Relocating To Elfland

“If the Church is truly the ‘newness of life’ – the world and nature as restored in Christ – it is not, or rather ought not be, a purely religious institution in which to be ‘pious,’ to be a member in ‘good standing,’ means leaving one’s own personality at the entrance – in the ‘check room’ – and replacing it with a worn-out, impersonal, neutral ‘good Christian’ type personality. Piety in fact may be a very dangerous thing, a real opposition to the Holy Spirit who is the Giver of Life – of joy, movement and creativity – and not of the ‘good conscience’ which looks at everything with suspicion, fear and moral indignation.” (Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World)

“In the night season our soul awaketh early unto thee, O God, for thy precepts are light. Teach us thy righteousness, they commandments and thy statutes, O God. Enlighten the eyes of our understanding, lest at any time we sleep unto death in sins. Dispel all darkness from our hearts. Graciously give unto us the Sun of Righteousness, and preserve our life unassailed, by the seal of thy Holy Spirit. Guide our steps into the way of peace. Grant us to behold the dawn and the day with joy, that we may raise our morning prayers unto thee.

“For thine is the dominion, and thine are the majesty and the power and the glory, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.”

(Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, ed. Isabel Florence Hapgood)

I recently listened to a sermon by Dr. Tim Keller in which he said the reason for the frenetic pace of life and general exhaustion among urban dwellers is that they have come to the city in order to find themselves. It is different for the people of God, he said (preaching from Jeremiah 29:1–14). We come to the cities of the world having already been given a self in the gospel; so our labors in a city are those of loving service, not the exhausting pursuit of self-discovery and self-promotion.

I appreciate that Keller’s comments were focused on urban missions, but I want to draw attention briefly to his more general insight regarding a given identity. Readers of this blog know that I am passionately interested in the rising generation of Christ’s church (not least because I am a father of four), and I can think of no more basic problem among the youth of today’s Christendom than their nearly wholesale lack of functional Christian identity. This shows up in a myriad ways: they have no problem “yoking up” with unbelievers; they cannot live without the latest status symbol; their lives are every bit as dominated by consumerism as their pagan peers; they have little or no interest in deep relationships with prior generations of the church (witness their conversation and reading habits) or in preparing themselves to rear the generation to come; they neither understand nor enjoy the Christian scriptures; their Facebook pages are indistinguishable from those of teens who make no pretense of worshiping Christ; and so on and so on.

The reason for all of this is that, at a functional level, our youth have no clear sense of who their God has declared them to be, and thus no compelling interest in becoming who they actually are. (Now there is a pronoun pileup for you!) They lack a functional Christian identity.

But we cannot stop there. Say the word “identity” in the modern context, and immediately we all start thinking in individual terms: the issue of my “identity” addresses who I am. But is this really so? Is it not the case, rather, that my identity is entirely situated, so that I cannot know who I am without knowing where I am located (in space and in time), to whom I stand related, and what is the fundamental vision of life in which I (and my relations) are operating (call it a worldview, or a Weltanschauung)? Let me quote from Charles Taylor:

“The question [of identity] is often spontaneously phrased by people in the form: Who am I? But this can’t necessarily be answered by giving name and genealogy. What does answer this question for us is an understanding of what is of crucial importance to us. To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.” (Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, p. 27)

Taylor later speaks of “a frame or horizon within which things can take on a stable significance, within which some life possibilities can be seen as good or meaningful, others as bad or trivial.”

And this, in turn, begins to sound a bit like the way the Christian scriptures address identity. In the Bible, we learn that every human life is fundamentally defined by a relationship either with the first Adam or with the Last Adam (Christ Jesus). Every human being is either “in Adam” or “in Christ.” Every human stands in a relationship with the Creator-God that is defined either by Adam’s sin, curse, and death, or by Christ’s righteousness, blessing, and life. To use a metaphor coined by a friend of mine, these are two different “operating systems” in which every one of the various “programs” of human life functions (eating, drinking, education, sexuality, etc.); or to use Ridderbos’ phrase, they are two different “modes of existence”; so that two people may be doing the exact same thing (eating a salad, for instance) and yet be doing so within two totally different life-situations or contexts. One is eating as a righteous, forgiven, beloved child of God; the other is eating as a condemned enemy of God for whom the creature (the salad, in this case) is the “be all and end all.” They are worlds apart, these two people, while eating the same salad.

