Joshua Ferris’ post on the North American Anglican entitled Part I: Have Christians Forgotten How to See a Mysterious World? was a surprise, but one which Christians in general and Anglicans in particular need to address. For me it really hits home because much of the core of my Christian life has been driven by coming to grips with the unseen world, and having to do so in an environment which both encouraged and opposed it at the same time.
At the start let me note that the graphic chosen for Ferris’ article–Gustave Doré’s depiction of the beatific vision from Dante’s Paradiso–is also the icon graphic for this site. I’ll come back to why that’s important later.
At the start there are two facts of life that have driven me in the direction of looking beyond the physical world.
The first is that one lesson my parents–especially my mother, product of the untransparent South–passed to me quietly is that the ultimate reality–and the truth necessary to navigate the world–was “beyond the curtain” and at best not obvious to those on this side. In addition to regional characteristics it’s a product of something that was embedded on both sides of my family: Masonry, which is the progressive revelation of secrets to the initiate and also relies on truth–such as it believes to be there–to be “beyond the curtain.” That may not seems remarkable, but in a country of “poker playing dogs,” it means that anything you say that goes against whatever CW the culture attempts to drill into you will get a sharp reaction.
The second that, as I have alluded to over the years, my coming to Jesus Christ was the result of direct divine intervention, complete with a command to repent and read his Word, and a focus on being baptised. When my mother and I went to our Rector at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, one Rev. Robert B. Appleyard, D.D., blew me off when I mentioned my encounter with God earlier in the year. (Yes, Diocese of Pittsburgh types, that’s the same Robert Appleyard who was later your bishop.)
More broadly, the reaction I do get from Christians has been either one or two things: similar to Appleyard’s, or the shock that I would become a Christian without going through the “system.” Evangelicals may proclaim that they don’t believe in one true church, but they do believe in one true system of getting saved and joining the church, and the distinction of the two on a practical level isn’t as great as either side would have you think. It’s so bad that, in the More than Dreams video of the Nigerian Mohammed, who saw Jesus in a dream and came to him there, Mohammed was forced to go through the “conversion experience” all over again by an Evangelical minister!
Outside of Christianity things actually get more interesting. I cover an encounter with a New Age type in my post To Reach a Destination, You Have to Have a Course: My Reply to Ron Krumpos, and to Rob Bell Too. Turning to what my Algerian lab assistant referred to as “the religion,” I had a long email debate with an Indonesian Salafi geotechnical engineer who, when I mentioned my experience, had only one question: “What did He (God) say?” On a slightly lighter note, when my PhD program was in trouble, one of the Iranian faculty members believed that our situation was due to “bad spirits” in the main engineering building! I think that, unless we recover the reality of the unseen, we’re going to be at a disadvantage vis a vis Islam.
All of that is one reason why I’ve stuck with being in a Pentecostal church. I don’t think that Anglicans, in common with other Christians such as Baptists and Presbyterians, have made the link between believing who God is and what he has said through his Word and his present supernatural operation in his people. It’s a lot easier to believe the Scriptures when the same things recorded there still take place today, done by a God who has not changed. The weakness of Pentecostal and Charismatic churches is that they spend too much time hanging around their Evangelical counterparts, which means that they focus too much effort on getting God to show up when the preacher does and not getting preachers and laity alike to show up when God does.
As far as Ferris’ recommendation to start with Dante, I cover that in my post Book Review: Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso). Encountering it was life changing, not only in the church I went to but, followed by actually reading Aquinas, saw a merger of the spiritual and intellectual that has served well through the ups and downs of life in church ever since.
Anglicans have done themselves a disservice adopting an uncritical acceptance of cessationism, one that has done more damage then they realise. Until we understand that the ultimate reality is one we cannot see, we will not be able to deal with the demonic forces that are coming against us.
