Letter #175: The Worldly Mind

Do We Believe or Not?

To Our Readers: This is our last email of the year. Tomorrow I’ll post one more List entry for paid subscribers, then Spencer and I will begin our Christmas vacations.

Speaking for both of us: Thank you for reading and supporting The New Jerusalem. It’s been our great pleasure to share these conversations and essays with you and we hope they will play their little part in the coming renewal of Christian faith. That renewal is in a race with a humanity-altering technology — technology that will put a new face on the old Deuteronomic choice between life and death, blessing and curse. We believe that only those living in the knowledge of God will know how to choose life.

For both Spencer and me, writing this Substack has been a startling experience. These letters have sometimes seemed to speak even to us with a voice that is more than our own. That said, keeping the site going was a tremendous amount of work in a year when the two of us produced four books, two podcasts, and a seemingly endless stream of satires, articles and commentary. We are discussing ways to better serve our paying subscribers, but in the meantime, we hope those of you who can will consider a paid subscription so we can keep the conversation going and give the site the attention it needs.

We enter Christmas discussing whether or not the modern West has lost its ability to see or speak about the invisible truths of the spirit. Let me conclude, then, by reminding you of the great catechism between Jacob Marley and Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ deathless A Christmas Carol.

Unlike the spirits of Christmas that will visit Scrooge later, Marley is a ghost, an eternal spirit suffering purgatorial punishment for his earthly sins.

When Scrooge regards his presence with scepticism, Marley asks: “Why do you doubt your senses?”

“Because a little thing affects them,” replies Scrooge with perfect materialist logic. “A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats.”

At this, the ghost lets out “a frightful cry,” that leaves Scrooge faint with horror.

“Man of the worldly mind!” Marley demands. “Do you believe in me or not?”

That, finally, is the question before us all. Do we think the soul Christ came to save is a figment of our inner constitution, a delusion of our longings, or a mirage of our collective unconscious? Or do we have faith that, invisible though it is, it is as real as reality, an objective fact even if it takes its shape through our subjective perception?

Such faith — the evidence of things not seen — is counted to us as righteousness precisely because it makes the invisible manifest, and boldly declares the truth of eternity.

On Christmas, the God who made us in his image sets himself before us in the image he has made.

Men and women of the worldly mind, do we believe in him or not?

Merry Christmas from The New Jerusalem.