Relocating To Elfland

If I were to offer a definition of theological maturity, it would likely be a humble comfortableness in the presence of mystery. (I have written about this, incidentally, before.)

Sophomoric theology is ever in quest of settled, simple answers – tidy “essentials” that cannot be wondered about. It loves reiteration, not conversation. It hugs the centerline and shuns guardrails. Remarkably, it retains these features in both its liberal and conservative forms: the liberal shrinks his “essentials” to a bare minimum, relegating everything else to the realm of mysteries that need not be believed; the conservative sees his creed as the end of all conversation, banishing mystery to the realm of things that ought not be meddled with. For both, it’s the stuff in the middle of the road that counts: for the liberal, all else is a matter of agnosticism; for the conservative, all else is fodder for anathemas.

Thoughtful learners of theology will understand that actually just the reverse is the true situation. There is a revealed truth on that side, and a revealed truth on this side; and both must be held, but they are hard to hold together. Accordingly, we take that truth as a “guardrail” and this truth as a guardrail, and once the guardrails are settled we get down to the difficult business of saying what lies between. Here there is room for all manner of conversation, even real dispute, for we are in a space filled with mystery, bounded as it is by two truths hard for us to reconcile, yet both true.

One need turn but a few leaves in the annals of Christendom to observe this. Famous guardrails have included the full deity and full humanity of Christ; the unity and plurality of the Trinity; the certainty of God’s eternal decree and the conditions of His historical covenants; the visibility and invisibility of the church; the church’s being in the world, yet not of it; the “already” and “not yet” of God’s kingdom; God’s knowability and incomprehensibility; the newness and oldness of the New Covenant; the divine authorship and human authorship of scripture; divine sovereignty and human responsibility; and so on. How can all of this be “resolved”? Well, certainly we must not drive over guardrails set for us in scripture. Within these rails, however, we must continue to search and ponder, and converse with one another; and we must be wary of declaring too quickly that our particular piece of pavement is the province of orthodoxy. This is not to say there are no right answers between the rails – there are. It is to say one should not feel theologically superior merely because one stands on an imaginary centerline. Such feeling betrays profound ignorance of the whole theological project. As Chesterton once put it, “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.”