Relocating To Elfland

I got quite a chuckle when a friend recently suggested RTE should be renamed “blogvinck.com.” In my own defense, it just so happens that I started this thing the same year I’m reading through the Reformed Dogmatics. 

But speaking of Bavinck, I want to go back today to my earlier entry on Christ as Savior of the world. I suggested there that a full-orbed doctrine of Christ must take account of His relationship not only to sinners (which scripture certainly addresses) but also to the cosmos (because this, too, scripture addresses, and with great profundity). Those who insist on giving individual soteriology “priority” over the cosmological implications of the gospel (or vice versa) must consider whether these are not equally ultimate in the Christology of the Bible. It is simply not the case that Christ is busy saving sinners now but will worry about the cosmos later. The One by whom thrones and dominions and rulers and authorities were created (Col 1:16) has now been raised from the dead and seated far above all rule and authority and power and dominion (Eph 1:20–21), and this has implications far beyond His overcoming the enmity of individual hearts. The cosmos is not the same since Jesus rose from the dead; that’s a broader issue than sinners getting saved. Salvation of the sinner is never abstracted from Christ’s taking His seat and His inheritance now as the Last Adam, even as Christ’s position with respect to the cosmos is intimately connected to what He is doing in the midst of redeemed sinners. The two cannot be separated, precisely because Christ is the fullness of who He is. 

Okay, but then I read something in Bavinck that made me think the root of all this does not lie, strictly speaking, even in Christology. Christology must (no surprise to Trinitarians) be placed in proper relationship to pneumatology; and when we get into the doctrine of the Spirit, it is even more obvious that the cosmological cannot be separated from the soteriological. Here’s Bavinck: 

“When in Scripture and in the church the revelation of God that appeared in Christ has become a constituent of the cosmos, a new dispensation begins. . . . For the special revelation in Christ is not meant to be restricted to himself but, proceeding from him, to be realized in the church, in humanity, in the world. The aim of revelation, after all, is to re-create humanity after the image of God, to establish the kingdom of God on earth, to redeem the world from the power of sin and, in and through all this, to glorify the name of the Lord in all his creatures. In light of this, however, an objective revelation in Christ is not sufficient, but there needs to be added a working of the Spirit in order that human beings may acknowledge and accept that revelation of God and thereby become the image of the Son.” (Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 1.347–48)

Bavinck’s thesis, as I understand it, is that world history is divided into two great dispensations (“two great periods,” as he says elsewhere, p. 1.382). The first dispensation is that of the Son: in this period, God prepares the way for His own coming to “tabernacle” among men in the Person of Christ Jesus. But once Christ has arrived, the “dispensation of the Son then makes way for the dispensation of the Spirit” (p. 1.383). Here Bavinck brings forward a magnificent metaphor: 

“Objective revelation passes into subjective appropriation. In Christ, in the middle of history, God created an organic center; from this center, in an ever widening sphere, God drew the circles within which the light of revelation shines. The sun as it rises covers only a small area of the surface of the earth with its rays, but at its zenith it shines brilliantly over the whole earth.” (p. 1.383) 

We are living in the second great period, the dispensation of the Spirit, in which God is bringing forth not the revelation of the Son (He has already done that) but rather the appropriation of that revelation by the power of the Spirit. This age “belongs” (if we may so express it) to the Spirit, whose task it is to take the things revealed in the Son and bring them to fruition in all the earth. Through the working of the Spirit, the rays of the Sun of Righteousness will fill the world as the waters cover the sea. Does this involve the salvation of individual sinners? Of course it does. But does it also have tremendous cosmological implications? To ask the question is to answer it: are we really prepared to say that the Spirit’s new creation work in history will amount to snatching a few souls from the flames of hell, while the world as a whole remains “without form and void” (Gen 1:2) until it is destroyed and the “real” new creation begins (cosmologically speaking) at the parousia of the Son? Such a view not only dishonors Christ as the Last Adam, it also dishonors His Spirit. 

