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.”

“A (small-u) unitarian theology proper necessarily leads to a tragic view of creation, for anything that ‘goes out’ from a unitarian origin is necessarily a diminished supplement, perhaps even a deicide. If a unitarian god could conceivably create (which is theologically doubtful), creation could not be a glorification of god. Unitarianism is inherently Gnostic, and Gnosticism is hyper-tragic, since it treats the creation itself as a fall, a tragic departure from an origin, an exile. For the Gnostic, to be created is to be abandoned, alienated, in a far country, and the only hope is return. Within a triune God, by contrast, there is always already a ‘departure,’ but a departure that does not involve any diminishment from the origin. The Son is equal to the Father in power and glory; the Father can beget a Son who does not diminish or veil His glory. This Son does not efface the Father; instead, the Father, though full of all glory, is ineffably, mysteriously ‘glorified’ by the Son. Such a God can make a world that does not demand a diminishment of His being, since He has eternally produced a Son who does not diminish His being.” (Peter Leithart, Deep Comedy, pp. 86–87)

“Creatures . . . are entirely and utterly dependent upon the Creator. To suggest that creatures might desire God ‘indifferently’ is to suggest that they can desire God without need. But creatures are nothing but need, nothing but what we have received. Pious as it sounds to ‘desire God for God’s sake,’ it is utterly pagan and simply a pious gloss on the Satanic temptation to be as God.” (Peter J. Leithart, Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, and Hope in Western Literature, p. 32)

Blogging has taught me afresh the difficulty of carrying deep water in a shallow vessel. So many subjects I want to write on simply resist being treated in such a forum. In their profundity, with their long history and various ramifications and implications, they defy the impertinence of a few paragraphs’ disposal. I have to resist the urge to start nearly every post with a caveat, “Now, I’m fumbling my way along the edges of something again. . . .”

Take aesthetics, for example. I’ve heard it argued, even by Christians, that there can be no such thing as objective beauty. I don’t accept this denial of objectivity, because it seems to leave the verdict regarding what is beautiful entirely in human hands; and while that might be appropriate in the sphere of human things (which I’m not quite ready to concede), it is surely wrong when it comes to our beholding the divine glory. God says to us, “Behold My glory,” and we have no right to tell Him we don’t happen to regard His beauty as . . . well, beautiful. If it’s all in the eye of the beholder, then God can’t tell us His beauty is objectively beautiful – which is about like saying He can’t tell us His truth is objectively true, or His righteousness objectively right.

But if there must (in my view) be some place for objective beauty, there’s a ditch across the road as well: the objectifying of beauty. As a father of two daughters, living beside the fashion capitol of the universe, this is of more than academic interest to me. What’s a fellow to do if his daughter asks him, “Daddy, am I pretty?” One can’t just respond, “Well, dear, it’s all relative,” or, “I think you’re beautiful, so you are.” If she’s sharp, she will probably respond, “Okay, then I’m going to stop cutting my fingernails, brushing my hair, and using makeup. Oh, and forget the braces.” We know there are certain things one can do to make oneself more beautiful, more aesthetically and visually pleasing, and this assumes some rough standard beyond oneself. It’s not wrong, strictly speaking, to say one person is rather plain and another person strikingly lovely. There are noses that are a bit comical, and eyes that can make one swoon; and some guys (not me, for example) have enviable hair. But then you trace this out a bit, and you land where our culture has arrived today: teaching its girls that real beauty is airbrushed, with a certain bra size and a blemish-free complexion. If you aren’t hot like all that, you’d better find some other way to get attention.

Set aside, if possible, how this kind of objectification has led to the commodifying of “beauty”; ignore the horrible fact that, having objectified “beauty,” we can now buy it and sell it like any other object on the market. I want to question the objectifying itself: Who says that “that” over there is the standard of beauty (male, female, or otherwise)? Who speaks with such authority?

As people of God, must we not say at some level that a thing is good and beautiful just because it is created? And does this not, in turn, require us to affirm a fantastic diversity within the field of beauty? I happen to like certain physical features, and I think they’re objectively beautiful on the ground that God put them there. Someone else may think other features equally beautiful; and he or she is on no less solid, objective ground, because God made those features, too! But we must go further. Cultural images of beauty are dominated by the physical; the biblical image of beauty is fundamentally personal – which is to say, there is a whole lot more depth and variety to beauty than can be exhausted in the human body. A person is truly beautiful as a person: the radiance of his or her soul (the character, the heart, the animus within) is joined to a particular body in which that inner life finds adornment and expression. This is why we have all looked at an old man and thought him exquisitely handsome; why we have all looked at a pretty young face and thought it hard, even ugly; and why no amount of makeup can ever make a corpse a thing of beauty. (It is also why no amount of pornographic images has ever satisfied a heart’s yearning for beauty.)

There’s truth in the old line, “God made you, and He don’t make no trash.” Perhaps we need our imaginations broadened to delight in more of His creativity. We certainly need our definition of beauty expanded beyond the soulless images of our culture. So, little girl, God made only one of you; and in all that you are – in all that He made you – you are truly beautiful.

“A creature really has a choice between only two options: either it chooses to be its own creator and thereby ceases to be a creature, or it must be and remain a creature from beginning to end, and therefore owes its existence and the specific nature of its existence only to God.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 2.376)

“Generation and procession in the divine being are the immanent acts of God, which make possible the outward works of creation and revelation.” (Bavinck, p. 2.333)

I recall a memorable conversation I once had with a friend. We were both sipping a beer, and he said to me, “Do you know how I know I’m an amillennialist? Because I look at this beer, and I think about the fact that it could damn me.”

Whether my friend was right to link his concern about his beer with a particular eschatological viewpoint, I am not prepared to say; I happened to share his viewpoint, and I was enjoying my beer just fine. But there is something here to which I think every serious Christian can relate: the question of how to enjoy the good gifts of God, the savor and beauty of created things, without falling into the sin of idolatry, of worshipping the creature rather than the Creator (Rom 1:25).

This interaction with John Piper’s “Christian hedonism” shows us how the doctrine of the Trinity can help us with that question. I found it extraordinarily useful.

“The thinking mind situates the doctrine of the Trinity squarely amid the full-orbed life of nature and humanity. A Christian’s confession is not an island in the ocean but a high mountaintop from which the whole creation can be surveyed. And it is the task of Christian theologians to present clearly the connectedness of God’s revelation with, and its significance for, all of life. The Christian mind remains unsatisfied until all of existence is referred back to the triune God, and until the confession of God’s Trinity functions at the center of our thought and life.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 2.330)

“[God] wills creatures, not for something they are or that is in them, but for his own sake. He remains his own goal. He never focuses on his creatures as such, but through them he focuses on himself. Proceeding from himself, he returns to himself. It is one single propensity that drives him to himself as the ultimate end and to his creatures as the means to that end. His love for himself incorporates into itself the love he has for his creatures and through them returns to himself. Therefore, his willing, also in relation to creatures, is never a striving for some as yet unpossessed good and hence no sign of imperfection and infelicity. On the contrary: his willing is always – also in and through his creatures – absolute self-enjoyment, perfect blessedness, divine rest.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 2.233)

Here’s a mind-bender for you:

“[God] always aims at himself because he cannot rest in anything other than himself. Inasmuch as he himself is the absolutely good and perfect one, he may not love anything else except with a view to himself. He may not and cannot be content with less than absolute perfection. When he loves others, he loves himself in them; his own virtues, works, and gifts. For the same reason he also is blessed in himself as the sum of all goodness, of all perfection.” (Bavinck, p. 2.211)