Relocating To Elfland

I wish to say from the start, I feel a sense of revulsion at what I’m doing. Human lives are being shattered in Japan in ways unimaginable to me in the comforts of my situation, and I’m about to take their anguish as an occasion for a blog post. Kyrie eleison.

That said, and at the risk of sounding petulant, I wouldn’t be doing this were it not that it never fails, when such tragedies score the earth, but someone points an accusing finger at the Christian church and thunders imperiously: “Which of these is true: either God is all-powerful but He doesn’t care about the people of Japan and therefore their suffering, or He does care about the people of Japan but He’s not all-powerful?” (We heard exactly this question when Martin Bashir channeled David Hume in a recent interview with Rob Bell – I should note that Bell’s “answer” was as fatuitous as anything I’ve ever heard.)

There’s no point in trying to answer such a question, because it’s knocking at the wrong door. Hard as it may be for an unbeliever to understand, we Christians aren’t sitting around trying to dream up a God who fits the clothes we make for Him, whose ways are readily found out, and who gives polite and tidy answers whenever we demand. We worship a God who has revealed Himself to us (His self-revelation is rather basic, actually, to our religion); we have no say in who or how He is. And He has told us unequivocally that He is absolutely sovereign (inclusive of omnipotence) and perfectly good. If Hume’s disciples wish to pound at the door of the Christian church, they need to revise their question: “Given your God is both sovereign and good, how do you respond to tragedies such as this one in Japan?” Now that’s a fair question.

It’s not a question, moreover, that the unbeliever has any business raising. If, as the atheist wants to believe, God doesn’t exist at all, then a powerful force in Japan (the tsunami) has encountered some weaker forces in the cosmos (human strength and ingenuity), and swept all before it. This stuff happens. It’s a harsh reality in the evolution of the cosmos, perhaps; it’s certainly not one to which any moral value can be assigned. So everyone needs to stop complaining and clean up. If, on the other hand, one wants to talk about some god other than the Christian God who is crying himself to sleep every night because of things that happen in his cosmos, well, too bad for him. We can hate him as we hate ourselves for our inability to stop tsunamis. Or we might think of a god who is strong enough to stop tsunamis but doesn’t want to: well, if this is “his” universe in any meaningful sense, then it’s not a good universe, and who are we to complain? On what basis are we going to make a case for “goodness” in what is most basically an “evil” universe? We need to catch up on our cosmology and get with the program. After all, do you really want to contend with a god who takes pleasure in tsunamis?

But these are childish questions, representing childish ideas. They have nothing whatever to do with the Christian religion. We Christians take our stand squarely within the bounds of our God’s revelation, and here two things comfort us. First, our God is sovereign. This means that tsunamis do not stalk the earth out of control (neither, thankfully, do rapists and thugs). We sleep at night knowing that nothing can happen that is not in the hands of our God; to live in any other cosmos would be a mind-warpingly terrifying experience. Evil, we know, is not simply “there” in some kind of dualistic competition with our God; He reigns over it, and will in time destroy it. Which brings us to the second thing: our God is good. He has told us what goodness and righteousness mean, and so we can look at the evils of the world and call them exactly that – evils. We can hate them because He does. How can it be that God sovereignly permits and ordains in His universe things that He declares He hates? That is a mystery of the Christian faith (it is not a mystery to which an atheist or deist has any access), but it is not an open-ended mystery. Our God has told us that one day He will judge the living and the dead. This hope of the final judgment assures us that evil will one day be vanquished, condemned, and eradicated from the earth. We do not know why God allows and ordains certain things, but we know He will judge them all in righteousness – and “shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just” (Gen 18:25)?

Put another way, the question of the “problem of evil” can be asked within the boundaries of the Christian faith, and we can give an answer of faith within those boundaries. The question really cannot be made intelligible outside the Christian faith in the gloomy marshes of atheism or deism. In these marshes there are only the imaginations of men; there is no one to whom such a question may be reverently addressed, nor anyone from whom an answer may be trustingly heard.

I say it again, Kyrie eleison.

“O Lord, which for our sake didst fast forty days and forty nights; Give us grace to use such abstinence, that, our flesh being subdued to the spirit, we may ever obey thy Godly motions in righteousness, and true holiness, to thy honor and glory, which liveth and reigneth, &c.”