I appreciate that caution is in order in “predicting” just how the Spirit will fill the earth with the glory and knowledge of the Lord. But surely scripture will not permit us to think of new creation as deferred until after the Second Coming; and we must be very careful not to diminish our hope in the prospects for new creation in the meantime. The reason for this lies not only in our doctrine of Christ but also in our doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

I’ve been reading through Bavinck’s material on general and special revelation, and it has tacked down some loose pieces in my thinking about the relationship of faith and reason. In the biblical schema of human knowledge, there are three basic components: from God’s side (1) revelation (both general and special), and on man’s side (2) reason and (3) faith. Scripture presents the interplay of these components in three different contexts: 

First is the pre-Fall context. Here man received from God both general revelation (in nature and history) and special revelation (e.g., Gen 2:16–17). His reason and faith were perfectly integrated such that he received God’s revelation with a reasonable faith and a believing mind. It was not the case (and this is important) that he engaged God’s general revelation by means of reason and God’s special revelation by means of faith. Things were not so compartmentalized. Adam took in general revelation believingly, and he took in special revelation rationally. At no point (prior to the Fall) were his faith and reason operating independently from each other, nor did his faith and reason operate at any point autonomously from divine revelation. 

Second is the post-Fall context among the unredeemed. In the post-Fall context, from God’s side we find a flurry of new special revelation that is redemptive in nature (messages of grace, “good news”). Fallen man, however, can neither believe this special revelation nor understand it; both his faith has turned to unbelief and his reason has been darkened by the Fall. And this affects his apprehension not only of special revelation but also of general revelation. Man may be able to dodge special revelation, but he cannot escape the general revelation of God that confronts him in every created thing, including himself; and he wars against the revelation of God, suppressing the truth in unrighteousness (Rom 1:18). This does not mean, however, that man has become a brute. He retains the faculties of reason, but he does not know created things truly because he does not receive in them the revelation of God (he is like someone trying to understand a piano while firmly rejecting the whole notion of music). 

More, however, must be said. Fallen man is without exception a believer; he is at every point a man of faith. He always believes in something, he always assumes something, for without a set of basic beliefs (principia, we might say) he could have no epistemology, he could account for nothing. But the faith-commitments of fallen man turn out, upon examination, to be irrational. Perhaps he believes in a realm of forms, or a noumenal realm, or a Weltgeist, or “laws” of logic, or whatever. But why is such blind faith warranted? None of these faith-commitments can fund a coherent epistemology: given any one of them, at the edge of human thought always lies a void, an unexplained and unexplainable blank. The realm of forms is “just there”; the noumena is “just there”; the Weltgeist is “just there,” unexplained and unexplainable and (which is very important) unable to explain the world that confronts us. If ultimate reality is idea, whence come concrete particularizations? If the noumena is that of which nothing can be predicated, how can we even ascribe to it “existence” (whatever that means)? If laws of logic are “just there,” is it not equally plausible that they are “just not there” (without a basis for attributing order and uniformity to the universe, for example, how can Hume’s objection to these things be countered)? Is an impersonal Weltgeist adequate to account for consciousness, for love, for beauty, for morality? It is true that the Triune God of the Bible is also “just there”; but at least, given Him, things can be accounted for. Reject Him, and there is no substitute. All the idols turn out to be lying imaginations that can neither speak nor save; given them, there is no basis for making the slightest sense of the world. 

It is not the case then that “faith” can be confined to the realm of special revelation, and “reason” given dominion in the sphere of general revelation. Such a schema does not take account of the idolatry of unbelief, or the epistemological implications of such idolatry. As Milbank and others have argued, from a Christian point of view there can be no legitimate “secular.” Secularity is religiously idolatrous. It is epistemologically, morally, and aesthetically impossible, borrowing whatever stability it has from outside itself. It is cosmically treasonous, and all of its territory is graciously but authoritatively claimed by the gospel. (I leave aside here the matter of “common grace,” though it certainly pertains to the issues at hand.) 

Third is the post-Fall context among the redeemed. As noted above, from God’s side after man’s Fall we find a flurry of special revelation that is redemptive in nature. But God must also give to man the gift of faith, since his heart has become wicked and unbelieving; with this gift of faith, man can once again believingly respond to God’s special and general revelation. Man’s reason having been darkened and made futile, the things of revelation are foolishness to him (however much he may borrow from them to construct some sort of coherent worldview); and so God also gives to man a sound mind, a renewed mind, that he may know God truly in all things, and know all things truly in God. 

