2022-10-20 A Meditation on Modern Dispensations

“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,” (2 Co 10:5 ESV)

In a world run amok the soldier listens, dutifully, to peace-lovers in every station: at the helm, in the barracks, serving the food, cheering with story and song. The soldier is listening, trusted, near to the fire, as Principles and a new kind of Edge in a world gone technological, scientific, advanced medical; in short, as some confluence of just what is and what is possible, does shape equally a reversion to fundamentalism. People with an ear for the spiritual estate, do balk at so much frontiersmanship and instead posit this to be a generation for the heightened application of religion’s Law.

Law, that is, not as the simple rules that keep our society running, but as mistakenly thought to be a religion even unto itself. It is thought that, at the risk of losing all religiosity, that some concessions must be made, some biblicism adopted, some known amidst a world full of unknowns. That is, the prophet within their own religion is hearing a deeper call for meaning and, as outfitted and discipled in a more superstitious era (that of Jesus), is reckoning with bold divisions as to who “gets” the technology and who is comfortable with the new dispensation.

And the changing of the guard regarding our notions of time: I might wake up tomorrow and be eighty. Where do the years go? Yet by the same token my joy and peace in believing remains. Somehow these thoughts are vouchsafed unto us with guarantee that in some regard they are the true physics and the true technological, adapted, evolved, the true estate of this world gone mad. That is, some science must leave room in it for a patient unseen hand, that grants explanatory device if that is what we seek, if that is our toolkit, whilst also granting mystical plethoric notions if instead we are looking for the spiritual, for the experiential matter-of-fact, for what and how in plain terms our thoughts find amongst God’s divine nucleus and atomic bits and pieces, time layered or translated unto notions of light’s speed, around which all distance and time does somehow warp, wherein friends are formed and Bold Experience is encountered. So the question, is Jesus real to me, is a question with a physic and with a medicine, with a networked technological and a meta aspect.

Facts and decisions do matter; we simply are too oppressed by rational notions as opposed to the magic and the superstitious notions of a bygone era. We think our minds strong, at least, strong enough to think from a safe and removed and dispassionate plateau, yet do not reckon with the fact, analogous to the fact that deeds done do matter, that the rumor of rational and scientific explanation, does create a barrier not easily translated into the spiritual. We see the archaeology of evolutionary stages, and poof, gone is our ability to rest secure in notions of a Creator God. We see the superposition of atoms, of quarks, of insane division upon division of the microscopic, and wonder how any prayer can overcome this march of progress.

Yet perhaps it can. Perhaps just as prudent study—for it is prudent thus to study what time has brought to fruition in these recent generations—just as prudent study produces many a simultaneous believer, many a church-goer with one foot planted in the explanatory and the scientific, just as that, it also produces better Narrative and Wonder. We rebel and mockingly point to the scientific and rational, to the networked and diagrammed, because always there is some other simpler point where we disagree with the religionist, something more close to the heart, something that is misunderstood or frowned upon. So we simultaneously do need fellowship and belonging, are thus grateful, and then also we have our own private wish, if only they would “get it”.

No matter, the transition away from a Law-based church gathering to a more gracious, I’m okay, you’re okay; I’m foolish, you’re foolish; setting outside church walls, is sacrosanct and all of us do it, if it isn’t found in our church home. We prefer the bar, or the civic events of our neighborhoods. We delight in the academy and in spheres of work. We put in lip service to a church gone obsessive, but breathe, catch our breath, on its periphery, where there are rumored to be rebels and undesirables, where some deeper flaw within Man’s spirit does manifest and therefore cause us suddenly to go all in with this Jesus stuff and this Cross stuff. No longer only slightly sinful, there are beacons and aspects of the man or woman’s very being that cannot be fixed, actions done in the flesh that cannot easily be forgotten or prayed away. So we are those mightily made over and atomically healed through and through, because Someone cared; Someone loved; Someone gave us the best modern—in His day—parables.