We take for granted at this late evening of Enlightenment’s day that truth is to be discovered by the earnest, individual seeker. Nothing stands above his range of movement as independent investigator, no truth looms larger than he, no calculation of danger is to be admitted.
The pastoral instinct must sometimes resist this jousting at objectivity. To ‘run ahead’ when sacred things are in the mix is not always an enviable task nor a good one. Not infrequently it’s potential damage to the community must first be sketched out on a napkin. Sometimes preemptive restraint is wiser than the intoxication of head-strong speculation.
Watch out that you do not lose what you have worked for, but that you may be rewarded fully. Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God; whoever continues in the teaching has both the Father and the Son.
The Johannine vocabulary lays ‘running ahead’ beside ‘not continuing in the teaching of Christ’ as approximate synonyms.
The first touches more upon the impulse that drives unrestrained speculative inquiry, the latter its lamentable outcome.
It is not easy in our day to know just where self-restraint and even communal prohibition against the departure from received truth into speculative imagination ought to be summoned up as something other than suffocating fearfulness.
Yet surely that point exists.
Truth grows from a communitarian seedbed. That origin hardly fixes all the answers before time has been allowed for the questions to emerge. Yet it alerts to lethal danger in trajectories that lead from fertile soil towards a lifeless desert. ‘Don’t go there’, it says with understated resolution, ‘and, if you do, take no one with you’.
Canter Bridge 
Leave a Reply