Relocating To Elfland

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary.” (Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 10, part 2)

“Few parents grasp the danger of children playing outside. The most enlightened educators do grasp it, and have taken steps to ensure that children will be left to their own devices, outdoors, as little as possible. They have shortened the summer vacation, parceling out free days here and there through the school year. The effect is to keep children from developing the habit of learning things outside of school . . . . After all, it takes children a week or so just to get used to the summer, and a week or two at the end of August to prepare for the new school year. Then, too, schools have heaped books upon the children to tote around during the summer, much as you would heave sacks of grain and skins of wine atop a camel before crossing a desert. The idea is not to instill a love of reading excellent literature. Recall that so-called great works of art are dangerous, as they rouse the imagination. No, summer reading ensures that no mental break occurs between June and September, no respite from the sedative.” (Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, p. 31)

I am loving this book.

“Culture, then, may be either godless or godly, depending on the spirit which animates it. Sin has not destroyed the creaturely relationship of man to his Maker, who made him a cultural creature with the mandate to replenish and subdue the earth. Sin has not destroyed the cultural urge in man to rule, since man is an image-bearer of the Ruler of heaven and earth. Neither has sin destroyed the cosmos, which is man’s workshop and playground. Culture, then, is a must for God’s image-bearers, but it will be either a demonstration of faith or of apostasy, either a God- glorifying or a God-defying culture.” (Henry Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture, p. 23)

“Christians are to live fully in the world and this will require us to work and play side-by-side with unbelievers. This, however, does not discount the fact that there is a spiritual antithesis between Christian and non-Christian peoples, as expressed in the Bible. How do we bridge these two truths? Historically, rather than bridge these twin truths, people have adopted one extreme over the other. The common grace thinker lands too heavily in favor of his shared cooperation with non-believes [sic] in the culture, while others stress the antithesis to such a degree as to reject all engagement in culture. This polarity is created when we start with common grace as the foundation for Christian cultural commitment. What I wish to propose, therefore, is a different starting point for Christianity and culture, which is the cultural, or dominion, mandate of the Bible. With this new starting point, we affirm both the necessity of the Christian obligation to the world and the existence of an antithesis between the people of God and the world.” (John Barber, The Road from Eden: Studies in Christianity and Culture, pp. 454– 55)

Read further context here.

No small component in the maturing of pastoral wisdom is to learn how to motivate and mobilize the people of God (including calling them to repentance) without scolding. Scolding has neither the courageous involvement of a real rebuke nor the affection and hopefulness of true love. It’s the outflow of private frustration, not divine mercies. What’s more, it’s very hard to listen to.

The Incarnation of the Son of God affirmed at once the goodness of all things human, and that everything human is fallen and needs to be redeemed.

Take any person at any point in his or her life, look closely, and you’ll find enough sin, stupidity, and general ugliness to bury (and probably damn) that person. But look again. And, if need be, again. You will see frailty, damage, deep need, and also potential. Sympathy will be called forth, perhaps even real hope. Perhaps even admiration. Who of us has not longed for this second look, when one’s shortcomings are exposed to the world? Who has not stood before a critic’s withering onslaught and thought, “Can’t you see I’m trying? Can’t you see I know I’m falling short? Can’t you see I don’t know what to do?” This is not, of course, how we generally respond on the exterior of things, but our hearts have felt it from early days when childish folly made a parent’s eyes blaze and we felt the lash of deserved rebuke. Many of us have learned to soldier on with little hope of a second look (whence come many veneers in the world). Hardest of all, I think, is to believe that God can look at us this way, not with rigor but mildness, not with righteous scorn but with tender compassion. Yet this is surely the message of the cross: God has stooped to touch the lepers, the eye of infinite grace has fallen on the hateful things of earth, the worthless are strangely treasured, and broken things will forever adorn His house.

A single sentence from Kenton Sparks on the Biologos website captures a view of scripture that is rapidly gaining ground in evangelical circles: “Scripture is a casualty of the fallen cosmos.” There you have it: like the humans who wrote it, scripture is fallen. It needs to be redeemed. It needs to be saved. Sparks is pretty explicit about this:

“Scripture is in need of redemption and . . . God is working to redeem it. . . . Even the New Testament, in spite of its special position and redemptive role in the canon, is by no means fully redeemed. It still envisions slavery as an acceptable social practice, maintains a very low view of women at points . . . throws ethnic slurs at Cretans . . . and includes Paul’s angry wish that his opponents at Galatia would ‘go the whole way and emasculate themselves.’ ”

And the conclusion of the matter:

“The Bible, with its two Testaments, plays a vital role in God’s redemptive work. Taken as a whole, it is a steady and valuable guide for God’s people as they seek to know him and to love their neighbors. But ultimately, the redemption of both Testaments, and of the cosmos and humanity, is accomplished by the death, burial, resurrection, ascension and return of our savior, Jesus Christ. Until that final day comes, we shall continue to struggle with the problems of pain and suffering, and with the problems in Scripture. These are our problems that Christ has graciously taken upon himself.”

Well, that’s reassuring to hear, isn’t it? Someday Jesus will save even the scriptures, so we won’t have to trouble ourselves anymore sorting out what’s scientifically accurate, historically reliable, morally acceptable, etc., from all the stuff that isn’t. Boy, will that be a relief.

