Relocating To Elfland

“One can not speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice.” (Karl Barth, Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie)

If Christianity is to remain true to itself, it must insist that there is no such thing as “the secular.” Which is to say, it must insist that there is no sphere of human thinking or doing ungoverned by the divine will and word. Precisely how God governs all things continues to be a matter of fierce debate, but that He speaks with sovereign authority in all created spheres cannot really be denied by those who take the Bible seriously.

I would not have thought of connecting Christianity’s resistance to the autonomy of the secular with the name(s) of God, but here Bavinck, though dead, yet speaketh:

“Nothing exists outside of or apart from God. This truth, it must be said, has over and over been violated: Plato’s dualism, Neo-platonism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism – they all put a limit to God’s revelation and posited a material substance hostile to God over against him. And in all sorts of ways these dualisms have for centuries impacted theology. The same dualistic principle is at work when in modern times, under the influence of Kant and Jacobi, the revelation of God is restricted to the sphere of religion and ethics, when only the religious and ethical content of Scripture is recognized, when the seat of religion is found only in the heart or the conscience, in the emotions or the will.”

Now notice the dire consequences of dualism:

“In this way nature with its elements and forces, human life in society and politics, the arts and sciences, are assigned a place outside the sphere of God’s revelation. They are considered neutral areas existing apart from God.”

In other words (and if the reader will pardon a double negative), we simply cannot accept the notion that God is not speaking in and to everything under the sun. All things – certainly all spheres of human thought and enterprise – are both instruments of His revelation (bearing witness of Him) and subject to His revelation (“normed” and governed by Him). Admittedly, Bavinck has the former primarily in mind: he is not dealing with God’s speech to all things so much as His speech in and through all things. As we shall see, however, these two aspects of God’s revelation cannot finally be separated.

If nature and human life come to be regarded as “neutral areas,” what follows?

“Then, of course, a proper appreciation of the Old Testament and a very large part of the New Testament is no longer possible. Nature and the world no longer have anything to say to believers. Revelation, which comes to us in the Word of God, loses all influence in public life. Religion, now confined to the inner recesses of the heart and the privacy of one’s home, forfeits all claim to respect. Dogmatics, specifically the doctrine of God, shrinks by the day, and theology is no longer able to maintain its place. Theology is no longer able to speak of God because it no longer speaks from him and through him. It no longer has any names with which to name God. God becomes the great Unknown; the world first becomes a domain without God [atheos], then a domain that is anti-God [antitheos].” (Reformed Dogmatics, p. 2.103)

There is a lot going on here, and in multiple directions. To begin with, a secularized realm is one in which the name of God has been erased, to the impoverishment of theology. One may say the firmament shows God’s handiwork, but while Darwinistic materialism reigns in the sciences, we all know this really ain’t so – it’s just the stuff that makes religious folk purr. One may say God reigns over the nations, but while political theory is ceded to Machiavelli and Hobbes, we all know this is mere pious metaphor – the kings of earth actually do as they please. Our conception of God does indeed “shrink by the day.”

But the problem runs the other direction as well. “Neutral” spheres not only deprive religion and theology of important funds of revelation (God is, as it were, gagged in such spheres), they also emancipate themselves from the claims of revelation. God is not only gagged, He is dethroned. His voice is silenced not only through these spheres but also within them. “Nature and the world no longer have anything to say to believers,” on the one hand. “Revelation, which comes to us in the Word of God, loses all influence in public life,” on the other.

Bavinck’s reference to the Old and New Testaments is important here, because it reminds us that our knowledge of what God is saying/revealing in nature and to the world must be derived from biblical revelation. Put differently, if we are to know that God is speaking in the firmament, we must learn this from scripture; and if we are to know what He has to say to the kings of the earth, we must learn this, as well, from scripture.

“Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.” (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, “The Maniac”)