On the Planted Telescope: the Seeker, the Finder, and the Path to Commitment
Fellowship Discussion Essay | 19 June 2026
Occasion. Isak, you and I spent Friday afternoon in a long conversation. It began with the question of Michael, whose mandala system of categorizing all human knowledge has been his life’s work, and whose worldview sits more or less where mine sat 58 years ago when he and I were in High School and college. After Michael’s example, we moved on to discussing your sense of the impossibility of living/keeping the biblical commands, deciding whether Christianity is one of many paths or the one true path, the cultural questions of sexuality in the present day, the question of those who never heard the gospel, your own struggle with excessive attention to, and dwelling on, the pull of the flesh, the exchange about coffee and alcohol and the pre-made response to temptation. The conversation closed with your telescope metaphor — that of a telescope held by hand, the metaphorical arm of flesh, which is not steady enough to prevent large slews across the sky. It allows occasional glimpses of the desired star, but it does not provide sufficient stability to dwell on any high-magnification, deep-space object in depth. The telescope metaphor rhymes with the difficulty of focusing on achieving a life goal when there is no stable foundation.
Your questions and struggles with faith should be universal, but sadly, some never question, ask why, or realize the profound mystery of existence. You grew up around the Christian fellowship, and you have heard the conversations and read the essays. You probably know the Bible considerably better than most adult Christians. And you are still searching. You want to find the truth, but questions stand in the way. The question you face is whether to commit to the standard you already know or to keep searching, as Michael has been searching for the 58 years I have known him. You are not a baby Christian. You are not a stranger to the biblical revelation. You are an articulate, intelligent, and careful young man who knows the common answers given to those questioning whether to commit to the Christian faith. These are the issues we discussed today, and I want to document our conversation, sharpen my presentation, and address them for you to review in a format you can refer to again.
Nine sections follow. The first examines what Michael’s mandala actually is. The second engages the hardness-of-the-commands question that occupied much of the early part of our conversation. The third takes up the many-paths-versus-one-top distinction. The fourth engages the cultural questions of the present moment. The fifth addresses the question of those who never heard the gospel, which was one of the big questions that drove me to search 40 religions. The sixth returns to your telescope metaphor and develops it. The seventh picks up the addiction-and-pre-made-response thread that closed the conversation. The eighth is what I want to say to you about commitment under partial knowledge. The ninth is the closing, on Romans 5:3-5 and 1 Corinthians 13:11-13, which are the scriptures the conversation pointed toward without my saying so explicitly.
I. Michael’s mandala
Michael’s mandala filing system is his life’s work. It is a comprehensive, elaborate, decades-in-development framework for categorizing the universe into nested structures of relationship and meaning. Michael is extremely intelligent and articulate. The system is intelligent. It reflects an enormous amount of careful thought, sustained study, introspection, and disciplined attention over the course of thirty years. It is, by any measure of intellectual labor, a remarkable artifact.
It is also, by my reading, the cognitive monument to a life of not committing.
What I see is a reflection of what we discussed in a different language during our conversation. The mandala is what perpetual searching produces when applied with intelligence and discipline. Someone who keeps looking, who never lands on a worldview with absolute standards, who does not take a stand because every stand looks provisional and every alternative looks possibly better, will eventually produce a system of organizing reality. The system organizes what he has found. The system catalogs the alternatives. The system tries to hold everything at once because the seeker cannot bring himself to set anything down as authoritative. The system grows more elaborate over time because every new piece of information, every new possible perspective, has to be accommodated rather than evaluated and accepted as absolute truth or rejected as a distortion of perfection.
Michael and I grew up together. We started, 58 years ago, in approximately the same place. We diverged because at a certain point, I committed, and he didn’t. The choice I made was specific. It was to take the Bible as the load-bearing standard against which everything else would be judged, to accept the Christological claim of the death and resurrection of Jesus as the central fact of history, and to organize my life and thought around those commitments. Once I had made that choice, the search did not stop — I have learned considerably more in the nearly 40 years since I committed than I knew before I committed — but the search acquired a stable reference frame. Everything else could be evaluated in relation to the anchor. Michael did not make that choice. He kept the search open. The mandala is what the open search has produced.
Michael is a good man. He is kind and thoughtful, and he stands in awe of the world around us; everything is a source of joy and wonder to him. He lives a good life and enjoys it greatly. But I mention this because I want you to consider taking the fork in the road where Michael and I diverged. You are clearly asking questions and trying to find Truth, but you have been unable to identify it. I am very familiar with being there. The choice seems to be between Christianity and some other coherent worldview that you have not yet found. But what your life is actually manifesting is a never-ending search with indefinite goals for understanding. You have a commitment to searching for truth as a standard that has the structural shape of being true, but it is actually a lifetime of producing your own mandala. Your mandala is your own elaborated, intelligent, sophisticated, never-quite-completed system of holding everything at once, but ending with nowhere solid to stand.
The seeker and the finder are not separated by the question of intelligence, dedication, or breadth and depth of the search. They are separated by their willingness to commit to the best available alternative and to change when the evidence is overwhelming that it is needed. The finder is the seeker who has committed. True riches flow from a commitment to the truth.
