L'Abri 101: The Humanness of Spirituality - Greg Jesson & Jock McGregor - L'Abri Rochester Fridays

L'Abri 101: The Humanness of Spirituality

 

(Lecture Syllabus follows the Blurb.)

This Summer we are trying something new!

We are beginning our Summer series of lectures with a short five-week course on the essentials of L'Abri teaching, what we sometimes refer to as the 'Five Themes of L'Abri'. Each Friday, Greg Jesson and Jock McGregor will co-teach one of these themes. For those of you who have wondered about what makes L'Abri's teaching distinctive or who want to learn more, this will be a good opportunity. Each lecture is stand alone, but if you can attend all five lectures that make up this short course, that would be best. This week we continue with our fourth theme, which looks at the area of Spirituality - Dr. Schaeffer felt that the traditional Sacred/Secular divide was misguided and that True Spirituality, rooted in the finished work of Christ, should cover all of life - and to be truly Spiritual is to be fully Human.

 

Greg Jesson's journey from Los Angeles took him to Switzerland, where he studied at L'Abri with Francis Schaeffer, back to LA where he earned a BA at UCLA and an MA at USC under Dallas Willard, and finally to the University of Iowa for a Ph.D. in philosophy. Most recently, he was a professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Ethics and Public Life at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Having decided to leave the university, he now spends his time writing, lecturing, restoring an old home, and looking after his dog, Dr. Watson.

 

Jock McGregor and his wife Alison direct the Rochester L'Abri where they have lived for the past 25 years. They met at Swiss L'Abri and previously worked at English L'Abri for ten years. Jock has a B.Sc. and an M.Div from Regent College in Vancouver. He lectures widely on many topics that bear on the relationship between Christianity and contemporary culture.

 

 

\/ \/ Greg's Lecture Handout Below \/ \/

 

Pondering the Five Themes of L’Abri: #4: The Humanness of Spirituality

Dr. Greg Jesson

gregrjesson@gmail.com

 

Without revelation from God (general and special) we can’t know what is objectively moral

Without revelation from God (general and special) we can’t know what is objectively normal

(Here, normal does not mean common; it is closer to the ideal. It’s normative. Normal blood pressure does not mean common blood pressure.)

 

This is really the question “Is there an objective human nature?”

 

Humans are in a large part self-determining: this requires that humans are not entirely mechanisms

Story of turtle and scorpion at a river

 

Progression of changing oneself:

A Feeling

A Thought

A Wish

A Dream

A Hope

A Plan

A Detailed Course of Action

An Act

 

“In the eighteenth century, the atheism of the philosophes discarded the idea of God, but not so much for the notion that essence precedes existence. To a certain extent, this idea is found everywhere…man has a human nature…each man is a particular example of a universal concept, man.

Atheistic existentialism, which I represent, is more coherent. It states that if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept…It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself…Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it…man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.

The existentialist…thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him…That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.”

Existentialism and Human Emotions by Jean-Paul Sartre, pp. 14-15, 22.

 

Your life as a pilgrimage:

“Midway on our life’s journey I found myself in a dark wood.” Dante, Divine Comedy.

Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, etc., etc.

 

Notice that there are only two options to find the standard of what is normal:

1. Inside oneself—for most nothing is more obvious

But, it is obviously wrong.

Why do my personal valuations have any authority, or claim of objectivity, besides the fact that my valuations are, by definition, mine?

2. Outside of oneself

This just opens one up to all the craziness of the world—we could list the destructive alternatives for hours.

 

The key to all of life is a rejection of God and God’s ways.

What we see in the world today is not only the rejection of God, but the rejection of the image of God.

Consequently, people are nothing and have no real value.

And then, completely predictably, nothing in life has objective value.

