I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about good memories. Particularly, about how although revisiting them is enjoyable, there is frequently for me a sense of something nostalgic about such recollection. It’s not that “the good ole days” were truly better than these, for often times memory is lovelier than past reality, or at least the appeal of the past moment is highlighted more through remembering. This is not necessarily a consequence of viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses. When recalling the pleasure or poignancy of a past event, conversation, place, or feeling, we can remember the feelings that struck us during such a time and recognize that they are of the same caliber we presently entertain. We can know that today is creating the same such memories for tomorrow, and still there’s something intangible, ineffable, incongruous, about a fond memory. Nostalgia, yearning, longing, bittersweet wistfulness…all these words approach the feeling I’m trying to disentangle from memory, but they don’t quite reach all the way. There’s something strange about remembrance of delightful moments…no matter how great the past has been, it’s hard—if not impossible—to arrive at genuine contentment by dwelling upon the past alone.
The cause of this is, I think, wrapped up in the nature of Time, and how that process carries us (and yes, I think it more useful to think of Time as a process than a stream, or line, or what-have-you). In “A Severe Mercy,” the author reflects on how even satisfying moments carry with them a certain sadness. Even during the most fulfilling, enjoyable times, we know that such a time is passing: fleeting and flying, never to return. This is because, he finally realizes, we are made for eternity. We are not intended to enjoy ‘fleeting’ pleasures, with the looming specter of the ensuing loss—whereupon we may only revisit such joys through the veil of memory. This pleasure tends to be incomplete, whether experienced through transient moment or memory, for that is not where our pleasure should be anchored.
However, stating that good memories offer incomplete contentment may be true, and the fact that we are made for eternity may play a part in the reason, but I think there’s another piece to the puzzle. It is apparent that God does not want us to live stuck in the past (nor dwelling on the future), and perhaps He’s structured our experience of memory in such a way as to keep us from living in our past. Of course, even though it provides an ultimately unsatisfying outlet, many people dwell in the past anyway—people choose all sorts of unsatisfying practices, after all. Still, I think God does want us to enjoy the good things in our past, but they cannot fully satisfy on their own…instead, they are meant to point us forward.
The moments in our past we most wish to remember, as well as those moments in the present which we wish would linger, both point us forward…not merely to our earthly future, but to our eternal home. They are not meant to hook us into a moment of time, but to spur us onward. They are a sort of narrative encouragement, perhaps even a sort of temporal inertia. This squares with the way God works, of course. Not only does He want us to fix our minds on the eternal rather than transient things (2 Cor. 4:17-18), but He’s a God who works within Time to realize His work in us. Sometimes He acts instantly, true, but normally He sanctifies, rather than glorifies instantly; He uses process instead of automatic results; He grows before He harvests.
There’s nothing new in these observations. It’s no secret that God is a God of process. The New and Old Testaments, personal experience, and history itself all tell the story of a God who is powerful enough to effect instant change, but chooses to work through measured development and natural growth. He takes a single man and through steady (albeit incredible) steps, turns him into a nation; He takes a shepherd boy and turns him into a poet-king; He takes a handful of people and turns them into a worldwide church. He takes an infant in a feed trough and grows Him into the Redeemer of the World. Also, he causes a handful of seeds to become a garden, an acorn to become an oak, a light breeze to gather into a storm front. There is, in these latter examples, a cyclical element…but there is also a directional, processional quality to them that cannot be denied. God moves things, people, and causes forward through Time.
That seems a pretty underwhelming statement. Of course things move forward through time, and it’s not difficult to recognize that God’s typical mode of operation is through process and developing stories. History is processional, not cyclic (the recurrence of common themes should be no more taken as evidence of the ‘cyclical’ nature of history than such would be in a novel). Change is something inherent in Time, and is the mechanism by which story, development, process, progress, and growth exist in Time. Again, this seems obvious—to the Western-inculcated mind, of course. Some few cultures held to a cyclical view of time and history. But what I’d like to proffer is the suggestion that at first inquisitive glance, it seems more predictable that God would have chosen a cyclical sort of way to work in history or to structure Time.
Why do I say this? Simply because of God’s immutable nature: He is the same yesterday, today, and forever, unchanging and eternal. Perhaps it could be said that because He’s outside of time, the fact that there is development and process within time is something of a moot point, i.e. because yesterday, today, and tomorrow lie ever in the Present to Him (Disclaimer: I’m not talking about God Incarnate here, but rather God Eternal. The Incarnation does muddy the theoretical waters a bit, as always—far too high an idea to even pretend to wrap one’s mind around), talking about temporal change in relation to an unchanging God should not come as a surprise. Or it could be said that because Creation is something tautologically other than Creator, “change” is merely something “not-God,” among many other such things like weakness, death, darkness, and doubt (again, Incarnation aside…). And I think there is truth waiting somewhere in the wings of that line of thinking. Yet it still strikes me as strange that God, in creating through the overflow of rejoicing in Himself (as Piper paints it), produced something so contrary to His own experience of changeless-ness. After all, the act of creating itself was a drastic change…and yet, because God is eternal and exists outside/beyond/above time, He arguably does not experience it as "change" per se, each moment being always the Present to Him (this poses an interesting seeming-paradox about the relationship between God, Time, and the Present which I won't introduce here). Can He subject Himself to change, as we understand it? Basically, I’m suggesting that the very possibility of change is to me an unexpected oddity when we consider God’s immutable nature. What appeals to an immutable, eternal, and utterly self-sufficient God about creating such an alien thing as change, as time? We think time and change are normal since they are all we ever knew—but how strange indeed for a change-less God to fashion them into His Creation?
Possibly the introduction/existence of change (by which I also mean in rather metonymical fashion process, development, growth, and story) is simply a result of the Fall, the introduction of sin into the system. Possibly, but I doubt it. The way God uses process, growth, and story seem too central to the way He works to be a product of accident. After all, when He chose to enter into the created order, to become a dependent rather than antecedent of Time, He came onto the stage in such a way as to require growth: from infant who “grew in wisdom and stature” to a Man who taught by story rather than tenet and formed His Bride through gradual and guided process. Although Christ’s arrival was unexpected, the way He chose to do so is quite in keeping with what we know of God. Christ’s 33-year story on earth became the focal point of the whole great Story of Creation. And that is why I say that God’s choice to work through means of process, growth, and intentional change is not incidental to His purpose in Creation: His use of story is essential to how He displays Himself and His will. This story, moreover, is what we normally mean by story, not a plot-less ordering of events…it points both forward and upward by means of narrative tension and momentum. Change is a part of His creative purpose.
And so we have an immutable and changeless God who chose to make change and processional Time a fundamental part of His creation. A God who subjected Himself to that change and process through entering personally into it; perhaps, even, this was one of His great purposes, that the Changeless experience Change firsthand. That’s impossible to know, and I don’t claim it so, but it just may be that for all we talk—and rightly—of God’s immutable nature, He wished to extend His already infinite Self by entering His story as a mutable character.
Yet if that is so—and really, regardless of God’s full reasons for entering into Time—there remains the truth that in spite of Christ experiencing and harnessing change, He remained rooted in eternity and perfection. He was complete, and yet He grew; this duality is a common theme for the God-Man, the One who was both sinless and sin. I think that, similarly, the process of sanctification/transformation in the Christian life is rooted in perfection and already-satisfied accomplishment…though we change, there is something of the eternal already at work (indeed, something that has already done its work) in us. 2 Cor 5:21 says “For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” That “made” denotes both a finished exchange and an ongoing process: in the words of the author of Hebrews, “by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.” I may be getting far afield here, but again there seems to be an interesting dynamic between time and timelessness, or change and perfection. Again I find it curious how God chooses to work in this: we are redeemed by the work of the Cross, Christ fulfilled His substitutionary role, and we are reconciled unto God. In Jesus’ own words, It is Finished. That is the Eternal God speaking (or so it seems to me), the One who entered into Creation at that single instant upon which Time hinges…a moment which trumped the constraints of chronology as it forced a bridge from eternity to here. But, although the work is complete on the one hand, on the other it is not. The victory may be won but the process is not complete. God still works within and along time, in such a way that seems so natural and planned. Not only does Creation display the tension between Change and the eternal God; so does human salvation.
Why does process feel so natural in ourselves, and growth appear so proper in and around us, and progress get pointed out even when it remains tacitly indistinct from mere change? Why do we expect story and development through time? Well, obviously there is the fact that we observe such things around us…but to return to my main point, why did God structure things this way? Is there something in God’s nature that is directional and/or processional, or does the manifestation of limited creatures’ experience of relationship with their perfect and limitless Creator necessarily give the impression of direction and procession? This could be the case regardless of sin—were Adam not to fall, we would still need to grow to move towards God; even when He is ultimately intimate (even indwelling, a fathomless thought), He remains in a sense unreachable to non-infinite creatures.
We are created in God’s own image. Although it may be worth noting that in Genesis when God created man and woman in His own image He created (apparently) an adult man and woman. Maybe He created them infants (although in Eve’s case at least that seems quite unlikely), and I find it suggestive that when God created beings in His own image He created them mature—at least physically, and one can assume emotionally and mentally as well, with only spiritual maturity on hold for ensuing reasons. However, I’m not quite sure what that suggests…perhaps that something truly made in God’s image doesn’t need growth? If so, it’s a suggestion that lacks substantial persuasive weight. In any case, we can infer from the Genesis account and elsewhere that mankind is an image of God, however sullied. After all, the man Christ is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” and “the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being.” We are created in God’s image, yet we expect and experience change, growth, process. Is that a part of our nature that is in God’s own image, or a result of the Fall, or otherwise a part of the Story God is telling? I really don’t know…I hesitate for obvious reasons to consider that there is something inherent in God’s nature that is analogous to human growth or directional change. Nevertheless, there is a piece I’m missing here, one which I don’t think I’ve quite articulated in this whole writing.
There’s one more thing I’d like to bring into the mix before I wrap it all up. These next thoughts are largely sparked by re-listening to a sermon from my old campus minister, Matt Dean, although the ideas come from a couple other sources too. The Greeks had two words for time: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos was often personified as “Cronus,” known to the Greeks as the consuming god of time and father of the Olympians. He was, in Greek mythology, a usurper of the sky god Uranus. Both he and his Roman counterpart, Saturn, wielded a sickle, for he was the harvester. In the Middle Ages, Saturn/Cronus was associated with melancholy, and in astrology he represents coldness, separation, skepticism, and misfortune. The sort of time he represented was the devouring, destructive, dreadful sort of time…the type that wastes away, that rots, that lies like an inevitable burden on the shoulders of mortality. In a less harsh light, it was the timeline sort of time, calendar time: it was our normal conception of time as an ever-marching procession of instants. Alternatively, kairos refers to “an appointed time, season.” This is not the sort of time that can be measured by seconds or days or years, but only by significance. In a way, chronos is the sort of time which flows unceasingly onward, and kairos is the sort which freezes chronos so that a moment of import can make its appearance.
I’m no Greek scholar, so I will not try to differentiate between the two concepts any further. Nor will I really draw any specific conclusions from the philological distinction between the two times. But perhaps “chronological” time really is a kind of usurper, introduced (or more likely, corrupted) by the Fall, and the “appointed” sense of time, the “right-place-at-the-right-time” sort of thing, is truer to the way the spiritual/celestial realm works. Perhaps one thing the Fall did was divorce these two manifestations of time. Of course, this is very speculative. Still, something tells me that a proper understanding of kairos might go a long way towards illuminating why an immutable, eternally-perfect God formed Time, why He uses it like He does, the necessity of the temporal element of process, transformation, and growth…and maybe even why there seems to be a tension between salvation being already accomplished and something we need to work out—in other words, the relationship between justification and sanctification. In the meantime, I will continue to suspect there’s a mystery to Time that I can’t unravel.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Monday, March 15, 2010
The Hiddenness vs the Apparentness of God
Sometimes it seems I either strongly like a talk here at Oxford or strongly dislike it—there seems to be no middle ground in which to relax, but rather two extremes that either rouse my polemical passion or, on the other hand, draw me along in apologetic agreement. The last talk at GCU qualifies as the former for, although the speaker seemed like a genuine enough sort of fellow, precious little he said struck me as either sound or harmless.
The title of the talk was “Science and the Hiddenness of God.” Pretty attractive topic, in my opinion, and I anticipated the sort of message that showed how science, properly understood and used, directs one to God. Or something along those lines; really, I just thought it would be interesting to hear from a scientist who was interested in theology. Almost right off the bat, I realized my expectations would prove misleading.
I’ll try to give a fair account of what the speaker’s message was, but I think of it more in terms of the ideas he was attacking and expressing more than as an outlined argument, so his points may well come across as more beggarly than they in fact were. He started by giving a bit of personal background: he was raised in Hong Kong, went to an Anglican school—where Christianity, he said with apparent disapproval, was the wrapper around all they learned—then went to Cambridge (the “Other Place” as it’s called here) to study chemistry. At this point he belonged to the creationist camp of Christian scientists. The worldview of such Christian scientists he described by mentioning their unofficial motto: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His Hands.” (He actually may have used Psalm 111:2 to highlight this idea: “Great are the works of the LORD; they are pondered by all who delight in them.” However, I can’t remember exactly which verse he used, and the former is the more familiar and direct for this line of reasoning so I’ve stuck with it.)
