They’re forgiven, so the deal is sealed. Hell is over: bye bye death, cya latter pain. No- there are still chilling obligations to be heard from our master.

He demands something of us. Yes, we are purchased- there is no doubt that we belong to him. But still, he turns to us and says something. A normative but fearful command that will make our hearts drop, our fists clench, and our teeth set on edge.

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

Deny myself? Suddenly my chest tightens while fear and greed take hold. Deny myself of what? Everything? Which things? Not everything: how then can I live? Only the bad stuff, right? I hope…

Not everything I have is bad. Can I keep; that stuff, those people, those plans and dreams? I’ve wanted some of those things my whole life. I thought you wanted me to have; that, those, her, him, it? God this is my life. Mine. Greed and fear still hold me. Does he want everything? Can I keep some of it?

“For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

I don’t want to lose my life. I like it. Correction: I love it. Please don’t take it. You promise: if I lose my life for you, then I’ll find it. Not the same life obviously, better I hope. But I don’t want better, I want the same! I want these friends, this degree, this job, this family, this life. I’m happy, most of the time. Things are wearisome here and there, but it’s not bad enough to want change.

Who wants to take up the cross? If I die to myself, will anything be the same when I wake up? Will I recognize this place? Will anything be familiar to me? Will I have anything left? The cross, the practice of death isn’t something I willingly climb up to.

No, I will not give up my life. At least not until I’m sick of it.

“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” (Matthew 16:25)

Written April 2, 2007

“A direct attack only strengthens a person to his illusion and, at the same time, embitters him. There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. And this is what a direct attack achieves, and it implies moreover the presumption of requiring a man to make to another person, or in his presence, an admission which he can make most profitably to himself privately. This is what is achieved by the indirect method which, loving and serving the truth, arranges everything dialectically for the prospective captive, and then shyly withdraws, so as not to witness the admission which he makes to himself alone before God- that he has lived hitherto in an illusion.

The religious writer must, therefore, first get in touch with men. That is, he must begin with aesthetic achievement…

If real success is to attend the effort to bring a man to a definite position, one must first of all take pains to find him where he is and begin there. This is the secret of the art of helping others. Anyone who has not mastered this is himself deluded when he proposes to help others. In order to help another effectively I must understand more than he- yet first of all surely I must understand what he understands. I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of not help to him. If, however, I am disposed to plume myself on my greater understanding, it is because I am vain or proud, so that at bottom, instead of benefiting him, I want to be admired. But all true effort to help begins with self-humiliation: the helper must first humble himself under him he would help, and therewith must understand that to help does not mean to be a sovereign but to be a servant, that to help does not mean to be ambitious but to be patient, that to help means to endure for the time being the imputation that one is in the wrong and does not understand what the other understands. Take the case of a man who is passionately angry, and let us assume that he is really in the wrong. Unless you can begin with him by making it seem as if it were he that had to instruct you, and unless you can do it in such a way that the angry man, who was too impatient to listen to a word of yours, is glad to discover in you a complaisant and attentive listener- if you cannot do that, you cannot help him at all.” Translated by Walter Lowrie, from A Kierkegaard Anthology.

Faith in the Christian sense is a nebulous word implying faith may not be justified and that it cannot be justified. There are variations of this in Christianity, from the fideist who teaches that everything outside of divine revelation is not beneficial, to the complete compatiblist who teaches that faith and reason are complimentary.

It would seem the debate about faith lies in the topic of justification, or proof. Either it is true that faith is something believed in without being seen and cannot be justified, or faith is something believed in without being seen and can be justified in the belief. There is a common misconception that if something can be justified through reason then it is no longer faith, but rather now becomes something else instead of faith. This is interesting because the same person who would say, “if faith can be justified then it is no longer faith but something else,” would be forced to conclude then that justifiable faith is either a belief that is true or untrue.

The logical answer is that faith which is able to be justified must be truth. It is strange then that one would refuse to conclude that faith may be justifiable, because if faith is able to be proved this would make a true belief and certainly no one would decide to have faith or believe in something they understand to be untrue. One should not understand the definition of faith as belief in something which cannot be proved. Faith should be belief in something which is not seen directly but may be proved through reason and need not necessarily be proved through reason.