II. The hardness of the commands and what salvation actually is
You raised, in various forms throughout the conversation, the worry that biblical Christianity asks of human beings what they cannot actually do. The commands are too high. The standard is impossible. A religion that requires what its adherents cannot deliver is, on its face, suspect — perhaps designed to produce permanent guilt, perhaps a sociological control mechanism, perhaps just badly engineered. The argument has precedent and cannot be dismissed.
What I want to say to you about this is what I tried to say at some length during the conversation, but I want to say it more carefully here.
The Christian claim is not that you can or will keep the commands. The Christian claim is that you cannot, that no human being ever has except Christ himself, and that this inability is precisely what the gospel addresses. The Levitical sacrificial system existed because Israel could not keep the law. The prophetic tradition exists because the people of God repeatedly failed to live the covenant they had been given. The Pauline doctrine of justification by faith exists because Paul knew, from his own zealous Pharisaical career, that the harder you try to keep the law in your own strength, the more clearly you discover that you cannot. The gospel does not say, “Here are the commands; keep them, and you will be saved.” The gospel says, “Here are the commands; you cannot keep them; here is what God has done about your inability.”
What God has done about your inability is Christ. The doctrine of substitutionary atonement is not an arbitrary theological invention. It is the answer to the structural problem the law itself names: the law is holy, and the people are not, and the gap between them cannot be closed by the people’s increased effort. No amount of striving lifts a sinful man to the standard of a holy God; finite effort cannot cross an infinite distance.
But notice what this does and does not mean. It does not mean that nothing is asked of you. The error that has hollowed out so much of modern Christianity is the inference that because we cannot close the gap by effort, we are therefore released from effort altogether — that grace is a blanket thrown over a life lived as an animal, that a man need only say the words and then go on exactly as before. That is not the gospel; it is the abandonment of it. What is asked of you and me is real and total: to confess our transgressions, to repent, to change course, and to do everything in our power to put on the character of the new man. This labor does not close the gap — Christ closes the gap — but it is the response of a heart that has actually committed, and a heart that will not lift a finger has not committed at all. The commitment is the whole thing, and the effort is the proof that the commitment is real.
The gulf between the Father and man, which was made uncrossable by our sin because of God’s uncompromising hatred of sin, was bridged from God’s side. The wrath was discharged on Christ, “who was made sin for us who knew no sin,” 2 Corinthians 5:21. This was the only possible way God could build a universe of children who could choose sin — the rejection of God — or obedience to His way, which is the love of God. He created man in the hope that man would choose Him, His way, and obedience to His law, and so satisfy His desire for a love that is reciprocated and freely given. To make that love possible, He had to give men free will, for love that is compelled is not love at all.
He is the source of all. The Father, the One, the Almighty, performed the most mysterious of all acts: He is of Himself, owing His existence to nothing and to no one. His nature, by His own self-identification, is love, and a heart whose nature is love can be satisfied only by love freely given. But here is the conflict written into creation itself: His hatred of sin is absolute, His desire is for perfect love, and the beings from whom He desires that love are ignorant of the deep consequences of their acts, driven by the desires of the flesh, and certain to choose the flesh over perfect love. That is a formula for inevitable, universal failure. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23.
To thread this needle of conflicting requirements, the plan was laid before the world began: “He was the lamb slain from the foundation of the earth,” Revelation 13:8. In the crucifixion, in the passion, Christ absorbed the wrath that human sin warrants. That wrath must be felt, and it must be discharged; it cannot simply be waived. The hatred of sin is not compassionate — it is reflexive and non-negotiable. The purity of God is complete, and the hatred of any violation of that purity is unmitigated and inseparable from the character of the Father. It is not a mood He could choose to set aside; it is what perfect holiness is.
So the wrath of God toward sin is real. The fact of man’s sin is real. The discharge of that wrath upon the Son, who took our sin as His own and has borne it, is real. The substitution is real. The wrath that would otherwise have fallen on you and me for our violations of His purity fell instead on Christ at the cross.
And here is why your commitment and mine are not a small thing, but the hinge of the whole matter: we are released from that wrath because we have committed to make Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior and to follow His words. For that commitment — that total dedication of our lives to walking His way — He has vouched for you and for me. Not because you or I will live it perfectly, but because we are committed to living it perfectly, and will rise, confess, and return every time we fall short. Because of that commitment, on your part and on mine, Christ is fully committed to stand as the substitutionary recipient of God’s wrath and to leave you and me clean. He became sin for us. He has taken the blows that had to be delivered for the violation that truly was yours and mine. Christ accepted what you and I deserved — and you and I are free to live in the Liberty of Christ, not because we have done nothing, but because we have given everything: our commitment to live His words, to follow His way, and to trust that His way is true, and good, and right.
The shape of the Christian life, accordingly, is a life of commitment to living His way. It is the shape of falling short, receiving forgiveness, attempting obedience, falling short, confessing, receiving forgiveness again, attempting obedience again, falling short again, and continuing this pattern for the entire course of your life. With maturity, by enduring in resisting temptation and living the great commandment to love God and neighbor as self, character is developed. The goal is sanctification, of becoming the perfect man. Salvation is not in the not-doing of the various sins; that is a byproduct of the development of character and aiming at the high calling. Salvation comes to the man who gives his heart to acting out the words of Christ: the committed giving of oneself totally to the relationship; your salvation lives in your commitment to live as the perfect man. There is no softening of the goal; no expectation of defeat is admitted or considered. If there is failure, your faith in His sacrifice is complete, your acceptance of it unconditional and without doubt. Your commitment is to be like Him. Your relationship with the Father is restored by Christ’s bearing of what you owed. The only appropriate response is gratitude, humility, and obedience. The not-doing (submitting to temptation/addiction/yielding to flesh attraction) is what you aim at because you love the one who paid the price for you (Christ). The not-doing is ultimately an expression of love for the Father/the Almighty God, who experiences all, and to whom is the ground of being and existence.