Here he began the argumentative phase of his talk, starting with his break from the creationist ranks. He realized that he did not think about Creationism the same way he “did science;” also, he mentioned that all these creationist scientists were, in fact, scientists—the whole problem, in his mind, came about by them not understanding that different literary genres exist. Reading Genesis 1 as strict historical fact misled his compatriots into an overly simplistic understanding. He realized that separate genres existed in the Bible, and he could mould his understanding of various passages based on the independent understanding he brought to the reading of the Bible. Creationist complaints against secular science, he began to believe, were not actually scientific. Around about here he made here his strongest point. He argued that when creationist scientists bring a complaint against, for example, the secular evolutionary account, saying that “Current theory does not explain this particular point,” and then use that to dismiss current theory, they are making an elementary blunder against the very thing that drives science. If he went to his supervisor and said “Current theory does not explain this, therefore we must dismiss current theory,” his supervisor would have been appalled. For science progresses when it is realized something doesn’t fit within current theory...when something doesn’t “fit,” you experiment until you add to current theory, you don’t dismiss it. Science is current theory moving, millimetre by millimetre, across the face of knowledge, propelled by realized gaps in present understanding. Before I continue, I will note—even though I’m trying to hold my counterargument until later—that I think he portrays creationist scientists unfairly. They are not acting contrary to science, and are not guilty (as a whole group) of what he claims: instead, sometimes science encounters or needs paradigm shifts, and creationists merely seek to address a previous shift perceived as erroneous. Science does not progress smoothly and evenly, for the course of scientific understanding has often been bumpy—or nearly stagnant—in the past. And “progress” does not continually go on when a previous error is perceived—no one does a mathematical proof or a laboratory experiment like that.
Anyway, he also made the point that science was like a great and elaborate edifice—one cannot remove a single column from a cathedral and expect it to tumble. Science is more resilient than that. Creationists picking at particular points cannot alter the building. Of course, if the analogy is used, one must accept that different cathedrals can be built if different materials and plans are made; even using the same foundation, vastly different structures can arise. The Gothic cathedral of Saint Denis was constructed on the same foundations as the earlier, much simpler, church upon which it was built. If creationists imagine a light, airy, and inspiring Gothic cathedral where the bulky basilica of secular science now stands, can they be blamed for trying to knock down a few walls to bring in illuminating sunlight?
While I’m showing my colours, a point about different “genres” in the Bible before I continue. The “genre approach” is often overemphasized. Though different sections of the Bible tend towards a method of expression that we can ascribe to one particular modern genre over the other, we should beware projecting our narrow cultural view backwards into a timeless Book. The whole Bible belongs, first and most importantly, to the genre it alone occupies: inspired Scripture. It is one cohesive Book much more than it is 66 independent accounts. Though different sections contain different styles, breaking a particular passage out of its place in the unified whole and approaching it simply as an independent piece belonging to a modern genre can become dangerously imbalanced. This is NOT to say that viewing the Bible through genre-inspired lenses cannot be useful—sometimes, it may be necessary—but we should keep foremost in our minds when doing so that these “different sections” of the Bible were not WRITTEN as distinct genres. Assigning them post facto to segregated genres each with distinct “rules” for understanding them can be to miss the underlying message. We don’t need to be modern literary critics to understand that different verses should be taken differently; do we take Pharaoh’s words the same way we take Moses’? But we are ill-served by those who put everything they dislike or don’t understand into the genres of “allegory” and “myth.”
Back to his argument. He made much of what is called the God Hypothesis, seeking to discount it entirely. This hypothesis, in short, is the belief that you need God in order to properly explain things. It has been used and misused much over the millennia: before “modern science,” curiosity was assuaged by appealing to the supernatural to explain natural phenomena; in the Christian tradition, God has often been at the beginning and the end of logical-philosophical reasoning and even ponderings on the mechanical arts; scientific debate has often included an appeal to God or Biblical authority—sometimes misunderstood by proponents on either side—such as the famous geocentric/heliocentric debate. The example the speaker used was Newton, who used the God Hypothesis to explain the orbits of the planets for, according to his calculations, the orbits should not be stable, eventually spinning off out of control. God was needed, Newton wrote, to nudge the planets back into their orbits every once in a while.
The speaker then came to Laplace. This fellow, a bit later than Newton, did Newton’s own calculations and showed that the planets did not need God to nudge them into place. The anecdotal-yet-plausible story is that, when Laplace showed his calculations to Napoleon, the little emperor asked him where God was in all his calculation. Laplace’s answer was “I have no need for that hypothesis.” This becomes the Laplace Principle, the point that we can understand science perfectly without God; that we can “do science” without appeal to God or the supernatural. In fact, the speaker said that if he could pass on just one sentence to future generations, who would lose all other scientific knowledge, he would choose to pass on the Laplace Principle.
The real point of the talk, true to his title, was the Hiddenness of God. This was really a polemic against Psalm 19:1 (which I already noted), and Romans 1:19-20 “what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Against, as well, other verses and the great weight of historical and modern Christian experience. His standard response to those who say that the heavens declare the glory of God, or that God can be glimpsed through the study of Nature, is “Where? Show Him to me...I can’t see any sign of Him in the stars.” He also maintained that if you started with the Cross and studied Creation, you’d find the God in Creation (hidden, significantly), that you’d expect; if you started with Creation and tried to glimpse God, you wouldn’t find Him because He was, in fact, hidden. His understanding of the Cross led him to deny the points about the Heavens declaring God’s glory and about God being made known through His works.
He then attempted some Biblical exegesis, going through the Bible chronologically to show that one of its key messages was the increasing hiddenness of God. He started with the Garden—God walked with Adam; then went to Abram, when God appeared to Him—rightly stressing the implication that “to appear” means “to have been hidden”—then to Exodus, when the people of Israel asked God to not appear to them again...and He never again appeared to the whole people of Israel. With Elijah, we have the last appearance of God to nonbelievers, immediately after which we have God appearing to Elijah not in the flame or earthquake or wind, but in a still small voice. In the last historical book of the Old Testament, Esther, God doesn’t even make an appearance.
Then, of course, we have the New Testament, where God appears—but only in the unexpected setting of a manger. Then, the crux of the matter: on the Cross, when Christ was mocked and told to demonstrate that He was in fact God’s Son, His response was Psalm 22. “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” The focal point of the entire Bible contains a cry to the God Who has forsaken, not only unbelievers, not only the faithful, but His very Son.
A compelling argument, and perhaps he presented it better than I have. Yet it has, in my opinion, glaring errors and painful falsehoods. My least favourite thing was his treatment of the Cross, and the argument of God withdrawing into hiddenness throughout the Bible that his treatment required. Of course, his iconoclastic approach to Christian tradition bothered me as well. Also, though, is his fierce allegiance to a secular scientific tradition that, in my opinion, is a cultural affectation injurious to deep knowledge. Since this post is getting long, I’m going to explain my problems with his Biblical and Christological interpretation here, and then (hopefully) post later about my problems with his particular scientific philosophy.
The basic premise of the Bible outlining God’s general and progressive withdrawal from man is slightly troubling to me. If anything, I think the Bible shows the opposite of that—God reaching out to a resistant, reclusive man in ever more dramatic ways, culminating in the Incarnation. That is sort of what Grace is, God extending His hand to unwilling man; God is not always OBVIOUS, true (and I imagine this point will come up again), but nor does He seek to hide Himself—He would be perfectly obvious if only we knew where to look. Sin, of course, disrupts our ability to look in the obvious places. We do not, to use Biblical language, “lift up our eyes and look to the heavens” and remember the One who knows each star by name. Sin is the missing piece of the puzzle in the speaker’s explanation. Why was God not walking in the cool of the evening with Abram as he had with Adam? Because Sin had disrupted Paradise. Why did God no longer appear to the collective people of Israel after Exodus? Because, due to Sin, they asked Him not to—it wasn’t Him trying to hide, it was Israel turning away from Him. Yet He refused to remain hidden, and found new and creative ways to become apparent.
In highlighting passages that showed God growing more hidden as the Bible goes on, the speaker skipped over some important counter-examples. God appeared to Moses in a more intimate way than Abraham, talking with him face to face, even though Moses came after Abraham; God’s Presence rested continuously within the Temple, long after Moses. Though one could argue God was “hidden” inside the Temple, the fact that the people always knew where to find Him (though they could not approach, due to their own failings) reveals the fundamental error of such language. The cry of God throughout the Old Testament seems to be “and they will be My people and I will be their God.” This does not suggest hiddenness to me.
More significant than whether or not there is a trend of God’s hiddenness in the Old Testament (and I think there’s not, but rather an interplay of God’s holiness, His justice, restraint, patience, and most of all, His love) is what the New Testament tells us about all this. Fitting Christ into an argument for the hiddenness of God gets one nowhere, I strongly believe. After all, His Name is Jesus—the LORD Saves—and He is called Immanuel—God with us. Using His cry of Psalm 22 upon the Cross does not show God’s hiddenness...although it does reinforce the idea that sinful men do not see Him where He is. For He was on the Cross in front of them, Son calling to Father, and though the Roman centurion recognized Him as the Son of God, most did not. Then again, most people missed the fact that something significant happened even after an eclipse, earthquake, the veil of the Temple being torn, and dead people walking through the streets of Jerusalem! How is God hidden through all that—or through His very ministry and its denouement on earth?
Jesus’ cry of “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” should be appreciated more fully. Now, I hesitate to write about this because of the weightiness of it, and though I’ll choose my words with care I’m sure I’ll place a misemphasis on something. I don’t want to diminish the anguish of Christ on the Cross at all—it was for this moment that He sweated blood the night before. This moment, when the Father (in some way, somehow, that I do not understand) turned away from the Son was I think the most anguished moment in humanity. Yet Jesus was not simply—it seems to me—expressing doubt or despair about the Father...He knew the Scriptures intimately well, and knew what psalm He was referring to. It is a psalm of painful lament, but one of trust and certainty too. Being the Rabbi that He was, I am convinced Jesus had the whole psalm in mind when He spoke. After all, these words are also contained in Psalm 22:
“I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax; it has melted away within me.
My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death.
Dogs have surrounded me; a band of evil men has encircled me,
they have pierced my hands and my feet.
I can count all my bones; people stare and gloat over me.
They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.”
We know such words speak directly to Jesus’ experience on the Cross...but they are not the theme of Psalm 22. The theme is, I think, found in such verses as this: “Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the praise of Israel” and “All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads: ‘He trusts in the LORD; let the LORD rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.’ Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you even at my mother's breast. From birth I was cast upon you; from my mother's womb you have been my God.” The significant thing about this latter passage is that in both Matthew and Mark’s accounts of this, Jesus’ cry is recorded right after the crowd mock and insult Him, telling Him to come down if He really is the Son of God. Jesus’ response to that? Psalm 22, which includes vivid trust in being in God’s hands since birth as a response to just such a challenge.
This psalm also contains such displays of trust and purpose as this: “I will declare your name to my brothers; in the congregation I will praise you...For he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one; He has not hidden His face from Him but has listened to His cry for help.” And later, “The poor will eat and be satisfied; they who seek the LORD will praise him—may your hearts live forever! All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him.” The psalm ends with these words: “Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn—for He has done it.” Mark and Matthew both, then, tell us that soon after Jesus cried out the beginning of Psalm 22, He gave up His Spirit. His mission was done—from “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” to “For He has done it!”...the bookends of the Psalm frame Jesus’ Crucifixion.
I’ll wrap up with this observation—using Jesus’ cry to highlight God’s hiddenness seems, to me, to ignore the deeper reality going on here. Immanuel completing His rescue of us—the wilful sinners who turned away from God, Who has pursued us ever since—that is the theme of the Cross. That is the theme of the Bible; if God is hidden from time to time, it is because of man’s choice, not His, either directly because man turns his gaze away from God, or indirectly because sinful man cannot bear God’s holy Presence. Laced throughout the Bible are claims that God can be known nonetheless: that was why He called Abram, after all. Instead of tracking God’s “hiddenness” through the Bible, a better theme would be God seeking to make His home with us in ever more intimate ways: with Abraham He occasionally met but was not pressingly close; with the Tabernacle, He made His home among the people, but it was a temporary dwelling; with the Temple, He made His dwelling among the people a permanent thing; with Jesus, He came down to live amongst us; with Jesus’ resurrection, He sent His Spirit to live WITHIN us.
