently count as "years" could instead be sub-annual events.
Sequence, Duration, and the Speed of the Past
The implications of this possibility are enormous. Consider Greenland’s GISP2 ice core, which contains roughly 50,000 visible layers. If those layers formed once per year, they represent 50,000 years. If they formed fifty times per year — during a period of climatic upheaval in the centuries following the Flood — they represent only about 1,000 years. If they formed one hundred times per year, they represent just 500. Nothing in the physics forbids this. In systems forced far from equilibrium, cycles can occur at much higher frequencies while maintaining internal order. An orchestra playing a familiar symphony at twice the tempo still keeps perfect time — it simply plays faster.
One objection to this idea is that many layered records exhibit chemical or isotopic signatures that appear seasonal. Alternating bright and dark bands in ice cores, or cyclical swings in oxygen isotope ratios, are commonly interpreted as evidence of summer-winter cycles. Yet intense and rapid climatic perturbations could reproduce such signatures many times within a single year. Volcanic aerosols could cause repeated cooling episodes. Rapid changes in surface albedo could trigger alternating warm and cold intervals. Sudden releases of heat from the oceans, or fluctuations in solar activity, could generate short-lived climatic pulses that mimic annual rhythms. The ice does not record how much time passed between these shifts. It records only that they occurred.
Archaeology offers an instructive parallel. A single tell — the accumulated mound of an ancient city — may contain a dozen discrete destruction layers, each with its own pottery styles, debris, and ash. Without textual evidence, one might assume that centuries separate them. But contemporary inscriptions sometimes reveal that all those layers belong to a single century of political chaos and repeated attacks. Sequence is not duration. The presence of a regular, ordered sequence of events does not, by itself, prove a long timescale. The same principle applies to natural records. They may preserve perfect order without preserving slow time.
The deep-time model’s strength lies in what is often called the "preponderance of interlocking evidence" — the agreement of numerous independent records. Yet that agreement is exactly what one would expect if a single global system, destabilized by a catastrophic event, produced multiple signals simultaneously. One mechanism could generate many different records. One set of climatic drivers could leave traces in many different places. One shared acceleration could compress what we now interpret as millennia into a much shorter span. Harmony among the records is not definitive proof of vast ages. It is evidence that they are responding to the same underlying forces — forces that may have been operating far more rapidly than we imagine.
Babel and the Memory of Creation
If the early chapters of Genesis describe real historical events, traces of those events ought to linger in the memory of humanity. Even if languages splintered and peoples scattered, those memories would persist — reshaped by environment, refracted through new cultural lenses, and reframed by human imagination, but never fully erased. And indeed, when we survey the world’s ancient mythologies, we find striking patterns that seem to echo a common source.
Across the mythic traditions of every major civilization, certain motifs appear with remarkable consistency. Nearly all begin with a primordial state — chaos, water, void, darkness — followed by a process of ordering or separation, and finally the emergence of a habitable world. The details vary, but the underlying structure remains stable. What changes is the nature of the agent responsible. Where Genesis describes a personal Creator who speaks the cosmos into being, myths substitute impersonal elements, battling deities, or emergent forces. It is as though humanity remembered the shape of the story but forgot its Author.
Mesopotamian literature offers one of the clearest examples. The Enūma Eliš opens with Apsu and Tiamat, male and female waters whose violent struggle gives rise to the gods and the world. The imagery of primordial waters and subsequent creation is familiar, yet God’s sovereign word is replaced by combat, and creation itself becomes the byproduct of divine violence. Egyptian cosmogonies tell of the watery abyss, Nun, from which the first mound arises or of Ptah shaping the world with his heart and tongue — echoes of creation by thought and speech, yet still framed within an eternal, uncreated substance.
Greek tradition, in Hesiod’s Theogony, begins with chaos, a yawning void from which earth and the gods emerge. Early philosophers, moving toward abstraction, stripped away divine agency entirely, proposing that water (Thales), the apeiron (Anaximander), air (Anaximenes), or fire (Heraclitus) was the origin of all things. Norse myth speaks of Ginnungagap, the void between fire and ice, from which Ymir the giant arises; the world is fashioned from his corpse, not spoken into existence. The Rig Veda imagines a golden egg forming within primordial waters. Chinese myth envisions yin and yang separating from an undifferentiated whole. Polynesian stories recount the sky and earth being forced apart by their children to let in the light. Arctic peoples speak of endless seas and ice shaped by animals.
The details differ — and indeed, the imagery reflects local environments: rivers and floods in Mesopotamia, the Nile’s cycles in Egypt, elemental fire and ice in the far north, volcanic islands rising from the sea in Polynesia. But beneath these surface variations lies the same basic narrative structure. Paul’s words in Romans 1 capture the dynamic perfectly: humanity "exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator." The myths are not random fabrications. They are fractured memories of a single, original story — distorted by time, language, distance, and human imagination, yet still recognizably shaped by the contours of Genesis.
The scattering from Babel (Genesis 11) provides a plausible historical framework for this phenomenon. If humanity once shared a common language and worldview, the original creation account would have been part of that shared heritage. Once scattered, however, groups would preserve the memory but reinterpret its details in isolation. The result is precisely what we find: a tapestry of stories that share structural features yet diverge in theology, a global memory that points back to a historical core.
Another challenge often raised concerns the apparent depth of language family divergence. Historical linguistics reconstructs shared innovations and branching patterns that seem to require many millennia. Yet observed rates of linguistic change are not fixed. They are strongly influenced by population size, geographic isolation, and the intensity of contact and migration. A sudden dispersion of small groups from Babel, each adapting rapidly to new environments and losing contact with others, could accelerate change far beyond modern rates — especially in the first centuries after the scattering. In this scenario, the apparent depth of linguistic trees could reflect an initial burst of rapid differentiation followed by long periods of relative stability.
Acceleration and the Post-Flood World
The divergence of mythic memory is not the only thing Genesis predicts. It also anticipates a particular tempo for human history in the aftermath of the Flood — one marked by acceleration rather than gradualism. A population reduced to a single family and then commanded to "be fruitful and multiply" would expand rapidly. A sudden linguistic rupture at Babel would generate abrupt diversification rather than slow, incremental change. Altered climates, reshaped coastlines, and transformed landscapes would demand rapid technological adaptation. And a humanity already literate, musical, and metallurgical before the Flood (Genesis 4:17–22) would not reinvent civilization from scratch. It would redeploy existing knowledge to meet new circumstances.
The archaeological record fits these expectations with striking fidelity. Permanent settlements do not appear gradually over long spans of time; they emerge quickly and at scale. Jericho and Çatalhöyük expand rapidly from modest beginnings. Eridu — the earliest known city in southern Mesopotamia — appears almost fully formed as a temple-centered community rather than a primitive village. Within what conventional chronologies regard as only a few centuries, Uruk undergoes one of the most astonishing urban transformations in history, growing from a small settlement into a metropolis of tens of thousands. Such explosive development is difficult to reconcile with gradualist models but entirely plausible in a world undergoing rapid population growth and social reorganization.
The linguistic record tells a similar story. The earliest known written languages — Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian — appear suddenly and fully functional, without any clear precursors. Early cuneiform is already sophisticated enough to record administrative transactions and complex literature. Names proliferate. Dialects diverge. Personal and place names multiply rapidly within the same archaeological layers. This is precisely what a sudden linguistic fragmentation would produce: a burst of diversity within a short window of time.
Technological evidence follows the same pattern. Within what archaeologists label a remarkably compressed horizon, we find irrigation canals, complex water management systems, monumental temples, baked-brick architecture, proto-writing, and far-reaching trade networks. Conventional explanations for this acceleration tend to be vague — "take-off," "threshold," "revolution." Such terms describe the phenomenon without explaining its cause. Within a biblical framework, the cause is obvious: necessity and inherited skill, combined with the urgency of rebuilding a new world.
Synchronisms and the Elastic Past
A common objection to any revision of ancient chronology is that the synchronisms — the points of contact between civilizations recorded in texts and material culture — fix the timeline too securely to permit compression. Yet this is a misunderstanding of how synchronisms function. They do not establish absolute dates; they establish relative order. And relative order remains intact whether events are spread over three thousand years or compressed into one thousand.
The great cross-links of the ancient world remain unchanged under a revised model. The Mari archives still coincide with Hammurabi’s reign. The Amarna letters still describe Canaanite city-states under Egyptian hegemony. Hittite treaties still reference New Kingdom pharaohs. Thutmose III’s campaigns still match the geopolitical landscape of the Levant. All these relationships endure because none of them depend on absolute year counts. They depend on sequence — and sequence is preserved.
The so-called Sothic cycle, long treated as a chronological anchor, is debated and uncertain even among specialists. Observations may have been taken from different locations, regnal correlations are disputed, and proposed alignments diverge by centuries. A compressed chronology does not reject the Sothic framework but acknowledges its real uncertainties and wider margins of error.
Shortening the timeline also resolves some long-standing puzzles. The "Greek Dark Age," an inexplicable four-century gap between the collapse of the Late Bronze Age and the rise of Archaic Greece, dissolves into a continuous line of development when the timeline is compressed. The mismatch between archaeological destruction layers in Canaan and the conventional late date for the Exodus also disappears when the Exodus is placed earlier, as the biblical chronology suggests. Population models, too, make more sense under this framework, since rapid post-Flood multiplication naturally leads to high densities without requiring implausibly steady growth over tens of millennia.
The Compressed Chronology: Events and Rationale
Global Flood (2500–2300 BC): Genesis genealogies converge near 2348 BC, and a 2500–2300 BC window accounts for textual variation. Mesopotamian flood layers and cultural memory align with this placement.
Babel / Dispersion (2250–2000 BC): Occurs during Peleg’s lifetime as described in Genesis. The archaeological record of abrupt cultural diversification and language splits fits this period.
First Permanent Settlements (Jericho, Çatalhöyük, 2300–2100 BC): Settlement follows dispersion rapidly.
Founding of Eridu (2300–2200 BC): Eridu appears fully formed as a cultic-administrative center shortly after dispersion.
Uruk Urban Expansion (2200–2000 BC): Rapid urban growth follows, fitting the accelerated post-Flood model.
Early Dynastic Period (2200–1800 BC): Warfare and competition emerge as populations densify.
Akkadian Empire (1900–1700 BC): A later Hammurabi date propagates upstream adjustments.
Ur III Dynasty (1750–1650 BC): Precedes Old Babylonian consolidation.
Hammurabi’s Reign (~1696–1654 BC): Astronomical recalibrations yield this later placement.
Mari Archives (~1800–1700 BC): Overlaps Old Babylonian period.
Destruction of Ugarit (~1200 BC): Late Bronze collapse remains unchanged.
Exodus (1450–1440 BC) and Conquest (1406–1400 BC): Aligns biblical chronology with archaeological destruction horizons.
Neo-Assyrian Empire (900–612 BC): Anchored by eponym lists and astronomical records.
Babylonian Exile (586 BC): Fixed by historical data.
Persian Conquest (539 BC): Constrained by multiple converging sources.
Conclusion: What This Argument Does and Does Not Claim
This argument does not treat Genesis as a laboratory manual or attempt to reverse-engineer miracles. It reads the text as theological instruction that can also describe real events, leaving traces in the world. A compressed chronology explains those traces coherently: rapid population growth after a bottleneck, abrupt linguistic fragmentation, swift urbanization, and the quick rise of states. These are precisely the outcomes the biblical story predicts, and they closely resemble what the archaeological record shows.
The goal is not to make chronology the center of faith but to show that Scripture and history need not be at odds. The compressed chronology retains the sequence of events, respects synchronisms, preserves first-millennium anchors, aligns the Exodus with destruction layers, and resolves major puzzles like the Greek Dark Age. It interprets interlocking "clocks" as evidence of shared global processes rather than unchallengeable proof of vast ages. Above all, it reorients the task of history: to interpret the meaning of events rather than simply count their duration.
If this reading is even close to correct, the ruins beneath our feet cease to be adversaries of Genesis. They become its witnesses — records of providence rather than rivals to it. The centuries after the Flood appear not as a slow drift through anonymous ages but as the swift, astonishing work of humanity rebuilding its world after judgment, still living under mercy.
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From the earliest centuries, the church has confessed that Adam’s sin brought death into the world, but historically this was understood as applying above all to human death. Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 were consistently read as teaching that man was created for life and lost that gift through sin. Romans 8 was also taken to mean that the Fall subjected creation to futility, but this “futility” was not read as the sudden beginning of animal mortality. Instead, it meant corruption, frustration, and disorder. Augustine described thorns, toil, wild beasts, plagues, and natural disasters as marks of this futility — creation no longer served man in peaceful harmony. Aquinas made the same point: animals were mortal by nature, but after the Fall creation resisted man and afflicted him with toil and disease. In this way, the Fathers and medievals held that animals had natural mortality, while futility referred to creation’s frustration of its God-given purpose in serving man.
The Lutheran orthodox stood in this same stream. Luther, in his Lectures on Romans, explained futility as creation’s failure to achieve the good purpose for which it was made: instead of ease and harmony, the earth now produced thorns, storms, and plagues. Gerhard likewise spoke of futility as corruption and disorder, creation’s “groaning” under man’s sin, but he was explicit that animal mortality itself was not a penal effect of the Fall. Pieper carried this line forward in the twentieth century, affirming that creation is in bondage to decay because man fell, but restricting “death through sin” to humanity. For the Lutheran tradition, as for the catholic consensus before it, futility meant frustration and corruption, not the loss of beastly immortality.
A significant shift occurs in the Reformed scholastic tradition, especially with Francis Turretin in the seventeenth century. Turretin, building on covenant theology and Adam’s role as federal head of creation, argued that the curse of the Fall extended so far that even animal mortality itself was a result of Adam’s sin. This move went beyond the patristic and medieval consensus, transforming the older intuition of Romans 8 — that creation groans in futility, resisting man and failing to reach its purpose — into a tighter claim that no creature at all died before the Fall. Later Reformed voices carried this forward, giving it greater weight in their theology of the curse.
The claim reached its sharpest form in the twentieth century through modern evangelical Young Earth Creationism. Writers like Whitcomb and Morris in The Genesis Flood (1961) argued that if animals died before Adam sinned, then the gospel itself collapses. This made “no animal death before the Fall” a non-negotiable foundation. Because of this stance, YEC apologetics had to invent elaborate scientific models — Flood geology, accelerated nuclear decay, catastrophic tectonics — to account for the entire fossil record within post-Fall history.
Thus the distinction is clear. Historic Christianity has always taught that the Fall brought human death and subjected creation to futility in the sense of frustration, corruption, and disorder, while allowing that animals were mortal by nature. The new development — beginning with Reformed scholasticism and solidified in modern YEC — is the insistence that no creaturely death at all could have occurred before Adam, and that this claim is essential to the gospel.
Now, let’s turn to the problem of Young Earth Creationist modeling.
