The Argument He Put Down

He was, for about nine years, extremely good at it.

Not in a shouting way. He was the quiet one at the end of the table who would ask a question that did not sound like anything and then ask a second one, and by the third the other man would have discovered a problem in his own position that he had not seen before.

He knew the passages in the original where it mattered. He knew which arguments rested on a translation choice and which did not. He had read the serious people on every side and could produce the strongest version of each, which is a discipline he learned early and kept, and it is the reason he usually won.

He stopped about two years ago.

Not by deciding. He noticed at some point that a conversation had gone past him at a dinner and he had said nothing, and then it happened again, and then he realized he had not entered one in months.

He is not sure what that is.

There is a version of it that is maturity. A man sees that the whole territory is a place where God did not give an answer, and he steps out of it, and that is not cowardice, that is proportion.

And there is a version of it that is defeat. A man gets tired, or gets bored, or quietly stops believing that any of it matters, and calls the stopping wisdom because that sounds better than the alternative.

He genuinely does not know which one he is, and he is not going to be able to find out by thinking about it, which he has established thoroughly.

Sit down. There is a verse that names the shape of the whole territory and it does not settle any argument in it.

Higher than yours

Here it is, and it is not a rebuke of thinking.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.Isaiah 55:8

This gets used to shut people up and that is a misuse of it. Read what it is doing in its own context, which is an invitation. It comes in the middle of a passage calling everybody who is thirsty to come and take freely, and the point of the comparison is generosity rather than obscurity: His way of forgiving is higher than yours, and larger than you would have designed.

But it does say the thing it says, and the height is real, and it means there are territories where the difference in altitude is the operative fact.

The timing of that day is one of them. Nobody was given it. Not the angels, and by His own statement not the Son. Which means every position in the argument you were winning was constructed on the ground rather than received from above.

You have not lost anything by stepping out of it. Isaiah 55:8 puts a real distance between His thoughts and ours, and the Spirit inspired that in the middle of an invitation rather than in the middle of a rebuke.

Which one it is

Now the actual question, because you asked it honestly and it deserves an honest method rather than a flattering answer.

The difference between maturity and drift cannot be established by introspection. That was rightly noticed, and most people never work it out. Both of them feel the same from the inside, which is: quiet.

What does distinguish them is not a feeling, it is a direction. Maturity stops one thing and starts another. Drift stops one thing and does not.

So the diagnostic is not the silence at dinner tables. It is whether anything has grown in the space. Are you praying more or less than three years ago. Is there anybody you are actually shepherding. Has anything got warmer, or has it only got quieter.

That is answerable, and it does not require you to interrogate your own motives, which is the loop the last two years have been spent in. Nothing written anywhere asked a man to reach a verdict on his own interior, and the Spirit searches a heart that its owner cannot read.

You are not disqualified by the ambiguity. Nothing written anywhere requires a man to be certain about his own interior state, and the Spirit is described as searching the heart rather than as leaving a man to audit his own.

What the nine years were worth

Here is something that has not been said to you and should be.

Those nine years were not wasted and the skill was not a vice. A man who can produce the strongest version of the other position is a man who has done something genuinely difficult and rare, and it is a discipline of love as much as of intellect, whatever it was being spent on.

The problem was never the ability. It was the subject. That particular argument is unwinnable in principle rather than in practice, because there is no evidence that settles it, which is why it has run for two thousand years among people cleverer than everybody at your dinner table.

What can happen now is that the same skill goes somewhere it can actually resolve something. There are questions where careful reading does settle matters, and where the person opposite is not defending a construction but genuinely misreading a text, and that is a good use of a rare thing.

You are still carrying something worth carrying. What is written puts the heights out of reach and does not ask anybody to stop thinking, and the Spirit gave that particular mind to somebody for a reason.