Obscure, obscure. Deceive, deceive!
The promise of worldly knowledge. Ah, disappointed people!
Transformation by mind and deed. Ah, languishing world.
***
Look closely: Deception reveals an inaccuracy to conceal a fallacy. Look closer: Deception reveals a lesser fallacy to conceal an indispensable one. The indispensable fallacies seek to obscure the truth, but they cannot succeed forever.
Prominent among fallacies is that our knowledge holds the power to transform our human condition, our world. (This is certainly not to say that knowledge is valuable is a fallacy.)
All around us swirls evidence that this cannot be true. Our age buzzes with more knowledge than ever, but our moral reality remains bleak. War, violence, inequality, oppression, and much more persist in cruel dominion. We rush to meet them with plans, policies, legislation, diplomacy, research, education, training, task forces, funding, social action. Are they not all absolutely necessary and yet so utterly inadequate?
This fallacy is rooted in the beginning, in the Fall. For humanity abandoned obedience to God in exchange for “knowledge.”
This schism is the site where we must excavate for truth and where we discover Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, transforming us and this whole world not by His infinite knowledge but by severe obedience to His Father—to the degree of dying on a cross.
Jesus calls us into this transformation with the words, “Take up your cross and follow me…”, “…obey all that I have commanded you.” We learn through this obedience (likely because we fail so often at it) that we cannot transform anything—not ourselves, one another, or our world—but that God has been, is, and will do this to a far greater extent than we can even dream.
Latitudes of Plenty 