I believe it’s perfectly coherent and even plausible (as I argued previously) that the earth is indeed “young,” and that there was a truly global flood. But there’s an utterly foolish project in and among YEC circles that involves modeling precisely how it was made young, and how the flood destroyed the earth.
One of the grossest dilemmas this project leads proponents of this particular YEC approach is called “the heat problem.” To explain: Let’s imagine if someone told you airplanes can fly, but left out the fact that air must flow across the wings. That would be nonsense. Flight without aerodynamics is no flight at all. In a similar way, some Young Earth Creationist models claim that radioactive decay, tectonic drift, and meteor bombardment all happened very quickly, but they leave out what always comes with those processes: heat. To compress billions of years’ worth of energy into just a few thousand—or even into a single year of Noah’s Flood—without accounting for the heat is like proposing flight without air. The mechanism is inseparable from the process. For another analogy, to claim that accelerated nuclear decay happened without producing overwhelming heat is like saying a man is running while standing perfectly still. Running is movement; decay is heat. You cannot have one without the other.
This is what people mean by the “heat problem.” If accelerated nuclear decay, catastrophic plate tectonics, and rapid cratering all occurred within a short span, the energy released would have been catastrophic. The oceans would have boiled, the crust would have melted, and life could not have survived. This difficulty does not disappear by rejecting uniformitarianism, the idea that the past always matched the present. Even if one allows for rapid rates, the physics of energy release remains constant: each nuclear decay event gives off a fixed amount of heat. Compressing billions of years of such events into mere centuries produces unlivable conditions.
The heat problem arises most sharply in the RATE project (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth), which proposed accelerated nuclear decay to account for isotopic signatures in rocks. The proposal compressed vast amounts of decay into the Creation week or Flood year, but at the cost of a catastrophic thermal load that no physical mechanism could disperse. Other YEC models avoid this particular problem, but raise others: either the theological problem of “apparent history” or the scientific problem of positing changes in constants without evidence.
At this point it is crucial to make a distinction. It is not YEC itself that is in question. One can lean toward affirming a young earth and a real, global Flood on the basis of Scripture alone. That is confession, and it is legitimate. What is being resisted here is not young-earth belief, but the insistence that such confession must be propped up by fragile models. Confessional Lutheran theology gives room for this distinction. It affirms that God created the world, that Adam fell, that the Flood happened. But it does not bind the conscience to theories of vapor canopies, catastrophic tectonics, or accelerated nuclear decay. Scripture says the Flood happened. That is enough. Faith rests on God’s Word, not on speculative physics.
This Lutheran instinct is visible throughout the tradition. Luther, in his Lectures on Genesis, insists that Moses is teaching history, not allegory, and that we must receive the text simply as God’s Word. Yet he ridicules philosophers who demand to know the how of creation, reminding them that God spoke and it was so. For Luther, creation is miracle confessed, not process modeled. Chemnitz, in his Loci Theologici, draws the distinction between God’s ordinary providence through secondary causes and His extraordinary works, in which He suspends or surpasses those causes. Miracles, Chemnitz insists, cannot be reduced to natural law. Johann Gerhard likewise interprets Romans 5 as teaching human death as the penal result of sin, not as a claim that no beast ever perished before the Fall.
In the modern era, Franz Pieper warned against tying the doctrine of the church to the fluctuating theories of science. In Christian Dogmatics he affirmed creation and the Flood as real history but denied that theology depends on scientific mechanism. Hermann Sasse sharpened this by insisting that once the church lets scientism dictate its categories, it has already lost its freedom of confession. Robert Preus echoed the same concern, teaching that when the gospel is tied to human systems, it falls with them; but when tied to the Word, it stands unshaken.
And C. F. W. Walther, the great confessional voice of the nineteenth century, put it in simple, pastoral terms: consciences must never be bound by human inventions, only by the Word of God. Walther warned that to make human constructs into conditions of faith is to burden believers with what God has not commanded. Applied here, his principle means that the church cannot require adherence to speculative models of geology or physics as a test of faith. One may confess a young earth and the Flood because Scripture teaches them, but no one may be forced to defend those events with canopy theories or accelerated decay charts. That would be to exchange divine certainty for human speculation, and to burden consciences with what God has left free.
The danger of insisting on models is twofold. First, models collapse under scrutiny, as the heat problem shows. Second, when faith has been bound to models, faith collapses with them. By contrast, confession does not collapse. To confess a young earth on the basis of God’s Word is secure. To make that confession rest on canopy charts and tectonic diagrams is to tether faith to human constructs. Confessional Lutheranism refuses such tethering.
This does not mean evidence is denied. Geology shows rapid burial and widespread deposits; cultural traditions testify to ancient floods; fossils appear suddenly and en masse. Christians may welcome these signs as consistent with the biblical account. But evidence is not mechanism. To insist that evidence must also be wrapped in a model that “explains” the Flood in purely natural terms is to confuse categories. The Flood, like creation, is a miracle. It is confessed as history, but not reduced to physics.
Genesis 1:29–30 states that God gave seed-bearing plants to humans and “every green plant” to the animals for food. At first glance this seems to suggest a world without carnivory, a vegetarian harmony between man and beast. Many who argue for “no animal death before the Fall” take this verse as their key proof. But the interpretation of this text has not been uniform across traditions, and within confessional Lutheranism it has been handled with characteristic caution.
Luther, in his Lectures on Genesis, takes the words at face value: God did provide plants as food for both man and beast in the beginning. He sees this as testimony to God’s abundant goodness in creation. Yet Luther does not extend the verse into a doctrine that all animals were immortal or that predation was metaphysically impossible. His concern is not zoological taxonomy but theological confession: God spoke, and it was so. The order was peaceful and good, but Scripture does not say more than that, and so Luther does not press the text further. Johann Gerhard likewise acknowledges the original provision of plants. But he warns against confusing this provision with a sweeping dogma about all animal death. Gerhard is careful to distinguish between human mortality, which Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 explicitly connect to Adam’s sin, and the life cycles of brute beasts. To press Genesis 1:30 into a law that no animal could ever die before the Fall is, for Gerhard, an overreach. The text reveals God’s sufficiency and order, but it does not answer every question about animal life and death. Franz Pieper, writing in the early twentieth century, maintains this line. He cites Genesis 1:29–30 as evidence of God’s original design for man’s diet but resists the Reformed and evangelical YEC move to make “no animal death before the Fall” into a doctrinal necessity. For Pieper, Scripture does not say that beasts shared man’s penal sentence of death, and to make such a claim is to bind consciences with what God has not revealed. Pieper insists that the center is Christ’s redemption of fallen man, not speculative theories about the zoology of Eden. Together, these Lutheran voices show a consistent pattern: the text of Genesis 1:29–30 is affirmed, but it is not pressed into a system. Plants were indeed given for food, but the gospel does not rest on whether lions ever ate gazelles in paradise. The Lutheran instinct is to confess what Scripture says plainly and to refuse to bind consciences with what Scripture leaves in silence.
The Resurrection is our paradigm. Christians do not attempt to explain it in terms of medical biology. That would be to deny it as miracle. Instead, we confess it as God’s direct act in history, the very heart of faith. Creation and the Flood belong to the same order of divine acts. They are real events, received on God’s authority, with evidence that may point toward them but without compulsion to model their mechanics.
Thus the Lutheran dogmatician concludes, in continuity with Luther, Chemnitz, Gerhard, Walther, Pieper, Sasse, and Preus: miracles are confessed, not modeled. Human death is the penal result of sin; animal mortality is not central to the gospel. Doctrine centers in Christ crucified and risen, not in speculative geology. A young earth may be confessed, but it need not be defended with collapsing scientific systems. The heat problem proves the point: when miracle is forced into mechanism, the model collapses. When miracle is confessed as miracle, faith remains firm.
Therefore, to lean toward YEC is not to bind oneself to RATE projects or to catastrophic tectonics. It is to confess what Scripture says: God created, Adam fell, the Flood came. This is most certainly true. And it is true not because we have solved the physics, but because God has spoken.
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The Real Canon Problem
There are things which only artists see. And the art these things inspire is studied by non-artists—reduced, dissected, and taught.
The only proper use of a canon for beautiful arts is to expand one’s vision to see new kinds of beauty beyond it.
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God has not only ordained and redeemed history writ large with your name in His book of life but also redeems you now in time. The stepping stones and the visible shore across the waters are equally good, true, and beautiful sources of comfort, joy, and presence.
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Part I
Sometimes I think the deepest anxiety we carry today is about being outnumbered by those who shape the world’s meaning and control the story. They seem define what it means to be human, speak for the future, and stand at the center of the world’s attention. And we who live by a different story begin to feel like oddities—these people devoted to an ancient book, carrying a vision of the human person that no longer registers as plausible, let alone essential.
I am tempted to wonder if we’re being foolish. Whether we’re unneeded. Unnoticed. Easily forgotten. I may wonder if—even if we were to live with conviction, or remember with care, or love what is truly good—nothing would depend on it. Everyone outside this Body will control the story; they’ll be more present to the world as its representatives of humanity; they’ll define what it is to be human and therefore become stumbling blocks to us Christians when we look around and wonder: do we have an outsized view of ourselves if each individual human being has a history that is infinitely grand?
I am tempted to fear that we will look around us and see this sea of people, this mass of humanity stretching further back in time than we Bible believers suppose, numbering in the billions, and that if we take each individual as seriously as we take ourselves, that there won’t be any room for some special providential history given that the propagation or tradition of the story we define ourselves by is pathetically infinitesimal.
But here is what steadies me: this story does not survive because we carry it well. It survives because God Himself has bound it to His Word which actively shapes our Christian, historical, interpreting, imaginations.
At the center of history is not our strength or memory, but the one Word that does not shift with the ages. Scripture is formative and eternal. It confronts us, revealing what we hide, questioning what we assume and speaking with the authority of the One who made us.
And yet there’s something else going on, making us anxious: remembering no longer seems to require a witness. What was once preserved through memory, reverence, and pain is now flattened—replicated, reframed, and circulated without asking anything of us, so we can begin to feel replaceable even in our deepest thoughts by AI or even by the sheer volume of production from other people.
Well here’s a thought: maybe the forced perspective of our obsolescence and the existential crisis that results from AI super-intelligence is a judgment on us and our idols. To prove finally that intelligence and invention aren’t our glory.
I don’t believe we were made to disappear into the crowd or to question the goodness of our inheritance simply because it is small. I believe we were made to remember, to interpret, to suffer rightly for the sake of what is good, to the glory of God.
History is not just information—it is an interpretive act and therefore incurs a responsibility. At its truest, history is a Christian disciple’s faltering attempt to listen to the past with moral attention, and our highest moral priority is first to the text of Scripture. How we do that is with certain methodological keys: All of history—whether sacred or secular—must be read through the lens of Law and Gospel. Without that distinction, we risk reducing history to moral examples or vague providentialism, as if the point were to extract ethical lessons and then to somehow redeem history with our own work. Christ already has redeemed history; our task is to confess this in the midst of ruins.
This is what I want my students to see: The soul becomes diffuse in a world where everything is archived but nothing is received in faith. They are here to receive the Word and bear witness—to enter our story as interpreters and stewards; not to dominate history, but to be shaped by its testimony.
I want them, and whoever reads this to know that this story is already composed to completeness. That is the comfort of history. Knowledge of history is ultimately for our total assurance, our comfort and even our joyful living in it.
Part II
Why read the Bible? You need to know your story. Why read broader histories? To rethink the thoughts of others who have lived on this earth and to fill in the details of our story. The Bible is always God’s thoughts for our reenactment. Our secular histories are, at their most truly historical, man’s thoughts for our reenactment to God’s glory.
But can you read only the Bible and be a good Christian? Maybe. But first, it would be difficult to understand much of it without literacy, not just the ability to read words, but the ability to understand the language, images, and cultural references within it. And the more history you know (that is, the more of other men’s thoughts you know) the more literate you will be. Moreover, you can hardly love your neighbors, or keep any part of the second table of the law, if you show no interest in what is going on in his life and in his mind.
Finally, the student of history is called to humility: learning, and teaching, that every human system, every empire, every idol of reason collapses—and that, in the ruins, man must listen to the Word for his continually life giving redemption.
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All the striving of human hands, all the pious resolutions, all the white-knuckled moral rigor, cannot raise a single sinner from the dead. The verdict that acquits sinners, spoken once for all on the hill outside Jerusalem, reaches us today in a trustworthy history recorded in Scripture. This is the bedrock: justification remains wholly extra nos, outside of us, the finished work of another: Christ crucified, Christ risen. To say Christ for us is to confess that no human work can save; to say Christ in us is to live in the Spirit who draws us into communion—“faith working through love”—the very proof we have passed from death to life in the bonds of a living Body.
The Spirit who joins Christians to the risen Lord never leaves the justified believer solitary. The declaration from beyond the grave that “I have been crucified with Christ… and Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20) is as real now as Calvary was then; and the same Spirit who binds us to Christ inevitably binds us to Christ’s people. Scripture speaks of that bond as “faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6); and declares that “we know we have passed from death to life because we love the brothers” (1 John 3:14). This means that the one made right with God is drawn into communion with those likewise reconciled—such that we do not drift alone through the pews, sealed off by invisible partitions of self-interest and private belief. In effect, we are members of one Body, each living nerve-end connected to the same Head, feeling the pulse of the same blood.
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Compromise in a relationship often means living with small, strategic half-truths about ourselves—seemingly necessary lies that help maintain a sense of unity. Yet beneath these polite deceptions lies something far more unsettling: the chaotic, out-of-control influences we exert on others long before we have paused to reflect on whether we should indulge our fleeting desires for every kind of sin. What we imagine to be private, insignificant impulses are actually laid bare to those around us—whole truths that others see more clearly than we do ourselves. Our “goodness,” then, too easily becomes an illusion we try to maintain, even though it strains against these deeper, often darker realities.
On a broader scale, this predicament resonates in spiritual work as well. Consider missionaries: how many of them truly see double-digit converts each year? And in what contexts do such fruitful labors happen? Is it the Spirit genuinely convicting hearts, or is it the force of a personality deemed authoritative? A certain education, combined with a particular temperament, might make conversion more probable—but providentially, entire people groups sometimes remain closed off to the Gospel. Culture, history, and social patterns can create barriers that, from our viewpoint, seem unassailable. Yet the same query applies to prayer: if we measure success by the tangible outcomes we desire, we miss the deeper truth. It is not about tallying responses or quantifying conversions.
The frustration emerges when we contrast our own meager results with the New Testament church—where conversions came in great waves, so frequently that the Spirit’s hand was undeniable. Is it truly the same Spirit now? Why does His work seem subtler, even elusive? The answer, though unsettling, also sets us free. When we realize everything is to God’s glory, the pressure lifts. Even if our words go unheard by the masses, God is still glorified when we speak His truth. This is the essence of soli Deo gloria.
