Hyperchoice.
I always wonder what people who read this blog think of me. Partly because of my self-centered personality, but also because of my tendency to wonder. I often wonder if people who know me only in my binary form would be quite surprised to meet and know me in person. And really, Rich is probably the only one who meets that criteria.
So for everyone cept him, it might be kind of surprising to find out how confused and faithless I am. I feel like a paper being ripped and torn by postmodern currents. I have so many questions - so many that I am scared to ask. In my more honest moments, I have a pretty liberal view of Scripture, God, and Christianity. It's not that I try to be evil or to rebel from the orthodox faith. It's just that alot of it doesn't make sense to me. Sometimes I feel like it's something we all make up and embrace to feel better about the situation.
For a while I seriously considered going to the L'Abri center in Minnesota so that I could get everything straightened out. At that point I was reading alot of Francis Schaeffer's Trilogy and had some real hard questions that needed to be answered. I forgot how that plan fizzled out, but either way I guess I began to feel like it wasn't necessary. Maybe it is. Maybe it will be. (I wish I could afford to go to an awesome Christian college.)
It's not that my own Church isn't sufficient for me, necessarily. But there is nobody here that I can ask the hard questions to and expect a solid, biblical, thoughtful answer. It's not that they are stupid or deceitful or anything like that. I just don't think anyone has bothered to even wonder about some of the things I wonder about.
One of the major issues I struggle with is the tendency of truth to become lies. That's probably a little exaggerated, as most things don't turn about to be intentional lies, so much as misunderstandings on behalf of authors. Time and time again, proportional to my learning and experience, instead of increasing knowledge, I feel like I'm only increasing my unknowledge. I'm an expert on telling you what I doubt. Just when I discover the true way to understand something, minutes later I find a completely opposite and equally tenable view. Since this repeats over and over, the Law of Diminishing Returns falls upon the confidence I have in new beliefs and teachings. There simply isn't one obvious set of Absolute Truths to be internalized. I have no doubt that True Truth is Absolute, I just doubt that's very easy or even possible to obtain. There's just so many choices. And at the end of the day, my most sacred certainties are the next man's sober doubts.
Vanity of vanities.
What steps do I take for resolution? I begin with prayer. I pray oh so hard for clarity and wisdom. I don't know why I believe God can or will give it to me, but I believe that he does. I immerse myself in the most Traditional forms of Christian scholarship I can find. I am also going to read this book soon: Hyperchoice.