The Double Search

Rufus Jones wrote a little book called The Double Search back in 1906, long before anyone reading this blog was born.  In the book he suggests that just as men and women through the ages have sought God, so God has been seeking us.  Old books, such as this one,  are often ignored these days by those of us who want to be up-to-date and modern.  We make the assumption that anything old is no longer valid.  Elton Trueblood called it the “disease of contemporaneity.”  Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote, “Many of us who call ourselves liberal are not liberal; we are narrow rather, with that most fatal bigotry of all:  we can understand nothing except contemporary thought.”  We think, erroneously, that our thinking is somehow fresh and new, that our ideas have never been pondered before, that our questions have never been asked before, that our struggles to find meaning and purpose in life have never been experienced by anyone else until we came along.  

A seminary professor years ago wrote a note on the front page of my essay: “I’m not particularly interested in what you think.  History is about knowing what others have thought.”  I rewrote the “research” paper.  I pulled musty old books from library shelves and read what others had written over the centuries about the subject.  I discovered in the process that “my thinking” was not new after all, and was quite shallow compared to the thinking others had given to the essay topic.  I’ve been grateful to that professor ever since.

Rufus Jones’ little book has much to say to us in our time.  Our search for God is not a one way street, and often times does not even depend on us at all.  God is seeking  us, perhaps even more vigorously than we are searching for God..This is really the story the Bible tells if we read it carefully.

The double search might also be thought of as our predecessors reaching out and seeking us, trying to share their story, their questions, their sufferings, their ideas and thoughts to help us in our own quest today.  Fosdick suggested that a man of “catholic” (universal) culture “should know how to be at home in all ages, to appreciate wisdom and spiritual quality in all forms of thought; he should drink the water of life from Greek vases and Jewish water jars as well as from modern faucets, and whoever lacks such culture robs himself (herself) of his inheritance of experience and truth.”