This is a very rough sketch and would need nuancing and revision at points, but I hope I am making some progress in organizing my thoughts.

With a certain amount of horror I read today’s New York Times article on current revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Let me say first that anyone who reads this article also needs to listen to Part 1 of Volume 89 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, and read C. S. Lewis’ potent little piece (on a related topic), “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” found in God in the Dock. 

So much is unsettling in this article, it’s hard to know where to begin. For starters, I would worry about the amount of guesswork involved in psychiatric diagnoses. Irritable, aggressive children, we are told, have often been misdiagnosed as having bipolar disorder, and treated with “powerful antipsychotic drugs, which have serious side effects, including metabolic changes.” (We draw a curtain of charity over the further comment: “there have been widespread reports that doctors promoting the diagnosis received consulting and speaking fees from the makers of the drugs.”) 

Well, I guess it’s a good thing they got this straightened out in the new edition of the DSMMD, because that all sounds rather cruel. But I’m not sure what to think when the alternative diagnosis is “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria.” Do they have a drug for this? Does it involve metabolic changes? Forgive me for speaking outside my field, but is it possible – just possible – that Johnny’s problem is . . . well, not so much biological as attitudinal; that maybe what he needs is not a drug but a switch to the behind? Or is someone seriously going to tell me the switch is abusive while these “powerful antipsychotic drugs” are marvelously humane? We would never inflict pain on Johnny; by the time we’ve finished doping him, he can’t feel any. 

But the really chilling stuff lies deeper than this. The DSMMD proceeds on the assumption – and make no mistake, it is an assumption – that all human emotions and behaviors are variations on brain chemistry, pure and simple. There are no spiritual, indeed no metaphysical, realities in play in the human psyche at all; everything is a matter of strictly material biology. 

But when you think about it, where does this leave us? In the first place, all moral responsibility is out the window. There’s nothing morally wrong about John Doe’s beating his wife; it’s just a manifestation of some pathology. Johnny can’t be held responsible for his disobedience and his temper tantrums; he needs treatment. 

Okay, but let’s take this materialistic view of things a step further. Under the old moral way of thinking about humans, there were meaningful distinctions between “good” and “bad” behavior, between behavior that is in bounds and behavior that is out of bounds. Hitting one’s mother in a fit of rage, for example, was simply wrong, and Johnny would be punished for it, hugged and held, set back on his feet, and sent on his way again. But how, pray, can similar categorizations of emotion and behavior be justified when everything is just brain chemistry. What, precisely, makes one manifestation of brain chemistry “normal” or “better” than another? How do we know when the brain is “malfunctioning” and when it is clicking along nicely? 

Well, the answer to this must be – the experts will tell us. I couldn’t tell you, looking at my five year old, what’s going on with his brain chemistry. He looks pretty normal to me, but what do I know? I’m just a lowly father whom no pharmaceutical research company would think of hiring. 

So the experts – the people with long white coats and various postgraduate degrees – will tell us what is “normal” and “abnormal” human behavior (I don’t think they use terms such as “good” and “bad” anymore). Okay. But once they start talking, there are some real head-scratchers. For instance, they tell us “hypersexuality” is a mental disorder in which “a great deal of time is consumed by sexual fantasies and urges; and in planning for and engaging in sexual behavior.” Hmmm. Does it make any difference if this “disorder” arises in the context of a happy marriage? Is the problem here really the quantity of sexual urges, or the object of those urges? On the old way of thinking about human psychology, sexual urges were to be regulated by love, chastity, and faithfulness, because these were considered virtues. But if sexual drive is just chemistry, I would have thought it chemistry of a very “normal” kind, and I’m not clear on why it should be regulated. Certainly it may flare up in ways we consider “unhealthy” (stalking a victim, for example), and in such cases bring on the drugs. 