Paradoxically, this same tension surfaces when we think of the “great books”—those storied tomes we finally read, only to discover that countless commentaries and centuries of secondary literature have overshadowed the original core. Millennia of theological debate and cultural disputes have created storms on the surface of these truths. We want detail, we invent more details, and soon lose sight of the profound simplicity at the heart of Christ reconciling the world to the Father. It is as though fleeting desires—like fleeting intellectual quarrels—mount up and obscure the fundamental answers that generations have sought.
In the midst of this, remember: “De studio theologiae non rixis disputationum sed exercitiis pietatis potius calendo”—the study of theology isn’t meant to be fueled by quarrels but by piety. Don’t overestimate your influence. Our debates and disagreements are surface-level tempests, overshadowing the greater reality of God’s redemptive work. This awareness can bring both humility and relief. It shows us why we ought not to overestimate our impact, while still recognizing how truly helpless we can be when our faults—and the hidden impulses behind them—are sinful and inflict sometimes unseen harm. Ultimately, humility in facing our chaotic depths, coupled with trust in God’s sovereign grace, brings us back to the simple hope we so often bury beneath complexity: Christ alone reconciling us, our fractured relationships, and our world to the Father. God’s glory is eternal, reliable, constant. We are to acknowledge the limits of our influence, the subtlety of our self-deception, and the grandeur of God’s sovereign grace. When we do so, we find the freedom to rest in the unshakeable reality that Christ alone reconciles us to the Father—even when our complexities and hidden impulses threaten to undo us.
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Jesus is Lord over all creation, which has been aching in turmoil since sin and death were mysteriously introduced. I do not know why or how that happened, but God’s interventions since that event, as recorded in Scripture, exceed what can be inferred from studying a world in decay. It is to the Scriptures, therefore, that we should turn if we are to study the true nature of reality and of our condition. To study this world without Scripture as our guide is to study death in its various forms and potencies, as we are always more aware of deficiencies than blessings. When we do look for the good in the world, it tends to be only in spite of the bad, such that the latter overshadows the former in our hearts and minds.
This pursuit of the nature of things without, or complementary to, Scripture, often has us framing human desires as autonomous systems running natural, programmed courses. The concept of what we call "natural" often assumes a necessary continuity, where there is none, biblically speaking. For instance, sexual desire is typically regarded as a constant, natural drive; yet, in Scripture, desire appears not as a continuous force but as something situational—a lust or longing directed at a specific object in a particular moment. Desire is deeply connected to the will and the heart’s orientation, either toward God or away from Him. Jesus underscores this in His teaching that to look at someone with lust is to commit adultery in the heart (Matthew 5:28). Biblical narratives reinforce this situational and specific view of desire. It is particular and relational, revealing the heart’s alignment—or misalignment—with God’s own desires and purposes.
Scripture teaches that, through faith by which we receive the power of the Holy Spirit, we can resist disordered desires as our hearts are redirected toward God. This is miraculous. The way that other miracles function in Scripture complements this understanding of desire, too. Miracles, far from being arbitrary or purely displays of power, often reveal God’s compassionate engagement with physical and spiritual human suffering, demonstrating God’s active involvement in restoring what sin has broken. Take, for example, the account of Peter’s shadow healing the sick in Acts 5. At first glance, it may seem like a magical spectacle—a fleeting shadow conveying divine power. Yet, in the broader context of Scripture, it fits seamlessly into the consistent patterns of God’s work: revealing His power in broken and flawed instruments, addressing suffering, and drawing people to Christ through their faith in Him.
The Lord’s work in reordering desire reflects His concern—God’s desire—for the human heart. Just as the people who sought Peter’s shadow believed in God’s ability to heal, faith enables believers to trust God’s work within their hearts, transforming disordered desires into righteous longing. The connection between miracles and desire therefore becomes clearer when viewed through the lens of divine restoration. Desire, when disordered, reflects the brokenness of humanity; miracles, in contrast, reveal God’s desire to heal and restore.
In conclusion, the biblical narratives of desire and miracles converge in their testimony to God’s desires. Man’s desire, far from being an autonomous force, is a reflection of our hearts’ orientation toward or away from God, in or out of alignment with His desires. When Christ transforms our hearts, that is a miraculous act of divine grace, akin to the physical healings recorded in Scripture; likewise, the other miracles in Scripture are not arbitrary displays of power but purposeful acts that restore body, soul, and relationships. They reveal a God who is sovereign, compassionate, and deeply engaged in the restoration of His creation. Through the reordering of desires and the miraculous acts of healing, God’s redemptive love becomes tangible, offering hope to a world groaning under the weight of sin and pointing to the ultimate restoration promised in His Kingdom.
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Indifference is not simply a lack of interest but a refusal to integrate the experiences, perceptions, and imaginative responses that arise from the interplay of reason, emotion, intuition, and conscience—responses that lead to insight. These psychological and moral data form a bridge between our subjective inner life and the objective realities we confront, and their integration is essential for authentic understanding and meaningful action.
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The world often seems exactly as it would if there were no God. I don’t need to say why—any reader will know what I mean. Many argue that the human imagination fills this godless void of a universe with myths, symbols, and deities born of cultural habit rather than any kind of supernatural reality behind it all, so to speak. But this view overlooks a deeper truth: the way God has chosen to act in the world is not through obvious spectacle but through a deliberate inversion of the world’s expectations—not by erasing chaos but by redeeming it; not by obliterating myths but by transforming them into something we would not have imagined.
This living quality of Scripture also enables it to reinterpret and redeem the myths and symbols of human history. Just as Christ fulfills the Jewish law and the hopes of Israel, He also fulfills the deeper spiritual instincts of humanity, evident even in pagan myths. Festivals like Easter, Pentecost, and Epiphany illustrate this principle. Easter transforms the Jewish Passover into the ultimate celebration of redemption, while Pentecost reinterprets the Feast of Weeks as the moment when God’s Spirit empowers the Church to bring His message to all nations. Epiphany, often debated in its origins, incorporates themes from pagan and Jewish traditions alike—water, wine, light, and kingship—yet places them in the context of Christ’s revelation as the true God. The story of the Magi, for example, ties together ancient astrology, royal symbolism, and prophetic fulfillment, demonstrating how even the fragmented wisdom of pagan traditions finds its completion in Christ. Similarly, the miracle at Cana transforms the Dionysian association of wine with chaos and revelry into a symbol of joy, communion, and the abundance of God’s kingdom. Christ’s baptism in the Jordan reclaims water rituals from ancient myths and makes them sacramental (read: truly mysterious), a means of union with the living God.
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God did not reveal Himself as an abstract principle, comprehensible to all intellects at all times. Instead, He entered history—human history—as a particular person, in a particular place, with all the limitations that entails. This is uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable to admit that the universe might contain intelligences beyond our comprehension, and that God still might not choose them. But this discomfort is also the point. The incarnation defies the neat solutions we might prefer, where God manifests as some idealized, universally recognizable being. Instead, the incarnation confronts us with something scandalous and disarming: God’s choice to enter the world as one of us. The Christian claim remains stubbornly grounded in the particular, not the grandiose. If extraterrestrial life challenges this, it also asks me whether I really trust the mystery of God’s ways or whether I prefer a God that conforms to human reason.
Now let’s treat the second problem I mentioned: hypocrisy. I have long suffered the suspicion that I may not be living-out the same religious life as anyone around me. What I mean by that is that I’ve felt a stronger and stronger tug on my conscience that my faith has nothing to do with my actual life whatsoever—not the way I talk, what I say, what I do, what I do for a living, how I am a husband and father to my family—nothing. I have suspected that all of this theologizing is basically just a pet theory that goes into an elaborate personal diary of a blog here which I tinker with as a hobbyist. It’s an unsettling feeling that my faith may be untethered from my life, and it threatens to sever the very connection between the extraordinary truths (theological or otherwise) that I explore in my writing and the ordinary life I’m living.
The answer and relief for both of these tensions—the possibility of higher intelligences not mentioned in the Bible and the disconnect between intellectual faith and lived faith—may be found not in merely contemplating the incarnation of Christ, but in the historical fact of the incarnation itself. God chose humanity—not angels, not higher intelligences—and entered into the chaos of human life to restore it to divine order. That there may be other lifeforms that exceed us in technological advancements or in raw intelligence does not render the God-man story any more absurd than it sounded before—especially given that God is not just more intelligent than any of his creatures already but is infinitely so. With regard to the problem of the disconnect between my inner life of the mind and how I live, it must be answered that intellectual reflections on Christ fulfilling the myths of the world ought to lead not just to intellectual satisfaction but to concrete transformation; the Word made flesh meets us not in the abstract, but in our actual lives, our families, our work, and so on.
God redeems all things in history—even the anxieties about extraterrestrial unknowns or the gnawing sense of disconnection between my faith and my daily life. Returning to the image of Christ as the true Vine, He grafts me into Himself through my receiving his gifts in the Word and Sacrament. Faithfulness in vocation—however faltering—is likewise not trivial or disconnected but one of the very means by which God draws my fragmented life into His redemptive order.
Yet, a third problem deepens my disquiet: without a direct, revelatory experience of God, all we have is interpretation of this redeemed history for belief. None of us knows better than anybody else, or with any greater degree of certainty, what has actually happened in history. Every belief, every theological construct, stands on layers of interpretation. This unsettling reality threatens to reduce faith to mere opinion, dissolving its grounding in truth. How, then, can we move forward with any confidence, let alone conviction? If all we have is interpretation, and no one among us holds ultimate certainty about what has happened in history, then the anxiety is real: Is faith nothing more than the product of our projections, our need for meaning? This draws us back to the opening salvo I made at the start of this essay: it seems like there’s no God. The answer I gave before applies here, too, in that what looks like a void, the absence of God, is the very space in which He works.
I must remember that the unknown within me—the positive, uncharted potential that draws me beyond myself—is greater than the negative void that haunts me. This potential is Christ in me working-out my salvation and redeeming a fallen man. This, perhaps, is what it means to live by faith: to stand tall and loom larger above my anxieties, not because I possess certainty, but because Christ is in me, and because the tension itself reveals that there is more to me than my doubts. The incarnation means that God entered the chaos of human life and remains present in it.
Yes, the positive unknown in Christ looms larger than the negative space of doubt. Faith becomes not an escape from doubt but a way of living within it, allowing the struggle to refine and reshape us in light of Christ’s redeeming work. Through our gift of faith, we lean into the positive unknown in Christ—a reality that surpasses our comprehension and draws us beyond ourselves into something infinitely greater. The disquiet within us—the unresolved questions, the lingering doubts—is itself a kind of evidence that faith is alive, like a sort of sign that we’re being drawn into something better that can’t be reduced to mere intellectual assent or abstract principles. The incarnation is not merely an event in history; it is a living, ongoing reality.
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Honest thinkers do not reduce humanity to mere instincts for self-preservation or suggest that self-interest is our ultimate end, because experience tells us otherwise. Our true purposes occupy a space in our minds distinct from natural needs. We can perceive the difference in the quality of our thoughts when we consider natural ends versus this other kind of purposefulness. Some thoughts exceed utility and trace a purpose that compels us to confront evil, embrace love, and seek genuine joy with honesty and creativity—finding what isn’t yet present in nature to behold or pursue.
Fighting evil is our mission. This fight isn't a war against other people or a struggle for self-preservation; it's a confrontation with evil itself—corruption in all its forms. We resist evil, and God defeats it. This resistance demands vigilance against its subtle influences in systems, ideologies, and within our own hearts. And to do this resist, sometimes we must love for no other reason than that we've promised ourselves that certain truths remain, regardless of appearances—including the basic duty to love. This steadfast commitment is to truth, beauty, and goodness, all of which occupy that mental space where our thoughts—going beyond natural ends—create impressions drawn from our experiences.
This is less about dutifulness than about a spirit of discovery—and that is something joyful. Joy isn't found in merely learning historical facts like being saved from God's wrath; rather, it is in loving the God who saves us from His wrath. This love transforms resistance into profound joy. This is a crucial distinction. Redemption doesn't just spare us; it reconciles us, making possible a relationship where there was once alienation. While we may not require a dramatic conversion experience, we will experience transformation—a turning of the heart toward God.
Creativity depends upon the discovery of what God gives to us out of pure grace. The biblical doctrine of conditional immortality underscores this truth: life and salvation are gifts that must be received. Immortality isn't inherent; it's freely offered by God but contingent upon His grace and our acceptance. This is about recognizing that eternal life isn't guaranteed.
Yet our love of our Savior, which we know through discovery and creativity, exists in tension with our resistance to evil. At every juncture, we face five options: Christianity, Camus' rebellion, obtuseness, despair, or the worship of false gods. Camus' rebellion honors resistance against the absurd but offers no hope beyond defiance. Obtuseness settles for superficial existence, avoiding deeper meaning. Despair denies any meaning at all, while idolatry misdirects our innate longing for transcendence toward false substitutes. Only Christianity unites the struggle against evil with the promise of joy and a transcendent purpose that endures.
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Outside the church, as I listen to the voices sing a sacred hymn by Tchaikovsky, I hear something profoundly human—a tearing through the veil. These ghostly voices, composed individually, are then joined by the hand of the author and sent through fabric. They sing into a space—some place—and through the gaps they open, I glimpse that space for a moment.
I look up and see a gargoyle’s grimacing face—it’s caught in some sort of struggle to break free from the building from which it sprang. I suppose the artist who fashioned it struggled, too. He knew he could no more escape his constraints than a man could leap his own shadow.
I shut my eyes and imagine the artist also reaching outward into space, sculpting something that points further out than he can reach. He works on faith that there must be a space into which his work extends, yet that space is as distant as color is to the congenitally blind. Still, he reaches.
For the first twenty-five years of my life, I lived beneath the weight of shifting loyalties—imposed by shallow orders of piety, each wielding its own inhuman ideas about life’s purpose. Their rules and rituals promised clarity but delivered only constraint, pulling my gaze downward when I longed to look outward. So I ran. And as I ran, the horizon stretched endlessly before me—a line always just beyond reach, inviting but elusive. I was told to chart my way toward some final purpose, but all I could see were fragments of a journey dissolving into that infinite line.
What Heidegger and Deleuze sought to do—reducing reality to what is immediately before us, graspable in its readiness-to-hand—feels like a mirror of my old attempts to escape. I wanted to simplify life, to strip it down to what I could touch, define, and control. But the harder I tried to reduce the world to manageable pieces, the more the infinite loomed, pulling at the edges of my vision. The mundane particulars I tried to hold onto seemed only to remind me of what lay beyond them—something vast, something untouchable. The more I reached, the more I longed, and the more I saw how much remained unreached.