Once I know where I am situated – who my God is and how I am related to Him, who my people are and how I am related them, and what is the overarching story (or metanarrative) in which my tiny individual story is being written in this time and space – I can begin to figure out how to live.

Perhaps another metaphor may help us here. Biblically conceived, my life is not a story that I am making up as I go. My life is, rather, situated from the moment of my conception in the kingdom story God Himself is writing. Or to change the image slightly, I am given from conception a play script (theologians refer to it as the “covenant”) in which I am assigned a particular role (I have a unique spot in the dramatis personae); and I am to “put on” my costume and play that role by the script. I am told that, as a member of the covenant, I am “in Christ”; and I am to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” and make no provision for the old Adamic life (Rom 13:14). I am to “put off” all of the practices that naturally belonged to the “old self,” for the old self was itself put off when God placed me in His covenant and kingdom (Col 3:9–10). I am to “put on” all of the practices of the “new self” God has given me in His Son. Practice, practice, practice. And eventually, the role no longer feels unnatural; I have become what God has told me I am.

At the risk of being insufferably tedious, let me quote something I once wrote in another context (trying to relate all of this to the subject of Christian wisdom):

“Here perhaps is the genius of true wisdom. If it is the blight of folly (too often characteristic of youth) to be entirely absorbed with the self, and more narrowly still, in the present moment of the self, it is wisdom’s genius to view the self, and especially the moment, as a small and slightly significant part of a large and grandly significant whole. For the wise, every moment of the self stands ‘within’ a larger moment that itself stands within a grander series of moments – what we call a ‘history.’ Put another way, for the wise, each self-moment is part of a community-moment, which in turn is part of a historical movement (or better, a number of historical movements); and only as such does the self-moment retain significance.

“It is but a slight step from this to the idea that wisdom is inextricably grounded in narrative. The absence of a well-formed sense of narrative and a well-formed sense of identity in a community defined by a particular narrative, will usually explain the pervasive foolishness of youth. What is particularly frightening about this absence in the modern context is that modernity has, for many generations, self-consciously rebelled against the ancient narratives that once defined all human community. In bygone centuries, there existed religious narratives, or at least tribal and national narratives, that defined and shaped human community, and in which young ones were schooled. Now the religious narratives are simply ‘myths’; now the tribe is a ‘neighborhood’ in which all are functionally strangers, and the nationhood of nations is rapidly washing away into the global sea. Now the best one can hope for is a ‘Facebook community’ a year or two old, or perhaps a ‘reading community’ loosely built around the latest Twilight novel.

“The Christian scriptures are violently subversive of our modern foolishness. To us they present the grandest of narratives: the story of the kingdom of God stretching back to Eden, the story of God’s covenant community stretching back through Abraham to the creation-kingdom, and past that to the inner life of the Triune Creator. The surest way for us to impart wisdom to the youth of Christendom is to brand this story on their consciousness, resulting in what the Apostle Paul called sophrosune – sobermindedness. The ‘sober’ soul is aware; he has his wits about him; he is able to pull his head out of the present moment, to look about and orient himself to the larger community and story of which he is a part. He lives out of the wisdom and insight lavished upon God’s covenant people in Christ, a wisdom in which God has made known to us ‘the mystery of His will, according to His purpose which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth’ (Eph 1:8–10).”

I would love to go on to talk about how this concretely affects absolutely everything in daily life. There’s nothing impractical or abstract about it. Every day we are enacting a narrative of the self (an “identity” that rules in our hearts); we have only to become self-conscious about this, and we will see how it affects everything. But I have run on far too long, and must wait for another time.

On the question of whether children in the covenant community must be regarded as believers, our Reformed forefathers have given some interesting answers. I offer a few of those here, for our reflection.

