Meditatio vs Tentatio

When experience tempts one to disagree with higher truth, human abstraction has lost its grounding in reality: little-faith.

[Consider the event of when Peter was called to walk to Jesus on the sea during the storm. He saw the waves and was afraid, when he shouldn’t have been.

What was he afraid? His past experience told him what towering waves could do. His experience told him how the world normally works, and by that normal working he could expect imminent death.

Why shouldn’t he have been afraid? Because the presence of Jesus changed the equation. With Jesus present, his experience of how the wind and waves would affect him became invalid. Jesus’ power kept him walking over the water. Jesus’ power was there to protect him from the storm no matter how fearsome it might look and no matter how deadly it might have been had He not been there.

Peter’s past learning (his abstractions about how the world works), did not account for God’s work through Jesus. So his past learning gave him an incomplete (and thus inaccurate) picture of the world.

And this allegiance of heart to an invalid model of how the world works earned Peter the title of “little-faith”.]