Sartre: “Hell is other people.” No Exit

 

Biblical spirituality can only be considered in the full context of what Christianity actually is:

(true, the reality of the supernatural, living in the shadow of the Fall)

The Tradition of the “Inner Emptiness” of the Self

Colin McGinn, The Character of the Mind:

“The idea of a peculiarly mental substance, when you think about it, is extremely weird. It is quite unclear that there is any intelligible conception associated with the words ‘immaterial substance.’ The alleged substance tends to get characterized purely negatively. We are prone to picture it in imagination as an especially ethereal or attenuated kind of matter. Stuff of the rarified sort we imagine the bodies of ghosts to be made of, the kind of stuff a hand could pass without disturbance.” p. 23

 

Myth has the power to make us say things that probably nobody believes

Beware of philosophers bearing stories: instead of “long ago and far away”, “we are prone to believe”

Arrogance and ignorance walk hand in hand.

 

So that when we come to Hume, we have the famous statements:

“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.” A Treatise of Human Nature, Selby-Bigge edition, p. 252.

 

“When I turn my reflection on myself, I never can perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive anything but the perceptions. ’Tis’ the composition [the bundle] of these, therefore, which forms the self.” p. 634.

 

“Philosophers began to be reconcil’d to the principle, that we have no idea of external [physical] substance, distinct from the ideas of particular qualities. This must pave the way for a like principle with regard to the mind, that we have no notion of it, distinct from the particular perceptions.” p. 635.

 

In the chapter on Personal Identity of the same book, (Book I of the Treatise) he says:

 

“The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations….” p. 253.

 

G.E. Moore: “Refutation of Idealism”:

“The term ‘blue’ is easy enough to distinguish, but the other element which I have called ‘consciousness’—that which sensation of blue has in common with sensation of green—is extremely difficult to fix. That many people fail to distinguish it at all is sufficiently shown by the fact that there are materialists.

And, in general, that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact seems to escape us: it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparent—we look through it and see nothing but the blue.” (p. 20)

…the moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish: it seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness.” p. 25.

 

These statements stand in a long tradition; maybe a mistaken tradition.

The self (person, mind, soul) is nothing. What is real are perceptions or mere physical objects.

 

Colin McGinn:

1. The relation of consciousness to its objects is peculiarly palpable and diaphanous.

2. Therefore, all you come across in introspection are the objects of consciousness, not consciousness itself.

 

G.E. Moore:

1. Consciousness is “transparent”, a “mere emptiness”

 

David Hume:

1. It’s impossible to perceive anything except perceptions.

2. Therefore, I never have a perception of myself or the world.

But, isn’t this a claim about oneself?

 

But if that is all you come across, you could never know that you are conscious, or that you are introspecting, and you would not know that consciousness is palpable and diaphanous, and you would not know that it is a pure directedness to things other than itself.

 

But, if it is a pure directedness, that is precisely a determinate nature and not an inner emptiness at all. If this is so, then apart from general problems about substances and qualities, there does not seem to be any reason why these pure directednesses could not come together to form substances quite as well as the determinate natures that come together to form physical substances do.

 

Ultimately, everything is weird. That is part of what it means to be ultimate. If you ever get down to what is ultimate about matter you are going to discover that matter is just as weird as anything you can think of.

 

Non-weird is always against a background of assumed regularities.

Why is my dog’s nose always cold?

 

If you lose the background, which is what happens when you get to what is ultimate then everything is weird.

 

How could Hume know that he had entered into himself?

Like the man who goes outside of his house and looks in the window to see if he is home.

 

A complete confusion between the Perception of the object and the Object of Perception.

Hume turns everything into a perception.

But, who is having the perceptions? If nobody, why call them perceptions?

 

Something profoundly wrong here.

 

Common experience needs to be weighed against the claim that there is just an inner emptiness. Nothing then over and against that the almost inexhaustible supply of what we experience

 

The fundamental feature of the mind: Intentionality: ofness or “aboutness”

Reveals an unfathomable rich and varied reality

“Outside of God the biggest thing in the universe is the human soul (mind).”

 

If it escapes us, how do we even begin to talk about it?

 

If we see nothing, how do we know that we are looking through it?

 

 

How do you feel? We abbreviate—“fine.”

