Relocating To Elfland

A vital question, at the core of Christian faith, is the question, “What is my relationship to God?” This is intimately connected to other questions: e.g., what is my standing before God (addressed by the doctrine of justification), what is my identity before God (addressed by the doctrine of adoption), and what is to be my response to God (addressed by the doctrine of sanctification).

As a pastor in the modern theological climate, I am amazed how difficult it is to persuade God’s people that a sure answer to this central, vital question may be found only in the objective Word of God, the Word of God that comes to us from without. The reason for this difficulty of persuasion in Calvinistic circles, I believe, is that we hold passionately to the biblical truth that faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit. We believe that without the internal (subjective) working of the Spirit, the external (objective) Word of God will simply not save.

This is an enormously important biblical truth. The problem lies in what we do with it. When we want to answer the question, “What is my relationship to God?” we turn, not to the objective Word of God (which comes to us in scripture, preaching, and the sacraments) but to the further question of whether we have experienced the subjective working of the Spirit. Notice what has happened here: the means by which we are brought to certainty has been confused with the ground on which that certainty is (indeed, must be) based. There is a world of difference between saying that one comes to know one’s relationship to God (that we arrive at the certainty of faith) through the work of the Holy Spirit, and saying that one attains to such knowledge and certainty on the basis of the work of the Spirit. Put another way, the objective rock on which faith is built cannot be the subjective work by which one is enabled to perceive and rest upon that rock. In seeking to determine what is our relationship to God, we have turned away from the object (what He says He has done for us) to the subject (what He has done or not done in us). No wonder we have problems with assurance.

Someone will surely counter, “But Paul says the Spirit bears witness in our hearts that we are the children of God.” Right, but the Spirit doesn’t point to this internal witness-bearing as the basis for our faith. Our rebirth and conversion (or lack thereof) is not what the Spirit witnesses to us; He tells us we are children of God by illuminating the revelation of Jesus Christ through Word and sacrament.

So stop trying to find evidence of an internal work of the Spirit, troubled Christian. If you begin here, your search will never yield an answer to your vital question. You are to look to Christ as He is set forth in Word and sacrament; and if your eyes are fixed restingly here, you may be sure it is only because of the illuminating, enlivening work of the Spirit. The Spirit works through Word and sacrament to show you Christ; you are closest to the work of the Spirit when you are closest to Word and sacrament, and you evidence the work of the Spirit most when you are rest in the Christ who comes to you by these means. And if you rest, this too will give assurance of salvation (WCF 18.2), but your resting (or anything else in you) can never be your starting point.

“If Christian revelation, which presupposes the darkness and error of unspiritual humanity, submitted in advance to the judgments of reason, it would by that token contradict itself. It would thereby place itself before a tribunal whose jurisdiction it had first denied. And having once recognized the authority of reason on the level of first principles, it could no longer oppose that authority in the articles of faith.” (Bavinck, p. 1.516)

“Doubt and distrust in the cause we champion renders us powerless in the battle.” (Bavinck, p. 1.515)

“The last year of the nineteenth century began on January 1, 1900. The ‘civilized’ world, less numerate than it thought it was, celebrated the beginning of the twentieth century on that New Year’s Day . . . .” (William Everdell, The First Moderns, p. 159)

I guess the civilized world wasn’t any more “numerate” a hundred years later, when it celebrated the new millennium a year early!

“If Christianity is a religion of redemption in the full and true sense of the word and hence seeks to redeem human beings from all sin, from the errors of the mind as well as the impurity of the heart, as much from the death of the soul as from that of the body, it in the nature of the case cannot subject itself to the criticism of human beings but must subject them to its criticism. The revelation that comes to us in Christ through Scripture in fact takes that position toward us. It does not put itself on a level below us to ask for our approving or disapproving judgment on it but takes a position high above us and insists that we shall believe and obey.” (Bavinck, p. 1.505)

At the risk of shameless name-dropping, one of my dear friends in the world is Hwaen Ch’uqi. This past weekend I was in Hwaen’s company, and we fell to discussing his views on Schoenberg and the modern assault on hierarchy in pitch (I believe he has an article coming out on the subject, so I mustn’t give away too much). His avowedly Trinitarian musings led me back to a recent fascination of mine: the place of music in Christian cosmology.

We all remember the story of Aslan’s singing Narnia into existence in The Magician’s Nephew. Even more impressive, if possible, is the theme of Ilúvatar with which Ainulindalë opens:

“Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Ilúvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void. Never since have the Ainur made any music like to this music, though it has been said that a greater still shall be made before Ilúvatar by the choirs of the Ainur and the Children of Ilúvatar after the end of days. Then the themes of Ilúvatar shall be played aright, and take Being in the moment of their utterance, for all shall then understand fully his intent in their part, and each shall know the comprehension of each, and Ilúvatar shall give to their thoughts the secret fire, being well pleased.”

Thus Middle Earth and the deep foundations of its eschatology were laid.