This is why the impossible commands are not, in the Christian frame, a defeater of the gospel. They are the reason for the good news. As humans, we cannot be good enough to meet the standard of Christ’s perfection; “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23. This is not a license to sin because we are not strong enough to meet perfection. This is a reason to be grateful for Christ establishing a way to restore a relationship with the Father. That gratitude is appropriate because He has satisfied both the requirements of a creation that enables the free will necessary to express love, and the need to fully express His essence, His hatred of sin, and the need to destroy every spot of imperfection in His creation. The love of Christ is expressed by our commitment to live His way, obey His law, and not subject Him to the pain of our sin. We will fail; the commands are not easy; the flesh pull is strong; and no one does it perfectly. You cannot close the gap. The sacrifice of Christ is necessary to restore a relationship with the Father. The argument from impossibility is therefore not an argument against Christianity. It is an argument from within Christianity for the centrality of Christ.
What this means practically is that when you fall, you get up. You confess. You receive forgiveness. You try again. The temptation is to read the falls as evidence that the standard is wrong. The Christian reading is that the falls are evidence that you are a human being who needs a savior, and the gospel offers you that savior. If you are committed to living the perfection of Christ, every fall is an opportunity to be thankful for the gospel, the good news that Christ threaded the needle by disclosing His plan through prophecy while hiding it from Satan’s efforts to foil it. The cycle of fall and rise is not a failure of Christianity. It is the lived shape of Christianity in the world that fallen human beings actually inhabit. It is a remarkable plan, and it satisfies all the criteria for creating the world from nothing and establishing a meaningful relationship with the Creator and life.
III. Many paths up the mountain, and one top reached by one way
The second worry you raised — sometimes explicitly, sometimes by implication — was the New Age mantra, “There are many paths up the mountain,” which attempts to counter the clear Biblical declaration of Christ as the only way. This concern addresses what appears to be the self-serving promotion of the Christian path and contrasts it with the obvious sincerity of spiritual seekers who embrace other traditions, not as rebels against Godliness, but as people who could not reconcile the language of the Bible with the realities of life. Is God going to condemn such people to hell because they could not comprehend the cryptic message of the Bible?
Other religions have moral teachings; all have serious adherents fully committed to living the Truth; all religions produce people who appear to live ordered and ethical lives. If Christianity is supposed to be the unique way, why does it look like one option among many roughly equivalent options? Why would a loving God set things up so that only those who happen to have been exposed to Christianity have access to salvation?
I want to make two distinctions here that I think the many paths framing collapses.
First, the many paths metaphor assumes that the goal is the same and only the routes differ. This is the assumption I think is wrong. The goal each religion proposes is not the same. Buddhism’s goal is the extinction of the self in impersonal nirvana, the cessation of desire, the recognition that all is suffering, and the understanding that the way out is non-attachment. Hinduism’s goal is multiple: moksha (release from the cycle of rebirth), reunion with Brahman, and the dissolution of the individual into the universal. Islam’s goal is submission to Allah, the doing of God’s will as expressed in the Quran and the Hadith, and ultimate paradise for those who have faithfully submitted. New-age religion’s goal is self-actualization, the discovery of one’s authentic self, the realization of one’s own divinity. Christianity’s goal is reconciliation with the Father through the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit, with the destination being God’s dwelling with his redeemed people in the new creation.
These are not different routes up the same mountain. They are different mountains, with different summits and different things at the summits. The Buddhist nirvana and the Christian new creation are not the same destination reached by different paths. They are categorically different states. To equate them is not religious humility; it is conceptual confusion. The many paths metaphor only works if you ignore what each religion actually says about where it is going.
Second, the many paths framing assumes that the religions are roughly equivalent in their answers to the deepest questions: where did the universe come from, what is life for, what happens to us when we die, and how is the gap between human imperfection and divine perfection closed. I do not think the religions are roughly equivalent on these questions. I think Christianity gives answers that close the loop on the questions, and the other religions give answers that, when followed out, leave the questions still open in important ways.
Where did the universe come from? Christianity: from the Word of God, through whom and for whom all things were made, who is also the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. Buddhism does not seriously engage with this question because, for Buddhism, it is a distraction from the practical task of liberation. Hinduism gives a multitude of competing accounts. Islam offers an answer (Allah created the universe), but it is sparse on mechanism and does not include the Logos-as-the-pattern-of-creation move that gives Christianity its connection between the rational structure of the world and the personal nature of God. New-age religion typically dissolves the question into vague cosmic-consciousness language.
What is life for? Christianity: to know God and enjoy a relationship with Him forever, to be conformed to the image of Christ, to participate in the redemption of the world, to love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. The other religions offer answers, but in my reading, they do not close the loop. Buddhism’s answer reduces life to a problem to be escaped. Hinduism’s answer reduces life to a single cycle on an endless wheel. Islam’s answer is closer to the Christian answer but lacks the love-and-fellowship dimension that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity makes possible. New-age religion’s answer reduces life to self-expression, which collapses into incoherence as soon as you ask what the self is and what it should express.