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If one views Christ through the lens of the absurd—as one might be tempted to do when grappling with the apparent contradictions between Christ’s meekness and the brutality of history—then His suffering becomes little more than a tragic gesture in the face of the world’s unrelenting cruelty. Alienation is impossible in Christ’s kingdom; and absurdity is impossible under the sovereign Lord of history. From Marcel’s perspective, Christ’s suffering is the very key to unraveling the false dichotomy between divine omnipotence and human vulnerability. The cross is not an absurdity to be passively endured or resisted through rebellion; it is the divine encounter that brings a new order into being. The world’s violence, its endless parade of wars, persecutions, and inquisitions, all testify to the reality that human efforts to impose order through force only serve to perpetuate chaos. The history of violence against heretics and the deployment of just war theory as an ad hoc, self-serving, justification for bloodshed must be seen as deep betrayals of Christ’s call to love, mercy, and reconciliation.
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“We speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen” - Jesus Christ
Christians read our story in the Bible the way we visit family photo albums and all the scraps of history we can recover of our ancestors. And not only by that, but by prayer, and by hope and faith, we have the evidence we look for when we wonder about God’s purposes.
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Ernst Cassirer writes, "The opening passage of the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus describes how Socrates lets Phaedrus, whom he encounters, lure him beyond the gates of the city to the banks of Ilissus. Plato has pictured the setting of this scene in nicest detail, and there lies over it a glamour and fragrance well-nigh unequaled in classical descriptions of nature. In the shade of a tall plane tree, at the brink of a cool spring, Socrates and Phaedrus lie down; the summer breeze is mild and sweet and full of the cicada's song. In the midst of this landscape Phaedrus raises the question whether this be not the place where, according to a myth, Boreas carried off the fair Orithyia; for the water is clear and translucent here, fitting for maidens to sport in and bathe. Socrates, when pressed with questions as to whether he believes this tale, this "mythologemen," replies that, although he cannot be said to believe it, yet he is not at a loss as to its significance. "For," he says, "then I could proceed as do the learned, and say by way of clever interpretation, that Orithyia, while playing with her companion Pharmacia, had been borne over yonder cliffs by Boreas the Northwind, and because of this manner of her death she was said to have been carried off by the god Boreas...But I," he adds, "for my part, Phaedrus, I find that sort of thing pretty enough, yet consider such interpretations rather an artificial and tedious business, and do not envy him who indulges in it. For he will necessarily have to account for centaurs and chimaera, too, and will find himself overwhelmed by a very multitude of such creatures, gorgons and pegasuses and countless other strange monsters. And whoever discredits all these wonderful beings and tackles them with the intention of reducing them each to some probability, will have to devote a great deal of time to this bootless sort of wisdom. But I have no leisure at all for such pastimes, and the reason, my dear friend, is that as yet I cannot, as the Delphic precept has it, know myself. So it seems absurd to me that, as long as I am in ignorance of myself, I should concern myself about extraneous matters. Therefore I let all such things be as they may, and think not of them, but of myself--whether I be, indeed, a creature more complex and monstrous than Typhon, or whether perchance I be a gentler and simpler animal, whose nature contains a divine and noble essence." (Phaedrus, 229D ff.)"
I quietly wept at this.
“It was Collingwood’s lifelong belief that the goal of philosophy is and always has been to unify the forms of life and thought. … He sought, therefore, to break down the dogma of specialization by showing how the forms interpenetrate and feed each other’s integrity and by warning that corruption in one form of life means a deterioration in each of the other forms. Collingwood made this point in the Principles of Art (1939). Good art, he argued, is possible only in a healthy society which is founded on a “truthful” consciousness. But if the self as revealed in one sphere of activity is corrupt, then it is just as corrupt when revealed in all the other spheres. Corruption of consciousness is the same thing as bad art and bad art is the same thing as corruption of consciousness. “Just as the life of a community depends for its very existence on honest dealing between man and man, the guardianship of this honesty being vested not in any one class or section, but in all and sundry, so the effort towards expression of emotions, the effort to overcome corruption of consciousness, is an effort that has to be made not by specialists only but by everyone who uses language, whenever he has it. Every utterance and every gesture that each one of us makes is a work of art.” (Editors intro to Faith and Reason, essays Collingwood)
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INTRODUCTION
Gabriel Marcel’s two-volume work, "The Mystery of Being" illuminates a crucial distinction between first-order and second-order reflections that has profound implications for how I have begun to conceive of philosophy, especially as it's taken to be the pursuit of wisdom. In this essay, I will demonstrate how Marcel’s distinctions have changed my thinking. They have led me to consider the confluence of recorded history and the arts to be a record of human suffering with or without hope. Throughout the essay I will also be honing a more precise definition of true philosophy as an essentially hopeful endeavor.
I’m influenced by my Lutheran tradition to look skeptically at the grand edifices of abstractions that philosophers have built over centuries — Tower of Babel-like spires that would emerge above the clouds of ignorance in which the rest of humanity is doomed to grope and scrape their way through otherwise meaningless suffering. Frankly, I don’t believe anyone can attain that God's-eye view above the clouds; instead, our vision is limited by the reach of our imaginations. This, to me, appears to be the inherent humility of the historical, human, condition.
Yet, in the way we share our reflections on the mysteries of life with others in our writing, our arts, and so forth—not the least of these mysteries being suffering itself—I believe we possess a gift as co-sufferers who find themselves wandering in the fog together. There are fraternal bonds in this, whether or not they are seen; insofar as wisdom is some kind of guide to life with others, I believe suffering is an essential way to it. The Christian Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans that “we also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.1” This stepwise movement from suffering towards hope that our lives should in some way transcend our ‘chains’ and our ‘thorns in the flesh’ is revealed to us as we walk the narrow way, reflecting upon what we experience and learning to love those who walk alongside us.
Given the unpredictable nature of our suffering, however, this movement towards the hope isn’t something that can be neatly systematized or assembled for an intentional escapist transcendence on demand, so to speak. In this essay I will try to show that Christian philosophers must wager on hope for a lasting meaning; and they will not have real hope if it is a mere product of their imaginations, no matter how towering their intellects may be. Wisdom is learned not despite suffering, not by having transcended suffering, but in and through it.
With the help of Gabriel Marcel (and others whom I reference in this essay), I have begun to see this process of becoming wisely hopeful through suffering as a matter of contemplative and historical reflections. We begin with an account of what motivated me to write about this.
Before I read Gabriel Marcel’s "Mystery of Being," I would sift through my modest collection of philosophical or theological books in half-slidden and collapsing stacks scattered around my room. I would take maxims, whole essays, or even simple references to other authors, and mine them like gems from marginalia and footnotes; then I would discard the excess materials in their own separate book piles, where they would lay for months, shamefully exposed as ultimately empty words to use as mere means and not as insights into the reflections of a fellow traveler along the way. I was on a quest for the philosopher’s philosopher—or what I might’ve called the one true thing we all must know.
Having learned from Gabriel Marcel, what I've come to realize is that should I ever unearth my elusive treasure its exalted status will crumble to ash the moment I acknowledge my profound misjudgment of its actual importance. Much like Madame Mathilde Loisel in Guy de Maupassant’s, “The Necklace,” my bad habit was to pursue the panacea for a despairing self image only to discover that I sacrificed too much in pursuit of it. There was no one true thing we all must know.
I arrived at this conclusion by the following reasoning: When we reflect, we commonly
turn our attention to the world of abstracted concepts and theories—the sorts of objects analytic philosophers try to universalize and which serve as building blocks for grand, interconnected, purely intellectual traditions (the “towers”, as it were). These can be any concepts at all; the world of symbols, for instance, or that of virtues and vices—but also the sort we take for granted like desire, happiness, or motherhood. We ponder these and adjust them according to our lived experiences, asking questions about their meanings or importance within a bigger picture, and then trying to answer those questions ourselves so that we might have a better map of the world to study.
But Marcel tells us that “the true questions are those which point not to anything resembling the solution of an enigma but rather to a line of direction along which we must move” . So, if I am to believe him, then when I not 2 ice that I have spent an unusual amount of time on just one supposedly prophetic tome, I should recognize that, whatever I am doing with my reading, I am no longer asking after truth.
There is far more than this one distinction to be learned from Marcel’s “Mystery of Being”; but this one thing I learned from him was essential to my discovery that, perhaps paradoxically, no singular discovery could ever exhaust my drive to find more; there are no prophetic words that could ever leave me wholly satisfied and restful in their all-encompassing wisdom. I will always carry a torch in pursuit of deeper truths hidden in literary catacombs. If there is such a book out there with the one true thing we must all know in its pages, I am confident that it will bid me return to the stacks: keep digging!
The core of Marcel’s contribution to my way of thinking about these matters we’ve discussed so far has been the distinction between first-order and second-order reflections as I encountered it first in “The Mystery of Being”. First-order reflections are our abstracted concepts, theories, and intellectual systems. Second-order reflection, by contrast, is a grappling with the mysteries of existence itself, anchored in the experience of being a subject in a particular historical situation. This second-order reflection is participation in an identifiable mystery from which we can’t extricate ourselves and which goes beyond anything we can fully conceptualize without losing sight of it. This inability to remove ourselves for a more objective view of the lay of the land, so to speak, will become especially crucial further on when we discuss the problem of suffering.
For now, let’s try to understand what is meant by reflection tout court. For Gabriel Marcel, “the point of philosophic thought is that it is reflective.” 3 The goal, in other words, is contemplation itself, not just the abstraction and manipulation of ideas. The philosopher contemplates worthwhile things—just as, I argue further on, the historian rethinks, as it were, only important data from the past—so “reflection is never exercised on things that are not worth the trouble of reflecting about.” This contemplative act of reflection is itself integrated with experience. Marcel continues, “the act of reflection is linked, as bone is linked with bone in the human body, to living personal experience; and it is important to understand the nature of this link.” He explains it this way: “If I take experience 4 as merely a sort of passive recording of impressions, I shall never manage to understand how the reflective process could be integrated with experience. ... reflection itself can manifest itself at various levels; there is primary reflection, and there is also what I shall call secondary reflection ... Roughly, we can say that where primary reflection tends to dissolve the unity of experience which is first put before it, the
function of secondary reflection is essentially recuperative; it reconquers that unity.”
This distinction between primary and secondary reflection is the singular theme that I’ve taken from Gabriel Marcel’s Mystery of Being, so it’s essential that we understand it thoroughly before moving on. The main idea is this: Marcel emphasizes the potential for connection, love, and transcendence through reflective thought. He believes that when we reflect upon an experience, doing so helps us to understand our relationship with other people. Moreover, through secondary reflection we restore the unity of experience that we’d dissected with our typical analytical thoughts. This secondary reflection aids us in reconnecting with others through participation in the mysteries that bind people together (most essentially through love).
Something else that may further clarify what he means to do by distinguishing between two orders (primary and secondary) of reflective thought is Marcel’s distinction between problems and mysteries. “A problem is something which I meet, which I find complete before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I myself am involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as ‘a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its initial validity’. A genuine problem is subject to an appropriate technique by the exercise of which it is defined; whereas a mystery, by definition, transcends every conceivable technique.”
Problems and mysteries both concern us. It’s not, in other words, as though philosophers are wise to ignore altogether the sphere of the problem, with its technical answers, which comprises much of what we consider the analytic school of philosophy. Rather, we are to understand the separate roles played by problems and mysteries, and I think one helpful way of seeing how each of these connects to primary and secondary reflection is to understand the one set as the substance of the other, such that we might say mysteries are the substance of secondary reflection whereas problems are substance of primary reflection.
At any rate, in defining mystery, Marcel cautions against a common mistake that isn’t only committed by the layman, but by philosophers as well. “We must carefully avoid all confusion between the mysterious and the unknowable. The unknowable is in fact only the limiting case of the problematic, which cannot be actualized without contradiction. The recognition of mystery, on the contrary, is an essentially positive act of the mind, the supremely positive act in virtue of which all positivity may perhaps be strictly defined. In this sphere everything seems to go on as if I found myself acting on an intuition which I possess without immediately knowing myself to possess it—an intuition which cannot be, strictly speaking, self-conscious and which can grasp itself only through the modes of experience in which its image is reflected, and which it lights up by being thus reflected in them.”
LOVE AND PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS
Now that we have had a good look at the differences between primary and secondary reflection as well as problem and mystery, we should return to the main focus of this essay which is how the categories Gabriel Marcel explicates in The Mystery of Being changed the way I think. First up is how I think about love.
Love, for Marcel, transcends mere analytical thought about human connection. One of his contributions to the topic is found in his essay "The Mystery of the Family" from "Homo Viator.” He writes, ”Love is the supreme act of faith, the luminous affirmation of the other in his or her irreplaceable being, which goes beyond the individual and his or her immediate existence. It is through secondary reflection that we grasp the unity of this experience, reconciling the fragments of primary reflection and restoring a holistic understanding of our relational existence.”
Love is a mystery, a substance—as I’ve called mysteries— of secondary reflection. It reaffirms our unity with another person, the beloved. By loving, we move beyond analytical thought which might focus on someone’s individual traits or isolated moments we shared with them, and we integrate these experiences of them into a cohesive and meaningful whole. The following from Marcel captures the relationship between our key theme of secondary reflection and the love that bind co-suffering pilgrims on our individual and collective journeys toward transcendent hope. He writes, “Secondary reflection...involves a deeper engagement with the mysteries of existence. It is rooted in our subjective experiences and historical context, and it grapples with the fundamental questions of human existence. Love, being one of the most profound and mysterious aspects of human experience, is a primary focus of secondary reflection. Through love, we confront the ineffable nature of existence and come to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.”
Before encountering Marcel, my definition of philosophy resembled a sort of loveless moral reasoning. Here’s how I defined it: Philosophy is a synthesis of particular abstractions driven by conscience in search of an emergent whole, motivated by a love of wisdom. Given that Marcel believes secondary reflection has love as its primary focus, therefore, and in agreement with him, I’ll reaffirm the latter portion of my definition, namely, that philosophers whose work consists in secondary reflections are motivated in their work by love (as the primary focus can be reasonably identified as the telos, following Aristotle, to know the inherent purpose or telos of an action is to know what drives its pursuit).
We should pause a moment to rest from these points about terminology and briefly consider the actual state of things on the ground in the academy where professional philosophers are doing their work. Perhaps it’s helpful to evaluate the state this academy is in by asking whether academic philosophers, that is, lovers of wisdom, are demonstrating that they really do love wisdom. To delve into scandalous detail would take us too far afield for this paper, but I would suggest that they are not; regardless, though, of the truth of the matter, let’s assume for the sake of argument that I am right.
What then? If the philosophical academy seems to be lost, does that mean philosophy has been proven fruitless? After all, it’s fair to wonder what sort of philosophy should be so aimless. To answer, I don’t believe there’s a real dilemma here; it’s easy to survey the broader landscape of philosophical thought in any age and despair the apparent lack of focus—never mind any discernible progress—that would indicate a true love of wisdom among philosophers. My hope is buoyed however by my certainty that, the broader contours of academic philosophy notwithstanding, within every true philosopher (i.e., for every true lover of wisdom) measurable progress occurs across a lifetime in their increasing love for wisdom.
