Counting Sparrows and Building on Sand

It is better, then, and more useful to belong among the simple and unlettered, and by love to come near to God, than to imagine ourselves learned and expert and be found blasphemers of our own God — since these people conjure up another God as Father. This is why Paul cried out, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” He did not mean to attack a true knowledge of God; if he had, he would have been accusing himself. But he knew that some, swollen with the pretense of knowledge, fall away from the love of God and imagine that they themselves are perfect, and that this is why they put forward an imperfect Creator. So, to put an end to the pride they take in knowledge of that kind, he says, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” [a]

There can be no greater conceit than for a man to imagine that he is better and more perfect than the One who made him and shaped him, who gave him the breath of life, and who commanded this very thing to be. It is better, as I have said, to know nothing whatever — not one reason why a single thing in creation was made — and to believe in God and remain in his love, than to be swollen with knowledge of that kind and fall away from the love which is the life of man. Better to look for no knowledge except the knowledge of Jesus Christ the Son of God, who was crucified for us, than by subtle questions and hair-splitting phrases to fall into godlessness.

Think what it would come to if someone, gradually puffed up by attempts of that kind, took the Lord’s words “even the hairs of your head are all numbered” and set about inquiring into the number of hairs on each person’s head. Suppose he tried to work out why one man has so many and another so many, since they do not all have an equal number, but thousands upon thousands are found with different numbers — because some have larger heads and others smaller, some thick hair, others thin, and others scarcely any hair at all. And then suppose the men who imagine they have discovered the number of hairs went on to use that discovery to recommend their own sect.

Or take the saying that occurs in the Gospel: “Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin? And not one of them falls to the ground without the will of your Father.” Suppose someone took that as an occasion to count up the sparrows caught each day, whether over the whole world or in one district, and to inquire why so many were taken yesterday, so many the day before, and so many again today, and then attached the number of sparrows to his own theory. Would he not be misleading himself completely, and driving those who agreed with him into sheer insanity? For in matters like these men are always eager to be thought to have discovered something more extraordinary than their teachers.

Now suppose someone asks us whether God knows the number of every single thing that has been made and is being made, and whether every one of those numbers has received, by his providence, the exact amount it contains. We agree that it is so. We acknowledge that not one of the things that have been made, or are being made, or will be made escapes the knowledge of God; that through his providence every one of them has received its nature, its rank, its number, and its own quantity; that nothing at all has been produced or is produced pointlessly or by accident, but everything with exact fitness for its purpose and in the exercise of a surpassing knowledge; and that it was an admirable and truly divine reason that could both distinguish the proper causes of such a system and bring them out.

But suppose that, having won our agreement and consent to this, the man went on to count the sand and the pebbles of the earth, and the waves of the sea as well, and the stars of the sky, and tried to think out the causes of the number he imagined he had found. Would his labor not be wasted? Would not everyone with common sense be right to call him mad and out of his senses? And the more he busies himself with questions of this kind beyond other people, and the more he imagines he is finding out beyond other people — calling them unskilled, ignorant, mere creatures of soul, because they will not take up his useless labor — the more insane he is, and foolish, and thunderstruck. For at no single point does he own himself inferior to God. By the knowledge he imagines he has discovered, he alters God himself, and lifts his own opinion above the greatness of the Creator.

A sound mind — one that puts its owner in no danger, and is devoted to God and to the love of truth — will gladly give its attention to the things God has placed within human reach and made subject to our knowledge, and will make progress in them, daily study making them easy. These are the things that lie plainly open to our observation and are set out clearly and unambiguously, in so many words, in the Sacred Scriptures. And so the parables should not be fitted to expressions that are ambiguous. If that rule is kept, the man who explains them will explain without danger, the parables will receive the same interpretation from everyone, and the body of truth stays whole, its parts fitting together in harmony with nothing in it colliding with anything else. But to take expressions that are not clear or obvious and use them to interpret the parables — each man discovering whatever his own inclination leads him to — is absurd. On that method no one will hold the rule of truth. There will be as many systems of truth as there are people explaining the parables, and they will stand against one another and put forward contradictory teachings, like the questions in fashion among the pagan philosophers. [g]

By this way of proceeding a man will always be inquiring and never finding, because he has thrown away the very method of discovery. And when the Bridegroom comes, the man whose lamp is untrimmed and is not burning with a steady bright flame is counted among those who darken the interpretations of the parables. He has abandoned the One who by plain announcements gives freely to everyone who comes to him, and he is shut out of the wedding chamber.

The Scriptures as a whole, then — the prophets and the Gospels — can be understood by everyone clearly, unambiguously, and consistently, even though not everyone believes them. They proclaim one God only, and no other, who formed all things by his Word, visible and invisible, heavenly and earthly, in the water and under the earth, as I have shown from the very words of Scripture. And the very system of creation to which we belong testifies, by what falls under our notice, that one Being made it and governs it. So the people who shut their eyes to a demonstration as clear as this, and will not look at the light of the announcement made to them, will show themselves truly foolish. They put chains on themselves; and every one of them, by his obscure interpretations of the parables, imagines he has found out a God of his own.

For there is nothing at all said openly, expressly, and beyond dispute in any part of Scripture about the Father these men have thought up — and they testify to that themselves, when they maintain that the Savior taught these same things privately, not to everyone, but only to certain of his disciples who were able to take them in and who understood what he meant by arguments, riddles, and parables. In the end it comes to this: they maintain that there is one being who is proclaimed as God, and another as Father, the one who is presented through parables and riddles.

But since parables admit of many interpretations, what lover of truth will not admit this? To assert that God is to be searched out from the parables, while deserting what is certain, beyond doubt, and true, is the behavior of men who throw themselves eagerly into danger and act as though they had no reason at all. Is it not the same as building one’s house, not on the rock — firm, strong, and standing in the open — but on shifting sand? A building like that is easily brought down.