All knowing is adversely affected by the fall, yet people can—under the right conditions—attain reasonable beliefs on the things that matter most.

(Doug Groothuis, “The Christian Worldview in Classical Philosophical Categories“)

True enough. But “the right conditions” remain critical, and open to interpretation in lieu of an eschatological realization: crucial, a crux not merely of interpretation.

Give us that which, our heavenly Father, Wesley really understood, and Finney, the evangelist that most people know in this country and Whitefield and many of the others. A call for the individual to accept Christ as Savior and come under the shed blood of Christ and pass from death to life. A call for those of us who are Christians, oh God, to bow our hearts more completely and not let other things get in the way — to let the Holy Spirit have His place under the teaching of Scripture and within the circle of the teaching of Scripture, and then, Heavenly Father, to realize that everything belongs to the Lord Jesus. That He died not only to take our souls to heaven — but that our bodies will be raised one day from the dead.

(Francis Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto)

His problem was hard enough; his efforts to compose himself, however, were seriously defective:

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees ;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication ;
A sense o’er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Pains of Sleep“)

“My spirit I to Love compose.” The “I” that is mine, the “spirit I” and not the gross one, the one that may be “compose[d]” by the efforts of the Imagination, “composed” by such efforts “to Love” as the concord of Will (which directs the Imagination) and Reason (which Coleridge cannot but identify with the Spirit speaking within “My spirit”) called Faith (conducing always to Love wholly thus defined), a concord identical with the indifference among “in me” and “round me” and “every where” that the “Eternal Strength and Wisdom” perdure in being. . . .

Yet do we not decompose when we see such action to “compose”? Do we not substitute “to compose oneself” in order to forget our superstitious mistrust of “My spirit I to Love compose” as simply “I fix my thoughts on [God's] love”?

We do argue the point. You may find yourself within “we” yet not with me. Yet I maintain that Coleridge did not write this part without accuracy, that he never spoke of “spirit” or picked his capitals without consideration, certainly upon editing.

After all, he called the poem a “psychological curiosity” and companion to “Kubla Khan: A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.”

He did not decompose himself openly for the world to see “Oh, he didn’t feel loved enough during withdrawal pains.”

He didn’t know how to compose himself, and wanted help. Do we have any to offer?

(so think about that when you watch this)

The seventeenth century–no less than the second century or the twentieth century–abounds in examples of would-be faithful Christians who, lacking the sound hermeneutical basis which comes from apprenticeship to the historic understanding of the faith, combine a very high view of the Bible with extremely naive views of language, text, and (consciously or unconsciously) self-justifying motivations in the individual reader. The results in any time of this kind of epistemological cocktail include a free-wheeling entrepreneurial reading of the Bible–perilous at best, self-serving and, often enough, finally tyrannous at worst. In our own era it has certainly led to widespread confusion of Christianity with “the American way of life.”

In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.
Jesus, John 16:33

. . . that suffering for Truths sake
Is fortitude to highest victorie,
And to the faithful Death the Gate of Life;
Taught this by his example whom I now
Acknowledge my Redeemer ever blest.

To whom thus also th’ Angel last repli’d:
This having learnt, thou hast attained the summe
Of wisdom; hope no higher, though all the Starrs
Thou knewst by name, and all th’ ethereal Powers,
All secrets of the deep, all Natures works,
Or works of God in Heav’n, Aire, Earth, or Sea,
And all the riches of this World enjoydst,
And all the rule, one Empire; onely add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith,
Add vertue, Patience, Temperance, add Love,
By name to come call’d Charitie, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier farr.
Let us descend now therefore from this top
Of Speculation;
(Milton, PL 12)