To demonstrate the natural and obvious ring of truth in this claim consider an analogy to academic research, where individual researchers can become highly skilled and respected within their disciplines, yet where systemic issues can lead to a degradation in the overall integrity and reliability of the academy. As a group, they do not coordinate this pursuit in any notable or visible way. Likewise, though we are neither more ethical nor more self-aware (to name two definitive philosophical injunctions, namely, to be good and to know oneself) on the civilizational level due to the output of professional philosophers, so long as any philosopher loves wisdom and pursues it, he or she will grow in it.
My definition of philosophy needs another adjustment. The love of wisdom, according to my old definition of philosophy, was something static; and the intellectual synthesis was the locus of activity or growth. With Marcel’s clarifying distinctions in hand, and now having this deeper understanding of love as dynamic, I can see that the “particular abstractions” and their attempted syntheses in my working definition of philosophy should be considered mere first-order reflections. They do not grow. In contrast, the love of wisdom I referred to in my definition implicates second-order reflections, which do indeed grow. In other words, my earlier notions of philosophy as being a synthetic system of abstractions assembled by the intellect as we’re driven to this work by our consciences, was the product of my too-limited, first-order perspective; only through Marcel did I gain the categories to appreciate the deeper second-order work of cultivating a love of wisdom that unfolds or grows over the course of a lifetime.
This is a good place to pause our progress to a new definition of philosophy, for a little map-making work by way of a short reflection using the concepts we’ve just discussed. We’ll do so by way of a question: Why don’t more philosophers escape their abstractions to pursue philosophy’s namesake, the love of wisdom, and thereby grow in it? One reason why philosophy as a discipline flounders, or lacks progress, is that, on the one hand philosophers conflate healthy skepticism with cynicism, and on the other hand they conflate broadmindedness or a healthy expansive awareness with equivocalness or prevarication. Stated differently, philosophers tend towards cynicism rather than the avoidance of credulity which honesty requires; and in a sea of choices, they tend towards willful indifference about the rightness or wrongness of their choices. To give a couple of examples, whereas a cynical philosopher may attempt to demystify or demythologize love and describe it as a purely biological function, the true philosopher knows that love experienced individually implicates the whole person and not merely her biological functions.
Marcel refers to the total demystifying of love as a phenomenon into its biological components as “a stripping away of something that is an intrinsic part of our experience of love, thus impoverishing our understanding.” A healthy a 11 nd honest skepticism about love, on the
other hand, would be warranted—but only in a limited and patient way, with the
acknowledgment that the individual who has experienced love cannot simply abstract the
experience from herself. Similarly, a more honest broadmindedness about the range of human
experiences, such as love, would never allow her to expand the concept beyond her own lived
experience to other experiences, such as desire or pleasure, without doing injury to it as a unique experience. Marcel describes the willful expansion of love into mere relations of desire or pleasure as a “failure to recognize the essential character of love as something that transcends mere phenomena.”
As for the willfully indifferent philosopher, he is impervious to the uniqueness of love as a singular phenomenon; he closes his eyes to the fact that the experience of love cannot infinitely expand with tangential relations to other phenomena, continually broadening the contextual definition of love until it loses all definition at its borders. The true philosopher acknowledges that love is a real phenomenon that can be objectively identified. As do the other mysteries, love deepens and becomes more multi-faceted as we pursue it; love, in other words, does not undo itself or become diluted in a sea of other experiences. So, returning to our question—why is it rare for philosophers to escape the first-order reflections and increase in wisdom? I’d answer that the reason why our cynical and indecisive philosophers are caught in these snares, unable to confidently pursue love of wisdom, is that they are uncertain that they can trust whatever definition of love or wisdom which they know they’ve just invented. In short, they do not trust what they see because they think they’ve created it themselves—and they don’t know that they can be trusted. They don’t trust that there is anything behind their words that makes them meaningful in any permanent or ultimate sense.
As we’ll find further on, essayist George Steiner’s wager can come into play and rescue these supposed wisdom-lovers who are so afraid of their own shadows. For the moment, though, we will take a deeper dive into mysteries like love—the only phenomena that seem to transcend our particular restrictions to a time and a place in history.
REVISING MY PHILOSOPHY: BEYOND ‘THEORIES OF EVERYTHING’
In my definition of philosophy which we’ve begun to take-apart for revisions, I claimed that philosophers strive for a certain “emergent whole”. Although it’s a vague notion, this refers to a powerfully-enticing drive to find what is commonly referred to as a “theory of everything”—the comprehensive and unified network into which data can be fed and processed without surprises or infinite revisions of the principles governing the system. Eyebrows should be raising at this. We’ve already learned from Gabriel Marcel that such a systematic analysis isn’t elegant enough; it doesn’t go far enough; it remains within the bounds of first order reflection.
Following such lessons we’ve learned from Marcel thus far, we can already see that understanding a mystery involves a participatory form of knowledge where the knower is involved in, or participating in, what is known. In this sense, mysteries require a different kind of knowing than would come together into a unified theory of everything; mysteries are known in a way that is relational and involves a sense of communion.
Though we can speak of the transcendence of mysteries, nevertheless, the philosopher is always reflecting from within a setting in space and in time, which means the philosopher is always bound to the experiences available in their historical situation. Whereas universal desire and satisfaction nevertheless exist, the pursuit of a sort of emergent whole theory of everything will only produce frustration. We cannot attain this singular whole by philosophical straining. Comprehensive knowledge of infinite details is a philosophical system-builder’s futile work in primary reflection, which means it isn’t the aim of the true philosopher whose work is motivated by a love of wisdom accessed by secondary reflection alone.
As we’ve already established, a true philosopher is by definition a lover of wisdom, and love grows because its object is not a static and limited whole that we take in all at once. The true philosopher’s work therefore never stops unless his beloved muse has disappeared or has lost all of its radiance—an impossibility with regard to wisdom. We have therefore yet another reason to consider it impossible that there should be a universally satisfactory one true thing to jot down in a book; and we likewise have another reason to abandon the search for a singular “emergent whole” truth which would, in any case, be impossible to conceive without infinite imaginative powers. We never see anything emerge from beyond our imagination, and we never see anything at all in its entirety.
ART AND COMMUNITY: BRIDGING STORIES THROUGH EXPERIENCE
The older I get (I’m now thirty-seven), the fewer reliable connections I anticipate making in this life. While aspiring to love my neighbor, the scope continually narrows and time seems insufficient for attaining ultimate satisfaction in loving others. And yet the artist is not alone. As an artist and composer, I've found that seeking recognition for my art only makes sense with the prior faith or wager that I share a world with others with whom I may bond over our mutual love of beautiful things. In what follows, I will bring us nearer to something tangible and experiential, especially in a way that heightens our sense of belonging to a community. Gabriel Marcel had the following opinion on the role of the artist: “I concern myself with being only in so far as I have a more or less distinct consciousness of the underlying unity which ties me to other beings of whose reality I already have a preliminary notion.” We are indeed united to other people. It may be paradoxical, but we can and must affirm that our stories are connected, though there is not one single story. Artists—painters, illustrators, sculptors, poets, songwriters, novelists, and filmmakers alike—provide a glimpse of this unity. In contemplating Marcel's differentiation between first and second-order reflections, my perspective on the arts has evolved such that I believe that the arts are the very means by which experiences of suffering are woven into our separate and combined histories, thereby revealing to us what we share as human beings.
Gabriel Marcel wasn’t the only philosopher to believe as much about the role of the arts in the formation or preservation of community. Albert Camus, in his 1957 Nobel Prize reception speech, confessed: “For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from.”
Gabriel Marcel had similar thoughts about the novelist’s role in expressing the otherwise inexpressible: “The novelist communicates directly to us something which ordinary conditions of life condemn us merely to glance at. ... the greater a novelist is, the more he gives us the sense that he is not making anything up. I quote Charles Du Bos on Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’: ‘Life would speak thus, if life could speak’. I have no hesitation for my own part in saying that it is through the novelist’s power of creation that we can get our best glimpse of what lies behind and under the reverberatory power of facts.” I believe that this is the reverberatory power of facts: As we shuffle down the corridor of time, listening to the resultant symphony of every experience, our record of what we hear is what we call history. That brings us to our next topic.
THE WAGER ON MEANING: HISTORY AS A SYNTHESIS
The philosopher’s role isn’t to merely describe a world of phenomena, or of ‘sense impressions’ if you like, but to recount life as history. “Says who?” comes the sneering reply. I answer that reply with a quotation from essayist George Steiner. He believes there’d be “no history as we know it, no religion, metaphysics, politics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any ‘social contract’.” In other words, there is a metaphysical assumption we’re all making when we recount our lives in our histories. Moreover, like the arts, which presuppose other people, true history reconciles us. In the introduction to this essay, I noted that I would be considering what I called a “confluence of recorded history and the arts”. We have already looked at, in some detail, the human expression of lived experiences through suffering, sometimes towards wisdom. There is a history of this: the history of the arts.
Despite attempts to create individual histories, our common history enriches us when pursued collectively in a spirit of love. Our second-order reflections are communicated through diverse symbols drawing on diverse experiences, overlapping only as we weave them into our shared history—which I consider a means for reconciliation. Social bonds are only possible through reconciliation, as everyone is somewhat estranged, and strangers don’t fully embrace one another in the sin-warped stories they tell.
Returning briefly to Marcel’s distinction between problem and mystery, both the arts and history presuppose not only other actors but interconnectedness in ways that cannot be reduced to the sphere of the ‘problem’. George Steiner's argument about the wager on God resonates with what has been drawn so far from Marcel. Steiner’s version of Pascal’s wager expands on the concept by asserting that humanity does wager on God, whether it is admitted or not. The wager isn’t merely a rational calculation but a profound engagement with the mysteries of existence, dynamically engaged with experience. Steiner writes, “The text, the painting, the composition are wagers on lastingness. They embody the dur désir de durer.”
There is, therefore, a wager on the lastingness in art. Steiner calls it a wager “on the meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and response when one human voice addresses another, when we come face to face with the text and work of art or music, which is to say when we encounter the other in its condition of freedom, is a wager on transcendence. This wager–it is that of Descartes, of Kant and of every poet, artist, composer of whom we have explicit record– predicates the presence of a realness, of a ‘substantiation’ within language and form. It supposes a passage, beyond the fictive or the purely pragmatic, from meaning to meaningfulness. The conjecture is that ‘God’ is, not because our grammar is outworn; but that grammar lives and generates worlds because there is a wager on God.” ... “To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force. Accurate recollection and resort in remembrance not only deepen our grasp of the work : they generate a shaping reciprocity between ourselves and that which the heart knows. As we change, so does the informing context of the internalized poem or sonata. In turn, remembrance becomes recognition and discovery (to re-cognize is to know anew). The archaic Greek belief that memory is the mother of the Muses expresses a fundamental insight into the nature of the arts and of the mind.”
Much of the world’s magic remains unknown due to a lack of initial effort that could lead to one discovery after another. There could be a whole universe of meaning out there that remains undiscovered because of a missed direction. Consider what may be the reflections of someone who climbed Everest. Imagine he is driving down a highway, years later, and catches his reflection in his rearview mirror. Imagine he remembers a fleeting glimpse of his warped image reflected in his mountaineering partner’s goggles as the two of them made an alpine ascent years earlier. Imagine this experience—not of the climb but of this memory—prompts him to record it in a book along with other reflections, and that this book eventually lands in the hands of hundreds or thousands of aimless young people who are inspired to change their own lives after reading it. In the end, it wasn’t the act of climbing Everest that had the bigger effect; it was the person the climber became, with the thoughts he had later, which was shared with others and changed them.
Steiner concurs: “The archaic torso in Rilke’s famous poem says to us: ‘You must change your life’. So does any poem, novel, play, painting, musical composition worth meeting. … Commentary breeds commentary: not new poems. There is not, in the truth-hour of his consciousness, a commentator, critic, aesthetic theorist, executant, however masterly, who would not have preferred to be a source of primary utterance and shaping. There have in courts been all-powerful eunuchs, as there have been critics or deconstructionists magisterial over creation. But the basic distinction remains. ... No man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose ‘nerve and blood’ are at peace in skeptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if. ... The density of God’s absence, the edge of presence in that absence, is no empty dialectical twist. The phenomenology is elementary: it is like the recession from us of one whom we have loved or sought to love or of one before whom we have dwelt in fear. The distancing is, then, charged with the pressures of a nearness out of reach, of a remembrance torn at the edges.”
Steiner’s wager goes further than Marcel to say that we all do wager on God. I would affirm this, but clarify that everyone doesn’t know they’ve done so—which would be a matter of secondary reflection. In other words, the short of it is that there is no escaping responsibility to reflect or not reflect if we’re to maintain some posture of honesty and truth-seeking. This is partly what I meant in my original definition of philosophy as being a moral, conscience-driven, pursuit. All of humanity is implicated in not only our suffering and ignorance but also in our reflections on our way through the fog. Thanks to Marcel, I was able to parse further distinctions within what I knew to be true of this old idea of a wager on God for the possibility of meaningfulness in suffering. As we consider the wager on a transcendent meaningfulness, we can draw all of these threads together into the sort of synthesis which I referenced in my working definition of philosophy. That synthesis is history.
HISTORY AS WAGER: COLLINGWOOD’S SECONDARY REFLECTIONS
Another thinker to whom I’ve returned with new eyes is R.G. Collingwood, a philosopher of history who reveals the importance of secondary reflection. In R.G. Collingwood’s historical re-enactment, historians engage in a wager on the meaningful reconstruction of past events. This commitment involves a reflective and imaginative immersion into the thoughts of historical figures, acknowledging the limitations of historical evidence and embracing the inherent mystery in understanding the past (this embrace involves trusting history despite our ignorance). The historian's wager is not just a scholarly pursuit but a conscious choice to participate actively in the interpretive process, recognizing the complex interplay between evidence, imagination, and historical consciousness. It is my view that Collingwood's historical re-enactment and Marcel’s secondary reflection exhibit similarities, particularly in their shared emphasis on imagination and historical reflection.
Collingwood's method requires historians to reconstruct the thoughts of historical figures through reflective imagination. Similarly, Marcel's concept of secondary reflection involves a deliberate reflective process reaching beyond immediate experiences to a deeper understanding of who we are in relation to our history. Simply describing an event rather than rethinking the thought of the person living through it results in an impoverished material ‘history’ which is no history at all. To put it in Marcel’s terms, I believe Collingwood’s historical re-enactment, with its focus on comprehending the thoughts of individuals from the past, involves a form of secondary reflection. Moreover, it would be consistent to the philosophies of all three thinkers we have cited so far (Marcel, Steiner, and Collingwood) to assert that historical reflections endure in the annals of history when one person’s thought-world is replicated in another mind, with both people wagering on God’s transcendent value.