Never could fully express everything you experience through a day in terms of your feelings. Does that sound like an inner emptiness?

 

Optometrist—we report what we experience, not what is on the wall chart

 

The idea of an inner emptiness is an absurd contrivance of a view of mind that is based on the mythology of empiricism—the idea that all knowledge must come by means of sense perception (things we see, smell, taste, touch, and hear).

 

The most important things in life are not given through sense perception (mind, character, God, morality, etc.), but that is just tough for empiricism.

 

The inner emptiness line cannot account for what we actually know about the flow of reality that makes up our own lives. Empiricism is an utterly bankrupt theory of knowledge.

 

 

The Contours of the Soul: Phenomenology: a study of the entire interior life, a study of the structures of experience

1. feelings: bodily, mental, memories, sensations (feelings are loaded with life), emotions

2. acts of thought

3. acts of knowledge

4. acts of will, choices

5. rationality, inference, deriving other beliefs on the basis of what you know, if this is true then that is true

6. attitudes, preferences, orientations (Republicans, Democrats, collectors)

7. habits, dispositions

8. dreams and fantasies

9. character traits, deep-seated purposes, honesty, deceitfulness, malice, bodies of knowledge

10. states of being: being rational, being faithful, being courageous, being moral, being an American, being a skeptic, being an educated person, being Norwegian, being a follower of Jesus, etc.

11. creativity

12. aesthetical judgments

13. moral judgments

14. Comfort level, extrovert, introvert

 

Connection between the Creation of man, the Incarnation, and Christian spirituality

The person of Jesus is the central figure in each of these.

 

The whole of life is a creative act, and each life is a continual process of creativity beginning to end—with or without the involvement of God.

 

 

Practical Implications of the Humanness of Spirituality:

As we have stressed in each lecture, the identity of L’Abri is not exhausted merely by a set of ideas—even though those ideas are true. At the heart of Francis Schaeffer’s case for Christianity is the claim that ideas which are not being lived out are not really being believed. What we merely profess and what we actually believe are two different things. Schaeffer stressed the necessity of living consistently with what one claims is true, otherwise we are deceiving ourselves, which is hardly a life of integrity. So, what are some of the practical results of viewing the recovery of our God-given humanity as the essence of genuine spirituality?

 

1. Genuine spirituality is about more than the forgiveness of sins; it’s about God’s rigorous process of inner transformation as one is being conformed to the character of Jesus Christ.

2. Every person you ever meet has had struggles and disappointments as they have been living in the brokenness of the Fall.

3. In all our associations in life we are given the opportunity to treat each person with “grace and truth” (John 1. 14-17). This is how Jesus lived His life.

4. Life is filled with superb opportunities to minister to others and to learn in discipleship to Christ what true fulfillment, joy, and the meaning of life are.

5. Genuine spirituality is not about fancy rituals or non-propositional, meditative experiences, but follows the teachings of Jesus as he lived in the common everyday world. This Biblical spiritual life is necessarily connected with the creation, incarnation, and God’s revelation in history, which propositionally reveals God’s plan of salvation once humanity has gone off the rails. This is the only way for humanity to have a rational and loving relationship with God.

6. Christianity is a divine invitation to live our lives with God as He progressively transforms our character to be increasingly like that of Jesus.

7. Discover and cultivate the unique God-given contours of your soul in order to bring God’s healing grace and truth to those in your world. As Dallas Willard put it, “What are you planning to do with your life that will bring about results of eternal value?”

 

 

For Further Study:

Being Human: The Nature of Spiritual Experience by Ranald Macaulay and Jerram Barrs

L’Abri, Hidden Art by Edith Schaeffer

The New Super Spirituality by Francis Schaeffer

“The Emotional Life of Our Lord” by B.B. Warfield in Biblical and Theological Studies

Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ by Dallas Willard

“The Thought” by Gottlob Frege, start 12 pages in with paragraph that begins with, “A person who is still untouched by philosophy knows first of all things he can see and touch, in short perceive with the senses…”

The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism by J.P. Moreland