“16 Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. 17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. 18 Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, “What does this babbler wish to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities”—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. 19 And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” 21 Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” (Acts 17:16-21 ESV)

Man is forever fishing for verite, for the paradigmatic Expression of human mind, thought, affections, and activities. A potential insight occurs when one self reflects on just how affected, partisan, ricocheting, is any daily activity or output. We are entirely flying on a whim, on a slanted reality, on some cost-benefit analysis or, rarely, habitual goodness perhaps.

That is, “low anthropology” is a name for this theological phenomenon. It isn’t that we suddenly—by accepting Christ—become all-knowing or levelheaded, but rather that the duty to philosophize truthfully has been discharged. We have—call it fishing—arrived together in some shared Avenue called Cruciform thinking. We have seen the Cross… how a man or woman thinks dastardly, calculated thoughts alongside innocent blessed thoughts.

The existential fox-hole, then, posits this: in the foxhole there are no atheists. It isn’t that life suddenly becomes crystal clear, or not that alone, but rather that our fishing expedition has put paid to any notion or semblance of equanimity or self-reliance. The soldier in her or his existential terror, a terror so severe as to be faced rather blithely and rather calmly, all things told, knows the Need that Christ addressed: to put Value and Paid to man’s panicked realization come fishing expedition, that all thought and mentalism falls short in the name of pride or of hubris, in the name of strange fetishes and obtuse or stubborn hangups.

Because Christ came and Died for us, we have that rarely vocalized point of contact with our peer: do you really Feel it? Can we celebrate a modern day Pentecost this hour? Has the fishing trip returned and concluded: low anthroplogy, lowness around what plainly good or even-keeled thoughts do arise? By “low” is meant “humble”, “mistrusted”, “suspect”. By “anthropology” is meant Man and the study of Man. The study of his and her situation, all things told. His or her diagnosis, all things being equal.

So we do encourage that expedition most advantageous, epistemic Discovery, that ennui or glad resignation upon realizing Man’s strange paranoias and allegiances, the strange violating or intruding Thoughts that always invent themselves worse than the year before, the conversation overheard that we just wish we hadn’t heard: it will be recalled ad infinitum, for Eternity. But that glad realization: it is a neighbor but nothing more to self-annihilation, the latter the atheistic response to humble Encounter, and ours, the former, being a gushing, Blessed falling into the patient arms of Christ who Knew us.

So to our modern Pentecost! To the strange Value-Added paradigmatic Failure or the self-righteous thought. To the paradigmatic embrace of All Things, that All Things might be seen as futile, and this not for depressive conclusion but because living, breathing, blood circulating Flesh in Christ was a shoulder there, one to lean on.