Jesus is
The Truth, the wellspring and yardstick for all truth and the Creator of all
things both visible and invisible.
It follows
therefore, that when anyone reaches the very pinnacle of their particular
discipline they will find themselves looking into the face of Jesus.
Thus all disciplines,
whether Architecture, Medicine, Accounting, Psychology, History and all the
rest will ultimately be found to subsume seamlessly under His Lordship.
Theology is
indeed the ‘Queen of the Sciences,’ (though not many campuses would acknowledge
this in our day) and ‘The fear of God is the beginning of Wisdom.’
This is why
Scripture in employing metaphors to illustrate spiritual truths finds them
ready to hand in the fields of agriculture, medicine, biology, philosophy,
meteorology and many more.
Which leads
me to the discipline of Mathematics.
Could one
not find illustrations from mathematics which would bring to light spiritual
truths.
One could
call this synthesis of Theology and Mathematics, “Theomatics.”
Well that
rolls off the tongue quite nicely, but it would need to include some real arithmetic
anomalies.
For example
the Marriage Institution which declares that “—the two shall become one flesh.”
Would have to be rendered, 1 + 1 = 1
And the
doctrine of the Trinity would need to be, 1 + 1 + 1 = 1
This really
doesn’t look like a promising line of theological exploration.
However,
The square root of minus one is an intriguing mathematical concept which might
just come to our aid in helping us get our heads around some Biblical Brain
teasers.
Most people
know that if you multiply +1 by itself you will get +1
And if you
multiply –1 by itself you will also get +1
So the
square root of +1 (√1) could be either +1 or –1
So what
then is the square root of –1 (√-1) ?
Clearly it
can’t be either +1 or –1
The mind
does a back flip in trying to visualise the answer.
For this
reason this was sometimes termed an imaginary number until
mathematicians objected to this term pointing out that although difficult to
conceptualise it was not only real but very useful and effective in certain
applications.
Thus the
square root of –1 became abbreviated to the symbol i and it
is termed not an imaginary number but a complex number.
It is used
extensively in vector arithmetic.
We must
explain that unlike a number which has only magnitude, a vector is an entity
which has both magnitude and orientation.
Now what is
noteworthy, is that if a vector is multiplied by i that is the square root of minus
one, it has the effect of swinging that vector through 90 degrees without
altering its magnitude.
Thus, if a
certain vector of say 1 metre in length and lying in a horizontal plane, was
initially oriented to point North, after multiplying it by i it would point East. Multiply it by i again and it will now point South
and so on.
How might
this help our understanding of ‘Faith’:
Scripture
states that, “—God has given to every man a measure of faith.” (Rom. 12. 3)
Thus from
this text, faith is a gift from God for which man can claim no merit.
Yet Hebrews
11 verse 6 declares that, “—without faith it is impossible to please Him.”
Here,
clearly God is pleased when we exercise faith, for it would make no sense for
God to be pleased with a gift He had given with no activity on man’s part.
Also Jesus
commends the centurion for his great faith and upbraids the disciples for their
‘little faith’
Ephesians
2.8 reads: For by grace we are saved through faith, not of yourselves it is a
gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast.
Herein lies
the tension between Calvin and Arminius:
The pure
Reformed position would be that both the grace and the faith with which the
grace is appropriated are gifts of God, for if faith must be exercised with
volition by man then it becomes a work and man may claim merit for it and we
know no merit can attach to man in respect of his salvation.
To
Arminius, the grace is the gift, but it must be appropriated by the exercise of
our faith, but the objection remains that if volition is employed in such
exercise, this becomes a meritorious work.
But what if
faith is a complex concept, neither work nor gift or perhaps both at the
same time, just as the square root of minus one is a complex number whose
answer is neither +1 or –1 or perhaps both at the same time.
So complex
is the relationship between gift and works in the entity called faith that it
defies conceptualization.
Yet
difficult as it is to conceive, its effects are abundantly manifest for it can
change the orientation of a person.
Thus a
person coming to faith in Christ will experience a change of orientation – once
hell-bound he is now Heaven-bound, once afar off, he is now brought near by the
blood of Christ.
This might
help explain Jesus imperative to Nicodemus, “You must be born again,” while
shortly afterwards he declares that the wind (that is the Spirit) blows where
He wills: quite unpredictable and beyond man’s control.
In future
when one encounters a conundrum like this in Scripture, one need simply say,
“Ah well, it’s just like the square root of minus one, - incomprehensible but
effective.”
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