The Swiss-Italian Tunnel Solution
Today, Rogation Day, a reading was from Revelation 21, and its luminous vision of the Kingdom of God. It is where we hope we are headed. There the Lamb, Jesus Christ, is Himself the Light in which see everything else, especially the healing of the nations in the new city, Jerusalem.
But how do human beings as they feel their way, as they seek, come to believe it to be so? How do they get from this very-much-not-heavenly here to there?
I had an 11th grade math teacher who taught what he called the ‘Swiss-Italian Tunnel Method.’ For sometimes you should work the equation on from its starting point, and at the same time back from the known end-point. And the two could meet in the middle. The engineers did something similar in digging a tunnel under the Alps; they started from either side and were accurate enough in their measurements to meet in the middle.
Something similar is true where evangelism (announcing the Gospel), apologetics (defending it), and doctrine (explicating it) meet. For the truth is that ‘you can’t get there from here.’ The yearnings of the human heart alone will not get you to a 1st century rabbi and his murder by the Romans as the solution to our predicament. But what we can do is this. We can begin with those yearnings, tracings, inklings, intimations. We can follow them out, as far as they will go. And from the ‘other side’ we can understand that final beatific vision, and understand it to be what we are after, though as yet unbeknownst to us. ‘Pluralism’? It is the nations finding healing in the leaves of the tree of life. The meaning of suffering? They are gathered around the Lamb. The labyrinth of ideas? Our minds have to be illumined by the ‘Light in which we see light.’
Sometimes we stop short. From the side of liberal theologies we suppose the inklings are all there are. And from the traditional side, we might assert the vision as truth and have an end of it. But the digging from our side is salutary too, and in a myriad of ways, conversion occurs at the point where both excavations meet.
Peace,
+GRS
