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Literalists Lacking in Spiritual Understanding

My previous post (HERE) on the disciples’ insight into parables mentioned that there was a point (or points) when they demonstrated real perception into Christ’s teachings. Of course there were times when they didn’t as well. Related to that, in Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ classic book, Spiritual Depression (a personal favorite of mine), he likens the disciples to the blind man (at first only partially-)healed by Jesus, recorded in Mark 8. When Jesus asks the man if he can see, the man responds, “I see men as trees, walking.”

From this, Lloyd-Jones argues that Jesus’ miracle was performed this way intentionally in order to demonstrate a spiritual principle to the disciples. Like the prophet Nathan with David, Jesus was pointing the disciples to this partially-healed man saying, “You are the man.”

MLJ puts it this way:

It is difficult to describe this man. You cannot say that he is blind any longer. You cannot say that he is still blind because he does see; and yet you hesitate to say that he can see because he sees men as trees, walking. What then – is he or is he not blind? You feel that you have to say at one and the same time that he is blind and that he is not blind. He is neither one thing nor the other (p. 39).

He goes on to say that many struggling Christians are like this. It can both appear that they are and are not a Christian. This, however, is not my point in this post. So let me get to it.

MLJ describes the disciples in this way: the event of the healing of the blind man (in Mark’s narrative) is fresh off the heals of a discussion with the disciples about leaven (in which Jesus asks the disciples, “Do you not understand? Do you not see? Do you not remember?'”). Because he told them to beware the leaven of the pharisees, they began talking about literal bread. So, MLJ says, “they were literalists, they were lacking in spiritual understanding.” Jesus proceeds to call them out on this.

A literalist, in this sense, is someone who cannot see beneath the surface of a story or illustration or principle (and perhaps someone who cannot see beneath the surface without detailed explanations; maybe they see eventually, but it takes a lot of work). You might call this being spiritually obtuse.

I try to teach myself, my children, and want to teach my church, to be able to get beneath the surface of a story (a book, a movie, an illustration, and even the Bible itself) to see the Truth that is being conveyed – “to bring out treasures old and new” (Matt. 13:52). Call this insight or discernment or being spiritually-minded or whatever.

Douglas Coupland regularly makes the claim that only 20% of people worldwide are hardwired to recognize irony when they see it. I fear it’s maybe the same or less for Christians being able to recognize Truth when they see it: being able to see the not blind, not seeing man and recognize that we’re looking at ourselves in a mirror. The distortion/illustration is meant to allow us to see more clearly. But we find ourselves being stared down by Jesus as he asks, “Don’t you understand? Don’t you see?”

Charlotte’s Web: Dr. Dorian, Miraculous Webs, Animals Talking

My daughter and I just finished reading Charlotte’s Web. It was her second time, but my first (though I’ve seen the movie several times). I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed the book. Not only is it a great and moving story, but there is gold to be mined, such as:

“Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider’s web?”
“Oh, no,” said Dr. Dorian. “I don’t understand it. But for that matter I don’t understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.”
“What’s miraculous about a spider’s web?” said Mrs. Arable. “I don’t see why you say a web is a miracle-it’s just a web.”
“Ever try to spin one?” asked Dr. Dorian.
Mrs. Arable shifted uneasily in her chair. “No,” she replied. “But I can crochet a doily and I can knit a sock.”
“Sure,” said the doctor. “But somebody taught you, didn’t they?”
“My mother taught me.”
“Well, who taught a spider? A young spider knows how to spin a web without any instructions from anybody. Don’t you regard that as a miracle?”
“I suppose so,” said Mrs. Arable. “I never looked at it that way before. Still, I don’t understand it, and I don’t like what I can’t understand.”
“None of us do,” said Dr. Dorian, sighing. “I’m a doctor. Doctors are supposed to understand everything. But I don’t understand everything, and I don’t intend to let it worry me.”
Mrs. Arable fidgeted. “Fern says the animals talk to each other. Dr. Dorian, do you believe animals talk?”
“I never heard one say anything,” he replied. “But that proves nothing. It is quite possible that an animal has spoken civilly to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention. Children pay better attention than grownups. If Fern says that the animals in Zuckerman’s barn talk, I’m quite ready to believe her. Perhaps if people talked less, animals would talk more. People are incessant talkers-I can give you my word on that.”

