So, I have a blog. Despite much encouragement/badgering from friends, I have long been wary of blogging. Not that I’m wary of the practice in general, but specifically concerned about it for me. I have noticed in myself over the last few years a growing obsession with documentation. Since high school, I have had a strong interest in audio recording. As a musician, I think this appeals to me because of its ability to capture something so fleeting: a musical performance. But, as anyone who has ever done any audio recording (or work in photography, film, etc.) should know, the performance isn’t really captured. And I don’t mean to refer here to technical limitations and their expensive solutions (though certainly, I spend plenty of my time lustfully pouring over gear catalogs). The fact is that the performance, even if perfectly reproduced, is not what you want to preserve. It is the experience of the performance. It’s the thoughts and emotions that ran through your mind and body when the original performance happened. What we really want to preserve is an experience.
I’m convinced that the same can be true of just about anything that’s important to us. As a Christian and a theological student, that which is most important to me—that which I most want to preserve—is knowledge of God. Yet, I am increasingly convinced that the theological “knowledge” or “truth” that I’ve encountered doesn’t really stay with me. It’s not something I can possess, hold, store for later. As an evangelical Christian I’ve been trained to say that “truth is a person”—Jesus, and perhaps this is part of the problem here. If truth is a Person, just as much if truth were a musical performance, that Person is to me only as I experience Him. And experience is, as I’m learning, impossible to document.
Of course, all this has been said before, most recently in my thought life by Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian whose favorite word, it seems, is “event.” Revelation is an event, the Word of God is an event. Knowledge is not proposition, but rather something that happens. So why write papers, articles, books, blogs? At best, like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs, a text can point us to where the experience can be had. It can lead us back to that mental/emotional/spiritual state. It can remind us of the tastes, smells, sights, sounds of the experience. But it cannot be the experience itself. (And, like Barth, I would say the same even for the Bible, which is a text, as opposed to the Word of God, which is an event of revelation.)
This is all well and good, certainly texts of this kind have their place. This summer we’ll be recording a CD with the church worship team that will hopefully serve as a pointing text for our community, to encourage us to seek again that place in worship where we experience God’s presence. Fine. But even if one recognizes the limitations of texts, text-making still has its problems.
The one that I see as most problematic in my life is the why that text-making interrupts and short-circuits experience. I’m in the middle of reading my Bible, God is taking that text and in that moment making it His Word to me. In that moment of revelation, I suddenly have this impulse to leave and go write down what it is God is saying to me. But it never comes out right. It sounds simplistic and obvious; the profundity of the utterance is lost when it is removed from the revelatory experience. And even if that weren’t the case, the fact is that the experience has ended, I have closed myself to the rest of the revelation event because I wanted to go write it down.
Another set of problems centers around the problem of crystallization. The text-making process takes one experience and standardizes it. Some of the lowest moments of my spiritual life have been spent longing for the times in my life when I remember experiencing God’s presence. Sure, there’s a purpose for remembering, but when remembrance goes without expectation, I end up with nostalgia that rots my spiritual life. Crystallization also makes one think that knowledge is something you can possess, most dangerously, you can even convince yourself that you possess knowledge of God (or even God Himself?). Divinity School has brought this problem to my attention more often than I’d like to admit. The tell-tale sign for me is when I find myself vehemently defending positions simply because I’m on record (even if only in my own mind) as having held them. The distilled “facts” gleaned from a revelatory experience become idols that prevent me from hearing something new and different from God.
So, that’s why I don’t want a blog. I suppose my reasons for wanting a blog have also trickled their way out in this post; I admit I’m still not sure it’s a great idea. But here it is anyway. Maybe this will serve as a big first-post disclaimer.