Reason also has difficulties in definition and understanding. Reason may be synonymous with such words as logic and science all stating that the meaning of these things is that which is known with observation or experience. If one can justify or prove something, then it is considered logical or part of reason.

If what has been said thus far is true, then most would consider faith to be belief in something which cannot be proved and reason is belief in something which can be proved. This is obviously madness. People with faith would then be a people who think something is true only because they would like it to be true, and people with reason are the only ones who believe in something which is true, because it is proved true.

Faith and reason have been divorced in an impossible way that ignores sound argument and a full system of thought. What has been lost is that reason does require faith, and proper faith should be accompanied by reason.

The basis of reason and rationality is dependant on faith. For one to believe that they can trust the senses, or that their own logic is not distorted, or that two plus two equals four and only four requires faith in these basic believes. Rene Descartes makes an argument for distrust of experience in his Meditations of First Philosophy. He said that humans can’t prove that what they are experiencing is not the creation of some demonic mind or that, for instance, they are insane and what they are experiencing is distorted. One may say, “If this is true, then one can not know anything.”

The answer to this dilemma in reason, that rationality alone cannot validate itself in experience, is by way of faith in basic beliefs. Alvin Plantinga makes this argument in Warrant and Proper Function. One must have faith that senses may be trusted or that logic and the way it follows is correct and leads toward truth. Otherwise, if one trusts reason alone there is no possibility of knowing anything beyond reasonable doubt because the way which one claims to have proofs or experience has no reason to be trusted.

Faith, on the other hand, does not require the support of correct reason, but for faith to be anything more than an empty hope it must be accompanied by some sort of reason or logic. While it is technically possible for faith to be merely a weak belief, it is not preferred.

For example, a-six-year-old child may have faith in a good god. The child could believe it and live as if those were his beliefs. It would not require the child to understand an ontological argument for the god, and axiological argument for the god, nor would he have to know a cosmological argument for the god. While it would be a minimalist faith, it would be entirely possible for the child to simply believe in the god. But even the faith of a child is based on something. Whether the child trusted the words in his parents, or thought his believing friends to be good people, the faith was based on some type of reasoning.

Preferably though, faith should be accompanied by sound reason. 1 Peter 3:15 asks that Christians, “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” This would imply there is a reason for the hope that a Christian has, which further shows that faith may and should be accompanied by reason. In the ESV translation, the verse says, “to give a defense for the reason for the hope.” This conveys that the reasons are defendable, and therefore rational and logical. According to this then, the Bible asks that faith and reason not be separated.

Despite the separation between faith and reason in the past, the two cannot be separated. Because of their complementary nature, and their dependency on one another, both faith and reason should be married together in the minds of men.

Read Matt 19 and Psalms 43.

St. Thomas Aquinas defines humility similarly as “the virtue of humility” that “consists in keeping oneself within one’s own bounds, not reaching out to things above one, but submitting to one’s superior” (Summa Contra Gent., bk. IV, ch. lv, tr. Rickaby).

I seem to have a hard time in keeping true humility. Either I’m full of pride and work against the heart of men, or I’m humble but I loose my value in Christ and concentrate on all my faults. It’s so hard to understand that we’re actually made of dirt and that God doesn’t need us, but at the same time understand that God loves us and that’s why we’re valuable.

Humility is a daily balancing act for man.

After the fall of angels and in result, the fall of man, we’ve been on a path downward to destruction. God in His love for us has been resetting our tracks to put us on a path of redemption, but due to our fallen nature, some way we always seem to jump off the path God has created for us. Even more so, for a redeemed person who is a child of God, whose enslavement to evil has ended, they still jump off the path God has set before them. Why do they do this? They have all help, all hope, all love, all power given to them, but for some reason they choose against it.

Man is a curious creature indeed, fighting against the one he loves, who loves him, refusing to draw upon the strength given to him, and insisting on destroying the life given to him. If we were to look at this situation in the life of an individual, we would say that the individual hated himself.

Does the race of man hate himself?

Pray for man.