Whole and part
" Because the whole is in some way reflected in the parts, it is to be encouraged by going into the parts and not standing back form them."
Many of you know I am on a quest for the reality of God. It has been about a year since I first began to question what the reality of God might look like. I am happy to say I have made some progress. However, I am wondering if I will ever arrive at a satisfactory answer on this side of the door. Perhaps I will have to be content to be discontent.
I do not have time to read all books and listen to all thoughts. So I am narrowing down my goals to start with the basics and go further. The pure Word is obviously the best, but I am afraid I have a hard time eating large amounts of it in one sitting. Lewis and MacDonald are my main courses right now. But I am also going further and looking at some of the influences of MacDonald. I went to a library in Winnipeg and looked up Novalis, pen name for the German Christian romantic/mystic Fredrich von Hardenberg . Next to this book on the shelf however was a book called “The wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature.”
I am interested in this book because I am searching for God. I want to know him personally and love him in truth. My quest is that my love will have real feeling and that my mind will be satisfied with the arguments. I am exploring how God has created finite reality to display his nature.
The book speaks of wholes and parts. That nature is not a big conglomeration of parts making a whole, rather, the whole is perceivable within each part. This makes me very excited because it sounds like exactly what I am thinking. It points to the idea the God, the whole, exists and can be known not by disengaging from the parts, but by participating with them. We can know God on this earth, even being finite.
Of course our ability is marred due to our ..... [big abstract theological word]: Idolatry.
When I was in L’Abri I read a book called “Saving the Appearances” by Wen Barfield. It was about idolatry and how the fundamental nature of it has changed post enlightenment, but it takes on a different view than little creations of wood and stone. I did not follow the book well enough to really be able to talk about it, but what I began to understand was that we have not escaped idolatry. However, it looks very different.
The main idea that I have, after reading about this and hearing some lectures,
is that idolatry is making an image the reality.
All nature is an image: Gen 1:27, Rom 1:20
Therefore the modern idolatry is to make nature and self the only reality.
That is what I understand the whole argument to be. And I know in myself everytime I try to reach out to a personal being within “Nature” my mind goes through a series of arguments and puts forth feelings of doubt because of all the official scientific interpretations to every natural phenomena. So right now I am trying to overcome my naturalistic mindset of interpreting all phenomena as an impersonal even from some random cause (whence the first?)
posted by Sasha @ 12:30 PM
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