Another head-scratcher: “binge eating disorder” is defined as “at least one binge a week for three months – eating platefuls of food, fast, and to the point of discomfort – accompanied by severe guilt and plunges in mood.” This is not normal overeating, mind you; it “involves much more loss of control, more distress, deeper feelings of guilt and unhappiness.” Here again the experts have lost me. We all overeat (they say). But if we feel deep guilt and unhappiness along with our overeating, this is a chemical malfunction. Well, most of us have told lies in our lifetime, too. It’s pretty normal. But what if I happen to feel deep guilt and unhappiness about my lying? Or what if I’m having sexual fantasies about my neighbor’s wife (not “hypersexual” fantasies, just normal and well-regulated ones)? If I feel distress about that, can you give me a drug? ‘Cause it’s no fun, and according to the experts it ain’t normal. 

A final question. Not to be conspiratorial or anything, but what happens if the “experts” end up on the payroll of, say, a really powerful political entity? Has it ever happened that people in high places have decided certain emotions, expressions, and behaviors are politically inconvenient or undesirable? Would it, could it ever happen that behaviors might be termed “abnormal” because they are against prevailing political interests? And could it happen (indistinct stories from the Iron Curtain days keep rolling around in my head) that those afflicted with such pathologies might be confined to institutions for treatment? Could this even be justified in terms of human “kindness”? Maybe I’m just paranoid. Bring on the . . . yes, that feels better. 

There’s some good news, at least. Some experts are working on a proposal to identify “risk syndromes,” meaning that if you appear even to be at risk for developing one of the syndromes in the DSMMD, you can be labeled and treated and cured. Now that’s a relief. I think I look like a candidate for psychosis. Pass the drugs, and bless you, doc.

Can Christianity be world-affirming, or perhaps better creature-affirming, without falling into idolatry? Bavinck says yes, precisely because God reveals Himself in nature and history. But in order to see and hear His revelation in created things, God’s children must position themselves “in the Christian faith, in special revelation [Scripture], and from there look out upon nature and history” (Reformed Dogmatics, p. 1.321). “And now,” says Bavinck, “they discover there as well the traces of the God whom they learned to know in Christ as their Father.” He then puts forward this beautiful passage:

“Christians, equipped with the spectacles of Scripture, see God in everything and everything in God. For that reason we find in Scripture a kind of nature poetry and view of history such as is found nowhere else. With their Christian confession, accordingly, Christians find themselves at home also in the world. They are not strangers here and see the God who rules creation as none other than the one they address as Father in Christ. As a result of this general revelation [God’s self-disclosure in nature and history], they feel at home in the world; it is God’s fatherly hand from which they receive all things also in the context of nature.”

 No wonder Solomon “spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish” (1 Kgs 4:33). And One greater than Solomon said, “Consider the lilies of the field.”

 This is the kind of religion that will capture the hearts of children’s children with its sheer beauty and enchantment. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

I am a religious exclusivist. By which I mean, I think Jesus was serious when He said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through Me.” My faith in Jesus of Nazareth compels me to believe there isn’t more than one path “up the mountain” to God, and there aren’t multiple maps showing the way. There is a single holy book of revelation from God: it’s called the Bible. If Christianity is right, every other religion is wrong. It’s a zero sum game. 

Now this is the sort of conviction that, if voiced in public, can drop one’s popularity ratings in a hurry. A few years back, in a speech at the University of Regensburg, the current pope drew tons of rotten tomatoes when he quoted Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus as saying, “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Silly pope! What was he thinking? This is no way to promote friendly dialogue among the faiths! But hold on . . . 

Fast-forward a bit to the furor over the Mohammed cartoons. I remember a flicker of amusement watching “progressives” try to tackle this one: “What are the Moslems so upset about? It’s just a cartoon.” “No, you dummy, it’s hate crime. You can’t do things like that with Mohammed.” “But what ever happened to free speech? Don’t we pillory religious stuff all the time?” “You really are a dummy. This is Mohammed we’re talking about.” I don’t know if Allah ever got his satisfaction on this one; but it was interesting watching post-9/11 liberals try to process religious intolerance from a favored quarter. Did the Moslems need to join Benedict in niceness education class. . . . 

Fast-forward again to Robert Wright’s 2009 work, The Evolution of God. The idea here seems to be that if God would just grow up, we could at last put the star, the cross, and the crescent on one ensign, and all live happily together as one Abrahamic family. You can read about it right here. 

