I just read an article by Paul Heibert; “The flaw of the Excluded Middle” in an amazing book I am reading, The Celtic way of Evangelism, George G. Hunter III
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0687085853/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-4453860-5145401#reader-link
The article shows how the earth’s people explain life, live life, and face the future at three levels. The bottom level deals with the factors in life that our senses can apprehend; this is the “empirical” world that the “sciences” deal with. At this level, people learn to plant a crop, to clean a fish, to fix a water pump, to build a house and a thousand other things.
The top level deals with the ultimate issues in life that are beyond what our senses can perceive; this is a “transcendent” or “sacred” realm that Christianity and other world religions define, and then address. Heibert reports that, “religion as a system of explanation deals with the ultimate questions of the origin, purpose, and destiny of an individual, a society, and the universe.”
Western society and Western Church’s, especially since the enlightenment, have tended to exclude from their view of reality a middle level that is never the less quite real to people in societies (and increasingly real to postmodern people in the west).
What are the “middle-level” issues of life? Here one finds the questions of the uncertainty of the near future, the crises of present life, and the unknowns of the past. Despite knowledge of facts such as the seeds once planted will grow and bear fruit, or the travel down this river on a boat will bring us to the neighboring village, the future is not totally predictable. Accidents, misfortune, the intervention of other persons, and other unknown events can frustrate human planning.
We will talk about what inhabits the “middle-level” and how we as Western Christians deal with it, in the next blog… good stuff!
