Final Thoughts - Continuation of Response

So, having established the skeptic, not as an honest questioner, but as one who is justifying what he or she hopes is true, the person who poses the question "what is meaningful?" cannot be a skeptic. He does not doubt the existance of meaningfulness; he is only searching for that which embodies what he already knows to exist.

Whether you are a follower of Christ or not, faith sustains our lives. The real question is, in what do you have faith? Faith in Christ results in a deeper sight then one could ever anticipate; not a frenzied gleaning of empirical data to sustain faith, nor ignorantly blind faith, but a real faith that takes a step outside of what we can rationally understand, after which becomes apparent in what we can rationally understand.

Thus, we entrust our ability to learn and to grow to our Creator. What many do not understand is that faith and reason are not opposing, but co-existing concepts. No, they are even closer: faith and reason cleave to each other, for unbiased reason leads to the conclusion that a Reason exists higher than that which we can comprehensively understand. The existance of God would be illogical only if we could logically understand everthing that exists.

When Christ heals those who were blind, they were able to see. But the those who had physical sight, and yet did not follow Him, he calls blind. Hellen Keller was once asked what she felt would be worse than being blind. She responded that it would be worse to be able to see, yet not have vision. It was either G.K. Chesterton or Malcom Muggeridge who stated "we need to see through the eye, not with the eye."

If we focus on what we physically see, our life's work will consist a burial, rather than an uncovering. The Truth, which was revealed in many ways, all pointing to Christ, is desperately buried in the stratus layers of Academia, which, after years of scholarship, will remain fossilized by rhetoric and verbiage. If one brave soul, then attempts to hack through the layers of rock, and frees this Truth from its confinning grave in his own life, his loss is then his gain.

To bring this analogy back to our discussion, the bottom line is the question often reveals more about the questioner than that being questioned. The sediment with which we use to bury the Truth, in pretense of uncovering, says more about the ground one is standing on than about the Truth. A philosopher once said that we must never judge a philosophy by its followers; it's misuse. Another stated that there are five books to the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the Christian. Most will never read the first four. Although what the philospher said is fundamentally true. Christianity is hopelessly under attack because of the Christian. Because the Christian is lost in the outworking of each argument, and forgets to go back to the Cross. Therein is our deliverance, and all doubts, all skepticism, and all honest questions should be flung at the indestructable fiber of the Cross.

I will end with one of my favorite poems:

Poem By Francis Thompson

Oh world invisible, we view thee,
Oh world intangible, we touch thee,
Oh world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air—
Do we ask of the stars in motion,
If they have rumor of thee there?
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!—
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places;
—Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
But when so sad thou canst not sadder
Cry—and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry—clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesaret, but Thames!

Praise the Lord, He meets us where we are.