where is God to be found?

I miss God. I crave His presence. Feeling isn’t everything; I know it’s not about the feelings. But I do so miss feeling; the courage of conviction, the feeling of invincibility singing through my veins, the sheer reckless joy of knowing that I’m doing what I’m supposed to do and being who I’m supposed to be–both far more than I deserve. But where do I seek God now, where is He to be found?

Look to the LORD and his strength; seek his presence continually! Ps 105:4

The following is taken directly from Francis Chan’s ‘Multiply’, at a bible study last week through which God answered my question less than 24 hours after I asked it of Him.

“Since this is His world, it only makes sense to view the world from His perspective and live according to His principles. All of this means that as we study the Bible, we should be seeking to understand our God, our world, and ourselves. Rather than pursuing an emotional experience or trying to accumulate religious knowledge, we should be learning to live in the world that God made.”

“If you ever find yourself reading your Bible and not changing, then you can be sure that you’re approaching the Bible in the wrong way. It’s not about finding support for our lifestyle or way of thinking; it’s about approaching the mind of God and letting Him change and redefine who we are.”

“If we approach the Bible with humility, eagerly listening for God to speak to us, waiting to hear what God has to say rather than what we want to hear, then we are drawing closer to the one we were made to be in relationship with. True Bible study must always have intimacy with God as a primary goal.”

“Our responsibility is to lovingly care for the world that God made…Abraham was blessed so that he could be a blessing to all of the nations of the earth. Israel’s mission was to show the world who their God was. Though much of Christian thought tells us that we are the centre of it all–that it’s about you and God and nothing else really matters–the reality is that God is the centre, and He has saved us so that we can work with Him in His mission to redeem humanity and restore creation to what He originally intended it to be.”

“This means that when we read the Bible, we need to view it as our marching orders…we need to allow the Bible to shape our hopes and dreams. Every time we read the Bible, we should understand our mission a little better. Why are we on this earth in the first place?”

“We don’t have the answers–that’s why we’re reading the Bible. Approaching the Bible with humility means that we’re laying aside our agendas and looking for what God will teach us. Every time you find yourself struggling to accept something the Bible says, you’ve found an area of your life that needs to be brought into submission to Christ. Unfortunately, we often waste these opportunities by finding ways to explain away what the Bible is saying to us. And that’s the real test–when you find that your beliefs or lifestyle don’t match the Bible, do you assume that the Bible is wrong? Every time we find ourselves disagreeing with God, we can be certain that we are the ones who need to change. God didn’t give us the Bible to make us feel better about the way we do things; He wrote the Bible to tell us what He wants us to be and do. Until we begin reading the Bible in order to draw close to God and do what He says, we are completely missing the point.”

“”So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation.” 1 Peter 2:1-2. We should set aside every ungodly desire and inclination and simply long to be fed and nourished by the Word of God. Imagine how different you would be if you aligned your thinking and lifestyle with the Bible…you would love God more; you would be in tune with your God-given mission; you would see people not as a means to your own ends but as valuable creations of God, and you would find ways to love and serve the people around you.”

Plato: “Exile the Poets.”

Attached is a (double-spaced) eight-page midterm paper for my political philosophy class that stood at only six pages as of 1:02 am last night. By 1:32 am it was a seven-and-a-half-page paper all cited, quoted up and printed out. For once I handed in a paper formatted in a more…spacious font, haha.

(For reference, this is an exegetical paper on section 595a-608b of Plato’s Republic.)

The Platonic View of Arts in a Just Society

One of Plato’s lesser-known and more startling views is his judgment and treatment of the visual, dramatic and literary arts, which he claims would ideally be exiled and excluded altogether from the formation of the perfect just society. This was partly in response to the challenge that the arts posed to philosophy at the time of his writing, elevating art to an alternate authority on true knowledge. In the end of his work ‘The Republic’, Plato effectively dismantles the claim and shows that they have opposing ends; while philosophy moves humanity toward justice, the arts move humanity toward injustice. Plato then argues that art and drama have no place in a just society because they detract from the ultimate goal of pursuing true knowledge and cultivating the highest noble potential in the just soul. He exposes the arts as a second or third-rate alternative to the true pursuit of the highest good, and highlights its detrimental effects on society and how it in fact hinders the achievement of the good life.