I’m also including here Cranmer’s collect for Ash Wednesday:

“Almighty and everlasting God, which hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that be penitent; Create  and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ.”

Here’s another great article from David Bentley Hart, this time on the recent free speech ruling by the Supreme Court. To whet appetites all around: “when personal liberties become absolute, they also become simply another form of tyranny.” I have a short treatise brewing on this subject, but I doubt it’s appropriate material for a blog.

I recently listened to an interview with Kenda Creasy Dean on the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Dean is a professor at Princeton Seminary, served as a researcher with the National Study of Youth and Religion, and has recently written a book (based on her work with the NSYR) titled Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church. Here are her opening few lines from the interview: “I think one of the things that is really tricky, particularly to convey to parents, and to congregations as well, is that if you are trying to form your kids to be Christians, it’s not going to fit them very well for American culture. And actually, it’s probably going to deform them for some of the things that we value as a society. And nobody wants to deform their kids – everybody wants their kids to fit in, and to be able to do well.”

This is a call to discipleship that many Christian parents simply won’t embrace. They want their kids to have everything that’s valuable by the standards of North American culture – comfortable affluence, popularity, sex appeal, social experience, all the toys and perks and bells and whistles – and they hope their kids will somehow also want to be in church and keep their virginity as long as possible. The idea that following Jesus might deform their children from the standpoint of cultural values, that maybe their kids won’t fit right in and succeed in all the paths their peers are treading . . . it’s unthinkable. Jesus wouldn’t require such a thing.

Having grown up in separatist Christianity, I’m sensitive to the problem of Christians making themselves “weird” for weirdness’ sake. There’s no problem, for example, with Christians being comfortably affluent – for some, it’s their calling. For every one of us, not to work hard in order to have for purposes of enjoyment and generosity is simple disobedience. But anyone who thinks a life fully oriented to the glory of God won’t make you look weird by North American standards is asleep to the cost of Christian discipleship. Christian faithfulness doesn’t fit in. Get over it.

“Obedience to revelation must invariably mean to let oneself be involved. To be involved must then mean to be questioned, in such a way that the question to which revelation is the answer becomes our own question, and so revelation, as the answer acquires a direct relation to ourselves.” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.26)

People say a preacher must preach to an audience of One. That’s ridiculous. God didn’t ordain preaching because He needs to hear it, but because His people need to hear it. It is true, however, that a preacher must preach for the approval of One. And in this he must be resolute.

“O Lord which dost teach us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth; send thy holy ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and all virtues, without the which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee: Grant this for thy only son, Jesus Christ’s sake.”

I’m reading through David VanDrunen’s Living in God’s Two Kingdoms, and he keeps saying things that I think I must have misread, they’re so incredible to me. Our first father Adam, he writes, was given a royal task in the present world (the one you’re sitting on now while you read this), which task was to take dominion over the earth (p. 40). So far, so good; now here’s where things get a bit dicey. When Adam finished his royal task, the result was to be an immediate transfer to a new and entirely different “world-to-come” (or “new creation,” p. 40). That’s right: this “present creation . . . was never meant to be the final home of the human race” (p. 66), which was as true in Adam’s day as it is in ours. But that is not all, no, that is not all.

The means by which Adam was to finish his task in the world was his sustaining a probationary test of obedience in a particular garden, the garden of Eden (pp. 41–43, in which VanDrunen provides an exegesis of Genesis 2:15–17). Were Adam successfully to sustain his probation, he would immediately be transferred to the new (and totally different) creation or world-to-come, having “completed” his royal work on earth (p. 53). In VanDrunen’s words, “Adam was to have his entire obedience in the entire world determined through a particular test in a particular location [i.e., Eden]” (p. 50, emphasis in original).

[I should note parenthetically that this description of Adam’s task (take dominion), the intended outcome of his task (transfer to a different world), and the means by which his task was to be accomplished and the outcome attained (Eden probation), is based exclusively on VanDrunen’s reading of Hebrews 2:5–8. Whether his exegesis of the Hebrews text is accurate, and whether, if so, it can bear all the weight he wants it to, are questions I’m not prepared to address here.]

