Relocating To Elfland

Something faithful Christians have grappled with in every generation is how to remain loyal to the faith once delivered to the saints, while also being humble enough to acknowledge we don’t yet have everything figured out (indeed, there are mysteries even in things we do “understand”). God save us from theological novelty (the itch of “creative” thinkers) on the one hand; God save us from theological paralysis (the stasis of tradition-worshippers) on the other. Some help may be found here, I think:

“The life and faith that the church possesses is much richer than what comes to expression in its creedal statements. The church’s confession is far from formulating the entire content of the Christian faith. To begin with, a confession generally comes into being in response to specific historical events and arranges its positive and antithetical content accordingly. Furthermore, a confession does not make clear the inner coherence that exists among the various dogmas nor does it ever fully articulate the truth which God has revealed in his Word. The task of the dogmatician differs therefore from that of the student of the church’s creedal statements. The latter satisfies himself with the status of the dogmatic content of the creeds, but the former has to examine how the dogma arose genetically from Scripture and how, in accordance with that same Scripture, it ought to be expanded and enriched.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 1.31)

“All our talk of invisible things is metaphorical, figurative, poetic. . . . But this does not mean that what we say is untrue and incorrect. On the contrary, real poetry is truth, for it is based on the resemblance, similarity, and kinship that exist between different groups of phenomena. All language, all metaphors and similes, all symbolism are based on and presuppose this penetration of the visible by the invisible world. If speaking figuratively were untrue, all our thought and knowledge would be an illusion and speech itself impossible.” (Bavinck, p. 2.106)

If Christianity is to remain true to itself, it must insist that there is no such thing as “the secular.” Which is to say, it must insist that there is no sphere of human thinking or doing ungoverned by the divine will and word. Precisely how God governs all things continues to be a matter of fierce debate, but that He speaks with sovereign authority in all created spheres cannot really be denied by those who take the Bible seriously.

I would not have thought of connecting Christianity’s resistance to the autonomy of the secular with the name(s) of God, but here Bavinck, though dead, yet speaketh:

“Nothing exists outside of or apart from God. This truth, it must be said, has over and over been violated: Plato’s dualism, Neo-platonism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism – they all put a limit to God’s revelation and posited a material substance hostile to God over against him. And in all sorts of ways these dualisms have for centuries impacted theology. The same dualistic principle is at work when in modern times, under the influence of Kant and Jacobi, the revelation of God is restricted to the sphere of religion and ethics, when only the religious and ethical content of Scripture is recognized, when the seat of religion is found only in the heart or the conscience, in the emotions or the will.”

Now notice the dire consequences of dualism:

“In this way nature with its elements and forces, human life in society and politics, the arts and sciences, are assigned a place outside the sphere of God’s revelation. They are considered neutral areas existing apart from God.”

In other words (and if the reader will pardon a double negative), we simply cannot accept the notion that God is not speaking in and to everything under the sun. All things – certainly all spheres of human thought and enterprise – are both instruments of His revelation (bearing witness of Him) and subject to His revelation (“normed” and governed by Him). Admittedly, Bavinck has the former primarily in mind: he is not dealing with God’s speech to all things so much as His speech in and through all things. As we shall see, however, these two aspects of God’s revelation cannot finally be separated.

If nature and human life come to be regarded as “neutral areas,” what follows?

“Then, of course, a proper appreciation of the Old Testament and a very large part of the New Testament is no longer possible. Nature and the world no longer have anything to say to believers. Revelation, which comes to us in the Word of God, loses all influence in public life. Religion, now confined to the inner recesses of the heart and the privacy of one’s home, forfeits all claim to respect. Dogmatics, specifically the doctrine of God, shrinks by the day, and theology is no longer able to maintain its place. Theology is no longer able to speak of God because it no longer speaks from him and through him. It no longer has any names with which to name God. God becomes the great Unknown; the world first becomes a domain without God [atheos], then a domain that is anti-God [antitheos].” (Reformed Dogmatics, p. 2.103)

There is a lot going on here, and in multiple directions. To begin with, a secularized realm is one in which the name of God has been erased, to the impoverishment of theology. One may say the firmament shows God’s handiwork, but while Darwinistic materialism reigns in the sciences, we all know this really ain’t so – it’s just the stuff that makes religious folk purr. One may say God reigns over the nations, but while political theory is ceded to Machiavelli and Hobbes, we all know this is mere pious metaphor – the kings of earth actually do as they please. Our conception of God does indeed “shrink by the day.”

