Читать книгу The Outrageous Idea of the Missional Professor - Paul M. Gould - Страница 10

“Nowhere can the mind’s eye find anything more dazzling or more obscure than in man; it can focus on nothing more awe-inspiring, more complex, more mysterious, or more infinite. There is one spectacle greater than the sea: That is the sky; there is one spectacle greater than the sky: That is the interior of the soul.”—Victor Hugo31

“The most important [commandment] . . . is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”—Jesus (Mark 12:29–31)

Since ancient times, man has tried to makes sense of the fact that we live in a uni-verse. Philosophers seek to provide a metaphysical account of why there is unity among so much diversity—the age-old problem of the one and the many. Scientists have long been searching for a unification theory, hoping to find one fundamental law of physics that can unify and explain all the diverse phenomenon of this world. Artists seek aesthetic unity when painting or sculpting. In relationships, humanity seeks a kind of unity or harmony with each other, even while it often remains elusive. In our own lives, we hope to unite our thinkings, feelings, and willings under some over-arching purpose. In short, we long for unity. And this is as it should be given the reality of God.

I suggest that we long for unity because we’ve been created for such wholeness by the perfectly united triune God. And it is this divine unity that is the pattern for all lesser unities:

The Christian doctrine of God thus contains an assertion about the nature of unity. It asserts that all the actual unities of our earthly experience, from the unity of the hydrogen atom to the unity of a work of art, of the human self, or of a human society, are imperfect instances of what unity truly is. We may find in them analogies to that true unity, and learn from them something of what perfect unity must be. But perfect unity itself is to be found only in God, and it is through the revelation of God in Christ that we find the unity of God to be of such a kind as to cast light upon all lesser unities.32