Pulling It All Together

This class was challenging to say the least. Not because it was hard reading, but for my mind to grasp the ideas so foreign to my own background was difficult for the first month or so of class. My Christian tradition is so unlike the one taught in class. I feel ever so strong about my own tradition, but I think I came to a better understanding of the one presented in class. I still resist it, but I think I understand it a little better.
My main question during the term I have not expressed is "Is it wrong to resist someone else's epistemology?" I keep coming to the fact it is okay to resist what I believe to be untrue, but to accept the person who believes differently. I do not believe this is intolerance. I believe every single person does this everyday. Christians believe what they believe to be true. On the other hand postmodernists believe what they believe to be true. Muslims, animists, pantheists, Catholics, Hindus all believe what they believe to be true. This does not mean a person should kill someone else because they believe differently as Montaigne argues in his essay "Apology for Raymond Seabond."

I saw a constant theme through every book I read this semester. Montaigne summarizes:
For likewise these are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed. I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me."

This led him to say, "Only the fools are certain and assured." These two concept I found in all of the books I read this semester except for Dante. However, Dante changed throughout his journey through hell.
Wordswoth writes:
"Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when forest
I came among these hills...
I cannot paint
What then I was." Tintern Abbey (66-80)

Professor Anderson writes: "I remember the intellectual joy I felt when I realized that this faith of my tradition and that it makes sense, it answers to my experience. It's about my experience, and all experience - it says experience is more important than dogma, more important than systems."
I believe he is talking about the experiences happening externally and then creating new internal experiences that are life changing at times.

Augustine wrote: "This is the way I should like him to rejoice, preferring to find you in his uncertainty rather than in his certainty to miss you."

Although I see the connection between these books and the thoughts they consist of I do resist them. I believe I can be certain of God because He gave man special revelation through His Word and general revelation through nature. Psalm 19 says that the heavens declare the glory of God. Unlike Wordsworth I believe God is not nature, but created nature and that is how we see God's glory, through the intricacies of all living things, the workings of the earth's systems, and the magnitude of the universes vastness. These all point to a Creator or Higher Being. I can be certain of God's characteristics because He told man through His Word. The Word is His Word not man's invention.

Even though I resist the epistemology of the writer's the class studied I hope my grade reflects only my ability to understand and interact with the texts rather than my resistance to them.