All in all, I found the speaker’s Biblical interpretation not at all compelling. It was done with an agenda and according to a trendy worldview, one that wants to segregate Nature from the supernatural—one that elevates what can be quantified over what can be known of quality. Hopefully I’ll get to a discussion of his allegiance to his particular scientific philosophy in another post. However, I think his Biblical treatment called for answer more strongly: it seemed to ignore the problem of Sin, that God’s apparentness is hidden only by man’s sinfulness. It’s hard to justify his claims that the heavens do NOT declare the glory of God in any verifiable way, and that God’s invisible qualities have not been made known throughout Creation (suggesting, by extension of Paul’s passage, that man has an excuse for not knowing God?), without a casual handling of the Scriptures as pertains to sin.
The title of the talk was “Science and the Hiddenness of God.” Pretty attractive topic, in my opinion, and I anticipated the sort of message that showed how science, properly understood and used, directs one to God. Or something along those lines; really, I just thought it would be interesting to hear from a scientist who was interested in theology. Almost right off the bat, I realized my expectations would prove misleading.
I’ll try to give a fair account of what the speaker’s message was, but I think of it more in terms of the ideas he was attacking and expressing more than as an outlined argument, so his points may well come across as more beggarly than they in fact were. He started by giving a bit of personal background: he was raised in Hong Kong, went to an Anglican school—where Christianity, he said with apparent disapproval, was the wrapper around all they learned—then went to Cambridge (the “Other Place” as it’s called here) to study chemistry. At this point he belonged to the creationist camp of Christian scientists. The worldview of such Christian scientists he described by mentioning their unofficial motto: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His Hands.” (He actually may have used Psalm 111:2 to highlight this idea: “Great are the works of the LORD; they are pondered by all who delight in them.” However, I can’t remember exactly which verse he used, and the former is the more familiar and direct for this line of reasoning so I’ve stuck with it.)
Here he began the argumentative phase of his talk, starting with his break from the creationist ranks. He realized that he did not think about Creationism the same way he “did science;” also, he mentioned that all these creationist scientists were, in fact, scientists—the whole problem, in his mind, came about by them not understanding that different literary genres exist. Reading Genesis 1 as strict historical fact misled his compatriots into an overly simplistic understanding. He realized that separate genres existed in the Bible, and he could mould his understanding of various passages based on the independent understanding he brought to the reading of the Bible. Creationist complaints against secular science, he began to believe, were not actually scientific. Around about here he made here his strongest point. He argued that when creationist scientists bring a complaint against, for example, the secular evolutionary account, saying that “Current theory does not explain this particular point,” and then use that to dismiss current theory, they are making an elementary blunder against the very thing that drives science. If he went to his supervisor and said “Current theory does not explain this, therefore we must dismiss current theory,” his supervisor would have been appalled. For science progresses when it is realized something doesn’t fit within current theory...when something doesn’t “fit,” you experiment until you add to current theory, you don’t dismiss it. Science is current theory moving, millimetre by millimetre, across the face of knowledge, propelled by realized gaps in present understanding. Before I continue, I will note—even though I’m trying to hold my counterargument until later—that I think he portrays creationist scientists unfairly. They are not acting contrary to science, and are not guilty (as a whole group) of what he claims: instead, sometimes science encounters or needs paradigm shifts, and creationists merely seek to address a previous shift perceived as erroneous. Science does not progress smoothly and evenly, for the course of scientific understanding has often been bumpy—or nearly stagnant—in the past. And “progress” does not continually go on when a previous error is perceived—no one does a mathematical proof or a laboratory experiment like that.
Anyway, he also made the point that science was like a great and elaborate edifice—one cannot remove a single column from a cathedral and expect it to tumble. Science is more resilient than that. Creationists picking at particular points cannot alter the building. Of course, if the analogy is used, one must accept that different cathedrals can be built if different materials and plans are made; even using the same foundation, vastly different structures can arise. The Gothic cathedral of Saint Denis was constructed on the same foundations as the earlier, much simpler, church upon which it was built. If creationists imagine a light, airy, and inspiring Gothic cathedral where the bulky basilica of secular science now stands, can they be blamed for trying to knock down a few walls to bring in illuminating sunlight?
While I’m showing my colours, a point about different “genres” in the Bible before I continue. The “genre approach” is often overemphasized. Though different sections of the Bible tend towards a method of expression that we can ascribe to one particular modern genre over the other, we should beware projecting our narrow cultural view backwards into a timeless Book. The whole Bible belongs, first and most importantly, to the genre it alone occupies: inspired Scripture. It is one cohesive Book much more than it is 66 independent accounts. Though different sections contain different styles, breaking a particular passage out of its place in the unified whole and approaching it simply as an independent piece belonging to a modern genre can become dangerously imbalanced. This is NOT to say that viewing the Bible through genre-inspired lenses cannot be useful—sometimes, it may be necessary—but we should keep foremost in our minds when doing so that these “different sections” of the Bible were not WRITTEN as distinct genres. Assigning them post facto to segregated genres each with distinct “rules” for understanding them can be to miss the underlying message. We don’t need to be modern literary critics to understand that different verses should be taken differently; do we take Pharaoh’s words the same way we take Moses’? But we are ill-served by those who put everything they dislike or don’t understand into the genres of “allegory” and “myth.”
Back to his argument. He made much of what is called the God Hypothesis, seeking to discount it entirely. This hypothesis, in short, is the belief that you need God in order to properly explain things. It has been used and misused much over the millennia: before “modern science,” curiosity was assuaged by appealing to the supernatural to explain natural phenomena; in the Christian tradition, God has often been at the beginning and the end of logical-philosophical reasoning and even ponderings on the mechanical arts; scientific debate has often included an appeal to God or Biblical authority—sometimes misunderstood by proponents on either side—such as the famous geocentric/heliocentric debate. The example the speaker used was Newton, who used the God Hypothesis to explain the orbits of the planets for, according to his calculations, the orbits should not be stable, eventually spinning off out of control. God was needed, Newton wrote, to nudge the planets back into their orbits every once in a while.
The speaker then came to Laplace. This fellow, a bit later than Newton, did Newton’s own calculations and showed that the planets did not need God to nudge them into place. The anecdotal-yet-plausible story is that, when Laplace showed his calculations to Napoleon, the little emperor asked him where God was in all his calculation. Laplace’s answer was “I have no need for that hypothesis.” This becomes the Laplace Principle, the point that we can understand science perfectly without God; that we can “do science” without appeal to God or the supernatural. In fact, the speaker said that if he could pass on just one sentence to future generations, who would lose all other scientific knowledge, he would choose to pass on the Laplace Principle.
The real point of the talk, true to his title, was the Hiddenness of God. This was really a polemic against Psalm 19:1 (which I already noted), and Romans 1:19-20 “what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Against, as well, other verses and the great weight of historical and modern Christian experience. His standard response to those who say that the heavens declare the glory of God, or that God can be glimpsed through the study of Nature, is “Where? Show Him to me...I can’t see any sign of Him in the stars.” He also maintained that if you started with the Cross and studied Creation, you’d find the God in Creation (hidden, significantly), that you’d expect; if you started with Creation and tried to glimpse God, you wouldn’t find Him because He was, in fact, hidden. His understanding of the Cross led him to deny the points about the Heavens declaring God’s glory and about God being made known through His works.
He then attempted some Biblical exegesis, going through the Bible chronologically to show that one of its key messages was the increasing hiddenness of God. He started with the Garden—God walked with Adam; then went to Abram, when God appeared to Him—rightly stressing the implication that “to appear” means “to have been hidden”—then to Exodus, when the people of Israel asked God to not appear to them again...and He never again appeared to the whole people of Israel. With Elijah, we have the last appearance of God to nonbelievers, immediately after which we have God appearing to Elijah not in the flame or earthquake or wind, but in a still small voice. In the last historical book of the Old Testament, Esther, God doesn’t even make an appearance.
Then, of course, we have the New Testament, where God appears—but only in the unexpected setting of a manger. Then, the crux of the matter: on the Cross, when Christ was mocked and told to demonstrate that He was in fact God’s Son, His response was Psalm 22. “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” The focal point of the entire Bible contains a cry to the God Who has forsaken, not only unbelievers, not only the faithful, but His very Son.
A compelling argument, and perhaps he presented it better than I have. Yet it has, in my opinion, glaring errors and painful falsehoods. My least favourite thing was his treatment of the Cross, and the argument of God withdrawing into hiddenness throughout the Bible that his treatment required. Of course, his iconoclastic approach to Christian tradition bothered me as well. Also, though, is his fierce allegiance to a secular scientific tradition that, in my opinion, is a cultural affectation injurious to deep knowledge. Since this post is getting long, I’m going to explain my problems with his Biblical and Christological interpretation here, and then (hopefully) post later about my problems with his particular scientific philosophy.
The basic premise of the Bible outlining God’s general and progressive withdrawal from man is slightly troubling to me. If anything, I think the Bible shows the opposite of that—God reaching out to a resistant, reclusive man in ever more dramatic ways, culminating in the Incarnation. That is sort of what Grace is, God extending His hand to unwilling man; God is not always OBVIOUS, true (and I imagine this point will come up again), but nor does He seek to hide Himself—He would be perfectly obvious if only we knew where to look. Sin, of course, disrupts our ability to look in the obvious places. We do not, to use Biblical language, “lift up our eyes and look to the heavens” and remember the One who knows each star by name. Sin is the missing piece of the puzzle in the speaker’s explanation. Why was God not walking in the cool of the evening with Abram as he had with Adam? Because Sin had disrupted Paradise. Why did God no longer appear to the collective people of Israel after Exodus? Because, due to Sin, they asked Him not to—it wasn’t Him trying to hide, it was Israel turning away from Him. Yet He refused to remain hidden, and found new and creative ways to become apparent.
In highlighting passages that showed God growing more hidden as the Bible goes on, the speaker skipped over some important counter-examples. God appeared to Moses in a more intimate way than Abraham, talking with him face to face, even though Moses came after Abraham; God’s Presence rested continuously within the Temple, long after Moses. Though one could argue God was “hidden” inside the Temple, the fact that the people always knew where to find Him (though they could not approach, due to their own failings) reveals the fundamental error of such language. The cry of God throughout the Old Testament seems to be “and they will be My people and I will be their God.” This does not suggest hiddenness to me.
More significant than whether or not there is a trend of God’s hiddenness in the Old Testament (and I think there’s not, but rather an interplay of God’s holiness, His justice, restraint, patience, and most of all, His love) is what the New Testament tells us about all this. Fitting Christ into an argument for the hiddenness of God gets one nowhere, I strongly believe. After all, His Name is Jesus—the LORD Saves—and He is called Immanuel—God with us. Using His cry of Psalm 22 upon the Cross does not show God’s hiddenness...although it does reinforce the idea that sinful men do not see Him where He is. For He was on the Cross in front of them, Son calling to Father, and though the Roman centurion recognized Him as the Son of God, most did not. Then again, most people missed the fact that something significant happened even after an eclipse, earthquake, the veil of the Temple being torn, and dead people walking through the streets of Jerusalem! How is God hidden through all that—or through His very ministry and its denouement on earth?
Jesus’ cry of “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” should be appreciated more fully. Now, I hesitate to write about this because of the weightiness of it, and though I’ll choose my words with care I’m sure I’ll place a misemphasis on something. I don’t want to diminish the anguish of Christ on the Cross at all—it was for this moment that He sweated blood the night before. This moment, when the Father (in some way, somehow, that I do not understand) turned away from the Son was I think the most anguished moment in humanity. Yet Jesus was not simply—it seems to me—expressing doubt or despair about the Father...He knew the Scriptures intimately well, and knew what psalm He was referring to. It is a psalm of painful lament, but one of trust and certainty too. Being the Rabbi that He was, I am convinced Jesus had the whole psalm in mind when He spoke. After all, these words are also contained in Psalm 22:
“I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax; it has melted away within me.
My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death.
Dogs have surrounded me; a band of evil men has encircled me,
they have pierced my hands and my feet.
I can count all my bones; people stare and gloat over me.
They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.”
We know such words speak directly to Jesus’ experience on the Cross...but they are not the theme of Psalm 22. The theme is, I think, found in such verses as this: “Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the praise of Israel” and “All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads: ‘He trusts in the LORD; let the LORD rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.’ Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you even at my mother's breast. From birth I was cast upon you; from my mother's womb you have been my God.” The significant thing about this latter passage is that in both Matthew and Mark’s accounts of this, Jesus’ cry is recorded right after the crowd mock and insult Him, telling Him to come down if He really is the Son of God. Jesus’ response to that? Psalm 22, which includes vivid trust in being in God’s hands since birth as a response to just such a challenge.
This psalm also contains such displays of trust and purpose as this: “I will declare your name to my brothers; in the congregation I will praise you...For he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one; He has not hidden His face from Him but has listened to His cry for help.” And later, “The poor will eat and be satisfied; they who seek the LORD will praise him—may your hearts live forever! All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him.” The psalm ends with these words: “Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn—for He has done it.” Mark and Matthew both, then, tell us that soon after Jesus cried out the beginning of Psalm 22, He gave up His Spirit. His mission was done—from “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” to “For He has done it!”...the bookends of the Psalm frame Jesus’ Crucifixion.