But the problem runs the other direction as well. “Neutral” spheres not only deprive religion and theology of important funds of revelation (God is, as it were, gagged in such spheres), they also emancipate themselves from the claims of revelation. God is not only gagged, He is dethroned. His voice is silenced not only through these spheres but also within them. “Nature and the world no longer have anything to say to believers,” on the one hand. “Revelation, which comes to us in the Word of God, loses all influence in public life,” on the other.

Bavinck’s reference to the Old and New Testaments is important here, because it reminds us that our knowledge of what God is saying/revealing in nature and to the world must be derived from biblical revelation. Put differently, if we are to know that God is speaking in the firmament, we must learn this from scripture; and if we are to know what He has to say to the kings of the earth, we must learn this, as well, from scripture.

“Mine, mine was the transgression,” goes the English rendering of Bernard’s hymn, “but Thine the deadly pain.” As our ancient fathers laid their hands on the heads of sacrifice animals and confessed over them their sins, we think today of the Lamb of God and confess, “He bore our sins in His body on the tree.”

“He bore our sins.” Does this really strike home as it should? God knows how sentimentalized and sanitized the cross has become in popular representations; but among us who call upon His name, does it really register that the Son of God hung dying in agony because of us?

I know this already sounds like angst mongering. We have all heard preachers try to whip up mass feelings of guilt before the specter of the cross. The modicum of truth in such otherwise manipulative harangues is that we surely should feel something before the cross. It ought, just perhaps, to move us a little that “herein is love,” and an astonishing love, extended to enemies.

But let us descend to concrete matters. When we confess our sins before the cross today, how do we do it? Do we take a list of precepts, say the Ten Commandments, and think of ways we have transgressed? I wonder if this really gets to the heart of things. Seeing ourselves as rule-breakers has its place, but I doubt it will evoke a sense of the badness of our sins unless we see the glory of the goodness and righteousness God intended for us and see, in light of that glory, the depths of wretchedness to which we have fallen.

May I suggest today some extended reflection on God’s original calling to man to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth (Gen 1:28), to cultivate the sanctuary of God, and to keep it against all that defiles (Gen 2:15)? Here in the fourfold calling of humankind we might begin to see what we were made for, and how pervasive are our sins of commission and omission. We might also think of the threefold offices of our original estate: the prophetic office characterized by wisdom and knowledge, the priestly office characterized by holiness, and the kingly office characterized by righteousness. Or, we might consider the three relational theaters in which we were created: the cultic theater of worshipful communion with God, the communal theater of fellowship with our human neighbors, and the cultural theater of labor among the non-human creatures.

We might, in considering these things, feel just how badly things have gone awry. We might feel our real helplessness before the dominion of sin, and might awaken thankfulness for the work of the Last Adam, apart from whose death we would never have known relief from the curse, apart from whose resurrection our inheritance could never have been returned to us and secured, apart from whose Spirit the degenerations of sin would never have been reversed and healed. We may even, in contemplating how different is our estate now in the Last Adam, feel the stirrings of true hatred of sin, and fresh resolves after repentance and new obedience. “What Thou, my Lord, hast suffered was all for sinners’ gain.”

For some time, I have been thinking about starting a series of posts on the Psalter. I think it was in the summer of 2007 that I first read Stephen Dempster’s Dominion and Dynasy: A Theology of the Hebrew Bible. His section on the Psalms (pp. 194–202) opened up a whole new world to me regarding the eschatology and structure of the Psalter. (See also Geerhardus Vos, “Eschatology of the Psalter,” in The Princeton Theological Review, available here.)

What intrigues me about Dempster’s reflections is that they lift the Psalter, and Christian use of the Psalter, above the plane of individual devotional piety. Certainly the Psalms often express the soul of the individual saint; they give us language to pour out our hearts before God in the secret place. But there is, as Vos says, a “second face” of the Psalter: it speaks not just in the prayer closet but also in “the open places of a tumultuous world.” There is a deep historical awareness in the Psalms, a deep sense of where the currents of redemptive history are going; and it “goes without saying that what can be prayed and sung . . . in theatro mundi was never meant for exclusive use in the oratory of the pious soul.”