The Doing of That in a Day, Which May Ordinarily Take a Thousand Years

I’m trying to compile some of my favorite George MacDonald quotes from C.S. Lewis’ anthology. That’s all I intended this to be, but then I began to think of quotes I read elsewhere that were related. Why not write them down in one place?

On Miracles:

Think of Jesus’ words, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise’ (John 5:19).

The Father said, That is a stone. The Son would not say, That is a loaf. No one creative fiat shall contradict another. The Father and the Son are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another thing what His Father had made one thing. There was no such change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish and bread before…There was in these miracles, I think in all, only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day, which may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with us…Indeed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the wonder of feeding the thousands. It is easier to understand the creative power going forth at once – immediately – than through the countless, the lovely, the seemingly forsaken wonders of the cornfield (George MacDonald Anthology, pp. 12-13).

To this add C.S. Lewis’ thoughts, building off of MacDonald:

God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn the water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities. Thus every year, from Noah’s time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see…But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off. The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at the wedding party in Cana.

He continues,

God makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and there is an increase, and men, according to the fashion of their age, say… ‘It is the laws of Nature.’ The close-up, the translation, of this annual wonder working is the feeding of the five thousand. Bread is not made there of nothing. Bread is not made of stones, as the Devil once suggested to Our Lord in vain. A little bread is made into much bread. The Son will do what He sees the Father do…When He fed the thousands he multiplied the fish as well as the bread. Look in every bay and almost every river. This swarming, pulsating fecundity shows He is still at work.

Finally, he applies this principle to the Virgin Birth:

This time He was creating not simply a man, but the man who was to be Himself: the only true man. The process which leads to the spermatozoon has carried down with it through the centuries much undesirable silt; the life which reaches us by that normal route is tainted. To avoid that taint, to give humanity a fresh start, He once short-circuited the process…For what He did once without a human father, He does always even when He uses a human father as His instrument. For the human father in ordinary generation is only a carrier, sometimes an unwilling carrier, always the last in a long line of carriers, of life that comes from the supreme life (Essay on Miracles, from God in the Dock).

So then, for Lewis and MacDonald, miracles are God speeding up, or (to use Lewis’ words) ‘short-circuiting’ the process. In Jesus’ miracles he was effectively hitting ‘fast forward.’ He was breaking the speed limit of the so-called ‘laws of nature.’

As to the purpose of such miracles, Lewis cites a quote by Athanasius from On the Incarnation:

Our Lord took a body like to ours and lived as a man in order that those who had refused to recognize Him in His superintendence and captaincy of the whole universe might come to recognize from the works He did here below in the body that what dwelled in this body was the Word of God.

Pure gold from MacDonald and Lewis.

But add to this Martin Luther’s take on Psalm 147:12-14 (which says):

  • Praise the LORD, O Jerusalem! Praise your God, O Zion! 13 For he strengthens the bars of your gates; he blesses your children within you. 14 He makes peace in your borders; he fills you with the finest of the wheat.

In his vocation man does works which effect the well-being of others; for so God has made all offices. Through this work in man’s offices, God’s creative work goes forward, and that creative work is love, a profusion of good gifts. With persons as his “hands” or “coworkers,” God gives his gifts through the earthly vocations, toward man’s life on earth (food through farmers, fishermen and hunters; external peace through princes, judges, and orderly powers; knowledge and education through teachers and parents, etc., etc.). Through the preacher’s vocation, God gives the forgiveness of sins. Thus love comes from God, flowing down to human beings on earth through all vocations, through both spiritual and earthly governments.

When we pray that God would give us our daily bread, he does so through the means of human agency, the same goes for many other areas. All of life is, therefore, a miracle in some sense. But the workings of natural and human agency are so common that God must short-circuit the process to shake us out of our unbelief and monotony – and this is what we deem as a true miracle.

