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Writer's pictureChad Lewis

True Enlightenment

Enlightenment is a word on a lot of people’s lips these days, but what does it mean?


At the very least it’s a metaphor drawn from an experience we all share, for while all of us have eyes to see, we still need something to illumine the darkness. A world of reality surrounds us on every side, but it’s invisible to us without light.


Religions use this word to refer to a special class of insights people can get through sustained meditation, as in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. More familiar to Westerners is the idea that enlightenment comes through the free exercise of reason, calling to mind great thinkers like Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, and Immanuel Kant. Today, an increasing number of people use the word to refer to citizens who have been “woke” to the cause of social justice.


Room for doubt here.


Christianity doesn’t use the word all that much, but even a cursory glance at scripture shows that it is rife with the metaphor. We need only think of the creation of light on day one, the use of light as a metaphor for wisdom in the book like Proverbs, miraculous signs like the healing of the man born blind, and of course Jesus’s famous claim “I am the light of the world.”

Christians then have their own account of enlightenment, though not necessarily to the exclusion of other forms of enlightenment that men have traditionally availed themselves of. Meditation can bring insight, reason can explain, and men can in fact experience epiphanies that bring truths hitherto unacknowledged sharply into focus. Christianity does not claim to be the only light, but rather bears witness to the primordial light that gave light to all the others. As the gospel of John puts it: The true light, which gives light to every man, was coming into the world (John 1:9)


How is Jesus the light of the world?


Certainly in no crude literal sense. His is not reason, or transcendental meditation, and he is not a kerosene lamp. But he is light in the sense that he reveals to us the true purpose of our lives, and indeed enables us to realize that purpose through the shedding of his blood and the impartation of his spirit.


In the midst of a darkened world, to be indwelt by the Father of Lights—that is true enlightenment.

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