And this is where I draw a line. The “progressive” elites think we religious zealots should all just get along. No, it’s stronger than that. They think we should actually join with each other, putting aside our divisive differences. Mecca, Jerusalem, Rome . . . whatever. It’s the 21st century. It’s high time for a joint website. 

What annoys me about this (which would also annoy any self-respecting Jew or Moslem) is that the hybrid religion our friends in the media have so patronizingly suggested would no longer be Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. Let me say it again: a blended religion would be the death of all the religions in the blender. But what in heaven’s name gives our progressive friends the right to tout their new religion as superior to ours, and to tell us (from their religious high ground) what we may and may not tolerate? They won’t tolerate exclusivity, that’s for sure: it’s juvenile. (We’re not talking here about killing infidels; we’re talking about even believing someone is an infidel.) Am I missing something? 

Brit Hume (who is almost as silly as Benedict) says Christianity offers something Buddhism does not. What?! He needs to get a copy of The Evolution of God. (In fairness, Ross Douthat at the New York Times did try to cut him some slack.) 

And then I read this in Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics (p. 1.247): 

“Only a religious person is able to study and evaluate religious phenomena in their actual significance. It is not enough after all for the student of the science of religion simply to observe; he or she must introduce order into the chaos of phenomena, determine the place and value of the different religions, trace the life and growth and hence also the degeneration and adulteration of religion, and indicate where religion displays itself in its purest form and richest development. None of this is possible unless the practitioners of the science of religion bring along a standard that they apply to the various religious phenomena.”

The last sentence says it all. By whose authority did the “progressive” standard get its authority?

I recently finished Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (part of his Hinges of History series). It’s a wonderful read for those of us whose educational upbringing didn’t include much interaction with classical antiquity. Here’s a passage to whet the appetite:

“From pagan Greek liturgy came all of ancient drama; from medieval Latin liturgy came all of modern drama. That drama has always risen out of liturgy suggests that even the most secular theater is caught up in some aspects of communal religious experience: a large, hushed arena of spectators, who laugh, cry, applaud (and perhaps even sing) together and are therefore conscious of their fleeting bonds of community – their communion with the personae brought to life by the actors, their communion with one another as witnesses to a symbolic story that is, at least in some archetypal sense, a mirror of their own lives and the lives of their families and friends. It is this (usually) unspoken religious dimension that can give theater such depth, even as times such mystical resonance.” (Cahill, pp. 120–21)

A couple reactions. First, I wonder what this says about the “mini-shrines” set up in our modern North American homes, with the telly front-and-center and an eager audience gathered round for hours on end. I doubt one could generate, evening by evening, the same enthusiasm for Christian liturgy. What does this say about the “community” and “story” with which we identify? Second, I could not help thinking how differently some churches might conduct their liturgy if they really understood how dramatic liturgy is intended to be. Liturgy gives rise to drama precisely because liturgy is (or should be) telling a story: the “drama” of a Christian worship service should evoke, in the hearts of believers young and old, all the great dramas of God’s kingdom and covenant. Our God is doing in this worship service just what He has been doing since He made the world and announced redemption to fallen Adam: once again He is calling us, covering us, comforting us, cleansing us, consecrating us, and communing with us by His Word and at His table – and so we are one with the ages of His people.

I will be writing a lot about Bavinck this year. I’m reading through his Reformed Dogmatics, and it is mind-bending stuff. For example, he identifies (p. 1.61) three sources from which Christian theology derives its material: they may be alliterated as canon (scripture), creed (confession and teaching of the church), and Christian consciousness (experience). What is helpful about this triad is that it identifies the three main “players” in Christian theology: God Himself (the source of authoritative revelation), the community of faith (both historical and contemporary), and the individual Christian (the uniqueness of each particular soul and life). Christian theology listens to its God both communally and individually. 

But already in this statement we can see the necessity of a certain order or priority in the triad – an order which has gotten badly out of whack in our times. I would like to think it goes without saying that when we Christians think about theological questions, our task is to interact with the divine answers to these questions, as recorded in the biblical canon; but the briefest survey of modern Christianity will reveal that an awful lot of us think we are competent to supply the answers to the questions. Now certainly many Christians would not want to put it that way; but in practice what drives discussions of what we are to think and how we are to behave? Is it really “What has God said in scripture about this or that?” (In our individualistic times, do we even think to ask, “How has the church reflected and spoken about this or that?” Our Roman Catholic friends would perhaps be more inclined to ask such a question.) Or is our reflexive impulse to ask, “What do I think (or worse still, how do I feel) about this or that?”