It will serve us well to permit a lengthy passage from R.G. Collingwood that, as long as it is, explains rather succinctly his reasoning for defining the work of the historian as he does: “The historian, investigating any event in the past, makes a distinction between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event. By the outside of the event I mean everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements: the passage of Caesar, accompanied by certain men, across a river called the Rubicon at one date, or the spilling of his blood on the floor of the senate-house at another. By the inside of the event I mean that in it which can only be described in terms of thought: Caesar’s defiance of Republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy between himself and his assassins. The historian is never concerned with either of these to the exclusion of the other. He is investigating not mere events (where by a mere event I mean one which has only an outside and no inside) but actions, and an action is the unity of the outside and inside of an event. ... For history, the object to be discovered is not the mere event, but the thought expressed in it. To discover that thought is already to understand it. … All history is the history of thought. ... History constructed by excerpting and combining the testimonies of different authorities I call scissors-and-paste history. ... merely the transshipment of ready-made information from one mind into another.” He also echoes Marcel’s insights about the nature of secondary reflection when he stipulates that history isn’t a matter of mere spectacle, or noting of what has happened: “To the historian, the activities whose history he is studying are not spectacles to be watched, but experiences to believed through in his own mind; they are objective, or known to him, only because they are also subjective, or activities of his own.”
Collingwood’s approach to history also informs what is becoming my new definition of philosophy—slowly coming-together in this essay—insofar as it will imply that the philosopher’s historical reflections make moral demands that she change her life to become a better, wiser, person. He doesn’t make this moral injunction here; nevertheless what he does claim is a common-sense step away from that when he writes, “If I want to know whether I am as good a man as I hope, or as bad as I fear, I must examine acts that I have done, and understand what they really were.”
The small step is simply granting that a philosopher-historian would only seek to know himself if he is not hopeless to change for the better. Then it’s only one additional step to their responsibility or duty to act and to us affirming with another nod to Rilke that philosophers must change their lives in the light of the truths they have discovered about themselves—not only as the subjects but also as the objects of their historical reflections.
It will clarify much to cite Collingwood once again in order to close this section in which
we’ve considered history as secondary reflection. He tells us that history is a sort of Cartesian
“innate idea”—that it is “an activity of the imagination”; but in a way reminiscent of our earlier
reflections on the incompleteness of the task of the philosopher, the historical imagination is also always imperfect and incomplete.
Nevertheless, the historian-philosopher shouldn’t despair or concede to nihilism or cynicism in the face of so many unthought thoughts because, as he puts it, this shouldn’t inspire skepticism: “It is only the discovery of a second dimension of historical thought, the history of history: the discovery that the historian himself, together with the here-and-now which forms the total body of evidence available to him, is a part of the process he is studying, has his own place in that process, and can see it only from the point of view which at this present moment he occupies within it. ... The historian, however long and faithfully he works, can never say that his work, even in crudest outline or in this or that smallest detail, is done once for all. He can never say that his picture of the past is at any point adequate to his idea of what it ought to be. But, however fragmentary and faulty the results of his work may be, the idea which governed its course is clear, rational, and universal.” Steiner’s wager i 23 s compatible with Collingwood’s account of history as re-thought thoughts and this synthesis should be a source of hope, too.
The historian discovers himself involved in the process of secondary reflection as he does his work of recording history. That very realization should reveal to him a source of hope that transcends his sense of incompleteness.
HISTORY AND THE HUMAN CONDITION
Gabriel Marcel’s existentialism emphasizes the particularity of an experience in time and space by an individual grappling with the mysteries. Collingwood's perspective on historical reenactment likewise emphasizes the relevance of the historian’s situatedness in time and space rather than projecting all relevant information into a transcendent Platonic realm.
Steiner gives these an eternal grounding by maintaining that any coherent understanding of language and human speech's capacity to communicate meaning is underwritten by the assumption of God’s eternal presence. Consequentially, it isn’t only the artist who communicates as though her words have more weight and meaning beyond their pragmatic or expressivist value; it isn’t only the artist who wagers on history being more than sound and fury. On the contrary, we are all historians then—the artist, the professional historian, and the philosopher. The wager on God implicates every last human being. The way Steiner puts it, "The wager on God is not simply an intellectual proposition but a fundamental aspect of our human condition. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are all engaged in a wager on the meaning and purpose of existence.
Our beliefs, actions, and choices are all informed by this wager, shaping our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.” Philosophers that truly love wisdom order the cacophonous into a cohesive history, revealing reasons for seemingly absurd events. Thus, the story becomes their story—a material history, a mirror image of nature, spun and told by them in silk. Understanding history is recognizing a larger story, a bigger picture, where individual stories, events, experiences, and relationships contribute to the overarching narrative. With Marcel’s distinction in hand, then, I not only see history differently, but the whole of philosophy in the way philosophers synthesize what they abstract from meaningful experiences.
A RESTLESS HEART: EMBRACING MYSTERY ON THE JOURNEY
We’d be taking-on too much information, probably, to consider faith as a tangent from the main ideas in this essay, but even with regard to faith, now I can see that a sort of catechetical approach to spiritual growth can be dangerous in the way it provides the reductive questions and the reductive answers to problematized issues that should be mysteries. This method of stepping in front of a mystery, so to speak, to do the work of handing-on abstracted concepts, denudes living faith and supplies a facsimile dead-letter pondering in its stead.
Another helpful example of this sort of catechetical approach—remaining within the bounds of our topic—is found in the way we may grapple with the problem of evil and suffering. With Marcel’s distinctions, we can immediately see that this is a ‘problem’ only when we reduce it to abstractions, which is how we lose sight of evil itself. We can only experience or participate in real evil or else we’re just talking about a concept and a problem of a machine-world malfunctioning. Marcel puts it this way: “It is, no doubt, always possible (logically and psychologically) to degrade a mystery so as to turn it into a problem. But this is a fundamentally vicious proceeding, whose springs might perhaps be discovered in a kind of corruption of the intelligence. The ‘problem of evil’, as the philosophers have called it, supplies us with a particularly instructive example of this degradation. Just because it is the essence of mystery to be recognized or capable of recognition, it may also be ignored and actively denied. It then becomes reduced to something I have ‘heard talked about” but which I refuse as only ‘being for other people’; and that in virtue of an illusion which these ‘others’ are deceived by, but which I myself claim to have detected.”
Reflective, philosophical history, stained as it is with suffering, prompts me to reevaluate the philosophical consolations sought by philosophers like Boethius, himself a real prisoner (the great Van Gogh’s La Ronde des prisonniers springs to mind). When we adopt a reductive, analytical view of evil as a problem, we lose sight of the communal aspect of responding to evil because of our own corruption, which, viewed from another angle is our own participation in evil. Marcel states, “One must bear in mind that suffering and evil are realities which cannot be confronted in isolation; they call for a communion, a shared response that transcends the individual's capacity to endure.”
When we consider the problem of suffering evil longitudinally in history, and not just latitudinally as a cross-sectional sample of humanity at one moment in time, we notice that human history contains suffering, absurdity, and chaos, already mixed-into it. We can no more remove ourselves from the study of suffering than we can abstract the good, true and beautiful phenomena and contemplate each—like I sought to do with my literary gems in the introductory section of this essay—with hopeful designs for little blissful glimpses into the transcendent glory of God.
Whether history is finally a record of loss or gain would be a paradoxical question that mirrors our understanding of pain in the context of the movement of history. In our shared condition, we suffer losses together, and it is tightly-logical that the final meaning of any single loss (never mind the totality of suffering or loss) remains uncertain until we cease experiencing losses altogether. The philosopher would be foolish to seek her consolation in philosophical systems instead of finding it in a community with likeminded thinkers.
A literary trope becomes relevant: the only way out of trouble is to go through it. We must experience suffering; there is an existential imperative in it. The bare intellectual problem of suffering requires traversing its darkness with a light, acknowledging our ignorance about human history in its totality.
In my unraveling definition of philosophy, I had rather vaguely accounted for the conscience as being what drives the philosopher in their work. I also mentioned being a Lutheran. Fear, love, and trust are common touchstones for a Lutheran piety. By my lights, for a good conscience we will have a filial fear of the Lord such that we are convicted of our failures to love, but are reassured and not cowering before our Father as a result; our reconciliation with other people will demonstrate genuine love of the Lord; and our Pascalian wager will show our trust that He is the Lord of history. Moreover, we’re now equipped to replace my old definition of philosophy with the following: Wisdom is to fear, love, and trust, God through suffering; philosophy is the synthesis of historical reflections for the love of wisdom.
In conclusion, Gabriel Marcel's insights into the nature of philosophical reflection in “The Mystery of Being," have transformed my understanding of the pursuit of wisdom. His distinction between first-order and second-order reflections has deeply affected my understanding of philosophy and even of the human experience. Like Augustine's restless heart finding its rest in God alone, my reflections cannot provide lasting hope or satiate the deepest longings of the soul. Desire and its fulfillment will never cure despair and only secondary reflection or recollection re-involves us in the mysteries that issue in hope. I've come to recognize that true philosophy transcends mere abstraction and theoretical constructs; true philosophy involves a deep engagement with the mysteries of existence which are rooted in our historical and subjective experiences. Marcel's elucidation of the distinction between problem and mystery, exemplified by his exploration of love, further reinforces the significance of second-order reflection in deepening our understanding of reality. As I reflect on my own journey, Marcel's teachings have prompted me to reevaluate my earlier conception of philosophy as a synthetic system of abstractions, driven solely by conscience. Instead, I now see philosophy as a continual process of engaging with the mysteries of existence through historical reflection.
Moreover, Marcel's insights have reshaped my perspective on suffering and the human condition. Rather than seeking consolation in philosophical systems, I now find solace in communal, historical, reflection, and in the shared experiences of fellow sufferers. Some of the other philosophers in our communal work, such as R.G. Collingwood and George Steiner, have contributed not only information to sort with Marcel’s categories, but also their fraternity. Philosophy, as I now understand it, is not merely a quest for knowledge, but one towards reconciliation as well. Therefore, in redefining my understanding of philosophy, I affirm that wisdom is found in fearing, loving, and trusting God on the suffering servant’s reconciling path, while philosophy itself becomes the synthesis of historical reflections we share for the sake of love of wisdom.
I am reminded of the words of Rainer Maria Rilke: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Bibliography
Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. London: Albion Press, 2015. Kindle edition. First
published in the United Kingdom in 1946 by the Clarendon Press.
Marcel, Gabriel. Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2010.
———. The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1: Reflection and Mystery. Translated by G. S. Fraser.
Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1960. Gateway Edition. Fourth printing, 1966.
———. The Mystery of Being, Vol. 2: Faith and Reality. Translated by René Hague. Chicago:
Henry Regnery Company, 1960. Gateway Edition. Sixth printing, 1970.
Steiner, George. Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? London: Faber & Faber,
2010. Kindle edition.
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Is there anything else I consider true that functions in such a way that I have to maintain a web of beliefs around it, as if they were all co-dependent in a fragile ecosystem? This is the hardest question. There is a precedent, however, for this sort of system or web of beliefs that we consider real and yet aren’t descriptions of anything to which we can point as verifiably, scientifically, materially there in reality. One such example is ethics. We all know that corruption is real and undesirable, but to explain why we believe as we do about corruption, we have to raise a mass of beliefs that were holding together unseen beneath the surface.
In a strange way, this question about the fragility of belief systems is akin to the problem of evil in that both questions reveal the presence of evil with which we are promised in Scripture to wrestle and which God eventually overcomes in us. The weeds of doubt in goodness grow from our observations of evil—and this may come as a surprise to some, but the truth is that we cannot finally uproot them. The good news, though, is that God does the work Himself when Christ steps into the tangled garden of our doubts, sins, and fragility and answers not with explanations but with redemption. His life, death, and resurrection hold together the web of our beliefs, even when it seems impossibly fragile.
As we wait for that final consummation, the truth about this so-called ‘web’ is this: nothing we discover, believe, or contemplate—nothing we say, think, or do—will affect what happens to us when we die. Until then, the great beyond will remain beyond our reach, period, end of story. And we should let that sink in for a moment; it isn’t an endorsement of despair, but a recognition of our freedom from having to make an effort to maintain the web. Salvation is not the result of our efforts to hold the web together or to make sense of evil in creation; it is entirely the work of God despite our sinful thoughts, words, and deeds, all of which are full of the sound and look of death.
This truth highlights another tension we face: Either we’re mostly blamelessly coping with everything nature demands, or what we think and do is blameworthy because it offends the Creator and Sustainer of nature. Both of these are hard to believe, and they can’t both be true, can they? But here’s the thing: that very dichotomy—between blameworthiness before God and blamelessness before nature—is false. Christians are called to live in a way that neither denies the worldly reality of our struggles nor reduces us to mere creatures coping with the natural order. We are called to rest not in the coherence of our webs of belief but in the one who holds all things together. This is both liberating and humbling. It allows us to acknowledge the limits of our understanding without despair and to live in the tension of earthly fragility with a hope anchored in divine promises.
The truth is Christians don’t live with the same telos or end as this world has; in that sense, we therefore don’t need to consider the physical, psychological, and spiritual demands or hardships that hang around our necks in this world as ultimate. It isn’t any less likely that we are sinners as described by Christ in Scripture than that we are creatures struggling through dire straits as described by nature in this world. Both are true, and both find their resolution in Christ.
This dual existence is not without purpose. God uses the tension, the suffering, and even the apparent contradictions to draw us closer to Himself. Ole Hallesby’s words capture this beautifully: “Oh, how merciful! He gives us sorrow in the world, but joy in the Lord. He permits us to be ill in body, but well in soul. He makes us poor in the things of this earth, but rich in peace and hope.” God’s mercy transforms our earthly hardships into instruments of His grace. The struggles of this life, the weeds in the garden of our beliefs, and the brokenness we experience are not signs of His absence but of His presence. They are His tools for shaping us into the image of Christ.
And so, the truth is that the gospel answers questions the world cannot resolve. The systems we construct—whether ethical, philosophical, or theological—will always feel fragile, because they are. But the good news is that our salvation does not rest on these systems. It rests entirely on God’s grace, revealed in Christ and worked within us by the Holy Spirit. This frees us to live in the tension without despair, to endure worldly hardships with hope, and to trust that God will hold the web together, even when we cannot.
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Is God just an assemblage of fragmented speculations strung together across millennia by people who were bound by ethnic or other identities and so naturally melded their stories into what was recorded in Scriptures which were eventually handed down to us for different reasons altogether but likewise as a series of historical accidents? I want to see biblical examples of others struggling with this specific question, and then I’ll therein find some peace because I’ll know I’m a brother to that person and bound by the same deep longings and loves which he or she found answers to; I’ll trust those who share in this most essentially human sense and walk. The question will change; it’ll no longer be whether God exists as described, or whether he really did x, y, or z; instead I’ll ask why God, of whom we share knowledge across millennia, has done what he has done. The Bible emphasizes God's self-revelation through His actions, words, and interactions with individuals and communities. Rather than a static identity, God's revelation unfolds dynamically as people engage with Him in different contexts.