Chesterton, Orthodoxy, and the Cumulative Effect of Reading Fairy Tales

The above title has is the result of a great struggle of mind. For minutes, literally minutes, I pondered, ‘Is it Effect, or Affect?’ I’ll go with ‘Effect.’

I’m not quite ready to put my thoughts on Orthodoxy down in writing, but I do want to record one particular line of thought. Chesterton, in his wondrous way with words, said something that helped me make sense of something I had been thinking for a while. I’ll write more of this later, but his ‘The Ethics of Elfland’ chapter is quite riveting.

In that chapter he makes a statement something to this effect (I’m sure it’s ‘Effect’ this time): In Fairy Land trees are purple (or whatever color) to remind us that trees are actually green. Likewise, in Fairy Land apples are gold to remind us that apples are really green or red. And again, rivers run with wine in Fairy Land to remind us that they actually consist of water. In other words, rather than causing us to escape reality, such stories, when we are reading them correctly, actually remind us of, or point us to, reality.

My own experience in reading has led me to the same conclusion, but I didn’t know how to say it until I read Chesterton (Tolkien’s Essay on Fairie Stories makes much the same point as well). Just yesterday, in my post on the Tale of One who Traveled to Learn what Shivering Meant, I remarked that seeing a boy who couldn’t shiver in a magical land filled with death and hauntings was precisely what I needed to remind me that I have plenty to shiver about here. And this sort of thing has happened many times.

It is because of this that the cumulative effect of reading fairy tales, at least for me, is to remind us subtly, over time, that we live in a magical world. I believe it was somewhere in C.S. Lewis’ writings that I read something to this effect (there’s that word again) that drives this point home: he said that a child who reads of magical forests doesn’t start to despise real forests, but begins to see the real ones as a bit enchanted. In other words, the stimulation of the imagination caused by such reading brings life and vitality to what we otherwise, in our scientific age might see simply as natural processes.

I recently listened to a sermon by Douglas Wilson on the story of the Witch at Endor in 1 Samuel 28. In his observations on this passage he very briefly made the point that this story reminds us we live in a magical world – if we believe what God says about the world. This is a world with witches and giants (have you watched any NBA games lately?). This is a world with voodoo and mumbojumbo. But it is also a world with pure, good, clean miracles.

Miracles are all around us. I believe the biblical accounts of miracles – those of Moses, of Elijah and Elisha, certainly of Jesus. I believe in the resurrection of the dead. Why shouldn’t I?

Fairy stories only serve to remind me that we witness miracles regularly, and often without noticing: Take a magic pill and be healed – that’s not a fairy tale, that’s the modern pharmaceutical industry. Remove his impure heart and give him a new one – that’s not only the Bible (and I do not, of course, think the Bible is a fairy tale or even remotely comparable to a fairy tale), that’s the modern heart transplant. A man detaches his heart from himself and entrusts its care to a creature for safe keeping with the end result being his ultimate destruction- that’s not only a fairy tale, that’s modern idolatry at its finest! How many men to do have given their heart completely to a woman or a job only to have it crushed in the end?

Caterpillars really turn into butterflies. You can explain it scientifically, but it’s the stuff of fairy tales. Plants turn green because of air. You can explain photosynthesis scientifically, but at bottom, when you ask what makes them green, it’s something invisible. This is also the stuff of fairy tales.

Scienticism (I’m not criticizing science, but Scientism)would rob us of all awe and wonder. Fairy Land would remind us that there is plenty to be in awe of in every back yard and plenty to wonder at in the sky above us at all times. Scientism would explain the galaxies. But Fairy Land reminds us that there is awe and wonder in a bunch of balls made of dirt and gas that float in mid air.

To me, the cumulative effect of spending time reading stories of enchanted lands is that it makes the enchantment of our own world come to life. It’s been said before by lovers of such stories, but I’m just now figuring it out. And so I write…