What happens to us when we die? How is the gap closed between our imperfection and God’s perfection? Here, the differences are sharpest. The Christian answer — that Christ has borne what we deserved, that we are forgiven through his death, that we are raised through his resurrection, that the new creation is bodily — has no real parallel in the other religions. The Buddhist annihilation of the self is the opposite of resurrection. The Hindu reincarnation is the opposite of final redemption. The Islamic paradise is closer, but lacks the substitutionary atonement structure that addresses the gap between human guilt and divine holiness. The new-age elevation of the self is the opposite of the Christian crucifixion-and-resurrection-of-the-self.
The distinctive feature of the Christian claim is that other religions do not say what Christianity does. They have moral teachings that overlap because moral teachings across human cultures generally identify what humans find pleasurable (good) and its opposite. This polarity is intuitively satisfied and implemented in all moral systems. The love-your-neighbor command appears in Leviticus 19, and in other religious systems. It can be identified in some form in most enduring moral traditions. What no other religion has is the singular event of God-the-Son becoming incarnate, living the perfect human life, dying the substitutionary death, and rising bodily to inaugurate the new creation. No other religion has anything structurally similar to claim. Krishna and Arjuna had a wise conversation; Krishna did not die for Arjuna’s sins and rise from the dead. Muhammad received what he understood to be a revelation from Gabriel; he did not die for the sins of his followers, nor did he rise from the dead. Buddha realized that the world was suffering and that the path to liberation was the cessation of desire; Buddha did not die for the suffering of his followers and rise from the dead. The structural shape of the Christian claim has no real parallel.
This is the move I had to make to settle the many paths worry for myself. The question is not whether other religions also have moral wisdom. They do. The question is whether any of them has the structural shape of the gospel. Is life a permanent record of acts and their necessary consequence, or simply a mark in the sand for a moment that blows away into incoherent meaninglessness? Or is this a world where each moment is significant because it is felt exquisitely by God, and is part of the eternal record of credits and debits? I hold to the latter. A world of permanent significance allows for a world with meaning, a world that has consequence because of the pain, pleasure, and experience of life that it brings, has an additional level of gravity, reality, and significance that makes it worth living and living well. Christianity is unique in closing the gap. It allows God to express His wrath against imperfection without limit. Jesus Christ’s rising from the dead opened the possibility of the renewal of life after sin had condemned it to death. The resurrection was the inauguration of the new creation, in which God and man could restore a full relationship, in which man could be imperfect, as was necessary for him to have the freedom to love God by obedience or reject God and worship other gods (sensual satisfaction). The answer is that other religions lack the same structural justification for meaning and the purpose of life and existence. Christianity is not one of many roughly equivalent religious options. It is the one religious option that has the structural shape of being true.
This is also where I have to tell you the thing that finally let me become a Christian. The issue was the people I traveled with through some forty religions before I committed. In nearly every one of them, everyone I met was sincere, awake, and good-hearted. They were souls who were honestly reaching for God. I could not accept a Christianity that required me to condemn them wholesale as enemies of God. What freed me was noticing that Scripture itself holds together two sayings of Jesus that only sound like a contradiction. In one context, He says, “He that is not with me is against me” (Matthew 12:30). In another, He says, “He that is not against us is on our part” (Mark 9:40). I puzzled over these verses lightly in my youth to early adulthood as a Christian. Surprisingly, they were the key to resolving the conflict, as I saw in real life: good people doing their best. The resolution came when I needed it. I saw that these two sayings describe two different states of the heart, not two contradictory rules. The sincere seeker who is honestly trying to do right and has not yet grasped Christ is not against Him — he is, in his groping, unfinished way, already turned toward the light he can see. But the man who has truly seen Christ and still turns deliberately away, who knows and refuses, has set himself against Him. The dividing line is not how much a person knows; it is the direction the heart finally faces once the light has actually reached it.
That distinction let me hold together two things I had thought I must choose between. Christianity is uniquely, structurally true — there is only one summit where God actually dwells, and the mountains are not interchangeable. And my fellow travelers are not my enemies — I can honor their sincerity, love them as God loves them, and still long to hand them the very thing I searched forty religions to find. The uniqueness of the gospel does not oblige me to contempt; it obliges me to generosity, because I was once standing exactly where they stand now.
IV. The cultural questions and the rationalization of sin
You and I spent a significant part of the conversation on the cultural questions of the present moment — homosexuality, the love is love slogan, the Pride Month phenomenon, and the tolerance-as-virtue framing of contemporary discourse.
The cultural shift of the last sixty years has been engineered. It has not arisen organically from the discovery of new truths about human nature; it has arisen from the deliberate inversion of categories that the broader human tradition had previously held with near-universal consensus. The body was understood, across virtually every culture and every era of human history before the present, to have been made a particular way and for particular purposes. Sexual union was understood to be between man and woman, oriented toward procreation and the bonding of the marriage relationship, with the moral framework around it serving to protect both the relational and the generative dimensions. This understanding is in Genesis. It is in Leviticus 18 and 20. It is in Romans 1. It is in 1 Corinthians 6. It is also in the moral traditions of cultures that have had no contact with the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures. The near-universality of the traditional understanding is not, in itself, an argument that the traditional understanding is right. But it is evidence that the contemporary inversion is not the discovery of an obvious truth that all previous generations missed.