John Calvin responded thus to the Anabaptists’ argument that infants are incapable of faith:

“But since they think that it would be quite absurd for any knowledge of God to be attributed to infants, to whom Moses denies the knowledge of good and evil, let them only tell me, I ask, what the danger is if infants be said to receive now some part of that grace which in a little while they shall enjoy to the full? For if fullness of life consists in the perfect knowledge of God, when some of them, whom death snatches away in their very first infancy, pass over into eternal life, they are surely received to the contemplation of God in his very presence. Therefore, if it please him, why may the Lord not shine with a tiny spark at the present time on those whom he will illumine in the future with the full splendor of his light – especially if he has not removed their ignorance before taking them from the prison of the flesh? I would not rashly affirm that they are endowed with the same faith as we experience in ourselves, or have entirely the same knowledge of faith – this I prefer to leave undetermined – but I would somewhat restrain the obtuse arrogance of those who at the top of their lungs confidently deny or assert whatever they please.” (Calvin, Institutes, 4.16.19)

Perhaps even more telling is another passage that follows:

“Since God communicated circumcision to infants as a sacrament of repentance and of faith, it does not seem absurd if they are now made participants in baptism – unless men choose to rage openly at God’s institution. But as in all God’s acts, so in this very act also there shines enough wisdom and righteousness to repel the detractions of the impious. For although infants, at the very moment they were circumcised, did not comprehend with their understanding what that sign meant, they were truly circumcised to the mortification of their corrupt and defiled nature, a mortification that they would afterward practice in mature years. To sum up, this objection can be solved without difficulty: infants are baptized into future repentance and faith, and even though these have not yet been formed in them, the seed of both lies hidden within them by the secret working of the Spirit.” (Institutes, 4.16.20, emphasis added)

It is fairly standard in Reformed circles to affirm (as Calvin does here) that it is possible for God to work faith in infants; but should we regard all infants in the covenant as possessing the “seed” of repentance and faith? The Westminster Larger Catechism offers a strongly positive answer to this question when it says baptism is “a sign and seal of our regeneration and ingrafting into Christ, and that even to infants” (Question 177, emphasis added). If baptism seals regeneration (the seed of faith and repentance) to infants, they ought to be regarded (like adult professors) as regenerate, having the seed (at least) of faith and repentance. And this way of viewing the infants in God’s flock has solid support elsewhere. Zacharias Ursinus, for example, one of the co-authors of the Heidelberg Catechism, speaks as follows:

“This is sure and certain, that God instituted his sacraments and covenant seals only for those who recognize and maintain the church as already made up of parties of the covenant, and that it is not His intention to make them Christians by the sacraments first, but rather to make those who are already Christians to be Christians more and more and to confirm the work begun in them. . . . Hence, if anyone considers the children of Christians to be pagans and non-Christians, and damns all those infants who cannot come to be baptized, let him take care on what ground he does so, because Paul calls them holy (1 Cor. 7), and God says to all believers in the person of Abraham that He will be their God and the God of their seed. . . . Next let him consider how he will permit them to be baptized with a good conscience, for knowingly to baptize a pagan and unbeliever is an open abuse and desecration of baptism. Our continual answer to the Anabaptists, when they appeal to the lack of faith in infants against infant baptism, is that the Holy Spirit works regeneration and the inclination to faith and obedience to God in them in a manner appropriate to their age, always with it understood that we leave the free mercy and heavenly election unbound and unpenetrated.” (Quoted in Geerhardus Vos, “The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology,” in Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, ed. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., pp. 264–65)

Centuries later, we find the same conclusion reached by a different path by Herman Bavinck:

“We can no more judge the hearts of senior members of the church than we can the hearts of infants. The only possibility left for us who are bound to externals is a judgment of charity. According to that judgment, we consider those who make profession of faith to be believers and give them access to the sacraments. By that same judgment we count the children of believers as themselves believers because they are included with their parents in the covenant of grace. The likelihood that the baptized are true believers is even greater in the case of children than adults.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 4.530–31, emphasis added)

Bavinck emphasizes the objective covenant promise of God to children rather than the subjective “seed” of faith within them, but the conclusion is the same – they are to be regarded precisely as we regard adult professors: as regenerate, repentant, believing disciples of the covenant Lord. It is not our place to call their faith into question, but rather to nurture it.

“From the night season our soul awaketh early unto thee, O our God; for thy precepts are a light upon the earth. Teach us to perfect righteousness and holiness in thy fear; for we glorify thee, our God, who existest in verity. Incline thine ear and hear us; and call to remembrance by their names, O Lord, all those who are with us and pray with us; and save them by thy might. Bless thy people and sanctify thy inheritance. Grant peace to thy world, to thy Churches, to the priests*, to the Authorities, and to all thy people.

“For blessed and glorified is thine all-honourable and majestic name, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.”

(Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, ed. Isabel Florence Hapgood)

[*In the Presbyterian tradition, the reference here would be to ministers and elders.]