When reading the Old and New Testaments, it’s wise to focus exclusively on knowing more of Christ. Delving into the meaning and historical context of any particular passage often leads to distractions. A lot of the Bible is written in ordinary language which is always inexact, so approaching it with pedantic 21st century, post-Enlightenment expectations is to not even give it a fair chance at the profundity it bears-out if we tune-out all of the noise of endless speculations about understanding the meaning according to the Sitz im Leben. It would begin as a book of a people; the Logos who inspired it became one of the people and gave his Spirit to join him.
Let’s consider which scriptures, if any, ring true. Whether the Bible rings true or not is impossible to know if the reader’s thoughts are louder—and these debates about the nature of the text are noisy speculations before experience. I’m a fan of experiential knowledge, so let’s start there.
There are two ways of reading history: there’s the it happened just like this model; and then there’s the this speaks of God way. It might seem like I’ve loaded the deck, but which of the two is the particularly Christian hermeneutic? That’s not to say it didn’t happen like that; sometimes there’s just not a whole lot to be gained from staring at a fact and nodding at it over and over again, affirming that “yup, that happened alright.”
So, with that out of the way, here’s an example of a good reading I found on Samson after a lot of frustration at the surface level silliness that so many spent their time insisting must have happened exactly as described (but without explaining why it should matter): “The rich symbolism of this vivid episode is glimpsed when we begin to understand how “honey from a lion” is a metaphor about good and evil. It is “the story within the story” symbolizing the meaning of Samson’s life. The story of Samson is misread when the obvious, literal answers to the Philistines’ two questions about what is “stronger” and “sweeter” are superficially taken to be the Biblical lesson: Samson is the strongest, and his violent revenge is even sweeter than loving dalliances with Philistine women. A more attentive reading reveals that the subsequent text calls into question the whole cycle of violence that Samson sets in motion at his wedding. His violent reciprocity seeks to punish the Philistines for cheating. Although angry, Samson wants to affirm that truth is more important than power. But he mistakenly keeps on using his strength to escalate violence. The cycle eventually leads to his own death. Samson’s fate illustrates that only a self-sacrificial gambit can bring an end to the cycle of violence. As a man of violence, he destroys all his Philistine enemies through “living by the sword.” But he learns the cost paid for this must be “dying by the sword.” Many have taken Samson to be a symbol of how a human can achieve total victory by accepting the noble path of self-sacrifice. In that respect, he is like Christ, who humbly offers his life. Yet, unlike Christ, Samson’s sacrifice is a violent one, whereas Christ’s commitment to nonviolence makes his sacrifice into an offering that bears witness to benevolence and forgiveness. Out of such a death comes true life, because only such love can truly end violent retaliation. That unusual love is both the sweetest and strongest.” https://bccatholic.ca/voices/c-s-morrissey/samson-s-riddle-gives-a-glimpse-of-divine-logic
Something to consider is this: If an incorrect way of interpreting Scripture has lasted centuries then it may not be a mere bad-yet-attractive idea that has spread; it may be that something of a psychological habit is at work in reaction to the text. Some people act as though ideologies are demons inhabiting the population and we have to guard ourselves against catching one by exposure to it. I think it’s more likely that fallen human beings have typical, predictable habits that we form in response to not only material externalities but also to the immaterial world of ideas.
The historic battles with such ideologies are not always our battles. It’s easy to find one’s position on the front line and fire into the dark, taking aim at what our neighbors to the left or right of us are targeting—without ever actually seeing the target or whether we’ve hit it (never mind the ethical questions this raises). Sometimes there’s no real enemy at all. We’ve trained our senses to hit on every hint of a historic enemy in so many -isms: enthusiasm, Gnosticism, pelagianism, and so on, and I believe this has taken our eyes off of Christ.
Against pragmatism: Are the biblical accounts meant to provide a preponderance of evidence favoring the likelihood of my eternal life in the resurrection through the atoning sacrifice of the Son of the living God? Is this also a reason for the pragmatic approach to prayer? Pragmatism puts me at the center, but we are not at the center, God is; likewise, just as God is to be confessed and not proven, so is our history. And, moreover, Aristotle says the following: “it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits,” and I agree with him.
I believe: I believe true humanity reflects the image of its Creator. The human relationship with the triune God is central to every truly human thought, word, or deed, regardless of the social context, historical paradigm, or scientific project at hand. All that we think and say of creation is either a rendering of God’s image or a vitiation of it. Ephesians 1:9-10: "having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth—in Him."
We do know: Adam and Eve were the first humans, and their presence and actions in the Garden of Eden had a profound effect on all of creation. This understanding is foundational to the Christian worldview and is affirmed in 1 Corinthians 15:21-22: "For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive." This verse highlights that the consequences of Adam's sin—specifically death—affected not just himself but all of humanity, pointing to a fundamental rupture in the created order. Furthermore, Romans 8:20-21 states, “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” This suggests that Adam and Eve’s sin had implications beyond humanity, introducing corruption and futility into creation itself.
We should not lose sight of this theocentric understanding of creation, centered on God’s purposes for humanity and creation as a whole. While this view can also be considered anthropocentric—given that it highlights humanity’s central role in the drama of creation and redemption—it ultimately places God and His plan at the center. The Garden of Eden was the initial setting where God’s good creation operated in a special state, free from death and decay, as suggested by the assertion in Genesis 2:17 that death was the consequence for disobedience. Thus, Lutheran theology sees the state of Adam and Eve in the Garden as a special state of preservation, where human immortality was maintained until the Fall.
With regard to dogmatism as something opposed to allegorical reading: Why do people write allegory? The answer must begin with anthropology and extend to a biblical understanding of human nature. Asserting truth dogmatically, however, runs contrary to the very nature of truth-seeking, which is shaped and deepened through the search itself. For Christians, such dogmatism is unwise and even unchristian because it stifles the openness necessary to recognize truth as something revealed rather than controlled. If we understand the human impulse behind creating texts like Genesis, we see that the origins and purposes of allegory and symbolism are meant to guide us toward divine reality, not reduce it to rigid formulas. These forms of expression serve as bridges between human experience and transcendent truths. For Christians, this connection is particularly meaningful because it resonates with the doctrine of revelation, where human stories become vessels through which God discloses Himself. Thus, exploring allegory is not just a literary exercise but a way of discerning how the human imagination is drawn to and participates in the divine.
We don’t know: The Word is given to us to create faith in God (cf. Romans 10:17: “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ”). The Word is not meant to provide exhaustive answers to every scientific or historical question about creation. Lutherans hold to the principle of sola Scriptura, which means that Scripture is sufficient for all matters of faith and doctrine, but it is not a comprehensive scientific textbook. As the Lutheran Confessions state: "The Word of God shall establish articles of faith, and no one else, not even an angel" (Smalcald Articles II, II, 15). Thus, we cannot add speculative interpretations to the Genesis narrative, nor should we insert more information into the text than is explicitly given.
Given this, we do not know definitively whether the six days of creation were 24-hour days in the modern sense or whether they symbolically represent longer periods. The Hebrew word for “day” (yom) used in Genesis 1 can signify a 24-hour day, but it can also mean a longer, indefinite period, such as an era (cf. Genesis 2:4, where yom refers to the entire period of creation). But even if you reject that possibility, insisting that yom must always mean a literal 24-hour day is an entirely meaningless assertion since every metaphor refers to something in the same way as if it were not a metaphor. I don’t mean to be snarky but that’s literally how metaphors work.
Finally, it’s also crucial to remember that when we call something poetry, myth, or historiography, that these are only loose and approximative categories. We can’t, in other words, look at the rest of Scripture and neatly demarcate all the examples of poetry and say “Nope! None of this is like Genesis—therefore Genesis isn’t poetic.”
We don’t know: Given our uncertainty about the length of the days of creation, we don’t know how old the Earth is.
We do know: The Word of God is given to create and sustain faith in God. Whether the universe is 6,000 years old or billions of years old is immaterial to faith because such information does not reveal anything about Jesus Christ or His work of redemption. The Formula of Concord states that the purpose of the Scriptures is to lead to faith in Christ, not to provide exhaustive scientific information (cf. Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, Article XI). Moreover, St. Augustine in The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad Litteram, Book 1, Chapter 19) warned against dogmatic interpretations of creation that go beyond what is necessary for faith, arguing that "it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics."
In sum, while we do not know the precise details about the days of creation or the age of the Earth, we do know that these questions do not impact the central teachings of faith, which are centered on Christ and His saving work. As the Apostle Paul emphasizes in 1 Corinthians 2:2: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Whether the Earth is old or young, what matters is that Scripture reveals God’s love and redemption through Christ, which is the foundation of faith.
We do know: We do know that the flood described in Genesis is presented as a whole-world event. Genesis 7:19 states that “all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered,” and Genesis 6:17 describes the flood as a judgment to destroy “all flesh” in which is the breath of life under heaven. If we take the text at face value, it suggests a global flood that impacted all of creation. From a plain reading, it seems that the intent was to depict a comprehensive destruction, not merely a local catastrophe confined to a specific region.
Interpreting the flood as a global event is consistent with the language used in the narrative, unless we factor in the historical context of the biblical authors and their limited knowledge of the world beyond the Ancient Near East. However, if we maintain a more literal view, it’s reasonable to assume the flood covered the entire planet. This view has been traditionally held by many Christians, but it comes with significant scientific challenges.
One of the biggest challenges to a global flood model is the heat problem. During a global flood, rapid geological processes—such as massive volcanic activity, tectonic shifts, and friction caused by fast-moving water—would generate enormous amounts of heat. This heat would be sufficient to boil the oceans and melt the rock layers, making survival for any life, including those on the Ark, impossible. This problem remains unresolved even within young-Earth creationist models, and simply saying, “God did it miraculously,” doesn’t work if we’re trying to use scientific evidence to support the flood’s occurrence. If we appeal to scientific findings and natural laws to support our points about the flood, then we need to be consistent and address objections raised by those same scientific principles. Invoking miracles only when we hit a roadblock undermines the use of scientific reasoning in the first place.
Is there anything in the Bible that teaches us we must educate ourselves with more than the Scriptures themselves in order to understand them?
How do I connect what I read in the Bible to closing my eyes and talking to Jesus about my problems? How do I know the Bible was written for me, too?
On our worst days, when we read Scripture, we’re either going to believe what our tradition gives as the essential teaching from individual and collective Scriptural readings—expressed in commentaries, Bible footnotes, Bible studies, and sermons—or else we’ll slog through the Old Testament confusedly and then, though relieved to find much easier passage through the New Testament, still come away with a hodge-podge of disjointed sayings and miracle accounts, with bits of good news interspersed. This post will offer some excerpts from a few Old Testament scholars whom I’m going to give a chance to help us wave-away such thoughts so that we might enjoy more good days with the Bible.
Let me add, quickly, what’s becoming my favorite disclaimer: It’s okay to be wrong about much of this. The object of faith unto salvation isn’t everything in the Bible understood precisely as it’s meant to be understood.
I might expect an objection now. Well, that’s a slippery slope! Are you suggesting we can have literal salvation without taking everything in the Bible as scientific historiography?
The answer is that yes, there need to have been innumerable people, places, and events, to fill out our history as God’s people. That history is indeed recorded in Scripture. But we have salvation through faith in Jesus Christ alone, and it’s not our job to gather all of the biblical historical data to inform our faith, so that we know there was a talking snake in a garden long ago — before we can know that we sin, for example. We know we sin by no other reason than our repentance. Through faith we receive eternal life, not through information. That doesn’t mean we can go without the word of God; but it does mean that we can allow the word to speak however it does and trust that it is true (note that this is different than what I criticize as collier faith of believing things are true without even knowing what they are at all)—yes, even sometimes without knowing exactly in what way it is true. If anyone balks at this and claims he knows in what way everything in the Bible is true, then I’d say, “Indeed, let God be true but every man a liar” (Romans 3:4 NKJV).
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At the end of every life, unless clemency is death itself, God refuses some of the most desperate pleas for mercy—if they aren’t Christian desires. Is that disappointing? Sometimes it seems like Christians are on a slow-drip, extended-release, awareness that we aren’t desiring correctly. If we aren’t desiring correctly, then we won’t be disappointed in the right things.
First, some questions. I’ve seen a video of kids playing on a Thai beach in 2004 just moments before the wave took them. I see things like that and I want to shout, “Run for your lives!” But am I supposed to whisper “Let go and let God”? Did any of those kids pray the Lord’s prayer, asking that his will be done before being violently crushed by white water, their bodies carried out to sea like detritus? I’ve read about the survivors of the USS Indianapolis and about how hundreds of sailors screamed as sharks took them under over several days. Did any of them pray for deliverance? How often do people pray for mercy, only for to God permit the worst possible terrors and suffering instead? Should sinners spend those moments in repentance or is screaming in horror just as well? Should Christians go to their deaths serenely, “calm as Hindu cows”? Let me quickly remind the reader now that there were people suffering slavery and torture while Jesus walked some small part of the earth for a handful of years. Well are you disappointed yet?
Now, some answers. Best case scenario: the world is fallen, we are all sinners; we will suffer and then die. Worst case scenario: Our sin-driven cynicism will lead us to consider the goodness of creation to be nothing more than mere divertissement. If that is our attitude, then we will lie to ourselves about the impermanence of all things and conclude that, (1) since everything is bound to pass away, there must therefore not be any desire worth pursuing above the others; and (2) all regrets are equal.
This cynical frame of mind is behind the illogic of all evils, including abortion. The basic grounding assertion is that, really, we all know that nobody’s actually certain God exists. After all, nobody has interacted with Him. Christians must therefore convince themselves of Christianity. Likewise, and consequentially, they’ll argue that everyone knows an unborn baby isn’t just as much a human being as an adult walking around—Christians must convince themselves of that, too. If we’re honest, the cynic might wager, there’s this whole raft of beliefs we should all give up if we want to have fewer hang-ups or regrets in life: everything from gender roles, to abortion being wrong, to God’s existence.
When it comes to the biblical categories through which Christians experience the world in all its ups and downs, the cynic scoffs. He might look at a beautiful sunset and wonder: Why would anyone talk about sin or redemption when we have this? — as if a pretty sunset were enough to satisfy hunger pangs of sin-emptiness. Conversely, he might ask: How could I love and enjoy this sunset when there are people suffering so many tragedies at this very moment? Such questions born in the cynical mind betray misplaced desires and regrets. The truth is that we don’t know God in the sunset. Tragically, there are a lot of suicides in Hawaii which make that point for me. We know God by his Word and Sacraments through which we learn what is worthy of our desire (and perhaps our regret) as we grow in Christ.