There was a time when one would have thought it wholly superfluous to point out in Reformed and evangelical circles how problematic this is. One would have thought it goes without saying that if the Bible is to retain anything like the position of authority it has held in the history of orthodox Christianity – if it is to retain any meaningful ultimacy as “the Word of God” – then human beings should not be in a position of parsing it to determine where it is really, divinely true, and where it is not only fallibly human, but even sinfully human. But alas, the days when such naiveté could be indulged are long past.

Pete Enns might tell you I’m writing this because I’ve missed the God of the Bible altogether. I just don’t get it that it’s not “a problem for God to enter into the human experience and allow that human experience to shape – from beginning to end – how the Bible behaves.” (Apparently, for Sparks, “from beginning to end” includes sin and the need for redemption. I’ll come back to that.) The God of the gospel is Immanuel. He enters our fallenness completely. But I, you see, insist on a fundamentalist, bibliolatrous, exclusivist, “finely-tuned system of theology” required by my platonic god who refuses to get his hands dirty in the real human situation.

On the subject of systems, I find it curious that the view of scripture put forward by Sparks and Enns is often portrayed as a mere corollary of Chalcedonian orthodoxy. We believe the Incarnate Word of God was not only divine, but also human – fully human. We must, therefore, embrace that the written Word of God is not only divine, but also fully human, including errors and even moral lapses that need to be redeemed. But doesn’t the analogy break down at just this point? Whatever human weaknesses beset the Son of God on earth, sin and the need for redemption were not among them; to affirm that they were is to deny that He was in any position to redeem anyone else. We might go further, in fact, by way of the communicatio idiomatum, and say that the absolute truthfulness and moral perfection of His divine nature were properly attributable to His human thoughts, words, and actions. And in saying such things we would not (pace Enns) be drifting anywhere near the frightful marshes of Platonism.

Reasoning by analogy back to the written Word, we must say – indeed, we stake a great deal on it – that even as God did not cease to be God when He became the man Jesus Christ, He did not cease to be God when He authored the scriptures through human writers. We need to be more precise still: the Triune God revealed in scripture did not cease to be that God when He inspired the scriptures, the God who knows all things and whose every word may be trusted. Here I am struck by the relevance of something J. Gresham Machen wrote in Christianity and Liberalism:

“Does not the liberal preacher say that the Bible is ‘divine’ – indeed that it is the more divine because it is the more human? What could be more edifying than that? But of course such appearances are deceptive. A Bible that is full of error is certainly divine in the modern pantheizing sense of ‘divine,’ according to which God is just another name for the course of the world with all its imperfections and all its sin. But the God whom the Christian worships is a God of truth.”

Reading this, one thinks Enns may be right to say that two different views of God operate behind these two different views of scripture. One is the God revealed in scripture, who remained so in the very act of inspiring human writers, ensuring pure words that require no redemption (even as, in the Incarnation, He ensured a pure human nature that required no redemption); the other is a god who either virtually disappears into his human writers (only in their entirely, authentically fallen words, undisturbed by any external power, do we encounter his), or stands apart from the human writers such that their words can be his only after the fact (Nestorius comes to mind).

To sharpen this point about different deities, it’s no accident that what transparently drives Enns and Sparks toward their radical view of scripture is what they perceive to be the irresistible force of modern science. They believe with modern science, for example, that evolution is an established fact, and that God must therefore have “created” the cosmos using the evolutionary process. But that is simply another way of positing that God “created” the cosmos using such processes as naturalistic science can discover, observe, test, and predict. God set the stuff of the cosmos in motion (there’s the Christian bit), then stepped back and let nature run its course (as understood by naturalistic science). Beyond the initial act of setting things in motion, the forces of nature are cosmically ultimate; put another way, those natural forces (or what Machen called “the course of the world with all its imperfections and its sin”) are “god.” In the context of such a deistic cosmology, it’s difficult to see how any other view of scripture could emerge than the one to which Enns and Sparks subscribe. If God surrendered sovereignty over the cosmos once He created it (being bound now by its unalterable laws, which science continues to discover), then how could He possibly have retained sovereignty over the thoughts and words of human writers of the Bible? How could He not have been bound by their finitude, fallibility, and sinfulness?

“Whereas the resurrection of Christ in a sense breaks the bonds of the social order that crucifies, so as to inaugurate a new history, a new city, whose story is told along the infinite axis of divine peace, the religious dynamism of Attic tragedy has the form of a closed circle; it reinforces the civic order it puts into question, by placing that order within a context of cosmic violence that demonstrates not only the limits but the necessity of the city’s regime. . . . The form, context, and substance of Attic tragedy underwrite a particular narrative mythos, which depicts violence as the aboriginal continuity between the natural and moral worlds, and the human community as a besieged citadel preserving itself in part through the tribute it pays to the powers that threaten it.” (David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 380)

“What must be grasped from the very beginning is that evolutionism’s cosmology involves an intellectual sleight-of-hand operation. It appears initially to denigrate man’s position in a universe of infinite (or almost infinite) space and time, only subsequently to place man on the pinnacle of this non-created realm. Man becomes content to be a child of the meaningless slime, in order that he might claim his rightful sovereignty in the place once occupied by God. By default – the disappearance of God the Creator – man achieves his evolving divinity.” (Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis, p. 253)