Exploring the Matrix: the Perception Balance

The eight points of the faith matrix are two-way streets.  In one direction, they lead us to connect with our object of ultimate concern, which for a Christian is God.   They are also ways that God flows out of us to God to the world. 

The degree to which God uses them in us differs from person to person, according to the will of the Spirit and our own individual personalities. Ideally, we should seek a balance though in all eight areas. A pursuit of these balances in our faith connection will help us improve our connection with God and our witness to the world.

The first balance is in the area of perception—that is how we learn about God and the world. The two ends of this balance beam are reason and passion. They are the lenses through which we come to understand God and the world.

This dichotomy can be labeled in many ways--Word and Spirit, knowledge and emotion, reason and passion.  Perhaps the best way to understand them is to think of one as objective understanding and  the other as subjective understanding.

Objective understanding is learning about our actual, material, concrete existence. It is the knowledge of the real, material universe, that we can either see, hear, taste, touch, and smell and what we can discern from it by logical or experimental means.  Observation, critical thinking, and experimentation help us test objective truth.

Objective knowledge must be based on faith. In order to apply logic, some truths must be taken as axiomatic. A Christian believes God has revealed Himself to us through Nature,  the written word, and though His physical incarnation in Christ.  These sources of revelation are taken by faith. An atheist, on the other hand, must have faith that everything that have ever happened has a rational worldly explanation. Rational thought requires solid assumptions, taken by faith. From these assumptions grow all we believe and accept about God an and the world around us.

Subjective understanding is our reaction to the objective world around us. It is made from our emotions, creativity, intuition, and imagination.  Subjective truth is not proven but felt.  It is not measured or weighed but express through symbolism and metaphors. It is not simply a factual statement of concrete knowledge, but a subjective statement of what we feel about what we believe.

An atheist or deist does not believe that subjective knowledge can teach us anything. To the atheist, the world as a closed system in which the feelings we share or the symbols we use to grasp the world are merely echoes of reality, grasped with rational thought. But for a theist, who believes that God can speak to the inner heart as easily as He can speak though nature,   subjective impressions are an important avenue through which God can speak. Things we cannot grasp with our minds can be experienced through the heart though our heart interacting with the Spirit of God.

Objectivity and subjectivity are not divided, but are points on a compass. We cannot make rational observations untainted by subjective feelings.  Neither can we accept what we feel in our heart to be true without testing it objectively.

The Bible states “the Heaven declare the Glory of God.” Though our objective observation of the universe, we see the evidence of God’s hand.  But God also God spoke to the prophets in dreams, visions and revelations, using metaphors and symbols.   A call to the ministry or some other occupation usually springs from desires that God placed inside us. But it must be tested by objective analysis and not just in subjective emotions.

Johnathan Edwards compared the head and the heart to the rudder and the sails of a ship.  The ship cannot move without the sails, but the ship cannot be controlled without the rudder. 

God speaks to us through both the head and the heart. We cannot truly perceive the world around us with out being grounded in both.

God is everywhere around us—in His Word, in nature, and in our heart.  To see him and understand Him, to really experience Him, takes more than our study or our feelings alone. It takes reaching out with both our minds and hearts together.  Without the heart, all our intellectual study of Him lacks the power to move or change us. Without the mind, we cannot know if the feelings and voices we hear in our head are really of God, the devil, or just echoes of our own mind.  But with the two together, we can experience God on earth, with all the fullness and Glory of His Divine nature.