The contemporary inversion has been accomplished primarily through the rhetorical strategy of moving the argument from the substantive question (what is sexual behavior for and what is its proper form?) to the tangential question (are you a kind person, are you tolerant, do you accept your neighbor?). The substantive question, when honestly engaged, has the answers it has had for most of human history. The tangential question, when substituted for the substantive question, allows the person who answers the substantive question correctly to be accused of failing the tangential question. You think homosexual practice is morally disordered? You must therefore hate homosexual persons. You hate. Hate has no home here. You are a bad person. The substitution is logically invalid — believing that a behavior is disordered does not entail hating the persons who engage in it; on the contrary, the love of the persons is what motivates the concern about the behavior — but the substitution is rhetorically effective. It moves the burden of proof from the side that has just departed from the universal moral tradition to the side that has continued to hold it.
The love-your-neighbor command is not violated by the refusal to celebrate what your neighbor’s flourishing is harmed by. The friend who watches another friend walk toward harm and says nothing, while smiling and affirming, is not being a friend. The friend who says I see what you are doing; I do not think it is right; I love you, and I am here when you need me, but I cannot celebrate this with you, is being a friend and loving his friend. The Christian framework treats the substantive moral question and the love-of-neighbor question as integrated rather than opposed. Go and sin no more, which Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery (John 8:11), is the model. He did not condemn her, but he did not celebrate her sin. He told her the truth about what she was doing and called her to a different life, in the context of having defended her from those who would have stoned her. The integration of mercy and moral clarity is the Christian standard.
The love is love slogan is, structurally, the rationalization-of-sin move that has appeared in every era of human moral failure. The slogan conflates categories. The love of friend for friend, parent for child, husband for wife, neighbor for neighbor — all of these are real and good. They are not all the same kind of love, and they do not all warrant the same kinds of expression. Treating all loves as equivalent is not a deeper recognition of the truth about love; it is the collapse of the categories within which love operates meaningfully. When everything is love, nothing is love specifically; the term loses the content that gave it weight in the first place. The slogan is therefore not a moral advance. It is a moral evacuation, dressed up in the language of moral advance.
When you encounter these arguments in the cultural air you breathe, the rhetorical pressure of the contemporary moment is intense and deliberate, and resisting it requires a stable reference frame from outside it. The Bible provides that reference frame. The historical Christian tradition provides it. Your own conscience, properly formed, provides it. What the contemporary moment provides is the constant pressure to substitute the tangential question for the substantive question and to be shamed for noticing the substitution. Do not let yourself be shamed or seduced by it. The substantive question has the answers it has always had. The persons who have been caught up in the disorder are to be loved, prayed for, befriended, witnessed to, and helped — they are not to be celebrated in their disorder. Celebration of the disorder is not love. The integration of clarity and mercy is what the Christian standard requires.
V. The pygmies, the never-heard, and the question of proportionate judgment
You raised, in a different language, a question that contributed to my search for truth in world religions in the first place: what about those who never heard? What about the pygmy in the rainforest, the medieval Japanese farmer, the pre-Columbian indigenous American — none of whom had access to the gospel through any cause of their own? Are they consigned to eternal conscious torment for failing to believe in someone they never had any way of hearing about?
Christian theology commonly settles this question in a simplistic blanket statement of condemnation of all who have not confessed the name of Christ, which is trivially proof-texted. I, of course, cannot give a definitive answer to this question, because I do not sit at the judgment seat, and I do not want to give any sense of leeway or downplay the necessity and benefit of bowing and confessing the name, “…that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow… and every tongue should confess…” Philippians 2:10-11, and “…unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.” Isaiah 45:23. In the following are three considerations:
First, the Bible itself addresses this question more than the more aggressive forms of Christian apologetics usually acknowledge. Romans 1 says that the basic moral law is written on the conscience of every human being, and that the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse (Romans 1:20). The argument is that everyone has access to enough natural revelation to know that there is a moral order and that they have not lived up to it. Romans 2 extends this: For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves (Romans 2:14). The pygmy in the rainforest is not without moral knowledge. He knows that murder is wrong, that theft is wrong, that infidelity is wrong, that cruelty is wrong, in the same way that the educated Westerner knows it. The basic moral order is accessible to every human being who has not deliberately seared his conscience against it.
Second, the principle of proportionate judgment is explicitly stated in the New Testament. Luke 12:47-48: And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required. The principle is that judgment is calibrated to the knowledge the person has. The man who knew the gospel and rejected it is more culpable than the man who never heard it and lived as faithfully as he could to the natural-revelation light he had. The judgment is not arbitrary or uniform. It is proportionate.
Third, the universal-reconciliation question, which the fellowship engaged at length in the Sunday meeting two weeks ago, is the broader theological territory within which the never-heard question sits. I lean tentatively toward the view that all people will eventually be reconciled to God through Christ, while acknowledging that this position runs counter to the mainstream Christian consensus and that I cannot settle it from the texts with the certainty I would like. I believe judgment is real. I believe nobody enters into communion with God for free. I believe Christ is the only gateway. What I do not know, and what I think nobody who is honest about the texts can claim to know with confidence, is the cost for those who do not in this life accept Christ’s sacrifice, and the temporal scope of their reconciliation. I trust that the judgment is both just and merciful in proportions I cannot fully calculate. I trust that the God who is described in Scripture as not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9) is acting consistently with that description in the administration of his judgment.