I’ll wrap up with this observation—using Jesus’ cry to highlight God’s hiddenness seems, to me, to ignore the deeper reality going on here. Immanuel completing His rescue of us—the wilful sinners who turned away from God, Who has pursued us ever since—that is the theme of the Cross. That is the theme of the Bible; if God is hidden from time to time, it is because of man’s choice, not His, either directly because man turns his gaze away from God, or indirectly because sinful man cannot bear God’s holy Presence. Laced throughout the Bible are claims that God can be known nonetheless: that was why He called Abram, after all. Instead of tracking God’s “hiddenness” through the Bible, a better theme would be God seeking to make His home with us in ever more intimate ways: with Abraham He occasionally met but was not pressingly close; with the Tabernacle, He made His home among the people, but it was a temporary dwelling; with the Temple, He made His dwelling among the people a permanent thing; with Jesus, He came down to live amongst us; with Jesus’ resurrection, He sent His Spirit to live WITHIN us.
All in all, I found the speaker’s Biblical interpretation not at all compelling. It was done with an agenda and according to a trendy worldview, one that wants to segregate Nature from the supernatural—one that elevates what can be quantified over what can be known of quality. Hopefully I’ll get to a discussion of his allegiance to his particular scientific philosophy in another post. However, I think his Biblical treatment called for answer more strongly: it seemed to ignore the problem of Sin, that God’s apparentness is hidden only by man’s sinfulness. It’s hard to justify his claims that the heavens do NOT declare the glory of God in any verifiable way, and that God’s invisible qualities have not been made known throughout Creation (suggesting, by extension of Paul’s passage, that man has an excuse for not knowing God?), without a casual handling of the Scriptures as pertains to sin.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
The Word and the Spirit
A while ago I visited a church that has since become my home church here in Oxford. I had almost settled into another church, having gone several times and liking it quite well—it was a friendly, Bible-teaching church. But this new one went beyond being “good” and meeting certain checklist-type qualifications. The difference, I think, was a vibrancy of worship, spontaneity of expression, and an openness to the Holy Spirit. These church members were clearly excited to be in the presence of God.
I’ve been thinking for a while about the role of the Spirit in the Church, in Christian community, and in individual Christian growth. This is rather natural for someone who belongs to a very charismatic church back home, and yet by natural disposition is not particularly charismatic, but more of a staid, intellectual, Reformed-theology sort of believer. By natural disposition, I said: by faith and experience I tend to favor more responsive forms of Christian expression. But anyway, for someone who is interested in theology and Biblical exegesis, Church of the Highlands is a mildly unexpected church to gravitate towards. There is teaching, of course, sound and Biblical, but more in the form of anecdote and application; the sermons are very seeker-friendly.
I’ve wondered if it is the right church for me many times (knowing, all along, that finding a church to fit my predispositions is much less important than growing to into a good fit for the Christian community in which I find myself). I self-identify as a (non-Roman) Catholic, (non-Eastern) Orthodox, Reformed Charismatic…so finding a church to “suit” me is a bit beside the point. There are three main reasons I remain with Church of the Highlands. The first and simplest is that it was God Who brought me there, and He has yet to say leave. The second is that I believe in the vision of this church: its seeker-friendly atmosphere is not a weakness of critically examining the Word, but rather an intentional strength enabling it to live the Great Commission better, in my opinion, than any other church I’ve encountered. The third reason is that I do not go to church for a Bible lesson; I go to church for the expression of the community that is the Body. And, I think, the purest expression of that community is worship…Scripture reading can and should be done as part of a personal lifestyle. Truly, the same can be said of worship (and by worship here I specifically mean worship by praising) but the Body worshipping together is a big part of what it’s all about; teaching and study are more a means to an end, the end being worship in all its multihued shapes. I can learn Biblical truth from the Bible itself, or Christian authors, or Christian friends…sometimes even a non-Christian source will hammer home a transcendent truth. Worshipping together, however, is harder to manage alone.
But this post is not about why I stay with Highlands. It’s more about what I’ve learned here, or what I’m in the process of learning. I went to a church I liked, but not in an impassioned way, for several weeks. And let me say here I don’t mean to belittle this church, or imply it’s not as good as any other specific church; the fact that it didn’t provoke a certain sort of response in me says much more about me than it does about the church. But, even before I arrived in Oxford I wondered what short of church I should go to, having been told several time there was no shortage of good churches here.
Part of me wanted to attend a high-church Anglican service regularly. But this was for purely aesthetic reasons, those of a nostalgic medieval English history student. For while I theoretically value liturgy-heavy styles, and even enjoy them…for me it’s the enjoyment of an opera or museum, not of a worship service.
However, I ended up getting several recommendations for good churches and liked the one I visited first. Its focus, I was told by more than one person, was on “teaching the Word.” The other church I was most interested in (having not gone yet) was a vibrant community, but not as interested in Bible teaching. Now, before I even checked out this other church I had preconceived notions about it. “Not as into teaching the Word” translated, to me, as indicating one of the liberal, ungrounded, wishy-washy churches that were more about emotion and friendliness than the Truth. I was, it turned out, wrong.
A dichotomy between passionate worship and a firm stance on the Bible, on Truth, does seem to often exist. That common divide between “worshippers in Spirit” and “worshippers in Truth” which should be no divide at all. Church of the Highlands bridges this perceived gap quite well, particularly in the pastor’s own vision and teaching (though as a congregation, my amateur opinion is that it inclines more towards the “worshippers in Spirit” side). Sure, the teaching may not be as “rigorous” as elsewhere, but teaching the essentials and “mere Christianity” should never be undervalued, especially in a culture that either knows them so poorly or ignores them for the sake of fierce debate about non-essentials. The practicality of truth to relevant circumstances is also of great benefit, a benefit that is sometimes absent in the more “rigorous” teaching circles. Still, my college ministry bridged this gap so well that it was not visible, at least to me. In my opinion—having not given it all that much analysis—this was due to Grace Campus Ministries’ focus on Grace and Community.
Still, even though I’ve experienced communities where the dichotomy between Spirit and Truth was not painfully visible, I’ve realized that I nevertheless expect it. And so, having not visited St. Aldate’s, I assigned it to the “Spirit” side, and felt St Ebbe’s fit comfortably on the “truth” side of things. But I visited St Aldate’s, recognizing a desire for community-worship that I cannot manufacture alone. Even before I stepped in, I had half decided to go to Aldate’s regularly, even if the teaching wasn’t great.
For, as I said above, I look for worship more than teaching in a church. Maybe this is because I’m a better student than I am a worshipper, and I need more guidance in the latter. But beyond that, I honestly think that the sermon part of a service is of secondary importance to the worship, and not just for me. This is not because I undervalue teaching—but, as I mentioned before, a lot of teaching should go on throughout daily life. We all have the Bible, and if we fail to read it on our own, fail to discuss it with our friends, fail to seek out an explanation from those wiser than us, then surely we need a preacher to do our work for us. But a preacher is not a necessary role in a church—a pastor, on the other hand, is. We have blurred those roles into a semblance of a single role, but they of course have quite difference job descriptions and callings.
I think describing Ebbe’s as focused on “teaching the Word” is a confusing label. Sure, each sermon I’ve heard there was based on a Bible passage—but so was the message at Aldate’s. And the messages at Ebbe’s were more historical and cultural studies than a deep exegesis of the passages…good and true and useful points, but nothing I couldn’t get reading the passage alone; less, I think, than I would get from discussing the passage with friends. That’s not to say they were at all bad sermons; it’s just that reading a passage and giving an introductory explanation of it is not the only way to “teach the Word” (a tangential note: our evangelical terminology seems to confuse the Bible with the Word, Who is Christ—the Bible being God’s Holy Scriptures, but not a fourth person of the Quadrinity, as a friend expressed to me a little while ago. This distinction will be fleshed out a bit more below). It is good for young Christians, perhaps (but then again so is application), but it’s doing the believers’ work for them. Better, I think, to meditate on a passage, study it, pray over it, consult concordances or supplemental material if need be, and let the Spirit illuminate it for you; other believers can check or correct your understanding later.
This does imply the danger of an individual’s false interpretation of Scripture. We can’t have every trying to find out for themselves what the Bible “means,” can we? Of course we can, if we trust the Spirit, the role of Christ’s Body, and the life of Christ within each believer. Of course, mistakes will be made—but with preachers “teaching the Word,” mistakes and false interpretations also occur. If Christians are taught to diligently and critically read the Bible, rather than merely passively receive a sermon, they will be less likely to make serious errors.
It seems that in some churches that focus on “teaching the Word rigorously,” the Bible at times becomes less than living and active, less of a companion to a Christian’s daily walk. You get some nice, occasionally insightful, oft-times quaint “lessons,” and perhaps some doctrine, but little application or relevance or introduction to the role of the Spirit. I think this derives from mildly contrasting views of Scripture itself. Both sides would agree that “all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, correcting, rebuking, and training in righteousness,” but one would equate the Word of God exclusively with the Bible; the other would see the Bible as one of the key ways God reveals His Word (His expressed and knowable will) to His people.
One of the friends who seemed to favor Ebbe’s helped provoke these thoughts a couple weeks before I visited Aldate’s. We agree about many theological particulars, but it became clear we have slightly different views of the Bible and how it relates to the Church, among other distinctions. Both of us agree that every word, in the original manuscripts, is fully inspired of God and its meanings are absolutely true. Where differ seems to be about how the Spirit of God relates to or uses the Scriptures.
I won’t attempt to provide an exhaustive argument on either side, but basically he thinks that the Spirit confirms and elucidates only what is in the Bible; I tend to favor the view that God is not limited by the Bible, and although God never contradicts His Own words, He is free to tell us things outside of the 66 Books we have—for example, God could tell me to go get in my car and go for a long drive, though the concept is found nowhere from Genesis to Revelation. That’s an over-simplistic example, but basically I think we have a genuine relationship with God of a sort (potentially) deeper and fuller than we have with people, and that this would be impossible if God were limited by a book the size of the Bible—or even one the size of Gibbons “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” A book all about a finite mortal—or the intimate relationship between two finite mortals—would be longer than the Bible; a book, no matter how long, would never fully express an infinite God. John says as much at the end of his Gospel account: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” Were the things He did that were not recorded less true than those recorded? Of course not. God does not, I firmly believe, cripple His ability to relate to His children by restricting expression of His will to a few hundred chapters of script. Many of which, incidentally (one thinks of long portions of Levitical Law and already-fulfilled prophecy) are not immediately applicable to us, unless we wrench them out of context. Again (to belabor the point), the intended meaning of much of Scripture should not be completely divorced from its context—we cannot claim for ourselves everything God said to Abraham, Moses, and Elijah…He shows us something of Himself through these stories which are not of us, but it is Himself, rather than the events recounted, that is the unchanging timeless point. Elevating the Bible to be the source of all spiritual truth we can know leads, almost invariably, to taking such passages out of context to fit them to a current situation…for if we believe God only speaks to us through the Bible, we must frantically search for something in the Bible vaguely reminiscent of what God is saying now, or else disregard altogether the Voice we hear as something sent to deceive us.
My friend would say, however, that all we NEED to know is found within the Bible; I would respond yes, but all we NEED to know can be found in perhaps a dozen verses, and possibly less. My friend would say that we cannot be sure about the truth of any claim apart from the Bible; I would say we only know that Bible itself is true because of the Spirit and the Body which the Spirit used both to compile the Bible we have and to confirm its continual relevance. I believe the Bible because I know God; I don’t believe in God because I know the Bible. My friend would equate “God’s Word” precisely with the Old and New Testaments. I would describe the Testaments as definitely a true expression of God’s will, but I would equate God’s Word with His Son, the Logos, “the image of the invisible God,” and the “radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being.” I would also leave room for any revelation—natural, supernatural, common, specific—to be a portion of the Truth God is speaking constantly over Creation. Yes, such general revelations as the existence of fatherly love, or such specific revelations as Christ appearing in an unbeliever’s dream (such as has happened many, many times in modern Turkey, bringing in many new converts) are open to misinterpretations…but so is Romans 9, or Revelation pick-your-chapter, for that matter. I would say that a new convert in a jungle in the Amazon can grow, even lacking a Bible, through the ministrations of the indwelling Holy Spirit. My friend would say no, for healthy growth the new convert absolutely needs a copy of the Bible. We would agree that, if the Bible is available, failing to study it is a recipe for disaster—but I would point to my Amazonian or African tribesman, or the believers during the first couple hundred years of the Church who lacked an “official” canonical Word of God because it hadn’t been agreed upon, and say “don’t sell the Holy Spirit short, don’t overlook the relationship with a living and sovereign, intimate and personal God, don’t limit the work of Christ in any way.”