To ask whether we ought to resist suffering if it is God’s will is to conflate punishment with chastening; moreover, it’s like trying to pull back the curtains to see the inner operations or logic of God’s Providence. It is infinitely preferable to recognize that Christians are alive and imperishable in Christ; our whole selves—inner and outer—remain hopeful that our outer-selves, our ‘clay jar’ selves, will be openly declared just and made new creations.
Sometimes, I admit, I’m tempted to say, “If Christianity were true, then I wouldn’t expect us to resort to euphemisms to clean-up real life events so that they fit into a systematic, Christian, theological mold. For example, ‘When it’s their time, God takes people home to him’ seems absurd on its face as a layman’s comment about a child dying a terribly painful death in a blazing fire or something—but it would be grudgingly accepted by any orthodox Christian theologian as technically correct (insensitivity notwithstanding).”
But this sort of criticism doesn’t take in the full scope of theology in order to see why this remark would ring true and not be insensitive at all. There’s a failure here to situate all of us in a fallen and suffering world that invariably ends in death. To bring into this conversation God’s providence in drawing his own to him through this suffering and death would only be considered glib or insensitive by those who are unaware of bigger picture of our situation here.
The greater context of God’s love through suffering as a goal or reason is one of those things that’s more important than what we judge according to our pragmatism. There is a depth of mystery, not a blankness, there. I have a related argument for those who despair of the possibility of intelligent aliens visiting us (esp. in the context of government officials coming forward lately with evidence of otherworldly technology). My reassurance for anyone worried about the theological issues related to this is that such creatures would be creatures; they would have to be either deeply wise or deeply evil if they had the same self-aware consciousness that we have and weren’t simply animals manipulating tools according to dumb instinct.
We won’t ever by our own spiritual growth in wisdom come to a total comprehension of suffering such that we wouldn’t feel its sting at all; we will, however, learn to reject the regret of the cynical and despairing flesh which expresses disappointment in God’s providence. Let’s turn with Martin Luther to the Word and change our tune to Christian pleas for deliverance, not mere respite. According to Luther, “we should think that, following the example of Paul, we ought to glory greatly in the cross which we have received because of Christ, not because of our own sins. When we consider the sufferings we receive only so far as we ourselves are involved in them, they become not only troubling but intolerable. But when the second person pronoun “Thy” is added to them, so that we can say (2 Cor. 1:5): “We share abundantly in Thy sufferings, O Christ,” and, as the Psalm says (44:22), “For Thy sake we are slain all day long,” then our sufferings become not only easy but actually sweet, in accordance with the saying (Matt. 11:30): “My burden is light, and My yoke is easy” (https://wolfmueller.co/christian-suffering-lectures/).
Finally, it can be difficult for some of us to believe that sin is the reason why there’s death and suffering in the world. Maybe that’s because sin being what’s wrong with the world is an incomplete explanation; what it leaves out is this, that sin is against the Creator. We easily forget the holiness of God. The good news is that faith receives the reconciliation.
There is a lot of handwringing about things falling apart. But as a reminder the big falling event is not right now. We’ve forgotten that the world was already fallen; we’re terrified now to encounter it in this state. The big rising event has begun already as well.
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“This is my play’s last scene, here heavens appoint / My pilgrimage’s last mile ; and my race / Idly, yet quickly run, hath this last pace, / My span’s last inch, my minute’s last point, / And gluttonous death, will instantly unjoint / My body, and soul, and I shall sleep a space, / But my’ever-waking part shall see that face, / Whose fear already shakes my every joint : / Then, as my soul, to’heaven her first seat, takes flight, / And earth-born body, in the earth shall dwell, / So, fall my sins, that all may have their right, / To where they’are bred, and would press me, to hell. / Impute me righteous, thus purge’d of evil, / For thus I leave the world, the flesh, and devil.” - John Donne
As for glory, I have experienced awe. And although such glorious and spectacular wonder is good, I take the awesome consolations of philosophy—no matter how substantial they appear—as thinner gruel than they ever seemed before. Faith doesn’t fill an empty space in our minds with wonder. If that were so, then such would render omniscience inerrancy’s opposite—and self-aware sinners know that’s wrong because sin isn’t invincible ignorance replaced by awe.
As for love, I have experienced passion. But I can report that the older I get, the fewer real, trustworthy, connections I expect to make with people in this life. I will love my neighbor as God intends but the scope continually narrows; there simply won’t be enough time in the world that I should die finally satisfied that I loved enough.
I will die in faith. God doesn’t give us faith so that we might perfect his gift. It doesn’t have its end in ever more rapturous mystical experiences in the knowledge and love of God. If that were so, we creatures would be the actors at center stage. But we’ll never know, love, or wonder, enough to perfect our faith in a God who knows us, loves us, and rejoices in our salvation from eternity. Faith doesn’t come to us as a nutrient-starved sapling. We aren’t denuded of satisfaction in God’s gift of eternal life. By faith we have already begun eternal life—and what greater satisfaction is there?
… The faith which makes us living people from dead ones has such great power that at that very hour when we begin to believe and grasp the Word we also begin to live with eternal life because the Word of the Lord endures forever [Isa. 40:8], and God, who is speaking with us, is eternal and will be with us forever.
(Johann Gerhard).
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There is a sense all men have that life is teaching them something. Is this a true story? It may seem to some especially perceptive skeptics that, when Christians refer to being transformed or taught by God, they refer only to what their experience has been like living with new ideas. This skeptic I’ve invented might say, “You may want to believe that you are a Christian but this claim says nothing more than that you adhere to a particular network of mere ideas.”
But my contention is that God is more than a mere idea and there is more than a merely psychological explanation for Christian belief.
Let’s imagine for the sake of argument that we put together a completely exhaustive psychological analysis and profile for me. I’m an enneagram type 5, Myers-Briggs ENTP, and so on. We could just as easily use that data to explain why I believe that I love my wife. I might not even be able to give more satisfactory reasons for that belief on my own than this psychological profile gives me.
Does that mean that I don’t have good reasons to believe that I love my wife?
Of course not. Skepticism explains too much.
Holes in the stories of our lives are ugly and they draw our attention to corruption. So, we can choose to pick at them, fixate on them—or we can do something different altogether and search for a greater pattern in which even corruptions reveal something about God. Failing this, we live in ignorance of what makes life good, and as such, ours isn’t an invincible ignorance but a self-imposed moral blindness.
One of my struggles in belief has always been an uncommon one that I’ve been calling “the problem of idiocy”. The general idea is this, that the Bible has a category for the good and the bad—but not the stupid, who only do wrong because they’re, well, morons. Is it always more biblically (read: truthfully) accurate to say that a cruel man intentionally inflicts suffering “because he’s a sinner”? Or might we instead say that “he hurts people because he’s an idiot”?
Then what about the intellectually handicapped? Can they ever even convert to Christianity if they don’t have “beliefs” to begin with?
Yes. Belief is the fruit of salvation, not its cause. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law” (Galatians 5:22-23 KJV). Therefore the intellectually disabled are saved the same way as everyone else though we may not see that fruit flourish in this life. We can however see that, if they’re conscious at all, they’re capable of knowledge (the way we know our parents even in the womb), assent, and trust, if even in the slightest ways.
Moreover, John Kleinig (https://youtu.be/KSOgVcfNfng) argues against an overemphasis on the intellectual side of humanity by noting that God made humanity in the image of God—without a word about Reason as what separates us from the animals. Now that I know this about what it means to be in God’s image, I’m better understanding something disastrous about much of missions work. We are tempted to assume that we are on God’s mission to restore benighted and pre-Enlightenment peoples to our image rather than ministering the word to them, the fruit of which is always surprising and mysterious when we encounter it.
I’d also argue that psychological reductionism of the sort I’m addressing here typically reduces intelligence and its opposite to amoral capacities. The commonly held belief in our secular Western thoroughly-psychologized self-understanding is that stupidity, for an example about which I’ve given a lot of thought, is the opposite of intelligence; but I believe that stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence. Instead, we should consider stupidity a consequence of immoral choices for false ideas (this is something like Bonhoeffer’s idea of stupidity). Sometimes these ideas form a network with other ideas born of selective listening or confirmation biases (i.e., choices to believe things that benefit oneself). There is no exception made for the provenance of idiocy; it must necessarily derive from the fall like every other ailment. So, no matter whether we’re referring to a smattering of people or an entire people-group, they’re all in Adam like us though they suffer different consequences.
One manifestation of stupidity is in a failure to believe the truth. In moments of temptation, it can seem that one’s mind is actually more occupied with, and he is more deeply exercised by, a fear of the temptation itself and of what it means, than he is consumed with whatever gluttonous or idolatrous desire. This is a failure to believe in God. If he believed in God, he would be wise to replace the fear of what his sinfulness means with a reverent fear of God—as experience in Christ would tell him that faith in Christ’s forgiveness erases or dispels from the Christian’s mind any other fears besides filial fear of the Savior God. So, is this technique anything more than a mental trick? Is it just an escape from rumination? Is there, in other words, a merely psychological explanation?
Another manifestation of stupidity is in having unwarranted reasons for true belief. A lot of people simply aren’t interested in the idea of God. Even if they’re religious, they seek utility elsewhere in religions. One way to get across what I mean by this is to note that, in my experience, I’ve never been able to convince someone to see God in precisely the same way as I see Him unless they have the right personality type to care about the idea of God the way a theologian might. They could be Christians—perhaps they’re church leaders—but when I ask them why they believe as they do, once we go off-script, I come to find that their reasons have nothing extraordinary about them unique to religious beliefs; they’re the same ordinary reasons that lead them to do every other ordinary thing they do in life. Some of them, for example, only go to church because they’re driven by social engagement. They mouth the words and say that they believe, but they’re not referring to belief as a deep trust in the same notions or mysteries as someone like me might go for. They don’t really mean anything. In short, ideas in themselves just don’t carry a lot of weight for such people.
Stupidity is not just blindness but active skepticism. There is a moral component, and this is not something reducible to psychology. Numbness to a rich emotional life will produce skepticism about sentimentality in toto. The emotionally-numb might skeptical that a film critic is indeed saying the same thing twice when she says that a film is both deeply meaningful and deeply moving. This is a redundancy because to be meaningful is to be moving, and vice versa. The mature can detect the difference between genuine sweetness and the saccharine; the former is evoked in fiction as well as in non-fiction, so this isn’t a matter of real or fake interactions (where only real world occasions would stir up real world emotions). The mature can manage such distinctions because emotional sensitivity is learned as part of a spiritual and moral education; the critic in our example has matured in such a way that her heart wasn’t hardened. In our emotional lives, as we discern the shallow from the deep in meaning, we are thereby able to make out a direction into which we might grow into our full maturity.
Real Christian spiritual maturity connects us to the history of a church full of other people who also grew to maturity. We are not just interpellated into ideological sets. We are born into a history freighted with endlessly meaningful lives. If we do not connect with them then we do not see God, we only see meaninglessness, and we die. Death has no dominion with those in Christ. The whole Christian religion is to be in Christ. His righteousness is ours. Sin is not an infinite fault; sin is a finite condition with an infinitely good resolution already delivered. To dwell on our sin by hyperfocusing on the holes in the plot is to give the enemy the final word on who we really are. Our shame was carried away, as well as our sin.
There is still an inescapable, gnawing thought which many people have which is that they’ve in fact never experienced God at all. This is often a suspicion that’s universalized to assert that really, if we’re honest, nobody has ever experienced God; to claim that the first Christians did so in the apostolic age is just fallacious special pleading. To that I’d say that such a view betrays an ignorance about the Christian experience of knowing God. Knowing God is a way of living in the world. It isn’t like knowing anyone else. It isn’t like an imaginary friend. This is yet one more way in which psychological reductionism fails: it fails to account for the way in which we know God. I used to think that if any theologian were honest and bold enough to tell the absolute truth about his or her belief, he or she would admit that nobody knows any better than anybody else whether God even exists. But now I disagree with that, although this kind of knowing is hard to describe. I can begin to describe this knowledge of my Christian identity by saying that I experience a deep peace and resolve when I see how choices for the good continue to shape my character into something better than what it was before.
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“Anyway, it hasn’t even been that long,” he said to his older brother, taking his hand. “Yeah you’re right,” came the reply. “He’ll be back, promise.”
Although we shouldn’t imagine our lives as marked-out on a timeline, our Christian faith is stifled without hope-filled stories to tell about eternity. And stories take time. The Christian story can be framed as Giver-receiver relationship and we receive everything before we can experience it. This takes time, too. There are two narratives in our minds as we experience the gift that is our lives. One is the story of our sin-stricken bodies and the other is the story of God at work through, for, and in, his own image. These are not two separate lives, but two stories about the same life.
Imagine that in our last moments, on our death beds, the first narrator cries-out in anguish and struggles for a few panicked breaths as the boulder rolls finally into place, sealing his tomb from all future light and life on the dying earth. Imagine that at this exact same moment, however, the other narrator's quiet voice—normally drowned out by the din of distractions—becomes the only voice. We hear it praising God because it is God's voice in us; it’s his Spirit, in whom "we live and move and have our being," and by whom we will have everlasting life. That will be the only voice that will remain in the end.
We can only change what we can author; the moral questions about what we ought to change are necessarily secondary to these natural boundaries. This is doubtless true but it says nothing of the enormity of our task. Are all things within our grasp? If so, then it would be morally necessary to grasp all things and pin them down in order to perfect them because all things are imperfect as we encounter them. Or is it rather that what we are to put into order are invisible things known by some other way than by sense perception? If the former were true, then our limits would be set by phantasmagoria and pinning them down would be an absurd Sisyphean task, as we are made to always perceive objects further out beyond our reach; our natural and good ambition would be a trick played on us, a delusion that we can control what is beyond us spatially and temporally. If it’s true, rather, that we are called to affect all things in some other way, then, even within our small spaces, rightly-ordered ambition actually tracks with eternal truths rather than with fleeting ones that move further away as we reach out to possess them. Of these several stories I am the reader, not the writer.
We can’t abandon our pursuits of happiness any more than we can want to not have been born. Nonetheless, most people don’t expect us to be happy because they don’t see that ultimate reality is God’s own happiness. Our beatitude is in transit. To assert that even the most miserable have good reasons to be happy despite the unhappy appearances of their lives is simply to rephrase the truism that appearances often fool us.
This calls for a demonstration. It has to be seen to be believed. Poetry is autobiography made pretty in order to transmit, in our time-bound language of signs and appearances, something of the essential beauty in its author; poetry is also theology, and for the same reason. The nearer to God, the better our poetry.
The same is true of prayer. Asking why Christians pray if our Father has preordained from eternity what will come is more accurately and more usefully framed as a question of causality than of purpose. When the Spirit impels us to ask something of our Father in the name of his Son, Jesus, only God can fully know why if final purposes are meant by the question. The causal question, however, is known by biblical theology and by the experience of the prayerful Christian who draws always nearer to God’s purposes in Spirit-led prayer.