What I can say is that the question about the fate of the pygmies who never heard is not a decisive judgment against the plausible validity of Christianity and the overt/obvious scriptural claim of Christ as the only way to the Father. The Christian tradition has resources for engaging it. The natural-revelation framework, the proportionate-judgment principle, and the question of universal reconciliation provide a substantial space within which the question can be addressed without either dismissing it or capitulating to it. The pygmy in the rainforest who lived faithfully according to the natural-revelation light he had is not, in my reading of Scripture, in the same situation as the educated Western atheist who heard the gospel, rejected it, and lived satisfying his sensual desires, having rationalized that there is no judge other than self as law. The judgment is proportionate. The mercy is real. The Christ who died for the world (John 3:16) died for the pygmy as much as for the seminary professor. How the application of that death to the pygmy proceeds in cases where the pygmy has never heard of it is a question I hold with humility, trusting the character of the one administering the judgment.
VI. The telescope, the planted instrument, and the depth of life
Late in our conversation, you offered a new metaphor for the search for meaning and understanding, and the importance of commitment. You spoke of using a telescope. When held by hand, it is unsteady, and focusing on distant objects allows only the occasional glimpse of a target star. This brief, seldom-seen fix on the target does not allow for in-depth examination. The wide field allows it to be seen continuously as one unremarkable object among many, without significant distinction as far as its individual character. A narrow focus and a stable platform are required for the in-depth examination needed to characterize a heavenly body in detail. Without that detailed focus, all stars look the same. With the steady discipline of commitment to a single goal, the richness of life is found.
The image is an analogy for Michael’s life. He has produced the mandala, the catalog of all stars, types, and their relationship. He has mastered the wide-angle examination of life. The record of what Michael has produced is comprehensive and impressive. But it has not, in fifty years of cataloging, allowed Michael to see any one star with the depth that requires sustained attention to a single object. The telescope keeps moving.
It can seem like a loss to point the telescope in one direction and spend all one’s time focused on that single object. But the planted telescope does not require you to give up examining every other star in the universe. The instrument planted on the North Star does not mean you never look at anything else. It means you have a fixed reference frame from which everything else can be located. You can walk around. You can look at the near field. You can attend to your work, your relationships, and the immediate practical demands of an ordinary day. You can, and should, return frequently and regularly to the object of your committed standard, the North Star that orients all other stars in its relation. Commitment to understanding the center and knowing the details of the absolute standard of life is important to put all other worlds in proper perspective. Committing to living that single standard of truth enables you to judge if your standard is rightly chosen. If you think you are pointed at the North Star, and its position changes every night, you have not identified the absolute truth. Over time, watching the same target across years, you see what a wide-angle or uncommitted platform cannot see — the slow evolution of the object, the changes that emerge only with patient integration over long periods, the depth that requires the discipline of returning frequently and looking in the same direction with a steady gaze.
In my experience, commitment to the Biblical standard as true and judging all else by that standard is required to gain the benefits of a life regulated by that perspective. It is the planted telescope. The instrument is fixed on the resurrection of Christ as the load-bearing fact of history. Why it was necessary and meaningful is key to understanding the purpose of life and the requirements for creating the universe. From that fixed point, everything else can be located. The other religions can be examined without anxiety because they are examined from a stable reference frame rather than held perpetually as candidate positions, one of which might be the right one. Cultural pressures can be evaluated without panic because the evaluator has a place to stand from which to measure them. Personal failures can be confessed and worked through without despair because the framework in which they appear is the framework of grace, not the framework of self-justification. The depth of life, understanding its purpose, method, and structure, arises logically and can be extracted with sufficient effort. The pearl of great price can be found if one sells everything to buy the field – total commitment is required to find, have, and own the pearl. That level of commitment to exploring the depth of your chosen path allows you to discern truth. The wide field and unstable platform do not allow for a detailed experience of the distant goal.
The commitment does not produce certainty about every question. I do not have certainty about the question of universal reconciliation. There are many specific theological points that the broader Christian tradition has debated for two thousand years. All will be resolved when we see Him face to face. Uncertainty about details should not be used as a barrier to making a full-hearted commitment to living the Biblical/Christ-centered life. The Biblical paradigm, with the words of Christ as the bedrock of truth, provides a stable reference frame for examining life’s complexities and moral dilemmas. Uncertainties about details should not be used as a disqualifier for commitment. The broad view, the wide field scan of all religions, easily identifies the bright star. The wide-field should be searched, but it should be done with the perspective of an intent to settle, to explore the committed path. Are other religions evil and only Christianity good? Whatever is wrong, not of God’s way, should be identified and spoken clearly. “…whatsoever things are true… honest… just… pure… lovely… of good report… think on these things.” Philippians 4:8. Identify what is good, and dwell on the truth, and put aside that which is false.