For the Gospel is not a collection of four books of the Bible. Christ is the Gospel, the Good News of God, as He is the Word and revealed Reason of God. It is a sad mis-emphasis to focus so much on the Bible that we downplay the very Gospel of Christ—it is the Gospel that saves, not the Bible. One of the great things about the Bible, though, is that it contains the Gospel account—it is perhaps the best tool for introducing the Gospel.
Enough of that. Let it suffice to sum up: I believe the Bible is the best single object for enabling Christian growth…but I would not call God or the Body of Christ “objects,” and would, in every circumstance I realize, seek to place no limitations on God’s relationship with His beloved. I realize I coming up against the Reformation cry of Sola Scriptura (in another post, I encountered the cry of Sola Fide, but I’ll ignore that one for now). I won’t try right now to place that mantra in context, and will offer no explicit opinions concerning its viability. But I do NOT think the Bible is exhaustively the Word of God; having only tasted the tip of the iceberg that is the weight of truth in the Bible, I still maintain that God is more talkative, more demonstrative, more involved than limiting Himself to the Bible. After all, the Bible itself speaks of Jesus Christ as the Word of God, which has more or less been the way I’ve tried to mean “the Word of God” throughout. What are we to make of that, really? Christ is the radiance of the invisible God; He fully encompasses what God is saying to His sons and daughters, in all the ways we can possibly understand it. The Bible, whether Greek or Vulgate, Hebrew or NIV, does NOT fully encompass God’s Word.
I hesitate to say this, but I actually think my view of the Bible places it in a more distinguished light than some Bible readers do (though not those who wrongly place it on near-equal footing with the members of the Trinity). I don’t look at the Bible as the culmination of what we are to know of God in this world (which is, I suppose, the understanding I am arguing against)…I see it as something MORE. For all the wisdom it contains, its purpose as I understand it is to point unfalteringly beyond itself—were the Bible to be given a voice, I think it would lament people coming to it to and settling down contentedly to fully understand it. We should come to the Bible to pass through it, into understanding of God, Who we can know much more about than the limited words found in the pages of the Bible. That’s what makes the Bible so great: it is an introduction to Someone much more expansive and limitless than itself.
It is like a key that unlocks a door into an ever-branching hallway: limiting our study to the key itself can make us ignore the Voice telling us where, when, and how to use it. It’s also like a prism that splits our one light of perception into a rainbow of knowing; it’s the tip of an iceberg that hints at unseen depths, the keyboard that plays a whole range of pieces all written by the same composer, it’s the 26 letters of an alphabet that enable an epic of expression, a code that makes a hitherto-unknown language fathomable. But more than these mysterious avenues of complexity that this one book can introduce, it is most like the letter of a Father to an estranged (and simple-minded) child, written in plain language but nevertheless hinting of the Father’s poetic mastery. And that is the true value and purpose of the Bible, introducing a Father to His children. The letter of introduction will never be forgotten, never be tossed aside, but it is only a starting point for the relationship, which will be filled with countless more words of love and wisdom from the Father to the child. It is a shame if the child never takes his eyes off that first letter—prized though it should be—and actually genuinely, intimately, interacts with his or her Father.
That was more of a tangent than I intended. But it applies to my original trajectory in this way: there are two sorts of teaching that are grounded in the Scriptures. One comes from my friend’s understanding of the Word, and is found at many good churches. When the Bible is the entirety of what we can know about God, though, a basic survey of a passage suffices; when it is a manual, a rule book, an exhaustive concordance, one needs to take no truly rigorous steps towards understanding relevance or application: the Bible, in brief, points mainly to itself.
The other sort of teaching, firmly grounded in the Bible and with a slightly modified understanding of “the Word of God, “can be found at Church of the Highlands, at Grace Campus Ministries, various other churches, the writings of Lewis and Chesterton. In its beginning steps it can merely be called “application,” but really I think it is about understanding the meaning and message contained in the Bible, and the interactive relationship it points to. This second sort of teaching, I firmly believe, has a bigger view of the Holy Bible.
I’ve been thinking for a while about the role of the Spirit in the Church, in Christian community, and in individual Christian growth. This is rather natural for someone who belongs to a very charismatic church back home, and yet by natural disposition is not particularly charismatic, but more of a staid, intellectual, Reformed-theology sort of believer. By natural disposition, I said: by faith and experience I tend to favor more responsive forms of Christian expression. But anyway, for someone who is interested in theology and Biblical exegesis, Church of the Highlands is a mildly unexpected church to gravitate towards. There is teaching, of course, sound and Biblical, but more in the form of anecdote and application; the sermons are very seeker-friendly.
I’ve wondered if it is the right church for me many times (knowing, all along, that finding a church to fit my predispositions is much less important than growing to into a good fit for the Christian community in which I find myself). I self-identify as a (non-Roman) Catholic, (non-Eastern) Orthodox, Reformed Charismatic…so finding a church to “suit” me is a bit beside the point. There are three main reasons I remain with Church of the Highlands. The first and simplest is that it was God Who brought me there, and He has yet to say leave. The second is that I believe in the vision of this church: its seeker-friendly atmosphere is not a weakness of critically examining the Word, but rather an intentional strength enabling it to live the Great Commission better, in my opinion, than any other church I’ve encountered. The third reason is that I do not go to church for a Bible lesson; I go to church for the expression of the community that is the Body. And, I think, the purest expression of that community is worship…Scripture reading can and should be done as part of a personal lifestyle. Truly, the same can be said of worship (and by worship here I specifically mean worship by praising) but the Body worshipping together is a big part of what it’s all about; teaching and study are more a means to an end, the end being worship in all its multihued shapes. I can learn Biblical truth from the Bible itself, or Christian authors, or Christian friends…sometimes even a non-Christian source will hammer home a transcendent truth. Worshipping together, however, is harder to manage alone.
But this post is not about why I stay with Highlands. It’s more about what I’ve learned here, or what I’m in the process of learning. I went to a church I liked, but not in an impassioned way, for several weeks. And let me say here I don’t mean to belittle this church, or imply it’s not as good as any other specific church; the fact that it didn’t provoke a certain sort of response in me says much more about me than it does about the church. But, even before I arrived in Oxford I wondered what short of church I should go to, having been told several time there was no shortage of good churches here.
Part of me wanted to attend a high-church Anglican service regularly. But this was for purely aesthetic reasons, those of a nostalgic medieval English history student. For while I theoretically value liturgy-heavy styles, and even enjoy them…for me it’s the enjoyment of an opera or museum, not of a worship service.
However, I ended up getting several recommendations for good churches and liked the one I visited first. Its focus, I was told by more than one person, was on “teaching the Word.” The other church I was most interested in (having not gone yet) was a vibrant community, but not as interested in Bible teaching. Now, before I even checked out this other church I had preconceived notions about it. “Not as into teaching the Word” translated, to me, as indicating one of the liberal, ungrounded, wishy-washy churches that were more about emotion and friendliness than the Truth. I was, it turned out, wrong.
A dichotomy between passionate worship and a firm stance on the Bible, on Truth, does seem to often exist. That common divide between “worshippers in Spirit” and “worshippers in Truth” which should be no divide at all. Church of the Highlands bridges this perceived gap quite well, particularly in the pastor’s own vision and teaching (though as a congregation, my amateur opinion is that it inclines more towards the “worshippers in Spirit” side). Sure, the teaching may not be as “rigorous” as elsewhere, but teaching the essentials and “mere Christianity” should never be undervalued, especially in a culture that either knows them so poorly or ignores them for the sake of fierce debate about non-essentials. The practicality of truth to relevant circumstances is also of great benefit, a benefit that is sometimes absent in the more “rigorous” teaching circles. Still, my college ministry bridged this gap so well that it was not visible, at least to me. In my opinion—having not given it all that much analysis—this was due to Grace Campus Ministries’ focus on Grace and Community.
Still, even though I’ve experienced communities where the dichotomy between Spirit and Truth was not painfully visible, I’ve realized that I nevertheless expect it. And so, having not visited St. Aldate’s, I assigned it to the “Spirit” side, and felt St Ebbe’s fit comfortably on the “truth” side of things. But I visited St Aldate’s, recognizing a desire for community-worship that I cannot manufacture alone. Even before I stepped in, I had half decided to go to Aldate’s regularly, even if the teaching wasn’t great.
For, as I said above, I look for worship more than teaching in a church. Maybe this is because I’m a better student than I am a worshipper, and I need more guidance in the latter. But beyond that, I honestly think that the sermon part of a service is of secondary importance to the worship, and not just for me. This is not because I undervalue teaching—but, as I mentioned before, a lot of teaching should go on throughout daily life. We all have the Bible, and if we fail to read it on our own, fail to discuss it with our friends, fail to seek out an explanation from those wiser than us, then surely we need a preacher to do our work for us. But a preacher is not a necessary role in a church—a pastor, on the other hand, is. We have blurred those roles into a semblance of a single role, but they of course have quite difference job descriptions and callings.
I think describing Ebbe’s as focused on “teaching the Word” is a confusing label. Sure, each sermon I’ve heard there was based on a Bible passage—but so was the message at Aldate’s. And the messages at Ebbe’s were more historical and cultural studies than a deep exegesis of the passages…good and true and useful points, but nothing I couldn’t get reading the passage alone; less, I think, than I would get from discussing the passage with friends. That’s not to say they were at all bad sermons; it’s just that reading a passage and giving an introductory explanation of it is not the only way to “teach the Word” (a tangential note: our evangelical terminology seems to confuse the Bible with the Word, Who is Christ—the Bible being God’s Holy Scriptures, but not a fourth person of the Quadrinity, as a friend expressed to me a little while ago. This distinction will be fleshed out a bit more below). It is good for young Christians, perhaps (but then again so is application), but it’s doing the believers’ work for them. Better, I think, to meditate on a passage, study it, pray over it, consult concordances or supplemental material if need be, and let the Spirit illuminate it for you; other believers can check or correct your understanding later.
This does imply the danger of an individual’s false interpretation of Scripture. We can’t have every trying to find out for themselves what the Bible “means,” can we? Of course we can, if we trust the Spirit, the role of Christ’s Body, and the life of Christ within each believer. Of course, mistakes will be made—but with preachers “teaching the Word,” mistakes and false interpretations also occur. If Christians are taught to diligently and critically read the Bible, rather than merely passively receive a sermon, they will be less likely to make serious errors.
It seems that in some churches that focus on “teaching the Word rigorously,” the Bible at times becomes less than living and active, less of a companion to a Christian’s daily walk. You get some nice, occasionally insightful, oft-times quaint “lessons,” and perhaps some doctrine, but little application or relevance or introduction to the role of the Spirit. I think this derives from mildly contrasting views of Scripture itself. Both sides would agree that “all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, correcting, rebuking, and training in righteousness,” but one would equate the Word of God exclusively with the Bible; the other would see the Bible as one of the key ways God reveals His Word (His expressed and knowable will) to His people.
One of the friends who seemed to favor Ebbe’s helped provoke these thoughts a couple weeks before I visited Aldate’s. We agree about many theological particulars, but it became clear we have slightly different views of the Bible and how it relates to the Church, among other distinctions. Both of us agree that every word, in the original manuscripts, is fully inspired of God and its meanings are absolutely true. Where differ seems to be about how the Spirit of God relates to or uses the Scriptures.
I won’t attempt to provide an exhaustive argument on either side, but basically he thinks that the Spirit confirms and elucidates only what is in the Bible; I tend to favor the view that God is not limited by the Bible, and although God never contradicts His Own words, He is free to tell us things outside of the 66 Books we have—for example, God could tell me to go get in my car and go for a long drive, though the concept is found nowhere from Genesis to Revelation. That’s an over-simplistic example, but basically I think we have a genuine relationship with God of a sort (potentially) deeper and fuller than we have with people, and that this would be impossible if God were limited by a book the size of the Bible—or even one the size of Gibbons “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” A book all about a finite mortal—or the intimate relationship between two finite mortals—would be longer than the Bible; a book, no matter how long, would never fully express an infinite God. John says as much at the end of his Gospel account: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” Were the things He did that were not recorded less true than those recorded? Of course not. God does not, I firmly believe, cripple His ability to relate to His children by restricting expression of His will to a few hundred chapters of script. Many of which, incidentally (one thinks of long portions of Levitical Law and already-fulfilled prophecy) are not immediately applicable to us, unless we wrench them out of context. Again (to belabor the point), the intended meaning of much of Scripture should not be completely divorced from its context—we cannot claim for ourselves everything God said to Abraham, Moses, and Elijah…He shows us something of Himself through these stories which are not of us, but it is Himself, rather than the events recounted, that is the unchanging timeless point. Elevating the Bible to be the source of all spiritual truth we can know leads, almost invariably, to taking such passages out of context to fit them to a current situation…for if we believe God only speaks to us through the Bible, we must frantically search for something in the Bible vaguely reminiscent of what God is saying now, or else disregard altogether the Voice we hear as something sent to deceive us.
