May 06, 2014
Calling All Fishermen
Navigating
the waters of college I’m overwhelmed with the words, terminology and concepts
of scholars and theologians. Their blending of archaic words with newly
invented words is beyond maddening for the lay person. I suppose, since they are
always quoting and referencing one another, that they are speaking the same
language. I have found a whole new appreciation for the unschooled, ordinary
fishermen that Jesus called to carry his message. I’m even thinking of the King
James Bible as being light reading.
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Words, terminology, and concepts are my enjoyment, but not those of scholars and theologians. I like forming ideas and testing them against reality. It’s like finding diamond when a concept built from combining observation and common facts tests out as real. Then it joins those I’ve found before to become like my treasure of parts and pieces with which to build more. But fortunately, thinking is not my career.
-----Career is different. The mere enjoyment of concepts is not threatening. Making a living off concepts introduces the threat of risk. Peddling the parts and safeguarding them both become as important as their development. And if they are not developed in sufficient quantity or interest to others, you don’t get paid for them. When the enjoyment of a new idea is the payment for its development, there is much less pressure upon both its reality tests and subsequent marketing. But communities of professional ideologies form amongst professional thinkers. And from them comes stresses and strains upon the marketer’s thinking to be innovative enough to draw a good price without being off-the-wall enough to offend.
-----Unless, of course, you become a lion of the intellectual community. And every professional thinker wants that position. It doesn’t eliminate the need for either their ideas’ innovation nor a semblance of their ideas’ being still tacked to the wall. For the intellectual lion, those two guardrails are pushed back across a wide, smooth, and receptive barrow pit. Here is where the intellectual elite has worked since the day man found the value of exchanging ideas. And following these elitist lions into the cushy barrow pits are the idea-lackeys distributing words, terminology, and concepts to working grunts of the highway having too much taste for the avant-garde. These friends and neighbors sprinkled amongst us buy those candied ideas for the high price of thoughtless conformity. Then they go out onto our streets and twist our culture. Gads!
-----The church also has been diminished by this industrial ideology. The fact is, the truth sells just well enough to keep an idea on the wall. But it fails to deliver the flamboyant innovation needed to steal minds from yesterday’s lion. So, to take the old lion’s place, truth is ridiculed as off-the-wall so innovation can be hung in its place. And all because Daddy looked his daughter in her hungry little eyes and realized he had to compete for the old lion’s place with new fangled words, terminology, and concepts.
-----But the fisherman feeds his daughter fish and worships the Lion for the truth He is. The unpressured fun of knowing the truth does not compete with the truth, as does the pressured needs of making money off thinking. The fisherman’s joy and admiration for the Lion casts competition aside and calls for finding truth to know the Lion. When truth brings new words, terminology, and concepts, then fine; they belong. The rub is: although the truth is free monetarily speaking, it costs the rest of those fun, innovative, almost off-the-wall, sellable words, terms, and concepts.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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