What we all want is the fruit of the planted telescope, but we cannot have it without the commitment to exploring its depth. Realizing the advantages of the planted telescope requires commitment. Nobody can decide what the most likely religion in which to find truth is but you. The choice is yours, and the consequences, for gain or loss, are only borne by you. The one thing that is certain is that without commitment, you will not experience the fruit and certainty that commitment brings. The choice to commit to the Christian standard as the load-bearing reference frame of your life is the responsibility of every soul, made alone, without the comfort or support of culture or academics. I made it almost 40 years ago and have not regretted it. Michael did not commit to dedicating his life to deep searching along a single theological path; instead, he produced the mandala. The fork in the road to commit or keep searching is one we all must make. The results/fruit of commitment vs. continual searching will necessarily follow.
VII. The addiction principle and the pre-made response
Late in the conversation, we moved to the question of habit and addiction. I told you that I gave up coffee in 1994 — that I had to, for health reasons, rather than as a spiritual discipline, although it should have been the motivation. The improvement in my clarity and emotional stability was obvious. But I continued using alcohol extremely moderately until about four years ago. I had used alcohol as a once-weekly celebration; pizza and beer at McMenamins, the local Portland brew pub, were my way to reward myself for the victory over another week. But even that small indulgence had a cost. I knew it and felt it. My emotional instability across the entire week was compromised, but I continued that habit for years. I want to develop this thread here because I think it connects to the broader pattern of your question about commitment.
The addiction principle, as I have come to understand it, is universal. Every human being is addicted to something. The thing varies — alcohol, food, work, sex, attention, validation, control, fear, anger, distraction, the endless scroll of digital media — but the underlying structure is the same. There is a particular activity or substance or pattern of behavior that the flesh wants more than it should want, that produces a short-term reward at the cost of long-term integrity, and that the person engages repeatedly despite knowing that the engagement is costing him. The Christian tradition has been working on this pattern for two thousand years and has never claimed that human beings, in their natural state, can simply stop being addicted to whatever they are addicted to by an effort of will alone, but it does require commitment and will. The pattern requires what I call the pre-made response.
The pre-made response is the decision you make in advance about how you will respond when temptation arises. The decision is often made poorly in the moment of temptation. In that moment, the cognitive resources required to make the decision are overwhelmed by the flesh. The rationalization is fluent, the immediate appeal is overwhelming. The decision has to have been made beforehand, in a state of clarity, and carried into the moment of temptation as a settled commitment rather than an open question. No, I am not going to do that. I decided not to. I am not deciding now; I decided then. The decision stands.
I realized the two most dangerous moments for any addiction are the moment of pain and the moment of celebration. The moment of pain — the bad day, the relational rupture, the financial setback, the feeling of failure — produces the impulse to numb. The addictive substance is the available numbing agent. The moment of celebration — the good day, the success, the relational high — produces the impulse to amplify. The addictive substance is the available amplifier. Both moments require a pre-made response. The response is the same: no, I am not going to use the substance to numb the pain or amplify the joy; the substance is not going to be how I regulate life; I have decided this, and the decision stands. The pre-made response, the commitment, is what makes the difference between a person who is being lived by the addiction and a person who is living with the temptation, but handles it by simply saying no, rationalized by the refreshed commitment. And yes, “Just say no” is possible and necessary. Support and continued rationalization are necessary to support the commitment. The large perspective on the deep purpose of life helps us recognize how addiction plays into the fact of God’s experience of living through us. We are given freedom to choose, to modestly appreciate pleasure. “Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it.” Proverbs 25:16
Of course, the commitment to sobriety, moderation in pleasure, and proper time connects to the broader question of what to commit to and when. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1 The same structure that operates in the alcohol-addiction case operates in the searcher-finder case. The searcher’s moment of decision to commit is also a moment of temptation. He faces the temptation to keep the search open, to not commit, to imagine that the unsettled state is somehow safer than the committed state. Having committed to commit, the searcher girds himself with armor against the next temptation to continue the search as a seeker. The newly committed man must establish his defenses and prepare a pre-made response for the next moment, in which the reasoned response is always the same: no. I can explore, study, and learn, but now my search comes from a bastion of commitment, rather than the open fields of seeking.
We must live in the world. New ideas will continue to arise. Is this new argument a totally new perspective, never before considered? Compare it with the established commitment; does it stand up under all imaginable angles of attack? Ask for the support of your Christian brothers in meeting the objection. The seduction to leave the fortress of faith and brotherhood is real, but it should meet the same level of rigor as was applied in choosing your faith. Is this new perspective really truer and better? All such seductions should be met with the same cool reason and willingness to be proven wrong. Trust in the scholarship of the millennia of tradition, but remain open to being wrong, but not flighty. Approach all new offers to a new faith as seduction. The seeking is from the perspective of commitment, open but skeptical. The commitment stands; the response is that I am not returning to the position of an uncommitted seeker every time I hear a new opinion. I hear, I engage strongly, I defend with my best arguments, I understand the objections and new offer, and I continue to weigh the claims against those of my faith. I remain skeptical until time, counsel, and my heart have processed that opening thoroughly – rather than reopening the question every time the cultural air shifts, every time I encounter a new objection, or every time my own emotional state would prefer continued searching to commitment. Having explored, rationalized, and committed, the pre-made response makes the difference between a life that lives the commitment and a life that endlessly reconsiders and returns to foundational seeking without an anchor to stand upon.
