Relocating To Elfland

I don’t know what I was expecting when I began listening to Hans Halvorson’s presentation at the recent Calvin College lecture series on Philosophy of Science, Faith, and Science, but it is a staggeringly brilliant piece of analysis. I would have to think when I have read or heard anything better on the subject of how the natural sciences interrelate with Reformed theological reflection upon scripture.

Halvorson’s Reformed intuitions (inculcated from childhood) lead him to conclude (with Augustine and Calvin, to name no others) that God is free over against His creation. This may sound obvious, but of course it has enormous implications for our thinking about whether certain actions predicated of God in scripture are scientifically “possible.”

He argues that proponents of the Divine Action Project have treated “nature” as something essentially autonomous, as something with the freedom of which God will not interfere; and that this notion of radical, autonomous freedom is anti-Augustinian. Think about it. Naturalistic, uniformitarian science and Pelagian soteriology are metaphysical sisters!

I hope this lecture gets trumpeted from the housetops in Christian colleges and universities.

“Learn to despise the place where you were born, its old customs, its glories and its shame. Then stick your head in a comic book. That done, you will be triple-armored against the threat of a real thought, or the call of the transcendent. Some people have no worlds for God to pierce through.” (Esolen, Ten Ways, p. 132)

“The past is dangerous, not least because it cannot go away. It is simply there, never to change, and in its constancy it reflects the eternity of God. It presents to the young mind a vast field of fascination, of war and peace, loyalty and treason, invention and folly, bitter twists of fate and sweet poetic justice. When that past is the past of one’s people or country or church, then the danger is terrible indeed, because then the past makes claims upon our honor and allegiance. Then it knocks at the door, saying softly, ‘I am still here.’ And then our plans for social control – for inducing the kind of amnesia that has people always hankering after what is supposed to be new, without asking inconvenient questions about where the desirable thing has come from and where it will take us – must fail. For a man with a past may be free; but a man without a past, never.” (Esolen, Ten Ways, p. 123)

“A church may be filled with creative ideas and overflowing with good works, but unless there be a sense of the presence of the holy there, of the presence of God – unless there be a capacity of worship – it is doubtful whether what is there is religion. Worship is not centrally an experience of ours; it is meaningless to speak of a ‘worshipful experience’ as if the holy were compounded of a clever arrangement of various kinds of lighting, sober music, proper tones of voice, and the softness or hardness of the pews, all so manipulated as to create a certain experience in us. Such ‘client-centered’ worship does not extend beyond the ceiling of the sanctuary, for here by finite media we seek to take the place of the holy, to create it synthetically. To these efforts to create a worshipful mood the usual congregational response is appropriate: ‘Preacher, I enjoyed it!’ But neither our manipulation nor the enjoyment are categories appropriate to worship. For God, not our own consciousness, is the object of worship; we experience Him, not ourselves worshiping. Worship is a response to the presence of God, our reaction to the appearance of the holy. And the point is not that we feel something then, though surely reverence, awe and wonder are normal; but that we relate ourselves creatively to him, that we respond to his presence in adoration and praise, in confession of sin and thanksgiving for mercies known and received. It is the relation to God, the felt relation to the holy – to the tremendous, majestic, awesome power and goodness of God – that is the core of worship. Thus we bow, thus we adore, thus we surrender ourselves – thus we experience God.” (Langdon Gilkey, How Can the Church Minister to the World without Losing Itself, pp. 107–8)

Quite some time ago, I expressed an intention to write a series of posts on the structure of the Psalter. That never came to fruition due to . . . well, small preoccupations like planting a church. But I noticed something new today that’s worth commenting on; and maybe one day I’ll situate it within a larger treatment of the structural features.

Book 2 of the Psalter opens with eight Psalms written by the sons of Korah. I had not noticed until today how heavily these Psalms draw from the imagery and themes of Genesis 1–3. For example, Psalm 42 begins with a corporate panting after God, who is described as a “flowing stream” (vv. 1–2) and the source of many waters (v. 7). The psalmist feels displaced from fellowship with this life-giving God, a theme that resonates deeply with the displacement of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, when they were thrust out from the stream-fed garden of Eden and the presence of the Lord.

