Sunday, July 15, 2007

Going deeper

Following my post yesterday about the Black Box I was encouraged to come across this from Tom Wright in his devotional commentary on Ephesians (4:17-24):
"You won't understand where behaviour comes from unless you understand the state of heart and mind. And you won't change the behaviour unless you change the heart and mind. This isn't what many people today expect to hear. There is a persistent untruth which has made its way into the popular imagination in our day: that Christianity means closing off your mind, ceasing all serious thought, and living in a shallow fantasy world divorced from the solid truths of 'real life'... But the truth is that genuine Christianity opens the mind so that it can grasp truth at deeper and deeper levels. This isn't a matter of university degrees and paper qualifications, helpful though they may be. It's a matter of the heart and mind being open to the even wider range of insight and imagination that comes with 'learning the king'."

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3 comments:

Geoff said...

amen.

Anna Thompson said...

Loving the Tom Wright, but I'm convinced that your two groups are not mutually exclusive. I tend to think about it a bit differently - God, rather that being limited by a specific skill set or tool kit consistent with his nature e.g. humans get hands and feet to work with, is so expansive that he can select a method of exercising his sovereignty from a potentially infinite range which is for the most part beyond our experience; we just get to play spot God. My Christian experience tells me that God does pretty much what he likes and by his grace allows us to recognise and comprehend some of it. So I'm happy to ask God a straight question and recieve a straight answer 'go there' 'do that' etc. but equally I'm happy to follow the clues and be shaped by the journey; yet again its both/and not either/or. What is intriguing though is the connection here between our search for the will of God and his revelation of his character, we ask what and he responds with who.

Matt Wilson said...

Hi Anna
Yes of course, as with most things there are extreme black and white poles and then a thousand shades in between.
And of course categorising people is a futile activity in the end because we are all individuals with our own eccentricities and curiosities!
M ;-)