Christian consciousness is a site for receptive reflection in theology; Christian experience is the sphere of practical outworking in theology. But if Christian theology is to remain in any sense Christian, it cannot derive from (it cannot be grounded in) the thought and experience of the individual. My ideas and experiences simply have no normative role in Christian theology; they do not (they may not) determine what I am to believe or do.

We should also say, over against Roman Catholic teaching, that the collective thought and experience of the church is likewise without normative status, in the sense that it stands fully under the judgment of the canon – as much as the individual, the church as a whole is receptively to reflect on the Word of her God and obediently to apply it in her corporate experience. But to give high churchmanship its due, at least in the community of faith there is the safety of many counselors. Christendom may err; but if it is Joe Christian contra Christendom, I will go with Christendom every time. (Here I must commend Chapter 7 in Robert Letham’s recent work, The Westminster Assembly: Reading Its Theology in Historical Context, pp. 120–58.)

Again, I would like to believe this is obvious. At any rate, Bavinck’s treatment of the theological triad provides a great deal of help in organizing our thinking about where theology comes from, and how it is constructed.

Lately I’ve been thinking again about the relationship between soteriology and cosmology: what God does in Christ for sinners and what He does in Christ for the world. All of this is bound up, of course, with definitions of the “gospel”: is the gospel about God’s saving sinners, or is it about His saving the world? I, for one, would like to say “both”; and in some recent reading in Romans, it became freshly clear to me why. The gospel of God, says Paul, is “about” (peri in the Greek) the Son of God (Rom 1:3). If you want to talk about the gospel, you have to talk first about Jesus the Son of God – and from Jesus, scripture moves organically to how He stands related to sinners (“He will save His people from their sins”) and to the cosmos (one thinks here of the magnificent hymn in Colossians 1:15–20). To put it somewhat technically, the nexus between soteriology and cosmology is Christology (which is charged with eschatology, but that’s another story).

When the church thinks of the gospel restrictively, purely in terms of individual souls getting saved, this is because of a deficient Christology. What on earth might it mean, in such a gospel, that Christ is the Last Adam? (I suspect the answer might be that He is Last Adam at the head of redeemed sinners now, and that He will be Last Adam over the world to come, but this has little to do with the present dying world.)

Likewise, however, when the church thinks of the gospel as a cosmic restoration plan in which individual reconciliation to God is relatively unimportant, this too is because of impoverished Christology. Jesus died under God’s righteous wrath against the real sins of real sinners, after all; and without the good news of propitiation, forgiveness, justification, and adoption, there might be a new heavens and new earth one day, but it will be uninhabited.

G. K. Chesterton once said of W. B. Yeats, “He is not stupid enough to understand fairyland. Fairies prefer people of the yokel type like myself; people who gape and grin and do as they are told.” I have begun to wonder if the God of the Bible does not share this preference with the fairies. I have begun to wonder if many fail to enter His kingdom precisely because they are not stupid enough to inhabit, with childlike imagination, the story of His kingdom on earth. And I am increasingly certain that the reason so few of us live well as His citizens is because we have lost touch with the enchantment of that story – we are simply too grown up to believe it is real, too grown up to find our deepest identity in it and uncritically to submit to its laws.

When Saint Peter says to us, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light,” are we stupid enough to see that this is not a string of quaint metaphors? Or do we smile sophisticatedly, then return to the “real world” where grownups live? After all, it is a bit awkward behaving like royalty in the “real world”; people start to regard you as odd, and who can long endure that? Who wants to be thought of as putting on airs; or worse, to be thought of as doing so because one lives in delusions of an unseen world?

But is it not precisely this to which the gospel summons us? Is it not to worship the unseen God, and to live as His offspring in the world? Is it not to entrust ourselves entirely to an unseen Messiah and, not having seen Him, to love Him and long for His appearing? Is it not to enact in the present world the life that belongs properly to the world to come? This is, undeniably, the stuff of madness; yet it is the madness without which Christianity ceases to be itself.