W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc. Home Page Contents Page for Volume What is New
ALPHA and OMEGA:
DISCOUNT THAT
AND YOU'VE GOT A MUDDLE IN THE MIDDLE
If You Don't Grasp That,
Muddled, Befuddled,
You'll be Grasped by the Wrong Party
Rev. Dr. Robert E. Donaldson
Presented by World Wide Web Witness Inc.
PREFACE
This is a little work in intention, designed to bring to an abrupt halt, the continuity confusion, and to both assign and apply the reality of things: that entities and constrained systems may be postulated as the first and the last, the beginning and the end, but only if you abandon logic, and causation, which is implicit by means of definability, so that properties and procedures are correlative, and bases are exposed in consequences. In other words, you may try to start with things, not with the personal, govern your thought by ignoring the point, beg the questions, assume anything, be all and end all, as it were.
Yet if you return to rationality, for a moment, perhaps as if on an excursion, a change, a holiday from assumptions, presumptions and veiled thought, or even thought ignored, or carefully uncultivated, then you end with the personal, One who is not only imaginative, but the eternally extant Being, making laws and forms and all else, One controlled by nothing and creating in the role of Creator; or again, hunted home again, you return to the ignoring of reason, use an imagination that ignores the arising of form, law, characterisability and categorical diversity, mind matter and spirit, as frolics without reason, and laughs at causality, and its logical requirements, while at the same time using its techniques to defend the position adopted: a simple self-contradiction.
The outcomes of such folly in various dimensions is considered, and the unbased income for such ideas. The outcome from what reason demands and revelation confirms and exposes indeed, is likewise pondered, realised and released to contrary views, that the means and ends, and the end of the means may be paralleled. If the one is unhappy, the other fulfils more than heart could wish, or mind desire.
Reason ends with facts that endorse it and declines to recognise what denies its finding, ignores its cohesive verifications and dissolves instead of adopting the revelatory aspect of this confirmation. Here what is both limited and treated as unaccountable, finds its rational ground, and no more is that folly to be found, which denies the application of reason and scientific method, by dissolving causal necessity,and yet deploys reason for its defence of the indefensible.
That constitutex merely the confusion of self-contradiction, you start and remain in the same place, requiring none other to add to it, since you yourself have already decided, in contradicting yourself, your model in your own actions, as if blind to assumption, and careless of constraints (cf. Deity and Design ... Section 8).
What then ? In that case, you cannot consistently argue; and your case is irrational, unworthy of thought. The more so is this, if you ignore what does use logic, insists on reason, and hence is consistent as an argumentative platform, and yet triumphs in its results in exhibiting what is rationally discoverable, and by revelation propositionally available, where there is no blur, or curfew on the light, for in this way of truth, all is comprehensible in principle, concordant in application; where what is verifiable confirms itself without exception in every domain of thought.
In that domain, rationality its minimum, inspiration its maximum, and that it is a test for all things rational and applicable by reason, which is found inherent in the constructions we investigate, so that they are investigable by reason, the two being of the LOGOS orientation. Since reason does not command us, but we have spirits which may opt otherwise, our minds are not chained to this, but may imagine what they please. Then they receive the products of our willing and roving spirits, which can imagine anything from rebelliousness to reason, spirituality to carnality, truth to lies, realism to fantasy, responsibility to erraticism. Rather than being propelled into such things in rashness, it is well to investigate and present as here, what is so to be found, and to ponder with increasing reverence, the result.
There are four initial brands in this regard: the rationality and thus investigability by reason in the universe, the objects in their intense and intensive cohesion, to be investigated; their source; and then ourselves. There is, then, the domain of the spirit, of will, freedom, imagination and subservience, co-operation or rebellion against whatever it sets its mind to, functions to be found in ourselves; and the basis for these things, their cause so that they are not without cause, abandoned by reason, incurring irrationality at the outset. In this overview, there are thus four places to consider, and in ourselves a diversity so great that it deserves further analysis, in mind, body and spirit.
