Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

What I am saying is that as long as an heir is underage, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. The heir is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. So also, when we were underage, we were in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world. But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.

• Galatians 4:1-7

“Gregory responded to Barlaam in his Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts. He argued that God can be known directly. But how is this possible since ‘apophatic’ theology, the negative way, says that God surpasses all knowledge? Gregory acknowledged a paradox here. The divine nature is in one sense communicable, in another sense incommunicable. We participate in God’s nature, yet he remains inaccessible. Gregory was not prepared to let negative theology have the last word.
“ ‘The mark made on the mind by the divine and mysterious signs of the Spirit is very different from apophatic theology … theology is as far from the vision of God in light, and as distinct from intimate conversation with God as knowledge is different from possession.’ (Triads 1.3.42) ”

• Tony Lane, A Concise History of Christian Thought

Gregory Palamas (1296?-1359) was theologian and cleric of the Eastern Orthodox church.  His noted controversy was with Barlaam, an Orthodox monk from southern Italy.  Gregory had been taught on Mt. Athos by a group of monks called the Hesychasts.  Barlaam set out to discredit Hesychasm.

Gregory, in defense of some of the points in his theology became the most outspoken voice of Hesychasm.  But his explanation of how one can know God, in the short quote from his Triads, is a beautiful way of describing what many today call the difference in head knowledge and heart knowledge.  As a few street evangelists would say, the difference for a “good person” to go to Heaven or Hell is about eighteen inches (the nominal distance from the head to the heart).

But I caught my wife crying one day, a few months before she died.  I asked what was wrong.  She said her entire life was wasted.  For the first fifty years, she only knew God intellectually, just in her head.  She kept trying to be as good as she could be, but she could think of no reason why she did so, until in 2000 she accepted Jesus into her heart.  Everything changed, but it was not long until her health began to fail.  Aortic stenosis that led to open-heart surgery, and then kidney failure two and a half years later.  We could have been out on the mission fields, but no, it took her too long to get God from her head to her heart.

I reassured her that all of this was in God’s timing.  The important thing was that Jesus was in her heart and He was making her a mansion in Heaven.

Can we comprehend the incomparable?  By the very definition, no.  But that gets back to Gregory’s dilemma with the concept of “theology.”  Theology is the study of something that is both practical (knowable) and spiritual.  I wrote about this issue in a different philosophy discussion, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Resolving Philosophy with Theology.  Gregory, who may have had access to Thomas Aquinas’ writings, but Gregory was dealing with the “revealed theology” that can only be determined by faith and spiritual revelation, while much of natural theology is determined by reason.

I also wrote that Moses Maimonides went too far in that he thought, from a Jewish perspective, that God was so unknowable that we could not even hazard a guess as to the attributes of God.  The discussion was entitled The Non-Attributes of God.

But if we remain totally in the realm of Philosophy where everything comes to what can be known intellectually, we are, as Gregory puts it, far away from God’s light, or as my street evangelist friends said, as far away as about eighteen inches.

And the distinct knowledge of a living Savior, living in Heaven and seated at the right hand of God, but also residing in our hearts…  That distinct knowledge is the difference in intellectual knowledge and possession.

For we who have God in our hearts possess something far beyond intellectual knowledge.  We possess the right to be called sons of God.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.