Is the Christian life a kind of quest, one that takes us to a destination of certain knowledge at some distinct point in this life, or is it instead meant to be an ongoing but always incomplete experience of the journey itself as we find ourselves--each day we live--traveling to the destination which God will make available to us, a destination still lying outside of what can be fully known by any one of us?
Is it a Quest for Certainty ... or an Odyssey of Exploration?
A FURTHER INQUIRY:
In so many ways today, it seems to me that people are refusing to ponder or accept the Gospel of Christ because they view Christianity as a means by which to reach a fantastically definitive spiritual goal in this life. They often tend to view it as an objectively achieved state of being, a blessed life, one that should materialize in such a way so as to enable us to exuberantly and permanently enjoy life in the here-and-now: with health, wealth, knowledge and happiness at our beck and call.
But what if Christianity, as far as it concerns us within the recesses and folds of our mortally short lives, does not send us on a narrow path for the sake of achieving a clearly discernable goal meant for this life-time? What if the Christian life isn't really-- however heroic it may seem—similar to the climax of
The Lord of the Rings stories where victory is gained with empirical certainty over evil forces? Might this alter how we view the essence of Christianity in what it is supposed “to do” for us and what it could do “to us” within our hearts and minds as we each make our way to that last day which we'll all have to eventually face...?
Perhaps if any of us is to successfully engage our own individual Christian life via a set of Christian beliefs offered by the Church that Christ mysteriously brought fourth into the historical matrix of our shared world, we need to adopt a more fitting view of the purpose of the Christian life, one that expects only to have to follow a Philosophy of Exploration rather than one requiring certain assumptions and expectations about various transcendent propositions which can never fully be captured by logic in the human mind. Such a way of thinking has been proposed, even if in various ways and articulations, by the likes of
Pascal,
Kierkegaard,
Langdon Gilkey,
Sarah Coakley, or
Rolfe King, among other Christian theologians and philosophers.
What Pros and Cons come about in your own thoughts about Christianity as a form of exploraton of life? How does an approach to Christian faith involving what King calls a
“Journey Epistemology” compare or contrast with how you have thus far understood the nature and purposes of, and ways of reasoning about, the Christian Life?
Well, it's always good to know one may be heading in the right direction before taking too many steps on a long journey. Of course, some people just like to make that Million Acre Hike anyway, here and there, don't they?