In acting in these areas, and moving in the last to the Bible as demonstrated earlier, but this time with application more specifically in mind, this being no mere repetition, we show and enjoy the realities and the Government of God and is nature, savouring His utter monopoly of truth, while abasing nature-worship and will-worship to where they belong : magnificent obsessions in this only, that they exhibit the extraordinary power of the spirit of man, to confuse himself and abase himself, even as he exalts himself. In doing either thing, reducing what he is to what is less than its function, or exalting it to more, he tends to make of himself both a laughing stock to the Lord in the process (as in Psalm 2), and a spectacle of disenchantment to truth (Jeremiah 2:13,27-28 - 18:14-15), before his fellows, as he wilfully dabbles in the self-contradictory, and deploys reason in its absence in his own model, as to its original and originative presumptions, only to argue as if he had forgotten his posture, stand and model altogether.
For all this there is a penalty, and it is felt and visible both in man himself, his society, his world, his resources, his spirit and his psyche or life; but to observe the tenacity with which he pursues this penalty, it reminds one of nothing more acutely than this, the rebelliousness of a schoolboy in an academy which forbids smoking (pot, tobacco, any noxious thing). He in principle will not BOW, and so smokes with the relish of self-fulfilment and perhaps self-importance. Thus in later years he dies early, as in many cases, and EACH case is moribund with tragedy.
WHY does he die ? In Wodehouse, there is an account of one of the 'bloods' who on principle will break bounds and perform exploits against perfectly harmless school rules. The Principal, a man of some understanding, perceives this as misdirected and misconceived adventurism, and on finding one of the students who, while absent from School, in a place forbidden, came to the aid of his daughter against a ruffian, speaks to that student more deeply. It is, he makes clear, no more as a headmaster that he ponders the point with the youth, but as man to man. In this he observes that he quite understands that the breaches of rule are matters of principal for the student, but notes that ... as far as he personally is concerned, it would be a great relief and advance if the youth could turn over a new leaf.
After the youth leaves his study, the author observes that the Principal or Headmaster then resumes his reading. He turns over a new leaf in the book of his choice; and so does the boy, in the book of his life. That is the Wodehouse tableau.
This is the better outcome. It is so in this fictional fantasy; it is so in fact. The love of God is such that the wantonries of this world, though in some measure understandable in misplaced zeal for the feel of autonomy, power, independence and derring-do, are neither ignored as one ignores the dangers of the raging ocean, in that one cannot intervene for ships in danger, for God has all power, nor are they revelled in, as if He were to say: Well you have put yourself there, in the vast ocean's grandeur, and now We shall take pleasure in the spectacle of your littleness before such might with which you dare to trifle.
On the contrary, God is revealed in Jesus Christ as in the Bible, as so loving the world that instead of just letting the occupants perish, and/or coming to judge it with assessments inviolable and exposing the vile as it is (John 3:16-19), including the moral pride of self-congratulation for the spiritual vagabonds, He took an entirely different course. He came in the very format of man, as it were, to speak man to man (cf. Hebrews 2). This He did with such authenticity that He even became exposed to the rigours of pain, the tests of truth, the vulnerabilities to passion, the madness of mockery, the callow chants of calumny and the vicious lust for cruelty to which settled selfishness is heir.
IN THIS FORM, He rebutted lies, errors and fallen philosophies, rejected disease readily and utterly so long as it was not a substitute for truth, but an expression of it, that is, so long as healing power was not to become the new feature and focus of worship, but God Himself remained in that solitary place as He should be.
He trod on serpents in human form as in Matthew 23, but not with physical feet, exposing their lairs and poisons. THEN He endured the pith of the impurity of man's fall into the seedy sickliness and puny passions of sin, and did so Person, on the Cross. Such was His action, this so that He might in justice and mercy mixed, award liberty to those who accepted this transfer of guilt, and this He consummated in rising, again personally in that very body so mangled, alive from the dead, just as He had raised Lazarus and others before, this not least to attest His authenticity as God, and the propriety of worship.
