Monday, May 25, 2020
706 - Outside the Box
Spirituality Column #706
May 26, 2020
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Outside the Box
By Bob Walters
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is
unseen, since what is seen is temporary and what is not seen is eternal.” Paul,
2 Corinthians 4:18
“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance
about what we do not see.” Hebrews 11:1
It wasn’t until I went inside a church that I truly learned
about thinking outside the box.
Seems backwards, doesn’t it?
All those judgmental, close-minded Christians steeped in spooky fear and
irrational legends “praying” into thin air about forgiveness, salvation,
eternal life, and God’s glory. Where is
the logic in any of that?
Turns
out that logic, so revered by “thinkers,” I discovered over time, is the box
that incarcerates humanity and truly confines the human mind. It is faith in these wonderful “things unseen”
which, as C.S. Lewis put it, is the light by which we see everything else. Faith in Christ is the most out-of-the-box
thinking we can experience.
Logic is helpful and isn’t necessarily a “bad” thing; it simply
is neither a very big intellectual box nor indicative of an assured moral
guidepost. Logic, on its own, provides
situational awareness, objective analysis, workable action plans, and a pathway
upon which opinion may safely trod but right-thinking and truth may
stumble.
Because a large part of modern culture insists logic cannot
be argued with, logic accommodates the tyranny of popular clichés, partisan
soundbites, and what 1900s Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton would call, “Truisms
that are not true.” Intellectual heft, you see, requires great intellectual
will and inspired intellectual energy. Not clichés.
Christianity is entirely an exercise in out-of-the-box
thinking.
First evidence of that?
Nobody saw Jesus coming. Despite
prophecy and the despair of the Jews badly in need of and waiting for God’s
promised Messiah, they saw nothing logical or attractive in a “savior” who was
a servant and who taught the moral enormity of servanthood and obedience “even
unto death.” That’s outside the box.
Pick your Bible story – Old Testament or New – and you’ll
find the true story of God, not much about the sanctified logic of humanity. If anything, the Bible reveals that when man draws
his mind within the small logical and often fearful, self-preservationist box
of himself, evil frequently emanates.
Why? He’s not thinking about God
or others.
Twentieth century Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who with
her family escaped Nazi Germany, attended the post-war trial in Jerusalem of
Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann. She
expected to see a monster, but her lasting impression of him was the evident
smallness of his ability to and absence of willingness to think. That, Arendt surmised, was how he generated
enormous evil out of his meek, “banal” personage.
In Christ – with mysterious but unwavering assuredness – we
possess the cosmic enormity and power of thinking about God’s goodness, truth,
and love. The freedom of Christ is the
freedom of thinking well outside the box of humanity’s confines.
Is our mind like Christ’s?
No. But does Christ impart His
mind to us? Yes, that’s why He entered
time and humanity: to teach, to share, to prove, to love, to serve.
It isn’t logical or in a box, but Jesus gifted us with a
whole new way of thinking.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) sees the Bible more as a how-to-think book than a rulebook.