“Time is the necessary form of the existence of the finite. It is not a separate creation but something automatically given with the world, cocreated with it like space. In a sense, therefore, the world has always existed, for as long as time has existed. All change, then, occurs in it, not in God. The world is subject to time, that is, to change. It is constantly becoming, in contrast with God, who is an eternal and unchangeable being. Now these two, God and the world, eternity and time, are related in such a way that the world is sustained in all its parts by God’s omnipresent power, and time in all its moments is pervaded by the eternal being of our God. Eternity and time are not two lines, the shorter of which for a time runs parallel to the infinitely extended one; the truth is that eternity is the immutable center that sends out its rays to the entire circumference of time. To the limited eye of the creature it successively unfolds its infinite content in the breadth of space and the length of time, so that creature might understand something of the unsearchable greatness of God. But for all that, eternity and time remain distinct.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 2.429)

Post-Darwin Christianity exhibits an extraordinary variety of views on how to read the scientific “evidence” for evolution. Some simply accept the “findings” of science, without any concern for how this acceptance might be squared with a faithful reading of scripture. Others believe some “reconciliation” of science and scripture must be attempted where they appear to conflict (the Author of nature is, after all, the Author of scripture); but opinions differ as to whether biblical interpretation should move in the direction of scientific findings, or vice versa. Should biblical interpretation be accommodated to the scientific evidence, or should our reading of the scientific evidence be accommodated to faithful biblical interpretation?

One question that lies near the center of these disputes is whether we are permitted to believe God has tampered with the scientific evidence. Some Christians want to say that since His first act of creating something ex nihilo (be it the world as we know it, or the “stuff” from which all things have evolved) God has confined His relations with the world within the “laws of nature” or “ordinary” providence. On this view, if we study nature and its “laws” (which are universally reliable) and are led to conclude that the earth is billions of years old, any hint to the contrary in scripture must arise from a misreading of scripture. What is off the table is any notion that God might have done something in nature that we couldn’t predict by the laws of nature.

Ken Miller, for example, says we haven’t understood the mythological character of Genesis 1–2. A “literal” reading of Genesis 1–2 must be wrong, because if it were correct, Genesis 1–2 would conflict with the assured findings of science. What Miller firmly refuses to believe is that God might have played fast and loose with the evidence in nature (e.g., creating a world that has the appearance of age). He emphatically rejects any idea of a “deceptive God” doing anything that might mislead or confuse the scientists.

Meredith Kline took a different tack. He insisted we haven’t understood the Bible’s own clues (notably Genesis 2:5) about God’s use of “ordinary” providence throughout most of the creation week. What we may perceive as “extraordinary” acts of God in Genesis 1–2 (e.g., giving light to the earth prior to the creation of the sun) become quite obviously “ordinary” once we grasp the details of his “framework hypothesis” concerning those chapters – which hypothesis importantly allows for a non-chronological reading of the creation days and for a very old earth.

Without debating the merits of Miller’s mythologizing or Kline’s framework hypothesis, it does seem to me they share a profoundly questionable assumption: that when we come to the facts of science, we needn’t be concerned that the facts are muddled by supernatural intrusions (beyond the bounds of the ordinary workings of nature). There is no need to posit a “God in the gaps”; we needn’t explain things with reference to surprises on the part of the Creator-King.

Disciples of Miller and Kline may argue that I have grossly oversimplified, even misrepresented, their views. I hope that is not the case; and I also want to remove any misunderstanding in what I am about to say: it does seem to me that, given the assumption described above, it is difficult to maintain the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ (or any other “miracle,” for that matter). Let no one mistake: I am not saying either Miller or Kline denies the reality of miracles. I want to parse out the logical conclusion of accepting their assumption (as I understand it); I am not saying that either man actually takes their assumption to its logical conclusion. What I am asking is this: if we are prepared to say that God has raised the dead, multiplied bread and fish and oil and flour, turned water into wine, walked on water, and healed the sick, then precisely how can we argue that God would never suspend the “laws of nature” to create the world in the order described in Genesis 1, or to destroy the world with a flood? How, in short, can we insist that things in nature may always be explained without recourse to the notion of supernatural intervention?

There may be an answer that I am missing, but . . . well, I am missing it.