In following posts, I will attempt (following Dempster) to work through the overarching structure of the Psalter, and also spend some time on “the gateway to the Psalter” – Psalms 1 and 2.

This piece by Roger Scruton at The American presents an extraordinarily brilliant analysis of “popular” music, as well as insightful reflections on the nature of music in general. Do take a couple hours to read and listen through it.

I think my most difficult pastoral task is praying for God’s people. I know exactly what Paul meant when he said, “We do not know what to pray for as we ought.” Any individual life, every household, presents a mountain of needs – often really heart-wrenching stuff, the kinds of things that bring you to tears if you think about them long enough. And there’s no point in pretending I have time to pray for each one of these needs. I don’t. This may be just as well, however, since God surely doesn’t need me to keep Him up to speed on the various troubles in the lives of His saints; and when I look at the lives of people, I can see that laundry-list prayers miss the mark, anyway. God’s people need something much deeper and broader than healing after a surgery, a lift of heart after bereavement, stable employment, wisdom to sort out marital difficulty, and so on. They need (as intangible as this may seem) what one might call the whole-life healing of divine grace. They need God to turn back the degenerating power of sin at every level, in every sense, in every dimension of their lives. They need the loving, cleansing, renovating rule of God to flood through their lives from one end to the other, rushing into all the cupboards and closets and corners, driving out all that is unclean and polluted and shameful; and then to spill out into their whole world, until all things are fresh and clean and whole. . . . But how on earth does one seriously pray for this sort of thing? It sounds delusional.

I am comforted by the fact that when I read Paul’s prayers for the churches of his day, I find him praying something much like what I have described. In his prison epistles, where he opens up his prayers in some detail, they invariably center on knowledge or wisdom. In Ephesians 1, he prays for “a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of [God]”; in Ephesians 3, that the saints “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge”; in Philippians 1, that love “may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment”; in Colossians 1, that the church “may be filled with the knowledge of [God’s] will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.”

And when we explore what it is Paul desires the saints to know – what he seeks for them in the way of wisdom’s content or substance – we find that it all has to do with what God is doing in the world through His Son. Wisdom is fundamentally knowing “the mystery of [God’s] 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 1:9); and it is this knowledge that God has “lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight” (Eph 1:8). In knowing the master plan of God’s world-restoring grace in His Son, we ourselves participate in that restoration. God by His Spirit brings knowledge of His world-restoring, world-reconciling grace-in-Christ into the citadel of our hearts and minds (Eph 3:16–17), and as a result we are rooted and grounded in love. Our whole way of thinking about, and responding to, everything is fundamentally altered. We are changed from the inside out by a world-embracing “vision” of divine grace. We understand (by grace) the hope to which He has called us, the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe (Eph 1:18–19); and the glory of it all works transformingly in us.

This is, of course, why preachers are to keep the gospel central in their preaching, and not simply to offer “practical helps” from the pulpit. We preach the master plan for the same reason we pray the master plan: because God’s people need more than relief from immediate pressing problems. They need such relief, to be sure, but above all they need to know what God is doing in the earth, so they may count their afflictions light, so they may remain grounded even when things are evil to the eye, so they may bring forth from their inmost hearts grace and truth for the world around them (Jn 7:37–38); or as Paul puts it, so they may bring forth “the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” (Phil 1:11) and “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Col 1:10).

To my own congregation: the next time I pick up the church directory and pray for you by name, this is what I will be praying. And precisely because I believe in the master plan, I believe God will hear from His throne in heaven and answer for the sake of His Son.

“Many earnest Christians are struck as they pray the Psalms by how often the petition for life and good fortune occurs. From a glance at the cross of Christ there comes to many the unhealthy thought that life and the visible, earthly blessings of God are in themselves at least a questionable good, and in any case a good not to be desired. They take, then, the corresponding prayers of the Psalter to be an incomplete first stage of Old Testament piety, which is overcome in the New Testament. But in doing so they want to be more spiritual than God himself.