Lest you think I am confusing commitment with stubbornness in the face of reality, please note that I think everyone must make an adult commitment to their religion. And everyone should be constantly testing the truth. Your birth religion does not determine its truth. You may have grown up on a metaphorical island, a monoculture that did not allow for comparison. As you grow up, expose yourself to new ideas, and continually test the rationality of your commitment. “…be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you…” 1 Peter 3:15. Does it meet the tests of freedom? “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free…” Galatians 5:1. Is your life showing fruit? “…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance…” Galatians 5:22–23. Be open to seeing the world through new eyes. Defend your commitment with honesty and rationality. If it is true, it will stand up against the temptation to worship false gods. “…above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.” Ephesians 6:16. Stand tall, be vulnerable, and be a champion. If you are convinced you are wrong after all, you have earned your right to change allegiance. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32.
VIII. Commitment under partial knowledge
The hardest version of the question is the worry that commitment under partial knowledge is itself a failure of intellectual integrity. If you do not know with certainty that the Bible is the word of God, that Christ rose from the dead, that the Christian framework closes the loop in ways the other frameworks do not, then how can you commit? Isn’t the honest position one of continued search until you find something that justifies commitment with certainty?
The Christian answer is that certainty in the deductive sense is not available for any of the deepest commitments human beings make, and that requiring it before committing is a recipe for never committing to anything. You cannot prove with deductive certainty that your wife loves you. You cannot prove that your closest friend would not betray you under sufficient pressure. You cannot prove that the basic structures of reality you depend on — that the sun will rise tomorrow, that your memory of the last hour corresponds to events that actually happened, that other people have the same kind of inner life that you do — are what you assume them to be. The argument from the requirement of certainty would, if pressed consistently, paralyze every commitment in your life. Nobody actually lives that way. Everybody commits to many things under partial knowledge. The question is not whether you will commit under partial knowledge. The question is what you will commit to.
The Christian framework, on inductive grounds, is the framework I commend to you as the framework most worth committing to. The argument is not that you should commit because committing is good in itself. The argument is that the Christian framework has the structural shape of being true: it closes the loop on the deepest questions in a way the other frameworks do not, it is historically anchored in events that the early witnesses were willing to die for, it has produced — across two thousand years of imperfect human implementation — more of the moral and cultural goods that make human life flourish than any other framework has produced, and it provides a stable reference frame from within which the depth of life can be seen. The argument is not deductive. It is the cumulative weight of converging considerations, none of which is conclusive on its own, all of which together produce the inductive case that commitment is the rational move.
Paul’s language for this, in Romans 5, is the language I want you to carry forward from this essay. We glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us (Romans 5:3-5). The Christian life is the long working-out of the commitment through the actual texture of a life — the falls, the rises, the cultural pressures, the personal failures, the unanswered questions, the seasons of certainty and the seasons of doubt — and what the working-out produces, by God’s grace, is character and hope. The hope is not ashamed because it is grounded in the love of God, which the Spirit has poured into the heart of the committed disciple. The commitment is what allows the working-out to proceed. Without the commitment, there are only the unsteady, random views through the unplanted telescope.
You know the material. You can articulate the objections better than most adult Christians can articulate their defense of the faith. What you lack is not knowledge. What you lack is the moment of commitment that turns the knowledge into a life direction. That moment is available whenever you are ready to take it. I am here when you want to talk it through further. The fellowship is here. Your father is here. Your mother is here. The conversation does not end when this essay ends. But the choice is yours. The fork in the road is the actual fork. Michael stayed on the path we were both on in High School and College, and, in the last 30 years, has produced the mandala, the detailed map of all of life’s roads. I chose a different path almost 40 years ago, developed Conscious Point Physics, which expands the first few verses of the Bible into millions of words, and spent 30 years as a counselor helping people make that choice. The choice is always available. “Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on.” (Led Zeppelin)
IX. Closing
And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.
— Romans 5:3-5
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
— 1 Corinthians 13:11-13
The second of these passages names the structural condition under which all human commitments are made. Now we see through a glass, darkly. The partial knowledge is the condition of being human in the present age. The full knowledge — face to face — is reserved for the age to come. Within the present age, what abides is faith, hope, and love. The three are not three different things; they are three aspects of the one committed life, in which faith is the trust that what cannot yet be fully seen will one day be seen in full, hope is the anticipation of that fullness, and love is the way the committed life is lived in the meantime. The greatest of the three is love because love is what the fullness will turn out to have been about all along.
The Christian life is the life lived in faith, hope, and love under the condition of partial knowledge, with the planted telescope fixed on the resurrection of Christ as the load-bearing fact from which the rest of reality can be located. The commitment is not made under conditions of certainty. The commitment is made under conditions of inductive sufficiency, with the trust that the one in whom it is made will, in His own time, complete what was promised. Romans 5 names the working-out. 1 Corinthians 13 names the epistemological frame within which the working-out occurs. Both apply to us all, and we pray, by God’s grace, for the entire course of our lives that it opens, matures, and bears the fruit of the spirit.
We are all in this together. We have a fellowship that loves each other. Your family loves you. That love is not conditional on your decision. But I would much rather you decide for the planted telescope of Biblical revelation than the unsteady one held by human reason and theory. I have seen both lives. The planted one is the one I commend to you. The commitment is yours to make.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38