Plato’s first indictment against art is that it misrepresents reality while claiming to represent it. Through deconstructing the artistic process, Plato concludes that what artists create is so distant from reality that it is, at best, peripheral to the pursuit of true knowledge, and at worst, actively detrimental to it. This argument is grounded in his distinctly Platonic metaphysical framework, which assumes “the existence of a single essential nature or Form for every set of things” (Plato 325). Plato reasoned that as the material things in life were transient, they could not be real. However, all material things identifiable as certain objects had certain attributes that defined it, through examining what makes a bed a ‘bed’, and not a chair—this Plato calls the essence of an object, or the essential nature of a thing, and this is what is real (326). Previously, he established that a just society logically had to be based on truth and reality, and so acquiring an understanding of true reality meant understanding these eternal forms of things (Plato 323).

If true reality is understood as the essential nature of things, then the material things that exist are objects created from the craftsman’s knowledge of these true forms. Much as we are capable of understanding the eternal form of a circle, but are incapable of perfectly translating that knowledge into drawing a perfect circle, the products craftsmen create from their mind’s eye lose something when they come into material being. When craftsmen create a bed, for example, they create based on their knowledge of the Form of things. Creations embody the essence imperfectly, and what craftsmen produce are particular beds, not the essential nature of a bed (Plato 325). Therefore they are one step down from reality.

Plato then examines how artists ‘create’ their art—first by observing these material objects, which are nothing more than imperfect manifestations of true forms, and then reproducing them. He also observes that in this act of creation, painters do not create with the intention of accurately reproducing the object as it is in material reality, but rather reproducing how it looks to the senses (Plato 328). And once more, something of the essence of the form is lost in the act of reproduction. Plato also points out that the essence of some things is beyond mere appearances. Therefore when a painter reproduces a carpenter in a drawing, they are not even imperfectly capturing the true essence of a carpenter—what makes a carpenter a carpenter and not a fisherman, for example—because that is his knowledge of and practical skill in carpentry (Plato 328). Plato explains how the essential forms are created by a god-like “master craftsman”, the diminished material particulars recreated by a craftsman, and what a painter recreates is only a further diminished likeness of a likeness, showing that “the work of the artist is…third in succession from the throne of truth” (327). Therefore it is logical that the first in succession to the throne of truth is what should be pursued and studied, instead of encouraging a third-best pastime, and furthermore that it would be foolish and illogical to attempt to substitute truth itself with the third-best alternative.

Logically proceeding from this point is Plato’s second charge against the arts: artists claim to have knowledge of things in life while having no true knowledge at all. Because they do not possess true knowledge, they are therefore unable to live truly virtuous lives themselves, much less contribute to educating society to a virtuous life (Plato 330). Here Plato turns to the claim that “to write well, a good poet must know his subject”, focusing on the tragic poets who wrote epic poetry about heroes and noble deeds (329). However, he reasons that if the poets did own that true knowledge of the heroes and noble deeds he was writing about, he would also be able to use that understanding to carry them out in practice; Plato then points out that any man “would be more eager to be the hero whose praises are sung than the poet who sings them,” because that is rationally a more valuable and worthwhile thing to devote oneself to (329). He restates this again clearly, asking Glaucon, “If a man were actually able to do the things he represents as well as to produce images of them, do you believe he would seriously give himself up to making these images and take that as a completely satisfying object in life?” (329).

Another point of evidence that indicates poets have no true knowledge is that they do not “hand down…a way of life” that contributes to the practical improvement of any dimension of society (Plato 330). Poets, Plato remarks, never attract bands of loyal disciples who “love (them) for the inspiration of (their) society”, unlike teachers who educate their followers to better practical living, translating their knowledge of human excellence toward shaping people into better men (330). Plato also examines this at a state level, comparing how good lawgivers have skillfully shaped societies through their knowledge, yet even the great poet Homer cannot claim to have improved any practical state affairs, such as governance, through all this poetry (330). It is clear through these arguments that Plato establishes a standard of judgment based on the logical assumption that true knowledge, by its very nature, must have practical manifestations. Finding no evidence of this, Plato concludes that poets therefore do not possess the true knowledge they claim to have.

