The Untraveled World
The Untraveled World
By Ralph Lynn,
Professor of History Retired, Baylor University
[This article first appeared in Brook Lane Health Services Bulletin, Hagerstown, MD]
Why is it that history is replete with accounts of people killing each other in disputes over theological matters, which we believe but about which we can know nothing, while we have no record of similar conflict over the tangible, readily observable matters associated with science?
Perhaps the nearest approach to an answer is that we desperately crave the security of certainty in our lives that are so full of impenetrable mystery.
In earlier times, religion had no rivals. Modern science is no rival, either, because scientists are seekers, never finders, of the comforting ultimate truth we cover.
Perhaps, then, we seek and find our desired certainty by committing ourselves unreservedly to some gospel that can be neither proved nor disproved. But this sort of certainty seems often to be troubled by doubts. Yet, despite our doubts–or perhaps to conquer them–each group tends to defend its gospel vigorously against all opposition.
What to do?
Perhaps we should begin by coming to terms with what seems to me to be the fact that, whether or not we are aware of it, we finite human beings are all agnostics. We are agnostics because the finite can know nothing of the Infinite. Happily, however, we can be believing agnostics.
Probably it is only after entering into immortality that we can actually know about spiritual matters. A sacred book can offer little assurance since it must be interpreted–but equally learned and equally devout scholars arrive at significantly different interpretations. Even the profoundly ignorant who insist that "it is all clear in black and white" are interpreting it.
Perhaps the way out is for Christians to approach the Bible with the humility which characterizes the approach of scientists to their "book"–which, of course, is our earth and the vast cosmos of which our planet is but a miniscule part.
Scientists are aware that they can learn only by asking humbly how Nature works. They are aware that their most cherished axioms are vulnerable and must be discarded with new discoveries. They must, in a word, be prepared to make changes in orthodoxy.
Should Christians be less humble in our search for the Infinite?
For all of us, religious or not, to quote Tennyson, "All experience is an arch where through gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades forever and forever when we move."
Perhaps we should remember and applaud that 19th century Scottish expositor of the Bible, Alexander MacLaren, who–apparently in a moment of both despair and confidence–exclaimed, "There is more light to break from the Old Book yet."
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