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When I attended Louisville Presbyterian Seminary I found myself drawn to St. Anselm who emphasized
faith in search of understanding. I was searching out my place in life and drawn to inquire deep questions about God. Though faith can never be pinned down through logic I thought, and still do, that we need to be both believers and thinkers of our Christian faith.
I believe that God gave us scripture to slow us down to think. How we think of reality should be both challenged and informed by God's Word. Often we encounter what we might call polarities; opposites on a continuum that need each other in order to understand reality better.
Here is an example of a polarity that holds to opposite truths together:
Look before you leap He who hesitates is lost
Our Pastor's Sunday School class is a group of adults who take seriously St. Anselm's faith in search of understanding. Struggling together to understand death's place in life as well as death's role in deepening our faith in God we look at these two passage.
Proverbs 27:1 is typically paraphrased into a type of common wisdom that states, "tomorrow is promised to no one." We tend to lean into this wisdom when we experience tragedy and loss and realize the fragility of life. Here one day, gone the next. While the passage doesn't specifically state this you can infer this meaning into the text.
The polarity is that tomorrow is promised. When you read Psalm 139: 16-17, all the days of our lives are written in God's book even before we live them. There seem to be many tomorrows built into the wonderful tapestry God uses to knit us in our mother's womb. However, those days are numbered and we know not how many we are promised.
Come join us on Sundays if you want to think, use your brain and struggle with other faithful Christians as we seek to more deeply understand God and our place in the world.
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