“And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” 1 Corinthians 2:1-2
I’ve read this several times over the past few days. I’m captivated by verse 2, “For I determined not to know anything …”
It makes perfect sense that Paul would have to determine not to know anything. If you’ve been reading the New Testament from the gospels, by the time you get to this statement you’ve just waded through 16 chapters of Paul knowing quite a bit. In his letter to the Roman church he reasons and he argues and wields logic all over the place. Paul was an intelligent man; he probably had the Old Testament memorized. And yet here, as he recalls his visit to Corinth, he remembers that he purposed in his heart to be ignorant of anything but the gospel.
Paul did not set out to impress the Corinthian people with his vast knowledge, understanding, or divine revelation of the scriptures. He did not reason with them on theology, or share his ideas on angels and demons. He knew nothing among them, “except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”
I can’t imagine the kind of humility that requires.
This morning I started thinking about the value of knowledge in our society. How much time and how much money do we spend trying to see how may facts we can make ourselves remember? Of course, a certain level of knowledge is good and necessary. But I had a high school history teacher who, when asked the annoying and very disrespectful “Why do we need to know this?” question, responded, “So you can look smart and pick up girls at cocktail parties.” I wonder if most of our drive for knowledge – as a society – isn’t rooted in vanity.
And I wonder, if I can be long-winded this morning, how that priority started. Somewhere during the genesis of our culture a group of people decided that an individual with a lot of knowledge is more valuable than a person who loves well, and the amassing of knowledge became the driving factor in our society.
When I was a freshman in college I spent one morning in an adviser’s office agonizing over changing my major when she finally told me, “It really doesn’t matter. As long as you get a degree from this school you can get a good job just about anywhere.” It doesn’t even matter, to some extent, what you know anymore, as long as you know a lot about something.
I wonder what it would do to our society – and our world – if we refocused some of that energy on teaching our students how to love (because “Jesus Christ and Him crucified” is the greatest expression of love). What if, instead of teaching 15-year-olds basic trigonometry, we taught them love? What if we took classes to homeless shelters or nursing homes where they could practice loving the unlovely? What if role playing had less to do with making a sale and more to do with turning the other cheek? I wonder.
knowledge vs. love
reincarnation request: denied
Titus sent me a link to a fantastic Newsweek article.
“In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission.”
“But beyond the irony [way, way beyond] lies China’s true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region’s Buddhist religious establishment … By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.”
That sounds like the by-line of an article from The Onion. The Chinese government should start writing for American tabloids.
Of course the Dalai Lama has rebutted by refusing to be reborn in Tibet as long as it is under China’s control. That’ll show ‘em. Instead, he’ll probably reincarnate among Tibetan exiles in India, Europe and North America.
What about the U.S.?
“If so, he’ll likely be welcomed into a culture that has increasingly embraced reincarnation over the years. Recent surveys by the Barna Group … have found that a quarter of U.S. Christians, including 10 percent of all born-again Christians, embrace it as their favored end-of-life view.”
Lama and the Chinese government can argue all they want about who is allowed to reincarnate and where, but what on earth is wrong with a society when one tenth of people who claim to be born-again Christians are voting for reincarnation? That doesn’t even make sense: if you’re all about reincarnation, why be born again?! Is Jesus a back-up plan?
One more sign that the last thing America needs is another false Christ. I’ll be introducing a bill to Congress next week that would effectively ban the Dalai Lama from reincarnating in the U.S.
let go!
It is so hard for me to let go of stuff – in terms of releasing my cares to God and trusting Him to take care of it. Especially people. I’m losening the death-grip on our finances, but people that I feel at least in part responsible for are hard. I have this mother hen complex that I’m trying to rebuke.
