Anosognosia

"My people are destroyed through a lack of knowledge". Hosea 4:6.

"Where there is no true vision, the people will cast aside what matters". Proverbs 29:18.  

Albert Einstein was one smart cookie. Ask any physics student, and they'll no doubt trot out his famous theory of relativity, or discuss how he revolutionised our understanding of the known universe. What's less well known about him is that in the last years of his life, he was a deeply troubled man - not about what he knew, but about what he didn't.

A whole new field of physics was opening up through the work of people like Neilz Bohr and Werner Heisenberg which was showing that the Quantum realms were far more exotic and strange than Einstein had ever imagined, and this was a problem. He spent his last days, frantically working to put this particular genie back inside the bottle, seeking to refute what these men were doing, but he failed, because he couldn't see the bigger picture of what was actually occurring in the world around us.

Blind spots are sadly also reflected in the realm of bodily affliction. Patients who have had strokes, for example, which have caused them to loose motion in a realm of their body still often think they are 'signalling' the limb or digit in such a way that they are actually causing it to move, even when they are in fact entirely failing to do so. It's interesting that the term agnostic derives from this troubling ailment.

Not grasping what is truly necessary can cause us to quickly find ourselves in a very disconcerting spot.

What happens, then, when we think about this manner of ailment in respect to faith and truth?

However 'switched on' we may think ourselves or our church leaders, the truth is that it's easy for this malady to be occurring.

The underlying problem here is that the less we really know about something, the less we usually recognise our own ignorance.

The scriptures, starting from our first parents, are littered with examples of when people step out in such ignorance, thinking they've grasped the key points, when they have actually missed it completely. What follows is a car wreck.

Intelligence has nothing to do with this flaw - remember Einstein - it's simply because we so often forget, to quote another great mind, Issac Newton, that the best we're going to do in this life is examine a few pebbles on the beach when the great expanse of the ocean still lies before us (actually, to be fair, Einstein did say something similar using the example of an eternal library, and us currently reading from just page one of the first volume... 'such is the mind of God').

Presumption of this kind - about what we think is comprehended - can quickly lead us to believe we are ('you shall be as gods') what we're not.

It's when we begin to apply this to our own particular circumstances that the cuckoos can really come home to roost.

If we are, in effect, essentially ignorant of how an issue or a teaching is actually impacting upon our witness, our fellowship, our ministry - if we have miss-read something crucial to the present moment - then the effectiveness of what we're about will have been compromised even though we believe we are still free from such a limitation.

It takes a great deal to pause and examine ourselves by the exhortation of Hosea or the Wisdom of Solomon - to face up to where our realms of examination may be lacking or where we may have missed aspects of the big picture, but allowing that manner of enquiry may well open a door into a far richer engagement with life and truth.

Jesus warned His disciples to avoid a particular religious 'leaven' (theology) that would impede them and stifle the growth of the Kingdom (Matthew 16:6). How prophetic this admonition proved when we consider what happened to some of the churches and leaders of the churches in Asia Minor, requiring Paul to step in, even when it ostracised him from the rest, to rectify the error for the sake of the Gospel (see the book of Galatians, chapter 2).

What so often counts in the church is when someone follows Paul's example - identifying what's being overlooked and strenuously engaging with this until it received the hearing it truly needs.

If we want to see health in the church and not some manner of fakery mistakenly taking hold, then we need to be equally as careful to follow in the light of that manner of discernment.