by Don Huntington, Editorial Director

“If error is corrected whenever it is recognized as such, the path of error is the path to truth.” Hans Reichenbach

Hans Reichenbach, the source of this month’s quote, was a genius who studied under Einstein and wrote articles and books on such heavy topics as quantum mechanics and the philosophy of science. Today’s quote is appropriate from the founder of Berlin’s school of logical positivism, which taught that nothing is true that cannot be demonstrated by observation and experiment – and that language involving such things as faith and belief is meaningless.

Reichenbach’s quote provides an apparently simple and effective pathway to perfection. If I can recognize and correct all the errors I commit whenever I become aware of them, then I will eventually eliminate all the errors in my life. Such an approach to improvement will prove effective, however, only if I can successfully respond to three challenges:

First of all, I must be able to recognize my errors. This isn’t as simple a process as it might appear to be from a distance. For example, I made mistakes with my children when they were young. In retrospect, my kids often needed me to be both more gentle and more firm in correcting their youthful misbehaviors and rebellions. I didn’t become aware of my failings to discipline them properly until the time for making an effective change was long since passed.

Most of us are unable to see blunders that we make. The Bible asks the rhetorical question, “Who can discern his errors?” with the implied answer, “No one can discern his own errors.”

Another challenge to my successfully following Reichenbach’s technique is being able to correct errors when I recognize them. Once again, this isn’t as easy as it might appear to be since I often lack the ability to make the changes that would be required to successfully correct my faults. Just knowing that my thought life is out of control, for example, doesn’t mean that I can then take control of my thoughts; simply realizing that I keep losing my temper with my wife doesn’t mean that I can control my temper.

The Apostle Paul was a better human being than I could ever dream of becoming, but even he frankly admitted, “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.” I know just what he was complaining about. Me too!

Finally, being able successfully to follow today’s quote into perfection requires that I be able to avoid too many new errors. This is another big problem since I can be as inventive as anyone else when it comes to figuring out new ways to screw things up and devising novel ways of shaming myself.

I’m so grateful that the life of grace has delivered me from trying to make my way up the impossible “path to truth” in Reichenbach’s quote. Every day I give myself into the hands of a powerful and loving Master, and every day He gives me the power, as the Apostle Paul himself wrote, “both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” I’m trying to comply with CS Lewis’ magnificent direction that we must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us. The process ceases to be a matter of attempted reformation and becomes one of displacement. Dynamic impulses for positive living are forcing out of my life the old dark influences that made me so helpless to identify and fix the things that were wrong with me.

The practice of submission provides no silver bullet to automatically deliver me from a struggle for goodness. Life still feels like warfare, and I frankly don’t win every battle. But I’m winning the war because I’m engaging in the battle with a powerful weapon. I struggle, often successfully, to actually make a daily, unfailing, and from-my-heart capitulation of intentions and plans into the hands of my Master.

What a wonderful life I live whenever I successfully make that surrender! How much better this pattern of life than attempting to engage in the onerous and ultimately futile struggle of merely trying to identify and repair errors in my life!

A sense of liberty comes from the simple realization that I don't have to attempt to attain to a goodness that lies beyond my reach nor pretend to have a standard that I don’t actually practice! The life of grace delivers me both from frustration and hypocrisy.

I’ve discovered an actual “path to truth” that is effective far beyond any program of self-improvement. I’m on a path that does set me free! It is doing so right now!

Dr. Don Huntington
Editorial Director
don@110mag.com