I highly recommend Walter Wangerin's book Preparing for Jesus: Meditations on the Coming of Christ, Advent, Christmas and the Kingdom for the season of Advent (and after continuing to the 12th day of Christmas). I continue to be struck by his words reflecting on Luke 1:46-56 for December 15:
It never is just the intellectual meaning of the words that captures the messages of the Almighty! The messages consist as well of things that must be felt, experienced: God's ineffable love, our emotional and spiritual responses, elements whose truth cannot be objectively analyzed nor reduced to doctrine.
Praise and thanksgiving require more than our brains. They want our laughter, our capering bodies, our trembling delight, smiles and the sweet flush of delight - and song. Praise must be sung.
I love this quote partly because there is no anti-intellectual bias in these words. But there is a recognition of the limits of the intellect. To know God is so much more than propositional statements. And when we experience God in truth, our worship must go beyond the merely cognitive … not in contradiction, but in completion.
All of me, all of us for all of God.
Soli Deo Gloria.
"… not in contradiction, but in completion."
-This is one of the most nicely concise statements of balance I have ever read. As a long-time Charismatic, and as one who loves doctrine, I have often been troubled by the unnecessary tension between "head and heart" as it were. Too many people have been told that the intellect must be bypassed to truly experience God, but of course He created our intellect, too, and the fullest expression of our praise comes only when we wrap our puny minds around some portion of divine truth; when we do, when we really do, supernatural joy is the natural result.
Posted by: Scott | January 03, 2007 at 08:27 AM