A Whole Case From A Fragment

Noam can tell you exactly what he was given, and it took him about six weeks to be able to.

The thing he was given was one sentence long. Less, really: an impression with about four words attached, about a person, arriving on a Tuesday morning while he was doing something else.

What he had by Thursday was eleven pages.

Not written down. In his head, which is worse. A whole coherent account of that person's situation, with a history, and a probable cause, and two or three predictions, and an explanation for three things he had noticed over the previous year that had not previously seemed connected.

And every step of it followed. That is the trouble. Noam is a careful reasoner and there was no sloppy joint anywhere in the construction; each inference was reasonable given the one before it.

He is forty-one, and he has done this his whole life, and about six weeks ago he sat down and did something he had never done, which was to try to separate the original fragment from the building.

It took him a long time. The building had grown over the fragment the way ivy grows over a wall, and he had to work backwards through his own reasoning, and what he found at the bottom was four words.

He had been carrying eleven pages and calling all of it what I was given.

You may know the ivy.

Maybe you also reason well. Maybe you have also never separated the thing that arrived from the structure you built on it, and maybe, if you tried, you would be surprised how small the bottom is.

The size of what anybody has

There is a clause in the middle of the love chapter that fixes the scale of the whole business, and it is four words long.

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.1 Corinthians 13:9

In part.

Not: some people know in part. Not: you will know in part until you get better at this. Paul writes it in the first person plural about everybody who has ever had any of it, himself included, in a chapter where he has just described having all knowledge.

Which means the maximum available holding is a fragment. Not a fragment plus a sound inference. A fragment.

And notice what that does to your eleven pages. It does not make them wrong. The reasoning may be perfectly good and some of it may turn out to be right. What it does is fix their status: they are yours rather than His, and a thing that is yours can be argued with, corrected, and dropped, and a thing you have labeled given cannot.

That is the actual damage of the annexation. Not that you reasoned. That the reasoning acquired an immunity it was never entitled to.

And what you were given is four words and the rest is yours. The written word fixes the portion at in part in the first person plural, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that separation hold in a man who took six weeks to find the bottom of his own construction.

And you are not being asked to stop reasoning. The word never once forbids inference and only fixes the size of the given portion, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than confiscating a mind.

Why yours is worse than most people's

Let me say the uncomfortable thing, because you would spot me avoiding it.

This annexation happens to everybody. Most people's version is small and obvious and somebody corrects them within a week, because their reasoning is visibly shaky and a friend says hang on, how do you know that?

Yours is not shaky. Every joint holds. Which means nobody catches it, including you, and the structure gets to eleven pages before anybody notices, and the person best equipped to detect the problem is disqualified by being the one who built it.

Good reasoning is not a protection here. It is the thing that makes the annexation invisible.

And you are able to hold four words as four words. The word says in part and repeats it twice in one verse, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the discipline of leaving a gap unfilled, which no amount of rigour produces on its own.

And nothing about you is under review for a mind that works. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has just found four words at the bottom of eleven pages.

What to do with the eleven pages

Not throw them away, and I want to be plain about that, because a man like you will otherwise overcorrect into paralysis by Friday.

Keep them. Label them. That is the entire discipline: the fragment goes in one column and the construction goes in another, and both are allowed to exist, and only one of them gets to be called what it is.

Because the eleven pages may be useful. They may also be completely wrong in a way that only becomes visible when the fragment turns out to mean something else entirely, and if you have kept the two apart then that discovery costs you a page rather than a person.

And you are permitted to be wrong about the construction without being wrong about the gift. The word separates the part that is known from the whole that is not, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a working distinction rather than a philosophical one.