so during our all church staff meeting today i began to sketch out a flow chart of the abrams quote with "truth" added into the mix. my paper turned out looking super jumbled and sloppy and difficult to follow, so i made a quick less-confusing version quickly on my computer just now (i used a section of my desktop as the background for the chart - yep, hedges - perfectly mysterious).
i figure, if truth is the point, then knowledge doesn't necessarily get us there. we can only arrive at true knowledge if we know for a fact that the knowledge we have is truth. so we must start with mystery. we must start with the questions in order to fully arrive at the results.
my immediate response, then, is that in order to discover the truth behind a mystery, it is more beneficial to start with mystery than to begin with knowledge.
but what i also found interesting in the development of this flow chart was the importance of the process we go through between imagination and truth. that long downward arrow is essentially where all of life happens. we decide where we're going, what we're believing, who we're following, where we belong: basically how we perceive the world. this all happens within that stretch of arrow.
the quest for truth is found in mystery and imagination - not in knowledge.
anyway. those are my thoughts, but i'd like to hear yours. any changes you'd like to make to the chart? disagreements? things you really like? let me know.
-ap.
3 comments:
I'm not quite sure how imagination leads directly to truth. Seems like there's at least one step missing there. I can imagine that dragons are real and that they sleep under my bed at night, but there's a lot some stuff that has to happen before I can conclude that that is true (which it is).
i'm with ya nick - but that's the point of the arrow kinda. the arrow is the process of life. determining what the truth is.
the "truth" might be false - no, there's not a dragon under my bed - but THAT is still the truth of the situation: there is no dragon.
but maybe there does need to be another step between imagination and truth. hmmmmmm...
i really like your chart. i think nick brings up a good point that i didn't really think about.
maybe knowledge is in between imagination and truth--because we don't start there. imagination is the spark but then we seek to know what is really real--what is truth. it is more than just knowledge that gets us there, but i think it's more than just a by-product of already having the truth.
actually i've been reading dallas willard's new book and it's all about how knowledge is not an enemy of faith but is in fact essential to it. i'm not sure what i think of it yet, but i'm also not very far into the book.
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