Eccentricity (n)
1. a circularity that has a different center or deviates from a circular path.
2. strange and unconventional behavior
I think you have met him. He was bearded, wild hair esoteric even coffee shop eccentric. Don’t start unless you have time to hear his quick description of the world. Let your ears ring after the hours of dissertation on God, politics or agriculture. Ivory tower talk of God , sex and politics. No love or justice like “agriculture” farming without the smells or soil between his fingers. Ideology and novelty prove to him their veracity. Because he is progressive he is different undefiled by human history. He has freed himself from the “great thinkers” he quotes. Rising above them with a petty debunking plagiarism under the myth of modernity. Remember when he made his own denomination which he is the a charter and only member. Do not listen to this man, but make sure you do not discard God’s prophets the same way. Elijah Isaiah and John the Baptist would have also seemed eccentric also.
We must learn to tell the difference. The man I described above is ready to leave the beaten path. He prides himself on being alone, but pride is never alone. It is faithful men that are rare. In the 1500s two men sought truth in the same question. Do the stars spin about this little pebble planet pivot? Or is the earth flung around by it’s more massive partner? Both men became proponents of the heliocentricity of our solar system. A man named Galileo deduced that God could not make the sun stand still for Joshua. He used his observations to help in the human tendency to explain the world without regard Jesus holding everything in existence. Kepler with the same observations praised God as he recorded the steps to the heavens celestial dance. From his assumption of an intentional and ordered creation he laid the framework for newtonian physics. Both men thought about a different center. One man though about heliocentricity to debunk Christ’s centrality. The other though about heliocentricity to praise His centrality.
Eccentric
From the Enlightenment through Modernity western cultures have followed Galileo. We have doubted everything and filled the vacuum with our hubris. We still look for a new Galileo to fill the hole by telling us why the other Galileos are wrong. I thank God for the Fundamentalist who did not doubt through modernity, but the time has come to not just survive, but to build. The world will not be saved by new ideas, but by God’s children recovering the ancient foundations and building by faith. To most those ideas will seem eccentric. They will laugh when you choose to have a family over your career or if you choose to let you knowledge of God inform our study of creation. All creation longs for the revealing of the children of God and the reconciliation of all things to Himself. I pray that in this post-modern world our children would be raised a generation of Keplers to recover and build on that whose foundation cannot be shaken.