KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 23 January
This beginning of signs
The story of Jesus teaching in the Temple at the age of twelve is complemented by the story of the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee. Both are epiphanies of the divinity of Christ; the one about divine wisdom, the other about divine power. The order is significant and speaks directly to our contemporary confusions in which reason or knowledge is subordinate to power. Human reason and power are finite and limited, on the one hand, and deficient and flawed, on the other hand. To know this is wisdom.
The deep lessons of the Epiphany are very much about what God seeks for our humanity. What is the purpose or end of our being and existence? Do we presume to think that human reason on its own power is sufficient to achieve human perfection? Or are we able to recognize the limits of our knowing and the problems of our doing? The questions are not simply rhetorical.
Wisdom and power are complementary divine attributes; properties of God made manifest in Jesus Christ in the Christian understanding. Such attributes of divinity are recognized in the other religions and philosophies of the world, albeit with differences of emphasis about the relation of wisdom and power.
In our contemporary global world, the technocratic reason that dominates our culture is very much about the subordination of reason to power. There is, however, no wisdom where reason is reduced to a tool or instrument of domination. These stories offer a corrective and a counter to our assumptions about power achieved through technology, a power which compromises the integrity of our humanity by reducing human thinking to thinking like a machine or to being “organic algorithms” as Yuval Noah Harari imagines. Greg Lukianoff’s and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind, Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home, James Bridle’s New Dark Age, Emerson T. Brooking’s and P.W. Singer’s Likewar, and Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now are but a few of a great and growing number of books and from a range of perspectives that highlight the problems of our over-dependence and uncritical relation to the digital world.