My friend would say, however, that all we NEED to know is found within the Bible; I would respond yes, but all we NEED to know can be found in perhaps a dozen verses, and possibly less. My friend would say that we cannot be sure about the truth of any claim apart from the Bible; I would say we only know that Bible itself is true because of the Spirit and the Body which the Spirit used both to compile the Bible we have and to confirm its continual relevance. I believe the Bible because I know God; I don’t believe in God because I know the Bible. My friend would equate “God’s Word” precisely with the Old and New Testaments. I would describe the Testaments as definitely a true expression of God’s will, but I would equate God’s Word with His Son, the Logos, “the image of the invisible God,” and the “radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being.” I would also leave room for any revelation—natural, supernatural, common, specific—to be a portion of the Truth God is speaking constantly over Creation. Yes, such general revelations as the existence of fatherly love, or such specific revelations as Christ appearing in an unbeliever’s dream (such as has happened many, many times in modern Turkey, bringing in many new converts) are open to misinterpretations…but so is Romans 9, or Revelation pick-your-chapter, for that matter. I would say that a new convert in a jungle in the Amazon can grow, even lacking a Bible, through the ministrations of the indwelling Holy Spirit. My friend would say no, for healthy growth the new convert absolutely needs a copy of the Bible. We would agree that, if the Bible is available, failing to study it is a recipe for disaster—but I would point to my Amazonian or African tribesman, or the believers during the first couple hundred years of the Church who lacked an “official” canonical Word of God because it hadn’t been agreed upon, and say “don’t sell the Holy Spirit short, don’t overlook the relationship with a living and sovereign, intimate and personal God, don’t limit the work of Christ in any way.”
For the Gospel is not a collection of four books of the Bible. Christ is the Gospel, the Good News of God, as He is the Word and revealed Reason of God. It is a sad mis-emphasis to focus so much on the Bible that we downplay the very Gospel of Christ—it is the Gospel that saves, not the Bible. One of the great things about the Bible, though, is that it contains the Gospel account—it is perhaps the best tool for introducing the Gospel.
Enough of that. Let it suffice to sum up: I believe the Bible is the best single object for enabling Christian growth…but I would not call God or the Body of Christ “objects,” and would, in every circumstance I realize, seek to place no limitations on God’s relationship with His beloved. I realize I coming up against the Reformation cry of Sola Scriptura (in another post, I encountered the cry of Sola Fide, but I’ll ignore that one for now). I won’t try right now to place that mantra in context, and will offer no explicit opinions concerning its viability. But I do NOT think the Bible is exhaustively the Word of God; having only tasted the tip of the iceberg that is the weight of truth in the Bible, I still maintain that God is more talkative, more demonstrative, more involved than limiting Himself to the Bible. After all, the Bible itself speaks of Jesus Christ as the Word of God, which has more or less been the way I’ve tried to mean “the Word of God” throughout. What are we to make of that, really? Christ is the radiance of the invisible God; He fully encompasses what God is saying to His sons and daughters, in all the ways we can possibly understand it. The Bible, whether Greek or Vulgate, Hebrew or NIV, does NOT fully encompass God’s Word.
I hesitate to say this, but I actually think my view of the Bible places it in a more distinguished light than some Bible readers do (though not those who wrongly place it on near-equal footing with the members of the Trinity). I don’t look at the Bible as the culmination of what we are to know of God in this world (which is, I suppose, the understanding I am arguing against)…I see it as something MORE. For all the wisdom it contains, its purpose as I understand it is to point unfalteringly beyond itself—were the Bible to be given a voice, I think it would lament people coming to it to and settling down contentedly to fully understand it. We should come to the Bible to pass through it, into understanding of God, Who we can know much more about than the limited words found in the pages of the Bible. That’s what makes the Bible so great: it is an introduction to Someone much more expansive and limitless than itself.
It is like a key that unlocks a door into an ever-branching hallway: limiting our study to the key itself can make us ignore the Voice telling us where, when, and how to use it. It’s also like a prism that splits our one light of perception into a rainbow of knowing; it’s the tip of an iceberg that hints at unseen depths, the keyboard that plays a whole range of pieces all written by the same composer, it’s the 26 letters of an alphabet that enable an epic of expression, a code that makes a hitherto-unknown language fathomable. But more than these mysterious avenues of complexity that this one book can introduce, it is most like the letter of a Father to an estranged (and simple-minded) child, written in plain language but nevertheless hinting of the Father’s poetic mastery. And that is the true value and purpose of the Bible, introducing a Father to His children. The letter of introduction will never be forgotten, never be tossed aside, but it is only a starting point for the relationship, which will be filled with countless more words of love and wisdom from the Father to the child. It is a shame if the child never takes his eyes off that first letter—prized though it should be—and actually genuinely, intimately, interacts with his or her Father.
That was more of a tangent than I intended. But it applies to my original trajectory in this way: there are two sorts of teaching that are grounded in the Scriptures. One comes from my friend’s understanding of the Word, and is found at many good churches. When the Bible is the entirety of what we can know about God, though, a basic survey of a passage suffices; when it is a manual, a rule book, an exhaustive concordance, one needs to take no truly rigorous steps towards understanding relevance or application: the Bible, in brief, points mainly to itself.
The other sort of teaching, firmly grounded in the Bible and with a slightly modified understanding of “the Word of God, “can be found at Church of the Highlands, at Grace Campus Ministries, various other churches, the writings of Lewis and Chesterton. In its beginning steps it can merely be called “application,” but really I think it is about understanding the meaning and message contained in the Bible, and the interactive relationship it points to. This second sort of teaching, I firmly believe, has a bigger view of the Holy Bible.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Revelation thoughts
(N.B. What follows is a sort of questioning-pondering, not intended as anything conclusive or static, just an issue I've been working on...so there are probably several problems in it.)
Rev 21:6-8 “He said to me: ‘It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost form the spring of the water of life. He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be My son. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.’”
One mystery in particular has occupied my theological curiosity for many years. It’s one I doubt I’ll ever understand (it took me a long while to accept Deuteronomy 29:29, that “the secret things belong to the Lord,” but I finally grew content with the fact that there is much I will never know, at least this side of Heaven); it’s one that perhaps no theologian has ever fully understood, even though many have tackled the issue. But I tackle it nonetheless, not—I hope—in arrogance, but with the avid curiosity God placed within me. I have never seriously doubted God’s existence—in truth, I’ve never been allowed to: more easily indeed could I doubt my own existence—and for quite a few years now I haven’t doubted God’s love and perfect goodness. The confusion and questions comes in at the question of evil.
How could a good, loving, and sovereign Creator allow evil and suffering within His Creation? If God were not absolutely sovereign, or were not Love Itself, there would be little problem; but there is little recourse to talking about our (or Lucifer’s) “free will.” After all, God created our wills, and they have only as much freedom as He allows. None are absolutely free; all are constrained by what He permits. How could He have created a will that chose “Evil”? For how could Evil have existed in an Existence created exclusively by Him, and maintained solely by His sovereign pleasure? Granted, Evil may be simply (if, perhaps, incompletely) described as “a diversion from God’s will”…but how, with a God able to control everything, who is the ultimate origin of everything, is that even possible? Furthermore, ignoring the theoretical possibility of Evil, how could a good and loving God allow His own creatures to stumble into it?
I’ve never read Lewis’ “The Problem of Pain,” although I’ve read a shorter essay by him about the topic…perhaps if I read the full book, my own ponderings would find better direction. But I doubt even Lewis can solve this mystery. The existence of evil is a trickier theological-philosophical problem than I have been able to describe here; even a little thinking along these lines demonstrates this. However, I’ve been thinking about the question long enough that I believe I have come to glimpse God’s character more clearly through my questions. Nevertheless, I still have no answer, although what follows is what I’m coming to understand of the whole thing, however incomplete or downright wrong it may be.
The passage from Revelation above made a new insight click into place. But I am always wary to draw any theology from Revelation, even more so than other works of prophecy—the other prophetic books having already occurred in large part, to varying degrees. In this case, however, what clicked was something already rolling into place, chugging along by the twin engines of Biblical exegesis and my personal disgust with a particular strain of “Christian” thought.
Exegesis may be an over-reaching word for what has taken place over the past few years as I read Scripture with a none-too-discerning eye. Yet one strain in my reading has been an attempt to better perceive God’s character as revealed in His Word, and several years ago now a single verse jumped out at me: Exodus 15:3 “The LORD is a Warrior, the LORD is His Name.” It did not strike me as surprising, necessarily, for as a young boy I loved the stories of battle in the Old Testament—David and Goliath, David’s mighty men, Gideon, Sampson, all those scenes which appeal to something fundamental in the masculine soul. Reading Eldredge’s Wild at Heart in high school emphasized this strand (among other strands; looking back, it may have been in this book that Exodus 15:3 was first brought clearly to my attention) in man’s heart. In the intervening years, however, this verse has been something of a lens through which I’ve looked, from time to time, at other portions of Scripture. The Imprecatory Psalms, for example, make a bit more sense in this light, as does Jesus’ brief but decisive burst of anger in the Temple Court (and His claim to have come “to bring a sword,” and the nature of His Second Coming), as well as all those mentions of spiritual warfare. It was helpful for me to remember that “spiritual warfare” was not some backwards-euphemism for pacific prayer and turning the other cheek. Spiritual warfare stems from something absolutely fundamental to God’s nature. 1 Samuel 17:47 is a good example of this: “All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves; for the battle is the LORD’s, and He will give all of you into our hands.” This acceptance of the Lord’s warrior nature also, in an indirect way, helps explain all those commands to the Israelites to “utterly destroy” the corrupt and rebellious peoples of the Holy Land—down to their wives and children, their goods and their animals. That, though, needs a longer treatise to satisfactorily explain it (I touched upon it in a previous blog, Meditation on Psalm 83, although it was a rather oblique study. That post, by the way, deals with some similar ideas to this post), so I’ll abandon that tangent for now.
That was one of the strands that recently produced a “mental click” of sorts for me—there is something in Yahweh’s make-up that is victorious, righteously violent, a vehement thing of holy burning fire. In the words of a current Christian writer, He is the God Who Smokes. He has the heart of a Warrior. Perfect Love is not pacifism (as we know deep down, I might add—who can watch Wallace fight in Braveheart because of his wife’s murder, and then for his people, or see Hawkeye and Uncas war for their loved ones in the Last of the Mohicans, or a grown Peter Pan fight to rescue his children in Hook, and not at least glimpse this truth? It is ingrained in our greatest stories. Even children’s movies such as The Lion King display an awareness of this.)
The other strand is a reaction to something all too evident in our culture, both Christian and secular. It is unbridled pacifism or, to put it into other words, an unwillingness to fight evil. I don’t know when I first became aware of this philosophy, but a good place to start talking about it is the book Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. All in all a very good and timely book, and I don’t mean to discredit a Christian whom I respect. But, in a portion of the book where Shane waxes political, he makes clear his absolute pacifism. It does not seem to me to be an objection to this war or that, but a categorical opposition to war in general. Now, this sentiment certainly carries a strong appeal; after all, in the absence of evil it would be the only right way to live. This last sentence, incidentally, leads with only a short step to my “apologetic” of the existence of evil and suffering. But let me digress—or, more optimistically, let me flesh out this idea.
Evil does exist. Ignorance of this fact leads to more than one serious error, but awareness of it can lead someone like C. S. Lewis to write his essay entitled “Why I am not a Pacifist.” Pacifism is, in a way, an unwillingness to get involved in the fight against evil: there were pacifists even during WWII, when the lines were quite clearly drawn. Hitler would never have been stopped if only pacifists faced him, and the Jews would be with us no longer nor, perhaps, Poles or Gypsies or Slavs. The fact that some wars—most wars, in my opinion—are unjust does not preclude the existence of just wars. To refuse to fight all wars is, since evil exists, to let evil win.
But I am not merely speaking on the scale of international war, although it will always be with us...historians among you might think to those precious few years when WWI was naively labelled “The War to End all Wars.” Nor am I really speaking of more “local” wars, genocides and all related cruelties that cry out to deaf ears for justice. When I speak of letting evil win, I am not just or even primarily talking of guns and bombs and fighter jets. There are cultural wars that are serious enough to merit the name...one thinks of the abolition of slavery in England, for example, among multiple other cases (I chose this one because in it the good guys won, and because the lines were so clearly drawn between right and wrong—albeit the insight for many came only in hindsight). In more general and germane terms, all of existence is a struggle, is a fight, is a war. (A pertinent quote from author Tim Stoner: “If there is a real enemy who is the Master Deceiver and pads silently about
like a ravenous lion seeking those he can devour, then peace is not an option.”)