Plato’s next objection to the arts follows quickly. Now he has established that poets do not possess the knowledge “qualifying (them) to educate people and make them better men”, he demonstrates how the poetical representations they create further distort reality (330). Plato assumes an ignorant populace that must be educated to achieve the good life, but poets appeal to their ignorant audience with “the inherent charm of metre, rhythm and musical setting,” dressing up their lack of knowledge to deceive people (331). “Strip what the poet has to say of its poetical colouring,” and the wise man can see that there is no truth beneath the appearance of mastery of their subjects (Plato 331). Using a familiar line of reasoning, Plato thus concludes that if there is no true knowledge in an artist, there will be no true knowledge and therefore no value in whatever art the artist produces.

Plato then returns to the teleological approach of defining an object, taking a different angle of investigation. If “the excellence or beauty or rightness of any implement or living creature or action has reference to the use for which is made or designed by nature,” then the person who utilizes the implement for its true purpose, such as a flute-player will have more knowledge of how excellent a flute is than the flute-maker who crafted it (Plato 332). Craftsmen therefore learn the true nature of a flute from the practical users of the flute, and are thereby able to judge by that standard how well or how poorly their products are made. In contrast, an artist painting a flute would neither possess the knowledge of what an excellent flute constitutes, nor learn of the essence of a flute from a flute-player. Lacking the “direct experience” of a flute as well as a “correct belief” from an expert, whatever representation of a flute an artist produces will not be very valuable or accurate (Plato 332). Furthermore, artists do not reflect on the soundness or truth of their work, nor aim to do so, and Plato concludes that they ultimately “only reproduce what pleases the taste or wins the approval of the ignorant multitude” (333). Artists, then, reinforce the ignorance of the multitudes instead of guiding them toward higher paths.

Plato’s third argument for his condemnation of the arts is that it strengthens the baser part of humanity and undermines the noblest part of the soul, reason. Having previously established that the human soul is divided into three parts, Plato re-explains how the weakness of our easily deceives senses is overcome by methods dependent on human reason, which give us an understanding of reality (334). Thus Plato draws the conclusion that the fact that the appearance of things our senses tell us contradicts what is real proves that it is an inferior to human reason. He then draws a comparison to art and reality; because art is so “far removed from reality,” it stands to reason that “the element in (human) nature which is accessible to art and responds to its advances is equally far from wisdom” (Plato 335). This element is identified as the emotional part of the soul, and Plato demonstrates that it is not that the just man does not experience emotion, but rather is more able to resist his emotions and keep the under control (335). From Plato’s understanding of the three parts of the soul proceeds the conclusion that being just requires cultivating reason to overcome and subdue spirit and appetite; the just soul is therefore ordered in a strict hierarchical structure. Here the arts once again become a faction warring against the philosophical good because it promotes the spirit and base desires of humanity, disrupting an ordered soul and in fact promoting disorder within the soul (Plato 337).

Plato observes that in exposing ourselves to drama or dramatic poetry, we “enjoy giving ourselves up to follow the performance with eager sympathy,” allowing the reasoning element in our soul to be overridden (336). Repeated experiences like this habituate us to relaxing the control reason has over the lower elements of the soul, weakening it and damaging our efforts toward cultivating a just soul. Furthermore, good drama is judged precisely by its ability to evoke our sympathies and feelings—it aims to stimulate the emotive impulses instead of subduing them (Plato 337). It is clear then that the arts encourage us to indulge in our emotions and therefore reinforce an inferior part of the soul, when “the goodness and happiness of our lives depend on their being held in subjection” (Plato 339).

