Tag Archives: Mere Christianity

No Simple Answers

Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller

There is a myth that is so pervasive and widespread that most of us believe its lies without thinking. What, you may ask, is this myth? It is the myth of common sense. Or, to use different words, it is the belief that people everywhere have the ability, wisdom, and understanding to come to the same conclusion as we would or do the same thing that we would do in a given situation. After all, some things are just plain common sense. Or so the argument goes.

The problem with this chain of thought is that everyone on the planet has a different way of seeing the world. We are all unique beings with our own experiences, abilities, thoughts, and actions. Taken together, it means that there is no such thing as “common sense” as we all have our own sense of the world around us.

True, as some might say, there are some shared cultural events, precepts and beliefs. After all, societies work specifically because of shared cultural norms (i.e. attitudes and behaviors that are considered normal with a culture, such as how one is to greet each other). However I would argue that just because we might agree on broad cultural norms, this doesn’t necessarily equate to having a common sense that is shared among humanity.  The world is too large and too multifaceted for such a phenomenon.

I highlight this myth because it shows how strongly the desire is within us for simple answers. We want a simple world with simple answers to simple questions.  We desperately desire a world that is easy to understand and easy to move around in with folks who see things the same way as we do. Reality, however, isn’t so simple or nice. As C.S. Lewis once remarked, “Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect…Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed.”[1]

So what should we do? If reality really is complex and strange, as it seems to be, then how do we approach things? How do we move forward through the darkness of the unknown while surrounded by paradoxes and oddities? To quote C.S. Lewis once again, the answer is to “leave behind all these boys’ philosophies – these over-simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simpler either.”[2]

Accordingly let us stop trying to reduce the complexity of this world into simple answers. Let us be honest with ourselves and others and acknowledge the complexity of the world in which we live.  And in doing so, let us also recognize the complexity and mysterious wonder of the Creator. He is not a simple being who can be described in simple terms or made to dance to the tune of our thoughts and desires. The focus of Christianity, Bishop Kallistos Ware reminds us, is not to “provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.”[3]

God is God. He is beyond our thinking and understanding (e.g. Ecclesiastes 11:5, Isaiah 55:8-9, Psalm 145:3, 1 Corinthians 2:11). Try as we might, our words and simple descriptions of him will always fall short of fully capturing the wonder of who he really is. Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth century church father, put it this way: “Anyone who tries to describe the ineffable Light in language is truly a liar – not because he hates the truth, but because of the inadequacy of this description.”[4]

 

Footnotes:

[1]C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 48.

[2]C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity, 48.

[3] Kallistos Ware. The Orthodox Way (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 14.

[4] Gregory of Nyssa. On Virginity, quoted in Kallistos Ware. The Orthodox Way, 24.