Before I came to Oxford, I attended a talk by an Oxford professor of theology. Somewhere else I wrote a rather in depth response to it (see “Taking the Lion out of the Faith”), so I will only touch upon it here. During a talk I as a whole rather enjoyed, it became clear that this fellow strongly disapproved of the warrior imagery in the Bible, dismissing the sanctioned violence of the Old and New Testaments as unenlightened views by the writers. Now, apart from the chronological snobbery and subtle danger of this sort of prideful Biblical interpretation (“Oh, certainly David meant that—but of course he doesn’t understand God like I do”), what really annoyed me was that he used Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia to support his point. I confess I really couldn’t follow his handling of the representation of Aslan as completely pacifistic, but afterwards in a discussion with him I mentioned—after pointing out some of the warrior imagery God uses through His Word—that it seems that his view of God emphasized the Lamb and obscured the Lion. His response was basically to the effect that this Oxford don’s picture of the Lion of Judah was in truth a Lamb in Lion’s clothing. This, by the way, completely ignores the Biblical phrase “the Wrath of the Lamb”...obscuring the Lion of God does not allow one to escape God’s warlike character. I still fail to understand how someone familiar with Narnia can make that mistake, but it was a reminder that wishful thinking can lead smarter and better educated men than me into grievous errors.
Having read Tim Stoner’s writing (both his book The God Who Smokes and many of his blog posts) I knew I was not alone in my objection to this strain of Christian interpretation. Of course, Lewis and Luther and Augustine and the Biblical authors alone would be sufficient, but it is helpful to read those living now who hold to and profess the Christian tradition...And Stoner is far from alone in that, of course: he is joined by Eldredge and many others. But this is more than I need write about this issue: suffice it to say that I have long objected to the current tendency to amputate all warlike characteristics from God, His Word, and the Christian life in general. It cripples us and—more importantly—it is patently untrue.
And so I come back to the verse at the head of this essay, especially the italicized portion. “He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be My son.” There are two elements to this yearning cry of the Lord that are familiar throughout His Word. One is seen there at the end: I will be his God and he will be My son. Often in the Bible “son” is replaced by “people,” but the meaning is basically the same. Throughout the Bible God is crying out for His people, His children, to come into proper relationship with Him...Hosea comes to mind most poignantly to me (Read Hosea 2 for a good expression of this). Also, in Romans 8 one can see this desire of God’s heart, particularly in verses 14-17. Elsewhere in both Testaments, though, it is found—it cannot be ignored, it is a major theme of Scripture: God is looking to bring His children, His people, into right relationship with Him. This is not, I repeat not, Him looking for people to obey and serve Him (“God is not served by human hands”) or even to merely offer Him praise. Romans 8:14 says it well “those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.” God is, to use C. S. Lewis’ imagery, looking to turn us into sons, gods, beings that—if we saw them today—we “would be strongly tempted to worship,” creatures of “everlasting splendours.” Oswald Chambers says it like this: “The one and only characteristic of the Holy Ghost in a man is a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ, and freedom from everything that is unlike Him.” God is not seeking servants—He is molding us into creatures who reflect the glory and beauty and majesty of the Creator. This is a higher calling than any of us would dare aim for, but He is certain to achieve it nevertheless.
This leads to difficulties that our imaginary heaven of sweet winged cherubs and harps does not demand. He is not merely looking to save us (though He does so, gloriously and graciously). He is, of course, looking for members of His own family to bring in; He wants to share His own character and being—He’s not looking for milksops, as Oswald Chambers says. And this brings me to the second familiar strand in Revelation 21:7: The idea of “overcoming.” It is found in all those verses I mentioned before which speak to the warlike elements of God’s divine nature. But it’s not only found referring to God’s nature—it’s also seen in descriptions of God’s people.
There is Gideon; in Judges 6 and angel of the LORD appeared to him, telling him “the LORD is with you, mighty warrior.”
It is seen in Samson, Joshua, and Caleb.
There is, of course, David. In 1 Samuel one man describes David—“I have seen a son of Jesse of Bethlehem who knows how to play the harp. He is a brave man and a warrior. He speaks well and is a fine-looking man. And the LORD is with him.” David himself says (in Psalm 144) “Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle. He is my loving God and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield, in whom I take refuge, who subdues peoples under me.” David the warrior-poet, it should be remembered, God called “a man after My own heart.”
This is sentiment is found in the New Testament as well. In Matthew 11:12 (ESV), for example, the Bible says “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.” There is—clearer, I think—Christ’s statement that He came not to bring peace, but a sword. God wars against evil throughout Creation, and He brings us into that struggle.
In Romans 8 I find a clear parallel to the imagery in Revelation 21:6-8. A selection from the end of this chapter reads (note: all these verses should, as always, be read in context. But I won’t lengthen this post by pasting whole chapters) “and we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose. For those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of His Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers...What then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us?...In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
A weighty passage, that touches upon many things—not least giving a certain perspective to God’s purposes in predestination that concern both His nation Israel and His people the Church, both corporately and individually: He is working through human history towards a definite goal that is broader and higher reaching than any one person. But I will not get much into that—there’s much in Romans 8 that is over my head.
What I want to focus on is that idea of being conformed into His familial likeness, and also this imagery of conquerors, of those who overcome; throughout Paul, too, the idea of straining, pressing on, running the race, overcoming, is a common theme. Laced through the whole Bible, God is calling men and women into becoming more like Him. This entails—among so many things—becoming one who overcomes. I must say here, the story of God’s warlike attributes is only part of the story—I’m stressing it because it is a part that is often brushed under the rug in Christian circles I’m familiar with. He is also a God of Peace and Comfort—but the point is, that peace and comfort must be understood in context of a War which God is involved in, and winning. Yet we should not ignore verses such as Hebrews 12:14-15 “Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many,” and Romans 12:17-19 “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” There are other verses too, which point to this mystery: God Wars and Restores, burns and heals, judges and forgives. Another mystery—it is the Lord’s to avenge and “the battle belongs to the LORD,” but He will give our enemy (and His) into our hands...we are not to be mere bystanders, nor amateur providences (See, e.g., 1 Samuel 17:47).
But back to my starting point: the problem of the existence of evil. We know that God created in order to display His Glory. It stands to reason, too, that He created in such a way to display a broad swath of His character, not just His power and divine nature, but other elements of His Person. He can do this without us, certainly—the heavens declare the glory of God, the rocks shout out with praise—but He chooses in His essentially relational Nature to bring us into the story. He displays His sovereignty, love, grace, beauty and more through both the animate and inanimate things in Creation. One of His favorite ways to display His character (it seems) is through His people. So we, in chorus with the stars and stones and waters of the deep, exhibit certain hints of His love and forgiveness, His justice and His mercy. But also—and here is the point—God’s victorious Nature, able and eager to overcome, is also made evident through Creation. This is done through both His deeds and ours.
It is, I think, safe to say this is a central purpose of Creation: To bring little gods into Heaven’s Family, thereby demonstrating God’s glory, His relational nature, His overflowing, joyful generosity and Fatherhood. To me (many probably realized this long ago) this hints at the answer to “why Sin?” Sin exists, possibly, because God wishes to display this portion of His Character: Yahweh is a Warrior, Yahweh is His Name. This perspective carries a slightly trouble flavor with it—it sounds as though God uses Sin for His own purposes. Indeed, that may be the case. But it should be remembered that we see now only darkly, as if in a smudged mirror, and that there do exist mysteries that are simply not ours to know. What we do know is that God is good, is love, is sovereign, is just, and that Creation exists for His Glory…somehow, the existence of Sin must—I think—glorify Who God is, or else I don’t think it would have been allowed…and we know it was allowed by a sovereign God. This emphasis on God’s conquering nature does not really change anything, it only offers a suggestion as to how Sin might glorify Him—by giving Him opportunity to Rescue, to Save, to Fight, to be Victorious and Sacrificial (it’s worth emphasizing that God’s Sacrifice on the Cross—which brings many sons into glory—seems to be only possible in the context of a war with Evil: and we know the Cross was for God’s glory).
But Sin does not only allow God to display His passion for victory directly, but also indirectly. God is creating creatures—us—who overcome, as He Himself has done and continues to do. He intends His creatures to display His own Person more than we realize. Not only by being loving and forgiving and generous (though that too, most assuredly), but also by overcoming and (in the words of Ephesians) “to stand our ground, and after we have done everything, to stand.” We are to eventually bear a strong family likeness, differing only in degree, to Jesus Christ. God does not turn a blind eye to evil, and nor should we…we were made, to some extent, for the very purpose of facing and defeating that evil through the grace of God. We need not shy away from the war imagery found through the Bible…it is meant first to warn us, then to rouse us. It is in this light that I read such passages as these:
“But the LORD is with me like a mighty warrior;
so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail.
They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced;
their dishonor will never be forgotten.
O LORD Almighty, you who examine the righteous
and probe the heart and mind,
let me see your vengeance upon them,
for to you I have committed my cause.”
--Jeremiah 20: 11-12
“A destroyer will come against Babylon;
her warriors will be captured,
and their bows will be broken.
For the LORD is a God of retribution;
He will repay in full.”
--Jeremiah 51:56
There are many such passages as these. We need not worry about the existence of evil, though we should be aware and serious about it. For we know Who wins, we know Who will ultimately be glorified: the Warrior Creator who is Love Absolute.
This may have merely muddied the waters, and perhaps there’s nothing truly original here; but the waters are muddy enough already, and I think it’s a perspective that should be heard in our quasi-Christian culture that takes the ostrich, rather than the Lion, as its mascot. Moreover, this seems to be a worthwhile path to explore...I do believe a part of the answer to “Why Sin?” is found in the propensity of God to conquer, to overcome.
Rev 21:6-8 “He said to me: ‘It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost form the spring of the water of life. He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be My son. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.’”
One mystery in particular has occupied my theological curiosity for many years. It’s one I doubt I’ll ever understand (it took me a long while to accept Deuteronomy 29:29, that “the secret things belong to the Lord,” but I finally grew content with the fact that there is much I will never know, at least this side of Heaven); it’s one that perhaps no theologian has ever fully understood, even though many have tackled the issue. But I tackle it nonetheless, not—I hope—in arrogance, but with the avid curiosity God placed within me. I have never seriously doubted God’s existence—in truth, I’ve never been allowed to: more easily indeed could I doubt my own existence—and for quite a few years now I haven’t doubted God’s love and perfect goodness. The confusion and questions comes in at the question of evil.
How could a good, loving, and sovereign Creator allow evil and suffering within His Creation? If God were not absolutely sovereign, or were not Love Itself, there would be little problem; but there is little recourse to talking about our (or Lucifer’s) “free will.” After all, God created our wills, and they have only as much freedom as He allows. None are absolutely free; all are constrained by what He permits. How could He have created a will that chose “Evil”? For how could Evil have existed in an Existence created exclusively by Him, and maintained solely by His sovereign pleasure? Granted, Evil may be simply (if, perhaps, incompletely) described as “a diversion from God’s will”…but how, with a God able to control everything, who is the ultimate origin of everything, is that even possible? Furthermore, ignoring the theoretical possibility of Evil, how could a good and loving God allow His own creatures to stumble into it?
I’ve never read Lewis’ “The Problem of Pain,” although I’ve read a shorter essay by him about the topic…perhaps if I read the full book, my own ponderings would find better direction. But I doubt even Lewis can solve this mystery. The existence of evil is a trickier theological-philosophical problem than I have been able to describe here; even a little thinking along these lines demonstrates this. However, I’ve been thinking about the question long enough that I believe I have come to glimpse God’s character more clearly through my questions. Nevertheless, I still have no answer, although what follows is what I’m coming to understand of the whole thing, however incomplete or downright wrong it may be.
The passage from Revelation above made a new insight click into place. But I am always wary to draw any theology from Revelation, even more so than other works of prophecy—the other prophetic books having already occurred in large part, to varying degrees. In this case, however, what clicked was something already rolling into place, chugging along by the twin engines of Biblical exegesis and my personal disgust with a particular strain of “Christian” thought.
Exegesis may be an over-reaching word for what has taken place over the past few years as I read Scripture with a none-too-discerning eye. Yet one strain in my reading has been an attempt to better perceive God’s character as revealed in His Word, and several years ago now a single verse jumped out at me: Exodus 15:3 “The LORD is a Warrior, the LORD is His Name.” It did not strike me as surprising, necessarily, for as a young boy I loved the stories of battle in the Old Testament—David and Goliath, David’s mighty men, Gideon, Sampson, all those scenes which appeal to something fundamental in the masculine soul. Reading Eldredge’s Wild at Heart in high school emphasized this strand (among other strands; looking back, it may have been in this book that Exodus 15:3 was first brought clearly to my attention) in man’s heart. In the intervening years, however, this verse has been something of a lens through which I’ve looked, from time to time, at other portions of Scripture. The Imprecatory Psalms, for example, make a bit more sense in this light, as does Jesus’ brief but decisive burst of anger in the Temple Court (and His claim to have come “to bring a sword,” and the nature of His Second Coming), as well as all those mentions of spiritual warfare. It was helpful for me to remember that “spiritual warfare” was not some backwards-euphemism for pacific prayer and turning the other cheek. Spiritual warfare stems from something absolutely fundamental to God’s nature. 1 Samuel 17:47 is a good example of this: “All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves; for the battle is the LORD’s, and He will give all of you into our hands.” This acceptance of the Lord’s warrior nature also, in an indirect way, helps explain all those commands to the Israelites to “utterly destroy” the corrupt and rebellious peoples of the Holy Land—down to their wives and children, their goods and their animals. That, though, needs a longer treatise to satisfactorily explain it (I touched upon it in a previous blog, Meditation on Psalm 83, although it was a rather oblique study. That post, by the way, deals with some similar ideas to this post), so I’ll abandon that tangent for now.