VanDrunen’s view of Adam’s task and the extremely circumscribed means by which it was to be “finished” leads to a particular view (which I must say I find utterly idiosyncratic) of Christ’s task as the Last Adam. Let’s begin with this:

“Before the second Adam no one accomplished the task of the first Adam, and after the second Adam no one needs to accomplish it. The last Adam has completed it once and for all.” (p. 50)

He goes on to assert that even as Adam’s obedience to the dominion mandate would have been exhausted in his sustaining his Eden probation, Christ’s obedience to the dominion mandate was exhausted when He finished His life of obedience (sustaining many temptations) and His work on the cross. There is nothing more now for Christ to do; His work (and the work given to the first Adam) is finished, once-for-all.

This, in turn, leads to a very definite answer to the question whether Christians (those in Christ) are still bound by the original dominion mandate given to Adam. Let me offer two quotes to show how serious VanDrunen is about his answer to this question:

“If Christ is the last Adam, then we are not new Adams. To understand our own cultural work as picking up and finishing Adam’s original task is, however unwittingly, to compromise the sufficiency of Christ’s work. Christ perfectly atoned for all our sins, and hence we have no sins left to atone personally. Likewise, Christ perfectly sustained a time of testing similar to Adam’s: he achieved the new creation through his flawless obedience in this world. He has left nothing yet to be accomplished.” (pp. 50–51, emphasis in original)

In another place he puts it even more strongly:

“Those who hold a traditional Protestant view of justification consistently should not find a redemptive transformationalist perspective attractive. As some of the Reformers grasped, a two-kingdoms doctrine is a proper companion to a Protestant doctrine of justification.” (p. 21, emphasis in original)

[For those unfamiliar with this terminology, by the “redemptive transformationalist perspective” VanDrunen means the view that Christians are to fulfill the dominion mandate, redeeming all of human life and seeking to transform the world in so doing. The “two-kingdoms doctrine,” by contrast, is the view VanDrunen himself is propounding.]

Follow the logic: the entire dominion mandate was to be fulfilled in Adam’s sustaining his Eden probation; he failed, but Christ fulfilled the entire dominion mandate in sustaining His probation; to say that Christians are in any sense bound by the dominion mandate is to say we need to finish the work of Christ, which undermines the sufficiency of His work and the traditional Protestant doctrine of justification.

All rather breathtaking, is it not? But there’s one more piece:

“Christians do not pick up and continue the task of Adam. Thanks to the finished work of Christ, Christians should view their cultural activities in a radically different way from the way that the first Adam viewed his. We pursue cultural activities in response to the fact [note this] that the new creation has already been achieved, not in order to contribute to its achievement.” (p. 57)

Now I’m probably just being a simpleton, but this dichotomy strikes me as a wondrous false. Are these really the only two options: either we “contribute to achieving” the new creation (in some sort of meritorious sense), or it has “already been entirely achieved”? I mean, substitute the word “atonement” or even “justification” for “new creation,” and I’m all in: we don’t contribute to Christ’s atoning work or our justification, because His atoning work is finished once-for-all, and we receive justification in the empty hands of faith. But the new creation? Somehow I’ve always had this compromised notion that the new creation is neither something once-for-all achieved nor something we merit by our own works, but rather something Christ has inaugurated and which is gradually being unfolding in the world under His lordship. But that, obviously, gets back to the whole simpleton thing.

I have an awful lot I would like to say about pretty much every point of VanDrunen’s thesis. In case you’re still wondering, I don’t like it. Not one little bit. But I’m out of time presently, so I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to ponder.

“Lord God, which seest that we put not our trust in any thing that we do; mercifully grant that by thy power we may be defended against all adversity; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

A Weltanschauung that rejects the metaphysical and confines itself entirely to the physical or material (i.e., one that trusts wholly in the presuppositions, methods, and findings of naturalistic science) has thereby forfeited the grounds from which to make any meaningful statements concerning the existence or nature of the metaphysical. Metaphysical claims simply do not fall within the ambit of science. The converse cannot be said of a Weltanschauung that embraces the metaphysical along with the physical or material. Religion may speak concerning science, while science must necessarily be mute concerning all things religious.

Discuss.