The Perilous Realm of Possibility

Humans do not like to fail, or to experience injury, and so we have developed a penchant for cleverly avoiding risk. We are clever when we assess situations with regard to the likelihood of injury (typically only with regard to the self), and we are foolish when we allow other concerns to cloud such clear and clever judgment. Before we even look to the world outside of ourselves to decide what our next move will be in the chess game of life, we first look to ourselves to assess what it is even possible to attempt to do. Better safe than sorry, or injured, or worst of all, foolish.

For instance, in principle humans would not even begin to seriously attempt to fly, knowing that we are land mammals, destined not to fly. We know our name, homo sapiens, and we named ourselves this because of our aforementioned cleverness. We know prior to any free imagination that the idea of human flight would be a fool’s errand, and it would be clever to invest in other ventures.

Yet, contrary to the principle of cleverness, humans have achieved flight. In the face of many dangers, humans have defied gravity. What was a principle of law, a boundary of possibility, turned out to be a mirage. Suddenly, a new virtue appears to contest with cleverness, and it is vision. The Wright brothers, among others, looked outside of themselves, at nature and other flying beasts, and caught a vision for the mechanics of flight. What is impossible for the human body, with its proportions of density and volume, becomes possible when it is helped from outside by materials alien to human nature.

I wonder, in regard to what matters most, if we are assessing our lives in the realm of possibility and cleverness, or if we have not yet caught a vision for what possibilities emerge when we start looking outside ourselves. Is it truly clever wise to name ourselves, to characterize ourselves as clever, calculating, and omniscient? After all, the tree does not try to be a tree, it just is a tree. Creation is not navel-gazing, but the nature of sin is to be man incurvatus in se.

Clever people look at themselves, searching for skills and strengths that might inform their assessment of the safe and profitable strategy.

People with vision look first, not at themselves, but at the destination. They venture forth looking for the impossible to become possible. 

Clever people bank on the status quo, hoping to stabilize the realm of possibility. Visionaries bank on reformation, hoping to realize the ideal.

If Christ is our destination, our origin, and our source of being, what type of people ought we to be? Is it any news to find out that it is impossible for humans, with our proportion of weakness and depravity, to follow in the way of Jesus Christ? What should we conclude then as we consider the divine imperative to seek the Kingdom of God? We should conclude that the righteous live by faith and that we work it out in fear and trembling. Let us give up our clever presuppositions of what the church can possibly be or do and look to Christ and His command and what the church is being made to be and do. He will give us a name and he will reform us to bear it. Christ commands us to love and bear with one another in forgiveness, confessing the Gospel in our lives together as a body.  The question is not how we will achieve it, but if we will attempt it. Our faithful endeavor is the evidence of the promise of fulfillment guaranteed by the work of the Holy Spirit. Soli Deo Gloria!