I Cannot Get Back To The Simple Version

At twenty-two he could say the whole thing in one sentence and he meant every word of it.

He is forty-one now and he cannot.

Not because it stopped being true. Because he has since read about eleven thousand pages, and he now knows, for every clause in that sentence, roughly who disputes it, on what grounds, how strong the grounds are and where the honest weak points sit.

Some of it holds up better than he expected. He would say that first, and he says it often, and it is not a consolation, it is a finding.

Some of it is genuinely open. Not fatally, not fashionably, actually open, in the way things are open when serious people who are not fools disagree in print and both sides have real reasons.

And here is what nobody warned him about.

He misses the sentence.

Not the ignorance. He would not go back and he would not want to and he is entirely honest about that. He misses being able to hand somebody a clean thing in eight seconds, at a bus stop, without a footnote.

Somebody asked him something simple in a corridor last month and he heard himself say well, that depends what you mean by, and he watched the person's face do the small polite thing it does, and he went home and felt about seventy years old.

The line is drawn on purpose

Let me be precise about what you are grieving, because precision is your language and vagueness would be no comfort to you at all.

You are not grieving certainty. You still have a great deal of it and you could list it.

You are grieving the ability to speak without qualifying, which is a social loss rather than an epistemic one, and you have been experiencing it as though your faith had thinned when in fact your vocabulary has thickened.

Those are different injuries and only one of them is real.

Now hear this and take it as settled rather than as consolation: the existence of a hidden portion is not a defect in the arrangement, and there is a verse that draws the line explicitly and assigns each side. That is not sentiment, it is what stands written at the end of the twenty-ninth chapter of Deuteronomy, and the same Holy Spirit who has been with you through eleven thousand pages is walking that street with you.

Read the structure of it. It is built as a division.

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.Deuteronomy 29:29

The secret things belong to the Lord our God.

That is not an apology for a gap in the data. It is a property assignment. There is a portion that is His, and it is described as belonging to Him, which means its inaccessibility is a feature of ownership and not a failure of disclosure.

But the things revealed belong to us. Also ownership. Also permanent. And note what it is for: not so that we may have a complete account, but that we may follow.

The verse is not embarrassed by the division. It writes it down as the shape of the thing.

So take this now rather than after the field settles: the open questions do not sit on top of your faith, because the written word assigns a hidden portion to God as His own property and gives the revealed portion to us to walk on, and the Spirit of God has been with you through every one of those eleven thousand pages without once being threatened by them.

And I will guard it, because this verse gets abused in both directions.

Nothing here says call every difficult thing a secret thing and stop working. That is laziness wearing a verse, and you would spot it in a student in four seconds.

And nothing here permits the opposite: presenting what is contested as though it were settled, or a disputed reading as though the field agreed, because that buys a clean sentence at a bus stop with somebody else's future disillusionment.

What is written simply draws the line and hands us the near side, and the Holy Spirit leads into truth at the pace of a walk.