Every Horizon's a Threshold

Every horizon is a veil that opens up to an even greater one.

1.
It is most often assumed by Christians and Atheists alike that Christianity is a religion and, being a religion, it is by definition a set of beliefs about reality which one sees as true or false. This is why the drama between Christian apologetics and Atheists is primarily over whether the set of beliefs Christians hold to be true can be proven to be certain through empirical and/or rational justification.

2.
Christians, quite frequently, assume the Bible is God’s word and take it to be able to communicate truth without need of being empirically tested or justified by reason. The Christian thinks, because they have access to “the truth”—the Bible (or the Bible and tradition)—that they have the ultimate resource to develop a world view which offers the right or correct view of the world.

3.
Because of this, Christians often see themselves as having the correct world view and other world views that cannot fit within it as completely incompatible and outside the truth. In this way, Christians see themselves as having an epistemic advantage over non-Christians. They believe they have adopted the correct set of beliefs to establish a conceptual framework, according to which the world becomes properly intelligible and by which they gain access to the Divine and the guarantee—or at least the possibility—of salvation.

4.
From this point of view—that of the Christian world view—the non-believer’s primary deficiency is epistemic. Their individual subjectivity or vantage point is compromised by not having the right set of beliefs, the instruction manual which would allow them to properly interpret being in the world and the conceptual furniture necessary to welcome God and house Him in their minds so as to obtain salvation.

5.
The question often for the secular person is this: how is one capable of differentiating Christianity (as a world view) from any other set of beliefs or mental representations of the world? How does the Christian world picture not simply become another set of beliefs that create a mental re-presentation of the world that the Christian uses to ascribe specific meanings to their experience? How can one grant Christianity an epistemic privilege over any other frame of reference, subjective vantage point, or world picture by which one ascribes particular meanings to their experience?

6.
The answer to this question, no doubt, is that there is no way for the Christian—at least the type we have been talking about—to prove the validity of their world view or its superiority to another. Inevitably, their beliefs are based on faith—a blind commitment to a certain picture of the world which, without such a blind commitment, would not necessarily hold up to experience. In short, such a Christian is always liable to be accused of confirmation bias.

7.
This is in fact why so many seem to leave Christianity today. They are presented with alternative world pictures and, when a certain experience is interpreted differently according to these different pictures, they are confronted both with the uncertainty of their perspective outside blind faith and the likelihood that an alternative world picture might offer a more comfortable or pleasing or even convincing interpretation of their experience. In fact, the greatest difficulty I had growing up in a fundamentalist Reformed church was navigating the fact that, though God was certainly real to me and real to me as Jesus Christ, the picture of the world constructed by the set of beliefs I was conditioned to see as necessary failed to match up with my experience. My life became an attempt to make things fit within something less robust and dynamic than life itself.

Eventually, I reached a point where I could no longer identify being a Christian with a worldview—a liminal set of beliefs which were supposed to offer a comprehensive picture of everything, to have re-presented everything as it is. Rather, I began to see the heart of life as directly challenging any attempt at fitting it into the picture frame, as greater than what can be circumscribed by thought. God is most known in how He brings our assumptions and limited understanding into question by the excessiveness of His very presence, which calls us to step beyond the frame we inhabit to be expanded beyond ourselves as we know ourselves—to inhabit life beyond life as we know life. To be true to reality, accepting mystery must become more important than obtaining mastery.

8.
It was this recognition that led me to the Orthodox Church. Yes, we have certain beliefs we state each liturgy about God and the God–world relationship when we recite the Nicene Creed, but these are but a few basic beliefs that act more as a shield against straying from what is known into wild speculation than as any comprehensive statement of the faith. When we participate in the Liturgy, we rise up to it—to the mysteries it reveals to us—and even then what is said only gestures toward a greater mystery which, in the end, will always exceed us, for God is infinite. Here the path to God and union with Him is infinite, and even as veil after veil is lifted to reveal more of Him, beyond that veil lies another and another, for epektasis—our “stretching out” in spiritual growth—never ends. It is in the Orthodox Church that I discovered that truth is not a set of propositions to defend but a life into which one is drawn—a life that reveals itself and, in the same act, refuses to be exhausted. To live in that life is to accept that every horizon reached is only the threshold of another, and that God’s nearness is always accompanied by the summons to go further still.