“As the petition for daily bread includes the entire sphere of the necessities of physical life, so the petition for life, health, and visible evidences of the friendliness of God belong necessarily to the prayer which points to the God who is the creator and sustainer of this life. Bodily life is not disdainful [not to be disdained]. Precisely for its sake God has given us his fellowship in Jesus Christ, so that we can live by him in this life and then also, of course, in the life to come. For this reason he gives us earthly prayers, so that we can better recognize him, praise him, and love him. God wants the devout to prosper on earth (Psalm 37). And this desire is not set aside by the cross of Christ, but is all the more established by it. . . .

“Therefore we need not have a bad conscience when we pray with the Psalter for life, health, peace, and earthly goods if we only recognize, as do the Psalms themselves, that all of this is evidence of the gracious fellowship of God with us, and we thereby hold fast to the fact that God’s gifts are better than life (Psalm 63:3 f.; 73:25 f.).

“Psalm 103 teaches us to understand the entire fullness of the gifts of God, from the preservation of life to the forgiveness of sins, as a great unity and to come before God thanking and praising him for them (cf. also Psalm 65). The Creator gives us life and sustains it for the sake of Jesus Christ. . . . Only for the sake of Jesus Christ and at his bidding may we pray concerning the goods of life, and for his sake we ought to do it also with confidence. But if we receive what we need, then we ought not to cease thanking God from the heart that he is so friendly to us for the sake of Jesus Christ.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible)

What would it take, I ask myself, to see the young generation in our Reformed churches develop what one friend of mine calls “an intelligent passion” for Christ and His kingdom? What would move them beyond mediocre conformity to pop culture or (perhaps even less savory) “churchy” culture? What would bring them to a place of reflective, critical, responsible, transformational engagement with the real world in which we find ourselves today?

It’s going to have to start at home, and to be honest, I can’t figure out what a lot of parents are thinking these days. Their offspring are given unlimited electronic access to everything under the sun, with no apparent supervision, and very little apparent instruction. The children spent most of their waking hours fraternizing with fools, without even the add-on of consistent catechizing and family worship, let alone serious conversations about a Christian philosophy of life. And then the parents are mystified when their kids turn out to be functional pagans by the age of twenty. This whole way of doing things has got to change. What is the better way?

Children develop an intelligent faith by interacting extensively with people who love them and who have an intelligent faith. Children don’t develop an intelligent faith by being told simply to believe certain things, without explanation, without interaction, without exploration of the hard questions that inevitably hang around the fringes of our finitude. If they can’t ask such questions and feel that the questions are being taken seriously, they will eventually (and sensibly) conclude that the faith they are being told to believe just isn’t defensible.

Children develop a passionate faith by interacting extensively with people who love them and who have a passionate faith. Passionate faith is faith that is profoundly connected to God through worship and to the real world through whole-life discipleship.

Passionate faith is systematically eroded when children are taught they are in “limbo” with God until they sustain some kind of spiritual rite of passage (dramatic “conversion,” for example). It is nurtured, conversely, when children see their role models passionately loving and worshipping God, and when they are taught that this wonderful God is their God from conception, fully and truly, without qualification.

Passionate faith is also eroded when children are taught that the real world is bad, dangerous, and best avoided by staying put in a Christian ghetto. Parents with a separatist view of culture and a pessimistic view of history will not be passionately engaged with the real world, and neither will their children (until they grow curious enough to go exploring on their own). Conversely, parents who enact before their children a delight in all created things, who have a robust theology of celebration and cultivation, who are up to speed on cultural developments and manifest a great love for what is good and a great hatred for what is evil, and who expect the kingdom of God to grow and flourish through the taking captive of every thought and every human enterprise, will be parents whose passion – both loving and hating – will be contagious for their children.

But if intelligent passion begins in the home, it can’t be confined to the home. Children need influences other than their parents; at any rate, such influences are unavoidable. So let young boys “hang out” with older men in the church, shooting guns, catching fish, building campfires, playing ball, reading poetry, grooving to music, watching films, and talking theology – and let them see that this manly life is good. Let young girls “hang out” with older women in the church, baking bread, decorating bedrooms, refinishing furniture, discussing economics, chasing little ones at the beach, making clothes, visiting museums, and taking in opera – and let them see that this womanly life is good. It does indeed take a community to rear a child, because children need to see that their parents aren’t crazy, but are part of an entire active polis called the city of God, the wildly diverse yet passionately thoughtful and engaging fellowship of His covenant people.

There is much more to be said, but I hope this gestures in the right direction.

“Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.” (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, “The Maniac”)