Entering into chartered territory
GK Chesterton has once mentioned that he had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. He used this to illustrate that all his thoughts and reflections about life, which he observed independently, ultimately ended up in a chartered territory, that his conclusions about life are precisely those which Christianity has concluded long ago.
As I think through this analogy, I realise that this often happens to myself as well. I have read stuff written by philosophers and writers who expressed thoughts similar to mine, which have in turn been derived through the constant daydreaming on the bus travels. One classic one is the one on infinite causes. I once thought, after knowing Christ, that if you ask a person 'why' to his questions enough, one has to reach a final point by which lies the foundational reason for all his questions. In short, I believed that there was to be no infinite number of reasons to every question. And I figured out that each question's why will end up either in God or some other transcendental explanation. And I was pleasantly surprised when I read about this in William Lane Craig's book.
Now here's the one thought that I learned from all these experiences. Are chartered territories really that bad? We often want to venture into un-explored grounds, and this is essential if we want to improve and move together as a society. But sometimes when we venture into unchartered territories, we deceived ourselves by thinking that we are really moving into unchartered territories, when what we have done is to find ourselves end up in chartered ground that just looks different on the map. Ultimately, it may just be like what Malcolm Muggeridge has said, that 'all new news are actually old news happeneing to new people'. We may think that certain ideaas are novel when the philosophy and thinking behind it has already been explored for many years. We may think that sensuality and sexuality are things of the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s, when it was a prevalent thing in Sodom and Gomorrah.
So what am I driving here? Sometimes we think that the Bible is a book so outdated and not keeping up with time. Liberal scholars may interpret the bible like how politicians interpret the American constitution. But we may be surprised that territories that we dare venture into are already territories that the Bible has explored and mentioned.
Final thought from GK:
As I think through this analogy, I realise that this often happens to myself as well. I have read stuff written by philosophers and writers who expressed thoughts similar to mine, which have in turn been derived through the constant daydreaming on the bus travels. One classic one is the one on infinite causes. I once thought, after knowing Christ, that if you ask a person 'why' to his questions enough, one has to reach a final point by which lies the foundational reason for all his questions. In short, I believed that there was to be no infinite number of reasons to every question. And I figured out that each question's why will end up either in God or some other transcendental explanation. And I was pleasantly surprised when I read about this in William Lane Craig's book.
Now here's the one thought that I learned from all these experiences. Are chartered territories really that bad? We often want to venture into un-explored grounds, and this is essential if we want to improve and move together as a society. But sometimes when we venture into unchartered territories, we deceived ourselves by thinking that we are really moving into unchartered territories, when what we have done is to find ourselves end up in chartered ground that just looks different on the map. Ultimately, it may just be like what Malcolm Muggeridge has said, that 'all new news are actually old news happeneing to new people'. We may think that certain ideaas are novel when the philosophy and thinking behind it has already been explored for many years. We may think that sensuality and sexuality are things of the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s, when it was a prevalent thing in Sodom and Gomorrah.
So what am I driving here? Sometimes we think that the Bible is a book so outdated and not keeping up with time. Liberal scholars may interpret the bible like how politicians interpret the American constitution. But we may be surprised that territories that we dare venture into are already territories that the Bible has explored and mentioned.
Final thought from GK:
An Imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the 12th century but is not credible in the 20th. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesday. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable for half past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believes depends upon his philosophy, not upon a clock or the century.
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