Worshipping your Creator is one thing; worshipping SUCH a Creator is significantly more! In this, though He had advised He would take this course, as found in the Bible, for over a millenium, even then, when the time came, man failed to deter Him, or frustrate His plans. Some indeed not only believed Him, but became godly members of the first Christian congregation on earth, starting worship on the very day He rose.
He could not be blocked, nor could any rational ground be found to overcome His action or dismiss its factuality, though the news raged in the public domain and eventually in Gospel format, overcame at least in external appearance, the Roman Empire..
The Church of the living Christ, therefore as in Acts 1:1, has continued in the power of the Lord, many as with the Jewish nation, abhorring Him, and trying to ignore Him, but some of these receiving Him as remedy, recipe of salvation and ground of immortality.
Thus, not only some Jews -
a people chosen to show His reality and truth and give praise in exemplary fashion, who while providing much of His gift in apostles and leaders, failed at the last categorically, though even here remain ordained to receive mercy at last in a more national fashion*1,
but also many Gentiles became part of the residue of faith in this world. This multiply forged residue, is a remnant, those saved by the Lord of creation, joined at last in one Gospel. Here is the personal crop of the God of creation and salvation, active for all ages of time, relinquishing neither love nor truth, and abounding in mercy and wisdom..
The stakes are high: everything for life, or worse than nothing; for after all, what has potential ruined, is rather less than nothing, for that at least ruined nothing, but has never been.
Therefore let us proceed to give in this domain of application, a sight of the depth of the ditch into which reason and man fall, when the latter is irrational, and the results all too natural, when this is done for his spirit and life; and we do so in the hope that it will help some to be strong and others not to be weak, to the point of a tottering wall verging on collapse, that then proceeds to turn to rubble.
One thing only will make it stand, and that is truth, righteousness and its Creator; and this, He being eternal, so that nothing was never the irrational basis, nor are questions merely begged in irrational disregard, is by His intervention in what is not by nature eternal, though fitted to be so. In this, man's predicament, the need is to turn to the Creator-Saviour, finding reason for Life in the Redeemer, the living God, and having the fractures removed, the frictions overcome with the salve of salvation in the joy of regeneration to life that does not fade or fail (I Peter 1:5-8 cf. II Corinthians 5:17ff.).
Truth may give trouble; it beats rubble. Love has no need for defence; it is its own defence, applying salve to the wounds, even if it stings, and health to the heart, even if it must first be broken (Psalm 51:3,17).
NOTE
See
Red Alert Ch. 10, Part II,
Let's Be Reasonable, for God Is! Ch. 5.
The Defining Drama Ch. 10,
It Bubbles ... He Calls Ch. 10 .
CONTENTS
ALPHA and OMEGA PERSONALLY
DIVINE IDENTITY PAPERS
Part II of the Above
Chapter 3
BEYOND NATURALISTIC MYSTICISM
AND ANTI-AETIOLOGICAL SELF-CONTRADICTION,
GOD HIMSELF,
AUTHOR OF MIND, CREATOR OF SPIRIT, SOURCE FOR MATTER
Chapter 4
Courage, Conviction and Enterprise from Christ,
and for Christ
from Malachi 1-4
GIVING AND GOD
Chapter 5
BEYOND MORAL SUPREMACISM
AND AUTONOMOUS ARROGANCE:
TO REALISM ABOUT OUR RACE
IN TERMS OF ITS ALPHA AND OMEGA,
GENESIS AND JUDGMENT
Chapter 6
LIVING IN CHRIST:
WHEN THE MIDDLE IS BETWEEN TWO FIXED POLES,
IT IS BEAUTIFUL
You start with God, you end with
truth;
if in the middle, you find him where he always was,
THEN rejoice.
IF NOT, THEN CALL ON HIS NAME,
WHO IN CHRIST CALLED ON THIS EARTH,
THAT IT MIGHT BE SAVED..