“The first act of the Christian life is a renunciation, a challenge. No one can be Christ’s until he has, first, faced evil, and then become ready to fight it. How far is this spirit from the way in which we often proclaim, or to use a more modern term, “sell” Christianity today! Is it not usually presented as a comfort, help, release from tensions, a reasonable investment of time, energy and money? One has only to read – be it but once – the topics of the Sunday sermons announced in the Saturday newspapers, or the various syndicated “religious columns,” to get the impression that “religion” is almost invariably presented as salvation from something – fear, frustration, anxiety – but never as the salvation of man and the world. How could we then speak of “fight” when the very set-up of our churches must, by definition, convey the idea of softness, comfort, peace? How can the Church use again the military language, which was its own in the first days, when it still thought of itself as militia Christi? One does not see very well where and how “fight” would fit into the weekly bulletin of a suburban parish, among all kinds of counseling sessions, bake sales, and “young adult” get-togethers.” (Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World)

My North American generation may be the first in the history of the world to raise indifference, boredom, infidelity, and aimlessness (except in the cause of vanity) to the status of virtues. We bridged the gap between a generation for whom it was cool to have questions but no answers, and a generation now nearing the drinking age who don’t even care about the questions (the devolution, one feels, was inevitable). Our standard response to anything deeper than People magazine is a thoughtful, “Whatever, man.” Should it vex anyone that this seems pretty well to exhaust our philosophical arsenal (and our convictions), we would admonish him to relax.

The average young man today is an emasculated nitwit. He has three things on his mind: cheap sex, easy money, and his own importance (whether expressed as a superiority or an inferiority complex is immaterial). What he lacks, poor fellow, is manliness: the character, principles, and learning that might qualify him for a family’s affection, an employer’s confidence, or the barest responsibilities of leadership. Not that this troubles him, particularly.

What of the average young woman in my generation and beyond? There will be little left of her when, in twenty years, the makeup finally gives out. Something about an entitled diva wannabe in a middle-aged body is really unattractive – but how long did we expect the veneer to hold up without any real womanhood underneath? You can’t paint on virtue. You can’t paint on wisdom, a willingness to learn what truly matters. You can’t paint on a well-cultivated soul, or purpose in life beyond self-glory. So after the paint starts to crack, you’re left with what you had all along: an entitled diva wannabe, whether the high-powered corporate kind or the trailer park variety.

We don’t know enough to know our own ignorance. We have too much to care about any of it. Our sensory experience has inflated until we can feel neither sobriety nor awe. Ennui is the spirit of the age: glutted with our cornflakes, we have starved out desire for anything else.

Part of the tragedy of the average is that it isn’t universal. There are people in my generation and beyond who have been forced to face the deeper realities of life under the sun. They are a lonely lot, these. I spoke once with a young man who had endured a terrible heartbreak. He confided in me how difficult it is for him to talk with anyone his age, because all they care about is the latest greatest pop band. It would never cross their minds to ask him how he’s really doing; nor would they have the attention span to hear him out, or wisdom to offer the slightest comfort. Pity these souls who, along with their peers, have left the innocence of childhood, but who have crossed the lonely threshold of maturity, while their peers remain happily stupefied in adultescence, cheerily enjoying the privileges of grownups without any burden of wisdom or responsibility.

“There are those who curse their fathers and do not bless their mothers. There are those who are clean in their own eyes but are not washed of their filth. There are those – how lofty are their eyes, how high their eyelids lift! There are those whose teeth are swords, whose fangs are knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, the needy from among mankind.”

The progression is telling: from rejection of authority, to pride and complacency, to indifference and cruelty. We just don’t care about anything bigger or better than ourselves.

I know, this probably qualifies as a “rant,” and a pretty cynical one at that. But diagnosis is not prognosis. Even in my generation in North America, there is still something called the kingdom of God, and those within it who fear the Lord their God and possess the beginning of wisdom. It remains true, however, that we must wake up to some things if we would serve the purpose of God in our own generation (Acts 13:36). We might begin by listening to our fathers and mothers.

“We give thanks unto thee, O Lord our God, who hast raised us up from our beds, and hast put into our mouths the word of praise, that we may adore and call upon thy holy Name. And we entreat thee, by thy mercies which thou hast exercised always in our life, send down now also thine aid upon those who stand before the presence of thy holy glory, and await the rich mercy which is from thee. And grant that they may always with fear and love worship thee, praise thee, hymn thee, and adore thine inexpressible goodness.

“For unto thee is due all honour, glory and worship, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.”

(Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, ed. Isabel Florence Hapgood)