That was one of the strands that recently produced a “mental click” of sorts for me—there is something in Yahweh’s make-up that is victorious, righteously violent, a vehement thing of holy burning fire. In the words of a current Christian writer, He is the God Who Smokes. He has the heart of a Warrior. Perfect Love is not pacifism (as we know deep down, I might add—who can watch Wallace fight in Braveheart because of his wife’s murder, and then for his people, or see Hawkeye and Uncas war for their loved ones in the Last of the Mohicans, or a grown Peter Pan fight to rescue his children in Hook, and not at least glimpse this truth? It is ingrained in our greatest stories. Even children’s movies such as The Lion King display an awareness of this.)
The other strand is a reaction to something all too evident in our culture, both Christian and secular. It is unbridled pacifism or, to put it into other words, an unwillingness to fight evil. I don’t know when I first became aware of this philosophy, but a good place to start talking about it is the book Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. All in all a very good and timely book, and I don’t mean to discredit a Christian whom I respect. But, in a portion of the book where Shane waxes political, he makes clear his absolute pacifism. It does not seem to me to be an objection to this war or that, but a categorical opposition to war in general. Now, this sentiment certainly carries a strong appeal; after all, in the absence of evil it would be the only right way to live. This last sentence, incidentally, leads with only a short step to my “apologetic” of the existence of evil and suffering. But let me digress—or, more optimistically, let me flesh out this idea.
Evil does exist. Ignorance of this fact leads to more than one serious error, but awareness of it can lead someone like C. S. Lewis to write his essay entitled “Why I am not a Pacifist.” Pacifism is, in a way, an unwillingness to get involved in the fight against evil: there were pacifists even during WWII, when the lines were quite clearly drawn. Hitler would never have been stopped if only pacifists faced him, and the Jews would be with us no longer nor, perhaps, Poles or Gypsies or Slavs. The fact that some wars—most wars, in my opinion—are unjust does not preclude the existence of just wars. To refuse to fight all wars is, since evil exists, to let evil win.
But I am not merely speaking on the scale of international war, although it will always be with us...historians among you might think to those precious few years when WWI was naively labelled “The War to End all Wars.” Nor am I really speaking of more “local” wars, genocides and all related cruelties that cry out to deaf ears for justice. When I speak of letting evil win, I am not just or even primarily talking of guns and bombs and fighter jets. There are cultural wars that are serious enough to merit the name...one thinks of the abolition of slavery in England, for example, among multiple other cases (I chose this one because in it the good guys won, and because the lines were so clearly drawn between right and wrong—albeit the insight for many came only in hindsight). In more general and germane terms, all of existence is a struggle, is a fight, is a war. (A pertinent quote from author Tim Stoner: “If there is a real enemy who is the Master Deceiver and pads silently about
like a ravenous lion seeking those he can devour, then peace is not an option.”)
Before I came to Oxford, I attended a talk by an Oxford professor of theology. Somewhere else I wrote a rather in depth response to it (see “Taking the Lion out of the Faith”), so I will only touch upon it here. During a talk I as a whole rather enjoyed, it became clear that this fellow strongly disapproved of the warrior imagery in the Bible, dismissing the sanctioned violence of the Old and New Testaments as unenlightened views by the writers. Now, apart from the chronological snobbery and subtle danger of this sort of prideful Biblical interpretation (“Oh, certainly David meant that—but of course he doesn’t understand God like I do”), what really annoyed me was that he used Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia to support his point. I confess I really couldn’t follow his handling of the representation of Aslan as completely pacifistic, but afterwards in a discussion with him I mentioned—after pointing out some of the warrior imagery God uses through His Word—that it seems that his view of God emphasized the Lamb and obscured the Lion. His response was basically to the effect that this Oxford don’s picture of the Lion of Judah was in truth a Lamb in Lion’s clothing. This, by the way, completely ignores the Biblical phrase “the Wrath of the Lamb”...obscuring the Lion of God does not allow one to escape God’s warlike character. I still fail to understand how someone familiar with Narnia can make that mistake, but it was a reminder that wishful thinking can lead smarter and better educated men than me into grievous errors.
Having read Tim Stoner’s writing (both his book The God Who Smokes and many of his blog posts) I knew I was not alone in my objection to this strain of Christian interpretation. Of course, Lewis and Luther and Augustine and the Biblical authors alone would be sufficient, but it is helpful to read those living now who hold to and profess the Christian tradition...And Stoner is far from alone in that, of course: he is joined by Eldredge and many others. But this is more than I need write about this issue: suffice it to say that I have long objected to the current tendency to amputate all warlike characteristics from God, His Word, and the Christian life in general. It cripples us and—more importantly—it is patently untrue.
And so I come back to the verse at the head of this essay, especially the italicized portion. “He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be My son.” There are two elements to this yearning cry of the Lord that are familiar throughout His Word. One is seen there at the end: I will be his God and he will be My son. Often in the Bible “son” is replaced by “people,” but the meaning is basically the same. Throughout the Bible God is crying out for His people, His children, to come into proper relationship with Him...Hosea comes to mind most poignantly to me (Read Hosea 2 for a good expression of this). Also, in Romans 8 one can see this desire of God’s heart, particularly in verses 14-17. Elsewhere in both Testaments, though, it is found—it cannot be ignored, it is a major theme of Scripture: God is looking to bring His children, His people, into right relationship with Him. This is not, I repeat not, Him looking for people to obey and serve Him (“God is not served by human hands”) or even to merely offer Him praise. Romans 8:14 says it well “those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.” God is, to use C. S. Lewis’ imagery, looking to turn us into sons, gods, beings that—if we saw them today—we “would be strongly tempted to worship,” creatures of “everlasting splendours.” Oswald Chambers says it like this: “The one and only characteristic of the Holy Ghost in a man is a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ, and freedom from everything that is unlike Him.” God is not seeking servants—He is molding us into creatures who reflect the glory and beauty and majesty of the Creator. This is a higher calling than any of us would dare aim for, but He is certain to achieve it nevertheless.
This leads to difficulties that our imaginary heaven of sweet winged cherubs and harps does not demand. He is not merely looking to save us (though He does so, gloriously and graciously). He is, of course, looking for members of His own family to bring in; He wants to share His own character and being—He’s not looking for milksops, as Oswald Chambers says. And this brings me to the second familiar strand in Revelation 21:7: The idea of “overcoming.” It is found in all those verses I mentioned before which speak to the warlike elements of God’s divine nature. But it’s not only found referring to God’s nature—it’s also seen in descriptions of God’s people.
There is Gideon; in Judges 6 and angel of the LORD appeared to him, telling him “the LORD is with you, mighty warrior.”
It is seen in Samson, Joshua, and Caleb.
There is, of course, David. In 1 Samuel one man describes David—“I have seen a son of Jesse of Bethlehem who knows how to play the harp. He is a brave man and a warrior. He speaks well and is a fine-looking man. And the LORD is with him.” David himself says (in Psalm 144) “Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle. He is my loving God and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield, in whom I take refuge, who subdues peoples under me.” David the warrior-poet, it should be remembered, God called “a man after My own heart.”
This is sentiment is found in the New Testament as well. In Matthew 11:12 (ESV), for example, the Bible says “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.” There is—clearer, I think—Christ’s statement that He came not to bring peace, but a sword. God wars against evil throughout Creation, and He brings us into that struggle.
In Romans 8 I find a clear parallel to the imagery in Revelation 21:6-8. A selection from the end of this chapter reads (note: all these verses should, as always, be read in context. But I won’t lengthen this post by pasting whole chapters) “and we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose. For those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of His Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers...What then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us?...In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
A weighty passage, that touches upon many things—not least giving a certain perspective to God’s purposes in predestination that concern both His nation Israel and His people the Church, both corporately and individually: He is working through human history towards a definite goal that is broader and higher reaching than any one person. But I will not get much into that—there’s much in Romans 8 that is over my head.
What I want to focus on is that idea of being conformed into His familial likeness, and also this imagery of conquerors, of those who overcome; throughout Paul, too, the idea of straining, pressing on, running the race, overcoming, is a common theme. Laced through the whole Bible, God is calling men and women into becoming more like Him. This entails—among so many things—becoming one who overcomes. I must say here, the story of God’s warlike attributes is only part of the story—I’m stressing it because it is a part that is often brushed under the rug in Christian circles I’m familiar with. He is also a God of Peace and Comfort—but the point is, that peace and comfort must be understood in context of a War which God is involved in, and winning. Yet we should not ignore verses such as Hebrews 12:14-15 “Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many,” and Romans 12:17-19 “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” There are other verses too, which point to this mystery: God Wars and Restores, burns and heals, judges and forgives. Another mystery—it is the Lord’s to avenge and “the battle belongs to the LORD,” but He will give our enemy (and His) into our hands...we are not to be mere bystanders, nor amateur providences (See, e.g., 1 Samuel 17:47).
But back to my starting point: the problem of the existence of evil. We know that God created in order to display His Glory. It stands to reason, too, that He created in such a way to display a broad swath of His character, not just His power and divine nature, but other elements of His Person. He can do this without us, certainly—the heavens declare the glory of God, the rocks shout out with praise—but He chooses in His essentially relational Nature to bring us into the story. He displays His sovereignty, love, grace, beauty and more through both the animate and inanimate things in Creation. One of His favorite ways to display His character (it seems) is through His people. So we, in chorus with the stars and stones and waters of the deep, exhibit certain hints of His love and forgiveness, His justice and His mercy. But also—and here is the point—God’s victorious Nature, able and eager to overcome, is also made evident through Creation. This is done through both His deeds and ours.
It is, I think, safe to say this is a central purpose of Creation: To bring little gods into Heaven’s Family, thereby demonstrating God’s glory, His relational nature, His overflowing, joyful generosity and Fatherhood. To me (many probably realized this long ago) this hints at the answer to “why Sin?” Sin exists, possibly, because God wishes to display this portion of His Character: Yahweh is a Warrior, Yahweh is His Name. This perspective carries a slightly trouble flavor with it—it sounds as though God uses Sin for His own purposes. Indeed, that may be the case. But it should be remembered that we see now only darkly, as if in a smudged mirror, and that there do exist mysteries that are simply not ours to know. What we do know is that God is good, is love, is sovereign, is just, and that Creation exists for His Glory…somehow, the existence of Sin must—I think—glorify Who God is, or else I don’t think it would have been allowed…and we know it was allowed by a sovereign God. This emphasis on God’s conquering nature does not really change anything, it only offers a suggestion as to how Sin might glorify Him—by giving Him opportunity to Rescue, to Save, to Fight, to be Victorious and Sacrificial (it’s worth emphasizing that God’s Sacrifice on the Cross—which brings many sons into glory—seems to be only possible in the context of a war with Evil: and we know the Cross was for God’s glory).
But Sin does not only allow God to display His passion for victory directly, but also indirectly. God is creating creatures—us—who overcome, as He Himself has done and continues to do. He intends His creatures to display His own Person more than we realize. Not only by being loving and forgiving and generous (though that too, most assuredly), but also by overcoming and (in the words of Ephesians) “to stand our ground, and after we have done everything, to stand.” We are to eventually bear a strong family likeness, differing only in degree, to Jesus Christ. God does not turn a blind eye to evil, and nor should we…we were made, to some extent, for the very purpose of facing and defeating that evil through the grace of God. We need not shy away from the war imagery found through the Bible…it is meant first to warn us, then to rouse us. It is in this light that I read such passages as these:
“But the LORD is with me like a mighty warrior;
so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail.
They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced;
their dishonor will never be forgotten.
O LORD Almighty, you who examine the righteous
and probe the heart and mind,
let me see your vengeance upon them,
for to you I have committed my cause.”
--Jeremiah 20: 11-12
“A destroyer will come against Babylon;
her warriors will be captured,
and their bows will be broken.
For the LORD is a God of retribution;
He will repay in full.”
--Jeremiah 51:56
There are many such passages as these. We need not worry about the existence of evil, though we should be aware and serious about it. For we know Who wins, we know Who will ultimately be glorified: the Warrior Creator who is Love Absolute.
This may have merely muddied the waters, and perhaps there’s nothing truly original here; but the waters are muddy enough already, and I think it’s a perspective that should be heard in our quasi-Christian culture that takes the ostrich, rather than the Lion, as its mascot. Moreover, this seems to be a worthwhile path to explore...I do believe a part of the answer to “Why Sin?” is found in the propensity of God to conquer, to overcome.
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