In Psalm 43, the psalmist prays that God’s light and truth will go forth and lead him back to the “holy hill” of the Lord, to His “dwelling” (v. 3). Again this echoes the imagery of Eden as a garden on a hill, from which water flowed down into the lands below (Genesis 2:10–14).

Psalm 44 is a variation on the theme of displacement: here the anguish of God’s people is expressed in terms of rejection and disgrace (v. 9), such that their belly cleaves to the dust (v. 25) – they have been reduced to the place and posture of the accursed serpent in Genesis 3:14!

Psalm 45 is a dramatic shift, offering praise to a mysterious kingly figure who is described as “the most handsome of the sons of men” (v. 2), and at whose right hand stands a lovely queen in gold of Ophir (v. 9). It is especially noteworthy that this Adamic figure is destined to rule over all the earth through princely sons (v. 16), and that the nations will praise him forever (v. 17). This calls to mind the downriver mission of Adam and his seed, hinted at in Genesis 2:10–14.

The king has been mentioned in Psalm 45. A royal city is now mentioned in Psalm 46: a fearless city, untroubled by the roaring waters that sometimes assault her, because she is fed by the river of God Himself (v. 4). God is in the midst of her; she will not be moved (v. 5). She need not fear the nations around her, because her God rules over them all. In time He will be exalted among the nations; He will rule in all the earth (v. 10).

Psalm 47 takes up the celebration of the worldwide reign of God: He is “a great King over all the earth” (v. 2). He will subdue peoples and nations under the feet of His chosen who live in the royal city (v. 3), because He “reigns over the nations” (v. 8).

Psalm 48 turns an admiring gaze upon this lovely city, which sits on God’s “holy mountain” like Eden of old (v. 1). Kings stand in fear as they look upon her, for God is fearsome in her midst (vv. 4–8). The praise of her King now “reaches to the ends of the earth” (v. 10); and to look on her is to know the glory of God, who will be her guide even to the end (vv. 12–14).

In Psalm 49, the sons of Korah turn away from the holy city to offer a word of wisdom to “all peoples,” to “all inhabitants of the world, both low and high, rich and poor together” (vv. 1–2): “Man in his pomp will not remain; he is like the beasts that perish” (v. 12). All his vainglory notwithstanding, he is under the curse of God, and to dust he will return. But God will ransom His people from the power of Sheol; He will “receive” them (v. 15) back into His own presence, His temple, His holy city, His everlasting kingdom. For them, the gate of Eden has been opened once again, and the nations do well to consider it.

“Eden is to created space what the Sabbath is to the [created] time rhythm.” (Arie C. Leder, “Christian Worship in Consecrated Space and Time,” in Calvin Theological Journal 32 [1997], p. 254)

There are two ways to raise unbelieving children. One is to tell them, in ways subtle and not-so-subtle, that God doesn’t love them. The other is to make it clear, in ways subtle and not-so-subtle. that God made a mistake in giving them to you.

“It is clear that those who support Christian universities would be quite upset if the qualifier came to mean that the education students received might put them at a disadvantage for being a success in America.” (Stanley Hauerwas)

“Consider what happens to people whose night skies are spangled with constellations like The Master of Hestviken, or Moby-Dick, or The Brothers Karamazov. These people are hard to fool. They are also hard to enlist in pursuit of the trivial and ephemeral. It is as if we had given them a powerful telescope atop a high mountain, and shown them how to use it, and directed their attention to the Orion nebula, and once they had learned to do so and to love the beauty they found there, expected them to look at light bulbs on a marquee. Or, if not a telescope, a magical device for seeing deep into the human heart; and then expected them to watch American Idol, or to be impressed by the maunderings of the latest political hack.” (Esolen, Ten Ways, p. 100)

It’s remarkable how the Christians least invested in the life of the local church will often be the biggest critics of its lack of energy; and how those most churlish and disgruntled will cry loudest about its lack of love.

Seems like this comes up a few times in the Bible. . . .