I have lain on the floor under the power of God . . . at least, I must say to my skeptical reader, it seemed so to me. At some points in my life, it felt as if God came and took power over every faculty and left me weak, utterly powerless, before His glory.
When praying for Pentecost, sometimes we receive it and nothing is like it. Power comes to us not through any labor we have done, but by the power of the Holy Spirit. I have wept under the conviction of the Holy Spirit and laughed with great joy in the Lord.
We are tempted to demand that God always give us His grace in this same way. We know our effort can do nothing and so hope that He will never require us to do anything. But when it is not Pentecost, Pentecost will not come however hard we seek it. We cannot manipulate God with our sincerity or our many prayers.
Revelation is a great good, but it is not a good we can produce at will.
I have also done hard intellectual work that ended in a vision of God. Sometimes at the end of working through a hard passage of Plato, I have felt a rush of God’s glory. I have, by His grace, reasoned and felt His pleasure at the end of the process. In the joy of this moment, the temptation appears to do it again . . . to seek God in reasoning.
Reason is a great good, but the good of it cannot come to us at our command.
I have learned to trust no man who does not admit that both reason and revelation are necessary in the life of any sane person. Our Father delights to give us good gifts (revelation), and also delights to see us act in His image (reason). When we use our noetic capacities we glorify Him; when we accept His revelation we glorify Him.
Reason and revelation are two ways of knowing the good, the truth, and beauty. Plato, for example, recognized the importance of both and in his Timaeus provided a mechanism for finding both. The brain would bring reason to the soul and the liver would bring divine revelation.
That we need both reason and revelation is hard to understand. We tend to prefer one to the other and then demand that God act as we wish. If we find reason hard, we ask for revelation. If we enjoy thinking, we worry that “revelation” will make our “work” less important.
Sometimes we don’t love the good, the truth, or beauty as much as we love the mechanism that allows us to find the good, the truth, or beauty. This is a serious mistake.
There is nothing new in this dilemma. In many terms it is my duty to teach the Bacchae by Euripides. This play teaches me that the tension I have felt in my own life is real. In the play, a king of a city is faced with the god of wine. The god of wine takes his followers out and makes them ecstatic. His divine power is uncontrollable and highly erotic . . . not in some filthy sense, but in the sense of high passions.
A person in the power of the god is not irrational, but in no need of reason. His devotees learn what they must by direct revelation and experience of the god. The king of the city will not accept this truth and is punished through this folly.
There is something, however, to be said for the king. He wants a city based on law, not passion, and this is surely the safer path! But safe is not joyful, so those in a safe city want more joy while those in a libertine city long for the order that comes from law.
Both the god and the king are right, in a way, but the king does not recognize the need for balance. Reason and law are not enough. Love may have “reasons” that reason cannot recognize. Euripides reminds us that to be a city, there must be law, but also love or liberty. Liberty rejoices, but law protects. This side of paradise, the law is needed, but it can never be the highest thing in the city. The law exists for love and not love for the law.
And so the god is right to provoke the city to ecstasy by his revelation, because the city would otherwise become sterile. Love is fecund . . . law checks the danger of the fecundity. In the same way, a Christian finds reason checking the excess of false revelation, and true revelation adding insight to the blindness of reason. Logic cannot produce truth and revelation does not produce sound thinking. Taken together revelation gives data to reason’s program.
I need Pentecostal power and miraculous insight in a mind trained to think well. There is no faith without Pentecostal power and no faith without thought.
I can hear the songs of my childhood reminding me to seek Pentecostal power . . . not by might, not by power, but His Spirit. This Spirit is the reasonable, divine Logos, a conversation that is sensible and can be followed. We would not know what we know without God’s ecstatic revelation of Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, but we would not be able to do anything with this knowledge without reason.
This reason itself must be purified by God and our “revelation” must be checked by His divine reason.
Euripides was right: we need both the god of passion and the god of reason in the City. The good news of the Gospel is that logic became flesh and dwelt among us and that we beheld His glory and His truth.
August 27th, 2010 | 9:11 pm | #1
Thanks John Mark for this reflection — yes we need both.
I found myself agreeing and also a little hesitant about what you’ve said. In one respect, as a Pentecostal, I have heard too many times that you Pentecostals bring the heat and we (insert other branch of Evangelicalism) bring the light. We’re the mind, but we need your heart.
I didn’t “really” hear you saying that entirely, but it comes close at times, too close for me to be completely at home.