We are not told in the Bible that Yahweh God sang creation into being, but David Bentley Hart, Robert Jenson, Jeremy Begbie, and others have recently shown how creation resounds with the “music” of the Triune life. This is especially so in the lives of His human creatures. Do we grasp, for example, what an astonishing thing occurs any time two people have a conversation? There is between two persons an absolute and inviolable difference, one might even say, distance. “I” am not “you”; the converse is likewise true; yet the interval between us is not one of utter alienation, precisely because God has given us a logos (we call it “language”) to traverse that interval, so that it may be one of consonance, of peace. Were it not for our doctrine of the Trinity, we would be left without a metaphysical ground for this; we would be left with either total difference (and dissonance) on one hand, or a collapse of personal distinctions on the other. How can it be that the logos traverses the distance between us, preserving the rich variety of our difference without isolation or hostility? The Christian answer is that this happens among men precisely because it happens within the God in whose image we are made. And few things express so well as music how an interval can be breathtakingly harmonious, even as the difference remains without which the interval would cease to exist.

How can it be, furthermore, that a hierarchy exists among men – that we are not, manifestly, all created “equal”; that we do not all hold the same station and possess the same gifts – yet this hierarchy can exist without violence (one thinks of a mother holding her infant child)? Again, the metaphysical ground is the personal properties of the Triune God, the order that exists in the relationship of the Persons. And, again, we find the illustration in music. Take a 1/3/5 chord, change it to 3/5/1, and the chord is not the same, even while the notes remain identical. The order of notes matters, it is genuinely significant, which detracts nothing from either the value of each individual note or their consonance when struck together.

Perhaps Yahweh did not sing on the day He when made the heavens and the earth; but the morning stars certainly did (Job 38:7), and they sang their Maker’s theme. They are singing it still.

“Faster, faster. All swords out now, all shields up to the nose, all prayers said, all teeth clenched. Shasta was dreadfully frightened. But it suddenly came into his head, ‘If you funk this, you’ll funk every battle all your life. Now or never.’ ” (C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy)

How do we know God’s heart toward us? How do we know His posture toward us? How do we know we are His elect, holy and beloved? We know these things only by hearing and resting on His covenant promises in Christ. To look within to what has happened in our own hearts or experience yields no better assurance than looking to a minister of the gospel (1 Cor 4:1) – in both cases the source of true knowledge and assurance, the Word of God Himself, has been confounded with an instrument or organ by which that Word is received. Assurance cannot be grounded in the intellect, heart, conscience, or experience; it can be grounded only in Christ as He is revealed in the Word of the covenant.

Adam was reared in a Reformed home. He was baptized as an infant, but he has been taught all his life (sometimes explicitly, but certainly implicitly) that it falls to him to demonstrate the genuineness of his standing in God’s covenant (whether it be a public profession of faith, some kind of “conversion experience,” or what have you). Because of this, the genuineness of his standing has always been a matter of uncertainty: will he prove himself to be truly one of God’s people? He spends his life watching those who are “really in” and is taught that, if he is one of God’s children, he will behave as they do. Now, in his adolescent years, he has all the normal questions and struggles that accompany the onset of adulthood. These questions and struggles serve to confirm his uncertainty about where he stands with God, and he feels like a hypocrite when he worships with God’s people, because he does not feel the faith and joy and desire for obedience that they apparently do. (In fact, deep down he resents his lack of freedom to enjoy the independent life he is already effectively living.) He has been reared in uncertainty, and the fruit is now an ugly doubt, which manifests itself increasingly as either despair or indifference.

Eve, too, was reared in a Reformed home. She was baptized as an infant, and she has been taught all her life (explicitly and implicitly) that God is her God and Father, that Christ is her Savior and King, and that she is loved with an everlasting love. She has also been taught that because she is so loved – precisely because of her standing in God’s covenant – she has the duty and privilege to embrace the blessings of her God and to live according to His good laws and wisdom. The genuineness of her standing has never been a matter of uncertainty – she has never been “looking in,” but has always known God’s people to be her people – and this has borne fruit in a sense of holy obligation. She understands the expectations of the covenant-bond, and embraces them. Now, in her adolescent years, she has all the normal questions and struggles that accompany the onset of adulthood, but she has the resources to work them out as a child of God. She is not her own, which is for her a source of comfort and purpose. And in the transparency of fellowship with her people, she finds assurance that struggle is inherent in all true discipleship.

“Even a freedom that cannot be obtained and enjoyed aside from the danger of licentiousness and caprice is still always to be preferred over a tyranny that suppresses liberty. In the creation of humanity, God himself chose this way of freedom, which carried with it the danger and actually the fact of sin as well, in preference to forced subjection. Even now, in ruling the world and governing the church, God still follows this royal road of liberty. It is precisely his honor that through freedom he nevertheless reaches his goal, creating order out of disorder, light from darkness, a cosmos out of chaos.” (Bavinck, p. 1.479)