In conclusion, Plato establishes that the arts run counter to the established higher good philosophy aims at. Philosophy and the arts are shown to have opposing ends; the former moves humanity toward justice, while the latter move humanity toward injustice. Starting on a metaphysical level, Plato shows how the nature of art and the artistic process excludes it from ever accurately representing reality. He then discredits the claim that artists themselves must possess true knowledge in order to produce their art, before moving on to analyse the effect art itself has on the people exposed to it—an effect shown to be damaging to the just soul. Plato’s criticism of the arts on multiple fronts all point to the same logical conclusion: allowing the arts into a society earnestly pursuing the highest good would therefore be irresponsible, which Plato condemns as “being careless of justice and virtue” (340).

Works Cited

Plato. The Republic of Plato. Trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford. New York and London: Oxford UP, 1941. Print.

“If God answered all your prayers this past week, how would the world be different?”

At one point during the church-shopping period of my freshman year, in the middle of a service at some random church, the Ghanaian woman seated on my right turned to me and asked me, “If God answered all your prayers this past week, how would the world be different?”

I turned the question over in my mind, uncertain of how to respond.

“What are the things we pray about?” she went on, then shared, “Someone challenged me once with that question, and I tell you the truth: it changed my entire prayer life.”

I thought about it. And the more I thought about it, the more profound a question I realised it was.

What are the things we pray about, and how significant are they, really? What does that reveal about our inner mindsets? How much faith do we have in the power of prayer? How much faith do we have in the power of God? Why do we pray for exams but not for elections, why do we pray over illness but not over injustice?

What we pray about shows what we’re concerned about. It reveals what we think about and what we care about. And this is where we fail individually and often where we fail as a community, because we are almost always far too inwardly-focused. It’s a human thing, but it’s a fallen-nature human thing, because we just keep sliding back toward our default setting: self-centredness.

(And self-centredness is wrong because we need to be God-centred. God does care about us, but He doesn’t care only about us.)

Being a Christian is being concerned about what God is concerned about.

And God is concerned about greater things.

So pray for greater things. Pray for grander things. Pray with boldness and hope and trust and compassion and pray with wider vision. Pray with audacity.

yeah this city is endless / and i’m, i’m walking alone

here it comes in the morning / i’m just trying to forget / keep it real, keep it simple / somehow just get out of bed

You wake up, and it takes you a while to make sense of your surroundings. To recognise your window. Your desk. Your denim jacket flung carelessly over the chair, your angry llama sprawled on top of your notebooks and textbooks lying open on the desk, just the way you left it last night. You’re in your room. You’re in your apartment. You’re in your school, in your city, in a country that is not your own.

You’re on your own.

You don’t get out of bed, like you usually do. You don’t shake off your dreams, like you usually do. You sit in them, and wallow. Your skin gets wrinkly beneath the surface. As the arms of your dreams around you melt slowly away, you hold the empty space inside of you with both hands, and you try not to cry. You don’t want to get out of bed but the thing is, nobody will care if you don’t get out of bed.

You get out of bed.

sunlight creeps in between the curtains / lose the sheets there’s no time for sleep

You get a bicycle. The bicycle makes you happy. You go kickboxing. Kickboxing makes you happy. You study for exams, and do well on them. That makes you happy too.

You’re not happy.

You run off to New York with a new friend. You explore it with old ones. You immerse yourself in the dusty shelves of a sprawling bookstore; you lose yourself in other peoples’ love stories and life stories and theories of anarchism and optimum marine aquarium maintenance. You eat all over the place, walk down High Line, climb up to the rooftop of The Met and just stand there, beholding. The city teems with people. It teems with life, with promise, with loss. You toy with the idea of staying, of leaving, of going back to what you left. You forget to remember why you do what you do, and more importantly, why you don’t do what you don’t do.

i lie, i pretend ’til i’m almost certain/ it’s a beautiful world.

You go home. You unpack your loose-leaf teas, dark chocolate honeycombs and spray-paint street artwork. You get in bed and pull the covers over your head and hug your tiger to your chest and try not to think and try not to feel.

You put your earbuds in. You listen to the Hillsong songs of sixth grade chapel bands and tenth grade retreats and thirteenth grade hospital rooms and home, home, home…Savior I come / quiet my soul / remember…

You snuggle into your pillow. As the lyrics of love and purpose wash over you once again you feel a little more lost, and then you feel a little more whole. You snuggle back under the wings of the Lord. And then you remember that this is where you belong.