Part of the issue for me is the way the NT depicts the Spirit as the one who replaces Torah in the Christian. If the Spirit is the love poured out (as Augustine understood Paul), then this divine love reintegrates human loves (emotion, passion, affectivity). At the same time, I see the point about the need for an external law because none of us have fully integrated affectivity.
And I fully concur with the point that we MUST pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful. I’m with you on the positive aspects of a fully Christianized platonism, I would just add a fully Christianized Stoicism to boot.
August 27th, 2010 | 9:34 pm | #2
John Mark,
Out of curiosity, how would you describe your state of mind when writing this post? Were you by chance writing under the “conviction of the Holy Spirit,” or feeling the “rush of God’s glory?” Would you say that you were “in the power of God?”
If not, do you happen to have other writings that you produced while under these influences? Would you be willing to make such writings available?
August 27th, 2010 | 10:09 pm | #3
To C. Ehrlich:
I was thinking about Euripides and Dionysus when I wrote this.
For me . . . silence and stillness is my usual reaction to “conviction” and “rush of God’s glory.” Thinking about it means it is over.
Dale:
We agree.
August 27th, 2010 | 10:50 pm | #4
John Mark,
It’s one thing to be thinking about the “conviction” and the “rush of God’s glory” while experiencing these things; it’s entirely a different thing to simply have thoughts while experiencing this conviction and rush of God’s glory. I was asking about the latter. Thinking about the conviction might be incompatible with experiencing the conviction, just as thinking about the joy of sex might be incompatible with experiencing the joy of sex. But this doesn’t imply that having thoughts is incompatible with experiencing the conviction–any more than having thoughts (e.g., about the loveliness of one’s spouse) is incompatible with the joy of sex.
If having thoughts is not incompatible with experiencing “the conviction of the Holy Spirit” or feeling “the rush of God’s glory,” I suspect that such thoughts could be recorded. I am really interested in whether you had any such record (whether the recording was performed during or after the experience), and whether or not you would be willing to share the details of any such recordings.
August 28th, 2010 | 8:25 am | #5
If I may be so bold here, I don’t think the analogy with sex holds because spiritual experiences are not embodied in that particular way. It is closer to the experience of joy one might receive from “thinking” about the qualities of a loved one.
Although there is a trajectory of Christian mysticism that sees union in terms of darkness and thus silence, I tend to go with the tradition that sees union as light. At least, this is the way my own experiences have unfolded. Silence itself may ensue, but this silence, for me, normally stems from being overwhelmed by a deluge of thoughts that the mind simply cannot contain.
Ecstasy on this point is more like Jack Black’s character when he saw King Kong for the first time. It was frozen and speechless by the sheer awe of this ape. There was so much to take in–so many thoughts–that he was overwhelmed by it.
To be overwhelmed by God’s presence does not necessarily entail the absence of thought altogether, but the overwhelming nature of the thoughts themselves because these thoughts are new insights (revelation?) about the infinite God of the universe.
August 28th, 2010 | 11:33 am | #6
I am sorry if I misunderstood the earlier question. To date my writings on these topics are the very sort of thing (including family life) that are in my Don’t Blog Zone.
Call it my own eccentricity.
August 29th, 2010 | 12:34 pm | #7
JMR, are you channeling JPII:
“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves (cf. Ex 33:18; Ps 27:8-9; 63:2-3; Jn 14:8; 1 Jn 3:2).”
http://www.ewtn.com/library/encyc/jp2fides.htm
August 29th, 2010 | 12:39 pm | #8
Or perhaps Bob Dylan…
“The whole world is filled with speculation
The whole wide world which people say is round
They will tear your mind away from contemplation
They will jump on your misfortune when you’re down.”…
“All my loyal and much-loved companions
They approve of me and share my code
I practice a faith that’s been long abandoned
Ain’t no altars on this long and lonesome road.”…
“It’s bright in the heavens and the wheels are flying
Fame and honor never seem to fade
The fire’s gone out but the light is never dying
Who says I can’t get heavenly aid?”
Ain’t Talkin’ (2006) by Bob Dylan
http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/aint-talkin
August 29th, 2010 | 4:46 pm | #9
Yes, and JPII was channeling Bonaventure, who was himself channeling the Victorines and Augustine, and so it goes–ah the communion of the saints, love it!
As for how to place Dylan in the tradition. . .well, I’ll let others take on that challenge.
September 5th, 2010 | 9:15 pm | #10
Well, think of this, I was looking at pictures of the catacombs and came across the beardless Jesus as the good shepard and later I flipped open my bible and it is about the good shepard. God can convey an idea which may not be highly emotional but can be striking.
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