Mind above scripture, or scripture above mind. But it’s not that simple, is it?

It’s easy enough to say that scripture is the rule for life, that there are things in it that are hard to understand and that sometimes don’t come close to making sense.

It’s easy to say that, and I suppose it’s true enough. You submit to it, you put your mind underneath it, you humble yourself. I’m not good at it, but I try to find my intellect keeling, as it were.

I’ve recognised in myself — ever since I was young, even — a talent if not for obfuscation and dissimulation then for at least finding the smallest point of chaos in the most dreadfully ordered patterns. For making even those blisteringly clear things seem a bit clouded. For saying, “Well, it’s not quite that simple…”

So here you go.

Is it really that simple? Is it really this act of will where I take my intellect like a burnt offering and hold it up on a silver platter? Or is there some kind of interplay between the mind and the scripture? There must be; we interpret and equivocate, don’t we? It’s not at all obvious what it all means, not without some clarification, much like archaeology, or some other arcane art. Compare, contrast, dust, tug, push, dig, all these things.

There’s a dialogue there. The mind creates structure — isn’t that what we do with everything? — when reading the scriptures. It’s part of what makes people people, that they find all sorts of patterns and structures and coherence; not to say that scripture doesn’t have any, not at all.

Worse yet, the brain needs to understand the way the brain works. I can recognise that there’s some interplay there between what I read, what I understand, and how I can humble myself before the one who made me to read and understand. But which one is under and which one is above? It’s a good question. Am I humbling myself in front of something I have constructed? Or am I humbling myself in front of the real thing?

This cognitive dissonance is not easily resolved, and probably wouldn’t be, if there was this giant vacuum in which to read the scriptures. Of course there isn’t, though. There isn’t some magical island where you can open up the book and just read free of prejudice and all those other things that come with being a part of the world.

Lots of different things intrude, but maybe the most important is that holy Ghost. Can I say he is the resolution? I believe so. He is not a construct, that much is clear. He is the person above personhood that, when you ask, shoves the right building blocks in the right hole.

That so many of us come to different conclusions when asking for his help is a mystery, isn’t it? You’d think he’d just blind his followers with light and lead them by the hand. He exists, though, and he is near. That much is clear.

You may say, I will listen and you will speak, and you may find the jumbled bits of your thinking falling into place. He is at work, not only there but in other places at well.

You may find that it is, after all, quite simple. Not this mumbo-jumbo about dialogue and over/under. And I may wink and say, We all get there in the end.

But I won’t tell you where. Not here. Not now.

Tags: ruminations, scripture, theology