—————————————————————————————————–

The heart is like a musical instrument. You tune it, and you’ve got it just right, and then you hang it on the wall for a few days and it goes out of tune. Or you tune it, and then something bumps it and it’s out of tune again. Our hearts can be right with God, and then something disrupts it or we neglect it and we stray.

I didn’t come up with that. John Flavel did, in the 1600s, but it’s good.

I realised that we need to be dedicated and intentional about re-tuning our hearts to God. Again and again and again. Look how far out of whack I got bent in just a week and a half of neglecting my God-time, of being preoccupied with other things, thoughts, wants. And how did it happen to me, when I have always been so sure? Then again. Look at the most solid, Godly people in the Bible. Saul, who God chose to be king over his special people…he fell away from God. David, the man after God’s own heart, author of all that God-stuff in the Psalms…he fell away from God. Solomon, who spoke with God and was the wisest man who’s ever lived…even him, it says, “in his old age his wives turned his heart away from God.”

So then what hope is there? Why is David still upheld as a man of God? He turned back. He repented, and sought God again. He went back to God.

“Keep your hearts with all diligence, for out of them are the issues of life… Holiness is essential for correct knowledge of divine things, and the great security from error… When men lose the life of religion, they can believe the most monstrous doctrines, and glory in them.” – Charles Hodge

Believers need encouragement. You don’t realise this until you’re taken out of your Christian community, until you stop talking about God all the time because it makes everyone around you feel uncomfortable. I didn’t realise it at first, until my wellspring dried up. It’s not an immediate effect. It may take a week, a month, a year…it took me a month. It’s completely different from hearing about and affirming mindlessly that yeah, of course Christians need encouragement, but never feeling like you need the support of others; until suddenly you stumble and you’re falling and there’s nobody to catch you or hold you or remind you of what you know and who you are and why.

1 Thessalonians 3

2 We sent Timothy, who is our brother and co-worker in God’s service in spreading the gospel of Christ, to strengthen and encourage you in your faith, 3 so that no one would be unsettled by these trials. For you know quite well that we are destined for them…10 Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you again and supply what is lacking in your faith.

11 Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus clear the way for us to come to you. 12 May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. 13 May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.

I feed myself. (Literally as well as metaphorically.) It’s not enough. I doubt myself. Look at what it’s supposed to be like–looking out for others and having others look out for you. Being strengthened and encouraged through trials. Being missed. Being loved. I wondered where God was, or more importantly, where He could be found; well in part, God is in community, in humans made in His image and pouring out His love. I miss that.

1 Peter 1

6 In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, 7 so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 8 You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him now, you trust him; and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy. 9 The reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls.

13 So think clearly and exercise self-control. Look forward to the gracious salvation that will come to you when Jesus Christ is revealed to the world. 14 So you must live as God’s obedient children. Don’t slip back into your old ways of living to satisfy your own desires. You didn’t know any better then. 15 But now you must be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy. 16 For the Scriptures say, “You must be holy because I am holy.”

18 For you know that God paid a ransom to save you from the empty life you inherited from your ancestors. And the ransom he paid was not mere gold or silver. 19 It was the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God…21 Through Christ you have come to trust in God. And you have placed your faith and hope in God because he raised Christ from the dead and gave him great glory. 22 You were cleansed from your sins when you obeyed the truth, so now you must show sincere love to each other as brothers and sisters. Love each other deeply with all your heart.

24 As the Scriptures say,

“People are like grass;
    their beauty is like a flower in the field.
The grass withers and the flower fades.
25     But the word of the Lord remains forever.”

Remind me that I am holding on to what is true. To what IS Truth. Thank You for the people You send into my life, and give me self-discipline to re-tune my heart to You every day.

It’s not easy, it’s not solved. But I feel like God’s giving me a second chance, that He’s testing my heart again. And I will wait. I will be strong and take heart and wait on the Lord. My favourite verses came back to me yesterday. They’re from Isaiah 40. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.

I will be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.

P.S. Keep Your Heart with All Vigilance by Dr. Wayne Grudem